Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Saving Us From Ourselves

by digby

A reader reminded me that Atrios wrote this other other day and I think it’s worth discussing a little bit more:

As Yglesias says, the only alternative to a full and blanket pardon wasn’t putting Nixon in chains, though that was a possibility. The important thing was to find out the truth. Our elites repeatedly redefine “getting past it” as “sweeping it under the rug” based on their apparent opinion of themselves as necessary moral and spiritual leaders for the riffraff. If they are revealed to be greatly flawed then without them as a shining beacon to light the way the riffraff will go astray and the country will collapse.

They are our betters and we need them they think, and so their class must be preserved even if the occasional unpleasantness must be swept under the rug.

There is a very recent example of that very thing. On election night 2000 as the CNN crew sat in the studio discussing whether Al Gore was going to retract his concession, what comes out of John King’s mouth?

SHAW: Were I Al Gore, I don’t think I’d be that terribly much in a hurry to rush out there and make the concession. This has to be one of the most difficult things in this man’s life.

KING: Intensely frustrating. You know, historically, when Richard Nixon lost in 1960, he was urged by many people to challenge the vote in Illinois. And he decided in the end not to do it because he said he didn’t want to create a constitutional crisis.

Yes, that good man Richard Nixon waa a big enough man to spare the country such an ordeal. Would Al Gore do the same?

The next day:

SCHNEIDER (voice-over): The Gore campaign points to the highly unlikely results in Palm Beach County, Florida, which suggests a high level of voter confusion over the ballot. Florida has already undertaken a recount as required by law when the results are so close. If the Gore campaign undertakes a legal challenge to the results in Florida, that could open the floodgates to legal challenges by the Bush campaign all over the country.

[…]

SCHNEIDER: What we are seeing is a dangerous politicization of the vote-counting process. Each candidate has to ask himself: How much is winning this election really worth? Is it worth creating a constitutional crisis? Is it worth undermining your ability to unite the country?

Soon, we had this:

The Bush administration argued from the beginning that: “Further recounts could unnecessarily delay the elections process, potentially leading to a federal constitutional crisis.”

A week later, we had worked our way up to this:

WOODRUFF: Well, it has been a full week since Election Day and there is still no official word on the winner. Coming up, our Jeff Greenfield takes on the question of whether Election 2000 has reached crisis stage.

[…]

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: “Constitutional crisis.” It’s a tempting phrase to utter. It carries with it its own sense of importance, like “defining moment.” But is this a crisis? Could it turn into one? Well, to use another tempting phrase, it depends upon what the meaning of crisis is.

(voice-over): Now here’s a real crisis in the making. October, 1973: President Nixon fires Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in the midst of his investigation into Watergate. The attorney general and his top deputy leave rather than fire Cox. Federal agents seal off the special prosecutor’s office. Could a president shut off an inquiry into his own behavior? It didn’t happen.

A firestorm of public pressure forced Nixon to name a successor, Leon Jaworski, who demanded of Nixon those famous secret tape recordings. And that could have triggered a real constitutional crisis when a unanimous Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes. Suppose he had refused. One branch of government defying the order of another. But it didn’t happen. Nixon turned the tapes over. The smoking gun of a cover-up was disclosed and the president resigned.

But this? Not even close, yet. What you have so far is the messy, inefficient business of vote counts. Instead of troops in the capitol, you’ve got lawyers in the courts. Instead of mobs in the street, street theater, and folks with a little too much time on their hands.

(on camera): So, could this turn into a crisis? Of course we’re not talking about anyone seizing political power or some adversary from abroad sailing up the Potomac, but we could be talking about a transfer of power tainted by charges of foul play.

An angry challenge to the electoral vote when the new Congress convenes in January; a bitter refusal of the losing side to acknowledge the victor’s right to govern; a new Congress that, for all the talk of cooperation, is frozen into inaction by a sense of icy bitterness that’s grown over the past 20 years.

A crisis? Maybe not. But as an unhappy ending to the end of all of this, that will do.

Oh my God! Finally this:

SIMON: But back to this question about frenzy and orgy. I think really the one phrase that is overused and seriously overused by the media is constitutional crisis.

EDWARDS: Yes.

SIMON: We do not have a constitutional crisis. A constitutional crisis…

KURTZ: We could have one by Tuesday.

SIMON: … No we won’t. A constitutional crisis is that one of these guys, Bush or Gore, says, “I’m not listening to the Supreme Court. I’m showing up on January 20. And everyone who believes in me show up with me.”

KURTZ: Right.

SIMON: If Nixon hadn’t turned over the tapes, that’s a constitutional crisis. Everybody here is following the rule of law. It is the opposite of a crisis.

KURTZ: Well…

EDWARDS: Well, I’d like to disagree a little bit…

KURTZ: … go ahead, Tamala.

EDWARDS: … first of all to your point about television and do we have a medium that’s fast enough? To pick up Wayne’s point about “Pulp Fiction.” I’ll just take the soundtrack. I think if we had some great music, that would make this better.

But in terms of constitutional crisis, I agree. I think that was overused and was used very quickly. But I do think that we’re starting to get to that point. What happens if we have a court sanctioned set of Gore electors and a legislative set of Bush electors? What do we do? That’s a crisis.

It became an article of faith that if this “went on too long” the country would fall apart and blood would run in the streets as the rabble completely lost its collective mind and stormed the castle. The wisemen had to END THIS NOW. We just couldn’t take a chance on counting all the votes. It was much too dangerous.

The Supreme Court took exactly that tack with one of the most egregious decisions in the nation’s history. Judge Gerald Posner even said that they were right to do it because if Gore had won the recount Tom Delay would have refused to acknowledge his electors and we would have had … a constitutional crisis.

The elites are always protecting us against the rabble, but they never quite say who that rabble is, exactly. Nowadays, it’s pretty clear, isn’t it? There were Freepers standing outside the vice presidential residence screaming “get out of Cheney’s house” throughout the recount. Roger Stone was down there in Florida getting ready to call in the Cuban Community and unleash the dirty tricks squad. The “bourgoeis riot” was just a little taste of what was to come. So, it’s pretty clear what the crisis was that the pundits and the political establishment were so keen to save us from — the crisis that would ensue if the impeaching, undemocratic, rabid Republican thugs were denied their victory. Don’t make trouble. Everything will be fine. We know these people. They’re the grown-ups.

The political and media establishment does not trust the constitution or the people, it’s that simple.

After all was said and done, Jon Stewart said it best:

LARRY KING: OK, what happens if the meddlesome “Miami Herald,” say in January brings forth its own vote and then tabulates it and shows you here’s what the dimples were, here’s what the chads were, and in one of them, Gore won? Would that cause a crisis then?

STEWART: Absolutely a crisis.

KING: And what would happen?

STEWART: The same crisis — nothing would happen. He’d be the president in the same way that Clinton got impeached, he was still the president. We’re not a nation on the precipice of any constitutional disaster other than — you know what we have? We have a pundit disaster. We’re out of pundits. They’ve been used up now, and they have nothing left to say.

Amen

Oh, one more thing. Let’s not forget that there was one Democratic moron who decided to further the GOP and media “crisis” meme in the lamest way possible:

LIEBERMAN: This action by the Florida legislature really threatens the credibility and legitimacy of the ultimate choice of electors in Florida. It threatens to put us into a constitutional crisis, which we are not in now by any stretch of the word.

With candidates like these…

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Hang ‘Em High

by digby

I’m not going to lose any sleep over Saddam Hussein’s death but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if the US had behaved like a world leader and sent him to be tried in the International Criminal Court instead of having the “Iraqi government” (which clearly has no real legal system) stage a show trial and now execute him in the middle of a civil war.

Call me crazy but it just seems to me that would have shown that we care about the rule of law and removed the festering wound of Saddam from the workings of the current government which was bound to exacerbate the sectarian hatreds. Of course, that would have meant that the Iraqi government was a paper tiger and it was very important to the Republicans that they be able to wave their purple fingers in everyone’s faces.

But I’m sure Bush will have a very serious press conference in which he will state that “the tyrant has been brought to justice” (mark my words) which is what’s important.

And hey, they just got to put out a terror alert. The Baathists are coming! Run for your lives!

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Sordid Truth

by digby

During those horrible early days after hurricane Katrina hit, I’m sure you remember the endless stories of looters and thugs and criminal gangs roaming the streets terrorizing the population. The right wing blogs had a lot to say on the subject.

There was one incident in particular that seemed to grab the imagination of the rightwingers. It was reported on all the cable news networks and inspired many blog posts like this one:

Did New Orleans police shoot and kill contractors who were walking across a bridge to inspect and seek to fix the broken levee, or did they kill those who had fired on the contractors? A few hours ago, news services and networks reported that five or six contractors had been shot and killed by the NOPD. Shortly thereafter, news services reported that the NOPD had actually shot “thugs” as a (Fox News host described them) who had fired on the contractors.

I do not know what happened, and am not assuming that the revised story is the true one. This is the first time I have heard of police or National Guard soldiers shooting anyone. For days, I have heard stories of black criminals firing on rescue crews in helicopters and boats, on police, and shooting and bludgeoning National Guard troops. One National Guardette ran away from the armed criminal who had hit her over the head with a pipe, and had shot her comrade. Did the Guardette even have a loaded weapon?

My expectation was that the police or soldiers would shoot a non-violent white or Asian, before they would shoot an ultraviolent black, but I was beaten to the punch by blogger Zach at Our Way of Life, who predicted Friday,

“If anybody gets shot for looting, they will be white or asian. Just remember you heard it here first.”

The current report on the bridge shooting at Fox News is only 14 words long.

“Hurricane relief efforts turn toward the gathering of bodies; police report shooting eight armed men on New Orleans bridge, killing at least five.”

In what sort of hellholes do people try to murder rescue crews, and people trying to fix broken levees? In America’s third world cities, that’s where. In the South Bronx in New York City, twenty years ago, Hispanic thugs used to attack fire engines speeding to put out fires with Molotov cocktails. Of course, it was white men putting their lives on the line to save Hispanics and blacks. Just like in New Orleans these days, apparently.

Considering how the mainstream media are doing their best to suppress the stories from coming out of New Orleans, I wonder if we’ll ever find out anything approaching the whole sordid truth.

It was my opinion at the time that this kind of hysterical, racist talk contributed greatly to the delayed response. (The beasts were taking over!)

I don’t know if the “sordid truth” of this incident will ever fully be known either. But a New Orleans grand jury believed there was enough evidence to indict several policemen for murder yesterday:

Four New Orleans police officers have been charged with murder in connection with two fatal shootings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year.

Three more officers were charged with attempted murder for the shootings, which also left four people wounded.

The incident on the Danziger Bridge, linking two mainly black, flooded neighbourhoods, came six days after the hurricane left New Orleans in chaos.

Defence lawyers say their clients are innocent of the charges

It was a mess in New Orleans those first few days. I’m sure there was plenty of violence and mayhem. But the media and particularly the fevered right wing media were all too willing to believe even the most ridiculous tales and they spread them with a glee usually reserved for presidential sexual indiscretions. They bear some responsibility for what happened.

And I’m still waiting to hear the whole sordid explanation behind the other infamous Katrina “bridge” story.

Update: NPR did a story recently on the Danziger bridge incident. Perhaps the trial will shed more light on the subject.

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Daffy Duck

Mallard Fillmore:

The truly disorienting thing about the bizarro world these people have created is that they actually believe the Republicans tried to “reach out and remain bipartisan” and the Democrats are ruthless operators who go for trhe jugular ( while also being cowardly wimps who can’t defend the country.)

I think this might be the best example of their “bipartisan style:”

“Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.”

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Chain Gang

by digby

TBOGG notices that the rightwing is lying by sending out bogus e-mails and pictures. I know it’s shocking. Who would have ever thought they would do such a thing?

I have a question, though. The second item he mentions is an e-mail allegedly from a current soldier in Iraq that found its way to The Corner — only to be revealed to have been circulating for years. I’m just curious. I’m on a lot of email lists; how come I never get anything like this. The right’s always got some crap making the rounds — tales of liberal satan worship or the “historical document” that nobody’s ever heard of proving that Thomas Jefferson was an evangelical preacher. You know the kind.

Why is it that liberals don’t have anything like this? Even assuming we didn’t send around completely unbelievable horseshit that anyone with an 6th grade education would see through, wouldn’t it be a good thing to have the capacity to circulate true information? How do they do it?

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Who’s Your Daddy?

by digby

Here’s an interesting little tid-bit. Four of the most popular posts of the year were by Crook and Liars. In fact, the most popular political post of the year was C&L’s post of the Stephen Colbert White House Correspondent’s dinner. And the second most popular was C&L’s post of Keith Olbermann’s Rumsfeld commentary.

What a nice little bit of liberal synergy that is — the blogosphere, the alternative cable media and video blogging. C&L’s been ahead of the curve on all this from the beginning.

John Amato — Blogger of the year?

For more on the current state of the blogosphere, check out David Sifry’s most recent Technorati report.

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The New Iraq Policy: They’re Talking Into “It”

by poputonian

In 1869, Henry Adams said:

For stretches of time, [the President’s] mind seemed torpid. [The Secretary of War] and the others would systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.

Yesterday, it was reported:

CRAWFORD, Texas – President Bush worked nearly three hours at his Texas ranch on Thursday to design a new U.S. policy in Iraq, then emerged to say that he and his advisers need more time to craft the plan he’ll announce in the new year.

See first entry. Sometimes these things take weeks.

(h/t Quiddity for the AP report.)

Matchmaker Made In Heaven?

by poputonian

In American politics, successfully threading religion through a needle is no easy task, and Barack Obama, in my opinion, missed the eye-hole in his earlier attempts to accomplish that feat. I criticized him back in July for suggesting that young, impressionable minds are unaffected when adult authorities make them stand and perform quasi-religious pledge rituals. I still believe Obama was wrong in what he said.

However, if the Democrats want to field a candidate in 2008, some compromises will have to be made, and based on something I learned yesterday, via Matthew Yglesias, the above might be the area where I’ll make mine. I’m not there yet, but peace is certainly a higher priority today than the pledge, and it was important good news yesterday to hear that Samantha Power was working with Barack Obama:

Obama Shapes an Agenda Beyond Iraq War

Key advisers in Mr. Obama’s foreign policy orbit include Ms. Rice; a Pulitzer Prize-winning anti-genocide activist, Samantha Power; a national security adviser to Mr. Clinton, Anthony Lake, and Senator Obama’s foreign policy staffer, Mark Lippert.

Ms. Rice, who now works at the Brookings Institution, is unabashed about her views on a potential Obama presidency. “I think he’d be excellent,” she said.

However, Ms. Power, who took leave from Harvard’s Kennedy School last year to work in the senator’s office, may be the foreign policy specialist campaigning most publicly on Mr. Obama’s behalf. During a speech last month at Northwestern University, she spoke of what a “President Obama” might do and sowed doubts about two of his potential primary opponents, Senator Clinton and the Democratic nominee in 2004, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts.

“Hillary Clinton came out about two-and-a-half, three weeks ago and endorsed the president’s position on coercive interrogation techniques, not McCain’s position, distinguishing herself from McCain, perhaps with 2008 in mind,” Ms. Power said. She also faulted Mr. Kerry for failing, during his debates with Mr. Bush, to mention the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A columnist for Time magazine, Joe Klein, has reported that Mr. Kerry made the decision based on focus groups his campaign conducted. “The answer came back, ‘It’s not a winner politically,'” Ms. Power said.

Recall that Ms. Power was an advocate and force behind the candidacy of Wesley Clark. She was also the counterweight to a character attack made on Clark by former General Hugh Shelton, who just happened to be on John Edwards’ payroll at the time. Back in 2003, I wrote the following on that topic:

Shelton’s smear of Clark can be juxtaposed with something written about Clark before he entered politics. This view of Clark is given by Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide.” Power is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

In her book, written before Clark entered politics, Power credited him with saving the lives of 1.3 million Albanians. She gives a more plausible explanation for Clark’s removal from Europe than Shelton does, and her opinion of Clark’s character and integrity more than outweigh Shelton’s.

At Clark’s press conference last week upon his return from the Milosevic trial, Power introduced Clark as someone who led an intervention in genocide for the first and only time in US history. Alluding to Washington politics, she said Clark was “willing to own something that was very unfashionable at the time.” She notes in her book (again, written before Clark entered politics) that this personal sacrifice caused Clark to suffer his early retirement at the hands of Washington bureaucrats.

The following excerpts from Power’s book give the details. The narrative surrounding the quotes was written by another person commenting on the book. Note especially Power’s last comment on Clark’s pariah status in Washington:

“General Clark is one of the heroes of Samantha Power’s book. She introduces him on the second page of her chapter on Rwanda and describes his distress on learning about the genocide there and not being able to contact anyone in the Pentagon who really knew anything about it and/or about the Hutu and Tutsi. She writes, “He frantically telephoned around the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington’s most influential planners” (p. 330) .

He advocated multinational action of some kind to stop the genocide. “Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. ‘The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,’ he says. ‘It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we’ll figure out how to do it.’ But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials” (p. 373).

According to Power, General Clark was already passionate about humanitarian concerns, especially genocide, before his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe. When genocide began to occur in the Balkans, he was determined to stop it.

She details his efforts in behalf of the Dayton Peace Accords and his brilliant command of NATO forces in Kosovo. Her chapter on Kosovo ends, “The man who probably contributed more than any other individual to Milosvevic’s battlefield defeat was General Wesley Clark. The NATO bombing campaign succeeded in removing brutal Serb police units from Kosovo, in ensuring the return on 1.3 million Kosovo Albanians, and in securing for Albanians the right of self-governance.”

“Yet in Washington Clark was a pariah. In July 1999 he was curtly informed that he would be replaced as supreme allied commander for Europe. This forced his retirement and ended thirty-four years of distinguished service. Favoring humanitarian intervention had never been a great career move.””

So, I wonder: Who would Samantha Power like to see team up with Obama in ’08? Clark and Obama held the same position on Iraq before the invasion was launched, something that could amplify nicely on the campaign trail, and both suggest that concerns for human welfare should be at the core of American foreign policy. Indeed, the world has had enough of the Republican conqueror mentality.

Clear The TiVO

Tonight at 10:00 PM
On the Sundance Channel

BLOG WARS

In 2004, political bloggers came of age. They propelled Howard Dean from fringe candidate to front-runner. They took on Dan Rather and won. And they charted the course for the “swiftboating” of John Kerry. As the 2006 mid-term elections approached, bloggers were preparing for battle again. Filmmakers James Rogan and Phil Craig’s sharp documentary examines how online democratic activism is shaping important elections by focusing on the decisive Connecticut senate race and Ned Lamont’s challenge to incumbent Joe Lieberman.

Re-live the glory days of last summer and check out some of your fave bloggers on screen tonight!

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Hickory Hillbillies

by digby

Those of us who follow politics from far outside the beltway are often amused at the way the DC estabishment has somehow convinced itself that it is a small town in middle American ca. 1937 and they are all Jimmy Stewarts and Donna Reeds. Those of us blue state heathens who live in big cities with big power centers particularly know how self serving and absurd this is.

Here’s a nice piece by Michael Crowley in TNR from a few months ago that they are reprising this week as a best of 2006 that’s really entertaining on just that subject:

Surry Hill. So reads a plaque at the end of the long, winding private road that leads to the crown jewel of McLean, Virginia: the 18,000-square-foot mansion that Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers and his wife Edwina call home. To get there from Washington, you drive across the Potomac River and along a parkway that, in the summer, is canopied by lush green trees. Shortly before the guarded entrance to the CIA, you turn off McLean’s main road and then down a private lane, passing through brick gate posts adorned with black lanterns and into a grand cul-de-sac. A massive brick Colonial with majestic, white Georgian columns looms above a perfectly manicured lawn. Tall trees surround the house; no other buildings are in view. But the best way to appreciate the grandeur of the estate–originally zoned for nine separate homes and featuring streams, ponds, and a pair of waterfalls–is from above. The Rogerses once hired a helicopter to take aerial photos of the property, which they converted into postcards–a project requiring a paranoid, post-September 11 CIA’s grudging approval.

On a recent summer afternoon, Edwina, a petite Alabaman with a demure Southern charm, opened the door to her house. Edwina doesn’t know the total number of rooms in Surry Hill, but an elevator services the house’s three floors. Upstairs, Edwina’s bathroom (one of eight) features a small fireplace by the tub. But she is proudest of her home’s dazzling–and eclectic–art collection. “We do a lot of lobbying for foreign governments. I just can’t imagine any country we haven’t gotten a piece from,” she explains. Sashaying from room to room like a docent, she points out the eight-foot steel-plated pantry door from Rajasthan, the light fixtures from Venice, and the four Taiwanese stone statues, each weighing 300 pounds, embedded in her dining room wall. (The floor had to be reinforced with steel to support them.) Her most delicate pieces are housed in their own “art gallery”–a white-walled room where ancient figurines, pottery, and pieces of jewelry lay on cream-colored stands under Plexiglas. “We hired the company that does the Smithsonian’s display cases,” Edwina explains. One tiny statue, from Peru, is labeled:

Monkey effigy
Moche variant
200-700

Within Republican circles, Surry Hill is an iconic place–a Shangri-la for those who toil on Capitol Hill and along K Street. (“Have you seen Surry Hill?” Republicans are apt to say. “You’ve got to go.”) It’s also a testament to the rewards awaiting ambitious conservatives in modern Washington, where unprecedented wealth is being made from the business of politics. Just ask the Rogerses, who have ridden a boom in Washington lobbying during the last decade. Edwina, a former Republican Hill staffer and Bush White House aide, worked at the Washington Group, chaired by former GOP Representative Susan Molinari, whose clients have included Boeing and the government of Bangladesh. Ed, a former aide in the Reagan and first Bush White Houses and a regular on shows like msnbc’s “Hardball,” co-founded the powerhouse lobbying firm of Barbour Griffith & Rogers in 1991. Last year, the firm–whose clients include Eli Lilly, Verizon, Lorillard Tobacco Company, and the governments of India and Qatar–reported revenue of $19 million. Built from these lobbying riches in 2002, Surry Hill is the psychic center of McLean. And McLean, in turn, has become the psychic center of the Washington Republican establishment.

Rogers is referred to as a “Republican strategist” whenever he appears on television. Let us hear no more from the mainstream media about bloggers making huge money and failing to disclose their ties, ok?

McLean covers just 18 square miles and has a population of 40,000. But it is packed with the people who impeached Bill Clinton, elected George W. Bush, launched the Iraq war, and have now learned to make millions from their association with government. Some are famous–people like Bill Kristol and Colin Powell, Scooter Libby and Newt Gingrich, several current and former Republican senators, and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Dick Cheney once owned a McLean townhouse–until he sold it to Bush’s 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh. Less well-known are the countless lobbyists, lawyers, and businessmen whose names rarely turn up in The Washington Post and who like it that way–people like super-lobbyist Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s former chief of staff; Frank Carlucci, former chair of the Carlyle Group, the notorious global private equity firm with close ties to the Bush family; and Dwight Schar, a construction mogul who is currently finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.

[…]

Conventional wisdom has been slow to assimilate this new reality. In the parlance of Beltway-bashing populists, “Georgetown” is the sneering shorthand used to describe Washington’s clueless, cosseted elites. That shorthand, however, reveals how little these critics really understand contemporary Washington. Georgetown–and the establishment that resided there–faded from importance long ago. Over the last decade of growing Republican dominance in the capital, a new establishment has risen up to replace it. In a sense, McLean is the new Georgetown. … “The whole Georgetown liberal inner sanctum, I just don’t think that exists anymore,” says Sally Quinn. “That whole little social class has just disappeared.”

In recent years, a new one has replaced it. Beyond their cultural preference for the suburbs, Washington’s cadre of movement conservatives had no interest in joining the Georgetown set–they had come to Washington to defeat it. Certainly, these post-Reagan conservatives–many from the South and the Sunbelt–hailed from a different class. Edwina Rogers, for instance, grew up in the rural Alabama town of Wetumpka. (“Dirt road, no telephone.”) Ed is from Birmingham. (They met when she was a University of Alabama law student and he was working for the 1984 Reagan campaign.) As Edwina explained it, “Georgetown is more for the social elite, the intellectual elite. The people in McLean are more from humble backgrounds, state universities, not coming in from Yale or Harvard. It’s middle-American nouveau riche.”

Indeed, the migration of power from Georgetown to McLean represents the shift in American politics in microcosm. The Northeastern liberal elite drawn to the urbane sophistication of Georgetown has receded. In its place has risen a new conservative striver class–more likely to have grown up in Texas (or, as with the Rogerses, Alabama)–that has set itself up as landed gentry across the Potomac River in McLean.

Or Arkansas, but that was different. Clinton was, evidently, from the wrong side of the hill (billy.)

But it’s not merely political power that has accumulated in GOP circles over the last decade-plus. It’s also money. The modern Republican brand of corporate conservatism, embodied in the capital by Tom DeLay’s K Street Project, cultivated a climate of unprecedented access–and therefore profit–for lobbyists. If the Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham scandals didn’t tell you everything you need to know, consider some statistics: Between 2000 and 2005, the number of registered Washington lobbyists doubled to about 35,000–and overall spending on lobbying grew by 30 percent, to $2.1 billion. A well-connected congressional aide can easily win a $300,000 starting salary on K Street. When John Boehner became House majority leader last winter, watchdog groups pointed out that a whopping 14 of his former aides had gone on to K Street lobbying jobs. Meanwhile, where it was once considered tacky for former members of Congress to lobby, they now routinely cash in their access and know-how for seven-figure earnings. In Washington, the spirit of public service has been overtaken by the profit motive.

Much of that profit has followed the maturing conservative establishment into McLean. “You’re seeing now what I call the Gingrich Republicans, the revolutionaries–all the staffers are in their early forties now, and they’re married; they’re moving off Capitol Hill,” says one former House GOP aide-turned-lobbyist. “And they’re deciding, OK, where am I going to be for the next 20 years. And, three-to-one, people move to McLean.” That helps to explain why McLean’s median income is among the highest in the country–topping such ritzy enclaves as Greenwich, Highland Park, and Malibu.

[…]

“There’s definitely more money in Washington than there was twenty or thirty years ago,” agrees Fred Malek, a venture capitalist and Bush family intimate who managed George H.W. Bush’s 1992 presidential campaign and co-owned the Texas Rangers with George W. Bush. But Malek, who has lived in McLean since 1969, contends that people like Brzezinski overstate its gilding: “I see a lot of families with kids, greenery. It’s a wonderfully close-in suburb that offers an island of tranquility in a sea of turbulence.”

Of course, it’s natural to have that view when you live, as Malek does, on Crest Lane, among some of McLean’s poshest homes. One property here, said to have been rented by Queen Noor of Jordan, listed in 2003 for $11.5 million. A realtor’s brochure describes it as “a spectacular estate,” which “curves dramatically on the top of a hill. … Watch the American eagles glide by!” Other Crest Lane residents include governor-turned-lobbyist Frank Keating and Richard Darman, a former Reagan official who is now a senior figure at the Carlyle Group.

Malek’s house lies at the end of a long arching driveway that passes lush gardens. On a recent morning, he sat in his living room filled with antique furniture, a gigantic fireplace, and a stunning view of the Potomac churning over rocks below. “It’s pretty nice,” he said matter-of-factly.

Malek sat and chatted about life in McLean for a while. Then the phone rang. He took the call and returned a few minutes later. “One of my airplane’s engines had a problem. That was the mechanic. Fixed.”

Last May, not far from Malek’s house at the Saudi Arabian ambassador’s compound, Prince Turki Al Faisal, the Saudi kingdom’s new emissary to the United States, hosted a gala party. The scene, according to the descriptions of those who attended, was straight out of the film Syriana. White drapes and soft lighting lent the compound’s pool house a dreamy atmosphere for the gathering of a few hundred of Washington’s biggest names in politics and media: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, Bob Woodward, Ted Koppel, John Negroponte, Syrian ambassador to the United States Imad Moustapha, and TV-hollerer John McLaughlin, who pulled up in a silver Porsche. The enormous compound–with a 38-room main house, 12-bedroom staff house, tennis court, and guard house at its front gate–has long been the scene of Washington intrigue. Its last occupant, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, used to informally host visitors like New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Tenet, who sometimes stopped off for a drink on his way home from CIA headquarters. Faisal’s gala didn’t run late–“there was no alcohol,” complains one attendee (unlike the more hedonistic Bandar, Turki forbids booze). But his obvious purpose of stroking Washington’s power elite had been served.

In the new McLean, socializing and lobbying are one and the same. An enormous amount of conservative hobnobbing is organized around fund-raisers or lobbyist-subsidized entertainment. Malek and his wife, Marlene, have hosted fund-raisers for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Olympia Snowe, George Allen, George Pataki, Arlen Specter, and George W. Bush. And events like Turki’s, designed to win favor and influence, are conducted on a massive scale. A notice in The Hill for last September’s installment of GOP lobbyist Tim Rupli’s annual Pig Pickin’ party expected around 500 guests, including several senior Capitol Hill staffers, who could enjoy a honky-tonk band and the roasting of three hogs. Alcohol was provided gratis by the DC-based wine and beer wholesalers’ associations. Indeed, the closest thing to an intimate Georgetown salon one can find in McLean may be regular dinners–including annual seder meals–hosted by Bush foreign policy aide Elliott Abrams and attended by such fellow neoconservatives as Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz.

[…]

The Georgetown of old was clubby, but it was not highly partisan; its heyday coincided with the era of postwar political consensus. The culture of McLean, by contrast, seems built around a politicized Republican identity. Just ask Terry McAuliffe, one of the few prominent Democrats there. (Not shocking in McAuliffe’s case, given that, as a millionaire former business mogul and golf enthusiast, he is perhaps Washington’s most culturally Republican Democrat. He also arrived in McLean in 1991, during a less conservative era.) “When we got out here, it was like animals in the zoo–‘Guess who’s moved into the neighborhood?'” jokes the former Democratic Party chairman. McAuliffe was once stopped at a red light in the middle of town when a stranger got out of his car and berated his politics. During Mark Warner’s 2001 gubernatorial campaign, McAuliffe planted a large warner for governor sign on his lawn. “Every couple of nights someone would come out after one or two in the morning and spray-paint all kinds of awful things.” Each time, McAuliffe would replace the sign with a fresh one. “This went on no less than fifteen times!”

[…]

Even churchgoing has a political cast in McLean. Worshippers at Trinity United Methodist Church, just off McLean’s main drag, listen to sermons from pastor Kathleene Card, wife of former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card. (The church’s signage recently advertised a somewhat belated sermon on christianity & world religions: understanding islam.) For evangelicals, there is McLean Bible Church, a $90 million complex that seats 2,400 parishioners. (“The Wal-Mart of churches,” one former church employee told the Post in 2004.) McLean Bible is led by the crusading Reverend Lon Solomon, who preaches a particularly doctrinaire and conservative gospel with the aid of elaborate mood lighting, 92 speakers, and the occasional fog machine. Solomon has attracted such prominent Republicans as Kenneth Starr, Dan Coats, Don Nickles, Don Evans, Senator John Thune, Senator Elizabeth Dole, and a clique of young Bush White House staffers. “It’s really because of Lon Solomon that I go,” the conservative Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, who sometimes takes notes during Solomon’s sermons, told the Post. “He does things that many others don’t do. He’s not afraid to say things and talk about political issues. He’s very pro-life and strong on opposing homosexual [marriage].” In one sermon during the Clinton impeachment, Solomon reportedly issued a thinly veiled Clinton-bashing spiel about how lying to the American people is wrong. That would be little surprise, given that Solomon is close to Ken Starr, to whom he sent encouraging personal notes during the Clinton inquisition. Perhaps because of Solomon’s fearless mixing of religion and politics, McLean Bible is a networking hub for young Washington conservatives, and many a GOP power couple has formed there. One McLean lobbyist, a former aide to Senator Phil Gramm named Jay Velasquez, told Roll Call that he met his future wife in the church’s lobby when she complimented his cowboy boots.

Isn’t that special? “Fearless mixing of religion and politics” is one way of putting it, I guess. (Why are churches exempted from taxation again?)

I think that what may have surprised me the most about this story is that Ed Rogers is married to a woman, but the large sums of money come in a close second. Property in McLean is more valuable that Greenwich or Malibu and there is something terribly wrong with that. These are the good ole boy Republicans who hold fancy “Pig Pickin’parties” and claim to represent Real Americans — it’s one of the greatest con jobs ever perpetrated. I’ve got no problem with people getting rich — I’ve got a lot of problems with people doing it by stealing money from the taxpayers while wearing a cross and condemning others’ morality.

This little community of newly minted aristocrats needs to be broken up. This can be accomplished by denying them any more taxpayer funded plunder and putting a few of them under the microscope and possibly in jail. At the very least, they should be exposed for the phonies they are. I suspect that most Americans don’t really give a damn about this stuff when things are going well. It’s when the economy goes south — and it will — that they will lose their patience. Be prepared. This story and others like it will add fuel to the fire.

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