Post-Bush Syndrome

In the end, the jury may be too confused to figure out whether it was Russert, or Miller, or Bob Novak, or Bob Woodward, or Dick Armitage, or Karl Rove, or Santa Claus who outed Valerie Plame.

But the public will conclude that they were all trading stories about Joe Wilson's wife, and getting off on it, and not one of them thought to step back and realize the gravity of what they were doing. At each turn both the reporters and the administration went weak in the knees every time they had a secret to share — the classic example being Armitage's when he spoke to Woodward about Plame. "His wife is in the agency. . . . How about that shit?" he bragged.

This image of overpaid Washington insiders giddy with the game of power politics, using the lives of eighteen-year-olds as poker chips, is what has inspired so much hatred and disgust for mainstream politics in the past half-dozen years or so. It was no accident that the gallery of the Libby trial was filled with correspondents from the blogging world filing daily reports — Firedoglake, the Huffington Post and BlogHer were represented, among others. They had to be there because . . . well, because there had to be some real reporters there. At least the bloggers know who they're representing. As the trial showed, no one can be all that sure anymore about the Washington media, or the dingbat politicians they hang around with.

Then there were the democrats, who strode back into town with the air of conquerors and immediately punted on first down when given a chance to do something about Iraq. It escaped no one's notice that while a parade of former war advocates in the Senate announced runs for the presidency, no one in the upper chamber seemed to have spent much time planning an Iraq strategy. The only candidate even talking about the war was Barack Obama, and that was only because he wasn't in office to fuck up the first war vote.

Like amputees who think they still feel their fingers and toes, the Democrats spent this first debate over Iraq running scared from a Republican attack machine that has been clinically dead for months. Even with the White House's poll numbers in the tank, and with the public roundly disgusted about Iraq, the Democrats still let Tony Snow and the rest of the neocon crew frame the debate on a war they've been consistently wrong about for four solid years. Even this late in the game, and with so much at stake, the Democrats were still far more afraid of looking weak than of doing the wrong thing.

"What happened was that all these advisers from the Clinton White House, the Jamie Steinbergs and the James Carvilles, they came back and told the middle-of-the-road Democrats that the Republicans would kill them if they voted for a redeployment, or a defunding of the war," said one Democratic strategist. "So everybody backed off and just went for the nonbinding resolution, which basically said nothing."

The only ones complaining were anti-war cranks like Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold, disillusioned idealists banished to the political kiddie pool by party pragmatists.

"What you have is a whole lot of middle-of-the-road Democrats, liberal Democrats, even people who voted against the war — and they refuse to pull the trigger," said Feingold after the Warner fiasco. "They refuse to do what needs to be done. It's a tragedy that good people who know better are trying to take the easy way out."

The Democrats took the easy way out in many areas. They promised an earmark-free budget and claimed they'd achieved one after passing a continuing resolution to keep the government funded for 2007.

"This is an earmark-free bill!" said Congressman Rahm Emanuel after the bill passed. Newspapers around the country reported the triumph at face value.

But the resolution is basically a scam. "Right, earmark-free," chuckled Winslow Wheeler, a budget analyst and former aide to Republican and Democratic senators. "It's an insult to Swiss cheese. I'll bet that as we speak, staffers are calling agencies and saying, 'We want to make sure you know that all the money from last year is still there.'"

And indeed, right after the resolution passed, word leaked that a Republican staffer circulated an e-mail request for earmarks for the upcoming Labor-Health and Human Services appropriations bill. The e-mail read, "The Labor-HHS deadline for all requests will be April 13, 2007.

"This . . . includes any programmatic funding, project funding, bill or report language requests that your Senators would like to submit for the FY2008 LHHS bill."

Earmarks, in other words, were alive and well. "The same-old same-old," said Wheeler. "Nothing's changed."

Around Washington, there were similar reactions from activists and analysts to the Democrats' ethics-reform bill. It prevented lobbyists from buying meals, stadium tickets, trips and private jet services for politicians — but it left open a loophole for lobbyists to still pay for those things through fund-raising committees set up by candidates. "You close one door, you open another" was how one Democratic activist put it.

"The bill has got to be judged as inadequate," said Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation. "We still have no more information about who lobbyists are meeting with and what they're talking about."

Now Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire. The issues that drove people to the polls in November — congressional corruption, the exploding budget, the war — Congress just took one halfhearted whack at them, then settled down for two years of campaigning and business as usual.

Is this really the last shot we'll get at stopping the war before '08? Didn't anyone get the memo in November? Apparently not; apparently, this is as good as it gets.

[From Issue 1021 — March 8, 2007]