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Tuesday afternoon, the Senate gallery. I forgot to wear a tie this morning, so no press box for me; I'm stuck with the cattle in the visitors' gallery. Down on the floor, John Kerry is standing up to mourn the loss of the so-called Warner resolution on the Iraq War — a nonbinding, limp-noodle piece of triple-compromised political hot air that carried about as much weight as a springtime engagement to J. Lo. But Kerry is making it sound like the Civil Rights Act had just been vetoed by Satan himself.
"The last twenty-four hours in the Senate have not been a profile in courage," he drones. "They have been a profile in politics."
Well, no shit, I think. Then I realize that Kerry isn't talking about the Democrats:
"Rather than protect the troops," he goes on, "our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have decided . . . to protect the president."
I sink in my chair. Protect the president? From what? From a fucking nonbinding resolution? Are these people insane? What's next, a "sense of the Senate" vote calling Bush a "meanie"?
Probably — and if the Republicans filibuster that, then the Democrats will get really mad. Maybe they'll hold their breath, or go sit in a corner during recess.
I had gone down the rabbit hole — into the weird purgatory of post-Bush Washington. The nation's capital is a strange new world these days, a place where horrible crises abound, but nothing much gets done and no one seems to mind. Forget about Iraq — who do you like in '08?
One thing that's obvious is that the Bush era is not only dead, it's buried. You could see that easily enough watching the plight of poor Mitch McConnell, the gray-faced Senate minority leader put in charge of rebuffing the Democrats' half-assed anti-war effort.
The mumbling Kentucky senator has the tired, semicompetent look of a post-Rommel German field marshal — a middling, potbellied bureaucrat who happened to be the only guy left to throw at the front after Patton broke through Bastogne. While the early-model Republican leaders of the DeLay-Frist-Hastert genus were all smug, toothy jerks who grinned for the cameras like they'd just written America a big fat ticket for a broken taillight, McConnell carries himself in public like a dour old lady; throw a habit on him and he could easily be the lead in Nunsense. The mere fact that he's the guy rallying the Republican troops these days proves that it's time to stick a fork in the once-terrible Bush machine.
In fact, the Republicans may have breathed their last gasp in the Senate, in an overplayed procedural gambit designed to prevent the Democrats from making their empty gesture against the Iraq War. The gambit in question was Mother Superior McConnell's filibuster of the pathetic nonbinding Warner resolution.
On the surface, the filibuster was a brilliant idea, a diabolical ploy designed to expose the Democrats as pretenders in the anti-war effort. What McConnell was really doing was tying debate over the meaningless Warner amendment to a resolution with real teeth: the so-called Gregg amendment, sponsored by New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, which would have asked senators to cast a vote promising that they would never defund the troops in Iraq.
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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.
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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]