Running On Brownie

Elections are fought on many levels and events can always derail the best laid plans. However, it appears to me that the outlines of an effective national strategy are taking shape for next year and it’s long overdue.

Since the early days of the Bush administration — when it was revealed that Junior’s top campaign contributor was a crook who led his company into bankruptcy with an elaborate pyramid scheme — cronyism, political corruption and incompetence have been the lurking back-story of modern Republican governance. The media have been uninterested in pursuing this story for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was its childlike proclivity to fall for misdirection. (Flip Flop! Shiny!) The GOP’s thuggish political tactics were well known and apparently respected. Everybody loves a winner, I guess. But corruption, spin and flat out patronage of this vast a scale is unprecedented in the modern era. This combination has created a political machine of almost unlimited power, but it may collapse of its own weight as it finally hits the wall of the legal system.

The GOP has been successful the same way that Enron was successful. Kenny Boy created a series of companies and interlocking entities that were so complicated that nobody could understand how they worked. (In layman’s terms, it’s called dazzling them with bullshit.) Likewise, the Bush administration has created these alternate discourses, challenging the very nature of reality, using public relations and partisan media to confuse both the public and the press and make us all question whether we are seeing what we think we are seeing.

But as with Enron, as long as the party’s raging nobody sees the need to look too deeply, certainly not the corporate media who are benefitting from Republican governance. Like them, Wall Street was not kind, if you’ll recall, to the few analysts who dared to question whether what Enron was claiming in its financials made any sense. The day finally came, however, when the house of cards that Lay built blew apart. Reality hadn’t been repealed, after all, and two plus two equalled four again. Wall Street turned on its winner and turned it into a loser overnight.

Tom Delay, Gorver Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Tom Davis, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and a bunch of other high level Republicans have likewise built a byzantine corrupt political machine. And just as the laws of the financial markets cannot be suspended forever, rampant illegal political behavior will eventually bump up against the rule of law.

The legal system may be the last remaining institution that is not subject to the post modern manipulation of reality that has been the hallmark of Republican crooks like Ken Lay and Karl Rove for the past decade. Facts and conclusions are tested in a rather stringent system that requires, at least, that both sides get an equal hearing and where people are held accountable for what they say. Even if the legal system becomes rife with corrupt judges and prosecutors, and its rulings keep political criminals out of jail, its procedures alone guarantee that a certain threshold of factual reality at least be tested.

David Safavian apparently thought that he could get away with “spinning” the Republican Senate and the FBI under oath. He was only half right. There is a lot of speculation that Karl Rove did the same thing, probably believing that his position as the most powerful man in the US government protected him. Tom Delay and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed and others may still believe they will get away with what they’ve done. And they may. We know they certainly would if it were left up to the press to pursue them on their own.

But you never know what a prosecutor will do and you never know what might offend a judge, no matter how politically powerful the subject is. Some of them might even feel they are an equal branch of government with their own perogatives. Juries are completely unreliable when it comes to understanding how powerful men should not be held liable for the same kind of crimes committed by the masses. Once inside the legal system, spin and PR lose a huge amount of their power. There is someone there whose job it is to unspin the spin and there are rules in place that force people to sit still and listen.

At some point the operators become lazy and hubristic and forget to cover their tracks and these corrupt pyramid operations lose their power when they come up against institutions based on reason and the laws of nature. Neither the financial markets or the legal system can sustain faith-based, marketing-style fantasies over the long haul. Reality is a tough competitor.

Howard Dean’s “culture of corruption” was prescient. Brownie and Karl Rove are the poster boys for a national congressional campaign in 2006.

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