I thought it was rather poignant today when the juror said “where’s Rove, where are these other guys?” I can understand it. Bush promised to fire anyone who leaked, but Rove’s still being paid by the taxpayers to do dirty political work for Bush and the Republicans even as we speak. Cheney is running all over the world babbling and shaking his fist like some sort of Hunter S. Thompson hallucination. It is kind of frustrating.
But let’s not forget what we know about our friend Karl Rove. There’s no doubt he participated eagerly in the smear against Wilson, he just wasn’t as stupid as Libby, nor did he have as much to cover up, what with having a half-wit for a boss who barely knows what day it is. And he got very lucky with the happy coincidence of a little sloppy gossip over drinks between blabbermouth Viveca Novak and Rove’s lawyer that gave him a plausible explanation for his miraculous recovered memories. Cheney is even on record as being pissed that Rove was getting the protection of the president while poor little Scooter was hung out to dry.
We also know some very unpleasant things about Rove’s motivations for going after Wilson with everything he had. It wasn’t because he was covering for his boss or even protecting his job. It was much more base and despicable than that:
Prosecutors investigating whether White House officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson’s credibility, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.
While lower-level White House staff members typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.
A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove’s interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove responded: “He’s a Democrat.” Rove then cited Wilson’s campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said.
Libby did this thing out of loyalty. Rove did it out of sheer partisan hatred.
It’s a shame that Rove isn’t going to bed tonight a convicted felon like Scooter Libby is. The fateful loss of the mid-term elections and the complete collapse of the Bush administration will have to be his legacy. After all, Karl Rove is “Bush’s Brain,” the king of the Mayberry Machiavellis who thought he could run a nation like a dirty tricks campaign in South Carolina. He was in way over his head and now he reeks of the fetid stench of Bush/Cheney failure, for which he, probably more than any other single person, is responsible. I would be very surprised if any politician in the country will ever hire him again.
It’s not what he deserves. But it’s better than nothing.
Update: Limbaugh says that liberals better be careful because they are “poking the bear” meaning that we are getting the wingnuts all upset and we’ll be sorry. I’m quaking in my boots, I don’t know about you.
And using the term “poking the bear” probably isn’t the best choice of phrases when talking about Scooter Libby.
Most lefty bloggers have been writing about this Plame story for years now, but it really took fire after the revelations about Karl Rove’s potential involvement in July of 2005. I went back today to look at some of my commentary from that period and this stuck out:
…did Scooter just blurt out Tim Russert’s name without thinking? If he lied about the Monsignor he was making a grave error. There aren’t many media figures in Washington who are viewed with any reverence anymore, but he’s one of them, as sad a comment as that is.
It’s a fatal error to get into a he said/she said with a guy like him — if there’s a trial, Russert’s the guy who will be believed.
(As it turned out, Scooter didn’t just blurt it out. They thought that hiding behind the reporters’ privilege was a pretty nifty plan and like all their nifty plans, it failed.)
Turns out that the Russert testimony actually was pivotal,as predicted way back when, according to Dennis Collins, the juror who spoke to the media:
“the primary thing which convinced us on most of the accounts was the conversation… the alleged conversation… with Tim Russert…”
Even though Russert admitted on the stand that he granted all government officials blanket anonymity unless they told him the conversation was on the record — the exact opposite of what one would assume went on with an allegedly adversarial press — Russert nonetheless brought with him the credibility and celebrity of NBC News and “Meet The Press.” He’s as close as we have to Walter Cronkite (God help us) and him being on the stand saying Libby lied would be a very difficult thing for any defendent to rebut. Like it or not, he’s the guy people trust in all this.
Update: As noted in the comments, “he said/she said” was not, of course, the crux of Fitzgerald’s case. His proof lay in the fact that Libby had been told by multiple people that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA before he talked to Russert as well as the fact that Russert claimed he never told Libby anything about Plame’s wife.
Still, when you hang your hat on Tim Russert being the liar, it’s a tough sell to a jury. He’s the famous newsman, Scooter is just a faceless partisan who works for Dick Cheney. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying it’s the way things work.
Update II: Michael Wolff has an interesting (if erroneous in some respects) take on the Libby trial in this month’s Vanity Fair, here.
The Libby verdict is very exciting — Howard Dean and other Dems are all calling on the president to promise not to pardon Scooter. The right is spinning like tops. Fox news commentators are lamely saying that the verdicts don’t make sense because they acquitted Libby on one count. Bob Novak said the Bush administration had no “guts” because they agreed to allow an “unsupervised” special prosecutor to investigate them when they could have just shut down the investigation from the beginning. (G. Gordon Liddy couldn’t have said it better.) It’s a bad day for the Republicans.
And it’s getting worse. I would suggest that everyone keep at least one eye on the next brewing legal scandal. It’s looking more and more obvious like the Bush administration fired all those US Attorneys because they were investigating Republicans or allegedly dragging their feet in investigating Democrats. In Washington state the federal prosecutor was pressured to investigate “voter fraud” where there was none.
With the vice president’s office being completely discredited today and using the justice department for political purposes, we are now officially in Nixon territory.
Talking Points Memo has a rundown and video of the hearings this morning and they are explosive. The meltdown continues.
(The “not guilty” pertains to the Matt Cooper lying to the FBI charge — they found him guilty of lying about his conversation with Matt Cooper to the grand jury.)
Now all he has to do is keep himself together long enough for the pardon. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bush doesn’t issue it immediately, to tell you the truth. Scooter doesn’t want to go to jail and if they can’t keep him out on appeal he might be inclined to start blabbing.
Watch the wingnuts go into full-on, shrieking harpy, spin mode like you’ve never seen before. I hope Fitzgerald has a thick skin. Hell, I hope he has a flack jacket.
Update: Fitzgerald did his usual straight arrow routine and says he isn’t going to further investigate. So, for the moment, it seems that’s that. Fitzgerald has always struck me as a true conservative prosecutor in the best sense. He isn’t on a crusade. Let history be the judge.
Unless, of course, he’s just being wily… he did say, after all, that the door was open to Mr Libby if he had something to say.
Update II: The juror who’s speaking said the jury thought Libby was the fall guy. “Where’s Rove? Where’s the rest of these guys?”
Wells and crew did a good job at making Scooter sympathetic. All that crying and “send Scooter back to me” was for a purpose. It wasn’t enough, but it was all they had and it had an effect.
Update III: If you want to see a sad, sad group, check out the Fox News coverage. Bob Novak is dancing like Tucker Carlson right now.
And if you want to read THE book on this subject, buy this book:
A few commenters yesterday were unaware of why state legislative bodies are involved in impeachment resolutions. This column explains it well.
It’s the People of Washington vs. Pelosi et al
In the State of Washington, it is the people versus Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership.
At issue is a bill, S8016, submitted in the state’s senate by freshman state Senator Eric Oemig, which would call on the U.S. Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against President George Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution and the people of the United States and of the State of Washington.
The measure, which would take the form of a joint resolution by the two houses of the Washington state legislature, accords with the instructions laid out by Founder Thomas Jefferson, who, in his Manual of the Rules of the House of Representatives laid out state joint resolutions as an alternative route for initiating presidential impeachment proceedings in the House in addition to the more usual route of a member submitting a bill of impeachment.
Jefferson’s prescient thinking was that if Congress, by reason of political cowardice or inattention, ever proved unwilling or unable to initiate impeachment when it was called for, state legislators, far from Washington and closer to the people, could do it for them.
But two unprincipled and devious Democratic members of Washington’s congressional delegation, Sen. Pat Murray and Rep. Jay Inslee, are undermining Jefferson’s carefully designed fail-safe system by pressuring Democratic state legislators to kill Sen. Oemig’s bill. The Seattle Times in a March 2 article, reports that Murray and Inslee are telling Democrats in the state senate to kill the impeachment bill on the grounds that it would lead to “divisiveness” in Washington, and that it would impede the “Democratic agenda” in Congress.
Forget grave spinning! This wholly inappropriate interference in state affairs by the state’s two leading national political figures must have Jefferson shitting in his mouldered pants!
Tough medicine, I know, for institutionalized Democrats who place party above people. But these otherwise fine and respectable pols go at risk when they do their higher up’s bidding instead of the people’s bidding.
For a perfect presentation to Senator Murray, please see this framing of the issue by jman.
I think that one of the reasons the conservatives are mostly hanging tough with Coulter is at least partially due to what she specifically said. She used the word “faggot” to describe a Democrat. This is the premise that forms the entire basis of the Republican claim to leadership and lies at the bottom of the media’s continuing ridiculous assumption that the Republicans are more natural leaders than Democrats. For forty years the Republicans have been winning elections by calling liberals “faggots” (and “dykes”) in one way or another. It’s what they do. To look too closely at what she said is to allow light on their very successful reliance on gender stereotypes to get elected.
Rick Perlstein recently noted that Saint Ronnie went for it early on:
…he got the tribal stuff right, the us-versus-them stuff–as when he confronted young people harassing him with make love, not war signs. He said it looked like they were incapable of doing either.
Reagan also used to say the hippies “look like Tarzan, walk like Jane and smell like Cheetah.” That’s not so different than Coulter saying, “my pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call ‘women’ at the Democratic National Convention.”
A lot of the shrieking aversion to the dirty hippie came from all that “feminine” hair on men’s heads and “masculine” hair on women’s bodies, if you’ll recall. My brother was constantly harrassed about “looking like a girl” in 1966 Mississippi for having hair below his collar. In those days, hair was a political statement and even though forty years have passed and most of those people can only dream about all that hair they no longer have, the right successfully parlayed that gender role anxiety into a political narrative that continues to powerfully effect politics today.
Coulter is somewhat desperate so she’s articulating this stuff in a crude and obvious fashion in order to keep her stale schtick going. But this concept is so ingrained in the political culture by now that the only thing that really stands out about it is the fact that she used an obvious epithet that is out of public fashion, even at a rightwing event. Suppose she had used the silly word “girlyman”? Nobody would be calling for the smelling salts. In fact, I would imagine the press corps would have told us all to “get over it.”
As Somerby pointed out earlier today, Maureen Dowd does exactly the same thing Coulter does without the vulgarity. He also recalls that Coulter recently called Al Gore a “big fag” on Chris Matthews show and nobody said a peep. This is because it’s so internalized that unless people are paying close attention, it just slips through. After all, she even saidBill Clinton is gay and it barely made a ripple:
DEUTSCH: Before we’re off the air, you were talking about Bill Clinton. Is there anything you want to say about Clinton? No?
Ms. ANN COULTER: No.
DEUTSCH: OK. All right. Did you find him attractive? Was that what it was?
Ms. COULTER: No!
DEUTSCH: You don’t find him attractive?
Ms. COULTER: No. OK, fine, I’ll say it on air.
DEUTSCH: Most women find him attractive.
Ms. COULTER: No.
DEUTSCH: OK, say it on air.
Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.
DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again. That Bill Clinton, you think on some level, has — is a latent homosexual, is that what you’re saying?
Ms. COULTER: Yeah. I mean, not sort of just completely anonymous — I don’t know if you read the Starr report, the rest of us were glued to it, I have many passages memorized. No, there was more plot and dialogue in a porno movie.
Q: Does Hillary Clinton have a good chance in 2008? What are her strengths and weaknesses? What did her reaction to your “Jersey girls” comments tell you about her as a potential candidate?
A: Good chance of what? Coming out of the closet? I’d say that’s about even money.
It may seem odd to you that she would call the most notorious womanizing president since JFK and his wife gay, but there you have it. Coulter is so coarse that she has to make the claim literal in order to keep her career going, but it’s actually a mainstream view.
Here’s just a small sampling of how this has played out in just the last six years:
Al Gore needed to be taught how to be an “alpha male.” He doesn’t “know who he is.” John Kerry “flip-flops” like a flaccid penis. John Edwards is “the Breck girl.” Howard Dean was “hysterical.” Barack Obama is “Obambi.” Bill Clinton was “a pervert.” Hillary Clinton is a lesbian.
The underlying premise of the modern conservative movement is that the entire Democratic party consists of a bunch of fags and dykes who are both too effeminate and too masculine to properly lead the nation. Coulter says it out loud. Dowd hints at it broadly. And the entire press corps giggles and swoons at this shallow, sophomoric concept like a bunch of junior high pom pom girls.
In other words, liberal moment or conservative slump?
Both, presumably, for reasons that could be explained in part by the ‘mommy party/daddy party’ cliché — that is, that voters typically favor Democrats (“mommy party”) on social issues and Republicans (“daddy party”) on national security.
This frayed old trope is just another version of the same thing. The leaders of the Democratic party (men up to now) are “mommies.” And cleverly, that makes the women daddies. But they are daddies like Melissa Etheridge is a mommy and that makes all the scared little boys and girls of the Republican rank and file either feel all icky and confused — or angry and hostile. (These gender stereotype issues seem to affect some people in a very odd emotional way.)
Coulter stepped over the line because she used a bad word. But nobody on the right and most people in the media don’t blink an eye at the implication of what she said. All this Claude Rainsing among certain rightwing bloggers and the press is just a little bit overdone, if you ask me. Being a “faggot” in common braindead GOP locker room parlance simply means being a Democrat and everybody knows it.
*Of course,it goes without saying that none of this is to say that actually being gay or being called gay is a bad thing. It’s just another dogwhistle they use to tease the lizard brains of their bigoted and repressed base (and peel off a few old people.) It’s a silly construct that is not going to work for them much longer as both gays and women take and open and equal place in the leadership of the nation. Coulter’s sad, campy threadbare show has the feel of a final tour to me.
Ezra makes a good point that should be emphasized because the story is getting very muddled:
THE VA THEY AIN’T. Reader RN writes in to say:
Walter Reed is an Army hospital, not a VA facility. As an active duty soldier, the care I received at Evans Army Community Hospital (the Army hospital in Colorado Springs) was best described as mediocre; the care I’ve received at the VA Medical Center in Denver (especially after I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis) is outstanding.
The press corps has done a very, very poor job explaining this, but Walter Reed and the other hospitals being criticized are military hospitals, not veteran’s hospitals (VA). They are run by the military, not the Veteran’s Administration, which is why the Secretary of the Army, rather than the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs, was cut loose.
My Dad is a retired veteran who was, until recently, cared for in the military system, not the VA, as retired military folks have long been. The old men were kicked out recently and turned over to medicare, which was sort of a shame since the military system kind of specializied in old men’s diseases for years. But before they kicked him out the decline in the quality of care recently was astonishing. For decades they were very, very good and then they just — weren’t.
I was unaware of the privatizing, but I’m sure that’s the problem. It undoubtedly accounts for the fact that they 86’d the old guys. Like all health care for profit, they try to get rid of any sick person they possible can. There’s no money in it. (At least they had an alternative, unlike these poor wounded guys who probably don’t have health insurance other than the military.)
As Matt Yglesias explains today, privatizing is not some sort of magical ritual that automatically results in goodness and light. Indeed, when it comes to government services it is just a plain old patronage machine that delivers to the favored politicians at the expense of the people:
I posted on the general problem here last month — it’s not as if there are dozens of United States Armies all competing against one another to run the best hospitals and choosing among a variety of suppliers of hospital services in a dynamic marketplace where the Army that runs a bad hospital goes out of business.
You’ve got private profits, private corporations, privatization, and all sorts of other private stuff, but you don’t have a market you have a patronage mill and you have suffering soldiers. The correct way to privatize government services if you don’t think they should be provided by the government is to just have the government not perform the service. If it’s something you think the government should provide — medical care for injured soldiers would be, I think, an uncontroversial case — then the government needs to provide it.
This, again, shows what’s wrong with Republicans running government. Their policies have now been proved to be terminally flawed in virtually every area of responsibility. This one, like so many others, has ripped off taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars that went directly into the pockets of well-heeled GOP contributors and average American have suffered for it.
Rudy seems to have a little problem with his kids, which isn’t surprising considering how he behaved during his marriage to their mother. And I would imagine that this didn’t help:
“I’ve always liked strong, macho men, and Rudy — I’m not saying this because he’s my husband — is one of the smartest people on the planet,” gushed the former Judith Nathan to Harper’s Bazaar in editions due out Feb. 20.
“What people don’t know is that Rudy’s a very, very romantic guy. We love watching ‘Sleepless in Seattle.’ Can you imagine my big testosterone-factor husband doing that?”
Describing Rudy, a former federal prosecutor, as “the Energizer Bunny with no rechargeable batteries,” Judi said, “One of the most remarkable things about my husband, who sleeps three or four hours a night, is his energy level and stamina.
I’m still not sure whether that was planted because of the prostate cancer issue or the transvestite issue, but his 18 and 20year old kids undoubtedly wanted to puke when they read it.
Giuliani’s 21-year-old son, Andrew, told The New York Times that he would be too busy working on his golf game to participate in his father’s presidential campaign.
“There’s obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife,” the younger Giuliani told the newspaper. “And we’re trying to figure that out. But as of right now it’s not working as well as we would like.”
Giuliani’s marriage to his third wife, Judith Nathan, followed his divorce from Donna Hanover, the mother of Andrew and Caroline.
In 2000, Giuliani announced during a live TV interview that he planned to divorce Hanover. She responded by publicly accusing Giuliani of adultery.
Caroline Giuliani has not spoken publicly, but the Times and New York’s tabloid newspapers reported that she was also alienated from her father as a result of his marriage to Nathan.
The New York Daily News reported that Giuliani rarely spends time with his children and that he had failed to attend many important events in their lives, including Andrew’s golf tournaments and Caroline’s school plays.
Campaigning in Southern California on Monday, Giuliani asked for privacy to deal with the strained relationship with his children.
“My wife Judith is a very loving and caring … mother and stepmother. She has done everything she can. The responsibility is mine,” Giuliani said. “The more privacy I can have for my family, the better we are going to be able to deal with all these difficulties.”
I’m sure they loved that bit about her being a loving and caring stepmother — the one who Rudy tried to move into the mayors mansion while they and their mother still lived there. He clearly doesn’t get it.
I think this is going to be of interest as long as Rudy is in the race and the press is going to love talking about it. But this I don’t believe:
Political analyst Charles Cook told Newsday that the latest twist would hurt Giuliani with the GOP’s conservative voters.
“This is just going to be one of a thousand cuts,” Cook told the newspaper. “This will just sort of fit into a whole constellation of issues that work against someone winning a conservative party’s nomination, a party that thinks of itself as a pro-family party. This just makes it really hard.”
I don’t know why everyone believes this. The “pro-family” party is a bunch of hypocrites who never hold their own leaders to the same standards as everyone else. It’s not that they don’t know who Rudy really is — it’s patronizing to keep saying that. They know, they just don’t care. As long as he blows the right dogwhistle tunes, they could not care less what he actually does.
And if he gets caught, all he has to do is repent to be forgiven (even though Bill Clinton practically crawled on his belly apologizing over Monica and they spit in his face.) It’s not about the family or the morals or anything to do with values. It’s about the loyalty to the team. That’s all they care about. Rudy can sleep with Chippendales dancers three at a time for all they care as long as he calls the right plays.
The fact is that if any of the top three Republicans win the nomination, the phony culture war is over. Not that the media or the political establishment will admit it. They’ll keep the kabuki going as long as they can until some other fake rightwing religio-patriotic nonsense comes along that the dissolute elites can glom onto to pretend they give a damn about the polloi.
Update: Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
BLITZER: Romney won that straw poll, which, of course, is non- binding, non-scientific, at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The “L.A. Times” had a poll out among RNC members. He came in with 20 percent, Giuliani 14, McCain 10, Gingrich eight. Everybody else sort of weighed down. Mitt Romney — some have said he’s flip-flopped on a lot of these issues, social issues that are so important to you, like abortion rights for women.
Do you accept his explanation why he’s changed his views since he ran for governor of Massachusetts?
PENCE: Well, let me say I’m — you were kind enough to mention that a — I’d like people to know I am a Christian, which means I believe in grace. I believe in conversion. I think one of the…
BLITZER: You believe him?
PENCE: I — you know, I do. I take — I’ve had a chance to sit down with Governor Romney personally and I think — I think his decision on embracing the sanctity of human life was a deeply personal decision. And however recent, I think I’m a — I’m a part of a pro- life movement that welcomes people coming to the moral rationale to (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
BLITZER: So you think his change is sincere?
PENCE: I really do. And, obviously, you know, this is an area where there’s going to be a wide range of opinions. John McCain’s great advantage on this particular issue is while he’s alienated conservatives on a few things, like campaign finance reform and other issues, this is an issue — on the right to life — where John McCain has always been, with a very few exceptions, rock solid.
BLITZER: Why is his campaign not generating the excitement among conservatives that, clearly, it’s not, given these — these most recent numbers?
PENCE: Well, look, I have great respect for Senator McCain. But you know better than almost anybody in the media that John McCain is a maverick. And he has, whether it be his opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts early in this administration or his advancement of the McCain-Feingold legislation…
BLITZER: The campaign finance reform. A lot of conservatives hated that…
PENCE: Well, I…
BLITZER: And you were one of them.
PENCE: I was the House plaintiff in the lawsuit that, with Senator McConnell, went all the way to the United States Supreme Court challenging that on first amendment grounds. And, recently, his partnership with Senator Kennedy on immigration — I had some problems with that.
BLITZER: What about Rudy Giuliani?
Because on major social issues like abortion, gay rights, gun control, his stance is very, very different than yours, historically speaking?
PENCE: Well, that’s right. And…
BLITZER: Could you vote for him if he were the Republican nominee?
PENCE: Well, let me say, you know, what I’m waiting to hear from Mayor Giuliani as a — as a pro-life conservative is, sure, I know that on a personal basis, he endorses abortion on demand. But what I’m hearing — I’m waiting to hear from him, who has a very conservative record as a prosecutor, a very conservative record as a mayor in virtually every other respect, is what will be his criteria for appointments to the federal bench.
Now, he’s indicated that he’s looking for judges like Justice Scalia and Justice Alito. If that’s the case, then that’s going to be intriguing to myself and, I think, to millions of pro-life conservatives around the country.
BLITZER: So you’re leaving the door open…
PENCE: But it’s a challenge.
BLITZER: You’re leaving the door open to supporting him?
PENCE: Well, I am, because, to that extent that a candidate for president holds pro-choice views but is willing to appoint strict constructionists to the court, I think pro-life Americans could see in that the possibility of ultimately achieving the end of dismantling “Roe v. Wade.”
Josh Marshall posted a letter from one of his readers yesterday that makes an excellent point about zombie conservatism. I’m going to re-post it here in its entirety:
What’s really at issue here is the extent to which problems with the military, specifically, and the government, generally, are a result of policy. The common explanation for the catastrophic results of many of the Bush administration’s initiatives (from Iraq to New Orleans and back again) is that they are the result of “incompetence.”
Incompetence, the lack of capacity or skill, is ultimately an exculpating trope. It insinuates that the plan, or effort, was sound and could have succeeded had it been competently carried out. Moreover, the incompetent are in way less liable: their lack of ability lets them off the hook. Thus, “incompetence” insulates the actors from accountability and leaves the policy itself unscathed.
My personal opinion, which has recently been reinforced by much of what I read in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, is that the Bush disasters are a result of the administration’s policies and not of some failure to effectively carry them out.
No one says, retrospectively, that Calvin Coolidge’s failure to help the victims of 1927’s Mississippi River flood was a result of incompetence. No one says that Mellon, with his inaction and insistence that the Great Depression would burn itself out through ‘liquidation,’ was incompetent. Both of these positions were wholly in keeping with the policies of the Coolidge and Hoover presidencies, policies that were not discredited until Roosevelt’s victories and the institution of the New Deal.
The problem, a problem that Waxman seems to be keenly aware of, is that as long as the government retains the same kind of policies, the nation will continue to suffer the same hardships. It is not until the beliefs that inform the ways in which the Bush administration runs the government are firmly linked to their consequences that the nation will stop voting for politicians who promulgate, and enact legislation based on, those creeds.
These policies will not (again) be discredited until they are tied to their reprehensible results. Insisting on the ‘incompetence’ of the Bush administration turns attention away from this linkage between policy and result. In fact, it insulates the policies while discrediting the men who are trying to implement them. It, thus, sets the stage for those policies to be enacted again.
I don’t think I ever thought of the word “incompetent” quite that way, even though the term “incompetence dodge” had been widely used to describe certain lame attempts to rationalize support of the Iraq war. But it’s bigger than just Iraq, isn’t it? Using that term to describe the Bush administration at all allows the “Bush is not a conservative” babblers to set forth the rationale that it was just an inability to carry out (presumably good) conservative policies that has led to such a catastrophic failure, when the truth is that the most efficient people in the world could not have made these policies successful.
This ties in with my post from last night. The problem is not that the Bush’s are unusually bad at governance, although they are. It’s that the Republicans seem to have created a con game in which they take power, steal the country blind, allow their craziest ideologues to wildly experiment with theories that only radical fringers think have a remote possibility of success and basically run amuck until they are forced to stop. Then they harrass the Democrats as they clean up the mess, setting themselves up for a resurgence by making it very clear that unless they are given another chance to mess things up they will make the political system even more ugly than it already is.
It’s the political equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum in the grocery store. You get to the point where you give them the candy bar just to shut them up, which is a big part of why Junior Codpiece came close enough to steal the election in 2000 and why the media and political establishment jumped on their bandwagon when they did it. Everyone knew that if the Republicans were not allowed to take power in 2000 there would be hell to pay.
Incompetence has nothing to do with it. In fact, they are quite competent at doing exactly what they want to do — gain power, do whatever they want for a few years, lose office, harrass Democrats rinse, repeat.
