Post-Bush Syndrome

This was basically an all-in play in a game of political Texas Hold 'em. The Republicans knew that if the Democrats bought the basic premise behind the Gregg amendment — the idea that there is no middle ground between victory and surrender that they would fold rather than risk casting a vote "against the troops."

McConnell apparently knew this, so he poison-pilled the Warner amendment by lashing Gregg to its hull, certain that his Democratic counterpart, the hypercautious career bureaucrat Harry Reid, would much sooner allow the filibuster than let the dangerous Gregg amendment through.

McConnell was right, and had this been a few years ago, when every move the Republicans made looked smart, he would have been hailed as a genius who hung the cowardly Democrats with their own rope.

Instead, McConnell woke up on Tuesday and found himself bashed in every major newspaper in the country as an obstructionist fuckhead. Everywhere, it seemed, the Washington rules of engagement were trumped by public anger over the continuing war disaster. Then, a day later, five Republicans who had voted for the filibuster defected, signing a letter vowing to "explore all our options" to get the Warner resolution to the floor.

"No one ever entertained the possibility that [the filibuster] would be a dead end," said Maine Republican Olympia Snowe. The same Republicans who acted as one with iron discipline early in Bush's reign were now selling each other out and cutting their own deals at every opportunity.

Exasperated, McConnell then fled to the panacea of Fox News Sunday to plead his case, only to get whipped like a dog there by Bush administration stooge Chris Wallace. When McConnell tried politely to explain the intricacies of his poison-pill legislative gambit, Wallace — looking perky and bursting with energy, like he'd just sucked off a forty-piece marching band at a New Jersey rest area — ignored him and threw some old comments criticizing Democratic obstructionism back in McConnell's face. Then, when McConnell objected again, Wallace just cut him off.

"Senator, forgive me," he snapped, "I think you're confusing the facts with the political perception of this here." And proceeded to lecture him about the realities of the current political climate.

McConnell just pursed his thin nun lips in mute surrender. It was a remarkable scene: a Republican leader getting whaled on by a Fox News anchor.

There was a time when the Republican Party didn't have to consider public opinion; all its leaders had to do was act decisively and the Chris Wallaces of the world made sure the public came around. Back then it was the Democrats, with their whiny counterarguments (stammered out between the leonine roars of The O'Reilly Factor), who looked like the losers no matter what they did.

It was a grand old time for the Grand Old Party, an era when the baldest idiocies went unpunished, and even Iraq in flames seemed like fireworks for the party. But the clock struck midnight, and Mitch McConnell was left holding the reins of the pumpkin, wondering what the hell went wrong.

Meanwhile, across town, the trial of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, provided another grim sideshow to the unfolding Iraq disaster. While the Washington press corps buzzed about the gossip spilling out of the trial on a daily basis — there were nuggets that Tim Russert hates Chris Matthews, for instance, and that plaster-faced New York Times she-villain Judith Miller keeps her notes in shopping bags under her desk — the fact that this trial was still about the Iraq War was somehow lost in the shuffle. In a way, the Beltway's tawdry interest in the "Inside Baseball" bullshit emanating from the Libby trial perfectly mirrored the Democrats' half-serious attempts to pass an anti-war resolution. For the portrait of both the Bush administration and the press corps that is emerging from this trial is that of a group of craven star-fuckers with their tongues so far up each others' asses that they scarcely even realized that their high school gossiping was helping to start a war. Like the Democrats with their legislative dawdling, they were doing something other than their jobs at the moment of truth and were too stupid to not be proud of it.