PMC Commentary

As Good As It Gets?

The Lewis Libby indictment is an overdue rein on the cowboys of the Bush administration. Finally, some accountability is demanded. Finally, the kneecapping suffered by anyone who publicly questions this White House is being revealed. Finally, a little slice of karma has plopped on the administration’s plate.

But let’s be realistic and face the hard fact that this is probably as far as legal justice will go. Not only is the underlying crime of outing a covert CIA agent swept under the rug, but what lies at the heart of Libby’s criminal activities – an illegal war foisted on innocents through unprecedented, executive-branch con artistry – will likely go uninvestigated till George Bush and Dick Cheney are snug in retirement. Only historians will be left to unravel the monumental scamming allowed to proceed unimpeded and unpunished.

That’s the downside, and perhaps the only justice ever dished out to Dick and George will materialize in the form of their reincarnation as Iraqi children subjected to Air Force cluster bombs.

There is, however, an upside. Naturally the Washington network of elitist schmoozers is in full responsible-civics mode, jumping at every on-air opportunity to declare that it’s a dark day for America when a presidency is crippled by the fallout of Libby-like criminality. Their boo-hooing may be entertaining, but nothing could be further from the truth. Some thing, or some body, was needed to neutralize this reckless White House before it did even more harm to the nation and the world. Its crippled footing is the best political footing of all possible worlds.

I dropped in on local talk radio over the weekend to hear if the callers, the most loyal of administration loyalists, were still sporting blinders. After 30 minutes it was clear they were. The airwaves were full of everything from one caller’s report on the horrible health dangers of diet soda to another caller’s astonishing discovery of sparse automobile traffic at 5AM – but not a peep about Bush, Cheney, Libby & Co. So I called in to rattle their cages, reminding them that had Bill Clinton lied his way into an illegal war they would have lynched him at the end of his own rope, and quite deservedly. That didn’t sit well. The loyalists soon began calling to denounce the deranged, hate-filled, liberal Bush-basher who dared question their main man.

So the radical base is as solid as ever. No matter. George W. Bush could stand naked in Lafayette Park enticing little boys with Halloween Milk Duds and the talk-radio crowd would say it only proves his love for children. But at long last, the country at large has had enough, if opinion polls – which now put his approval rating at an abysmal 39 percent – are to be believed.

The CIA leak blow-up, the surpassing of 2000 American deaths in Iraq, the amateurism of natural disaster relief, the Harriet Miers fiasco, ballooning deficits, those soaring oil company profits courtesy GOP policies and the criminal troubles of both Republican congressional leaders have depleted the right’s credibility and taken an irreversible toll. The heavy odds are now that this administration’s and the hard right’s well-laid plans to further advance a Darth Vaderian empire and Gilded Age Redux are, at best, lightly browned toast for the next three years.

The weakened White House promotes a liberal-moderate coalition in Congress, one now emboldened enough – or so says the writing on the wall – to say enough is enough. True, the administration’s boss and underboss (you decide which is which) and most of their caporegimes likely will evade Lewis Libby’s woes, but they’ve created others of their own.

Aiding and abetting

It is axiomatic that everyone looks good when things are going well. Dealing with high times isn’t a traumatic test of character, and therefore doesn’t reveal true character. It’s when things get tough that authentic personalities are exposed – and there can be no better example of this psychobabbling truism than today’s Republican Party in action.

With the White House’s upper echelon now in criminal jeopardy, we pause with wonder at how leading GOPers have scrambled, dissembled, backpedaled and raised hypocrisy to new and breathtaking heights. Perjury? Obstruction of justice? Pshaw. Mere misdemeanors, they say, little bumps in the political road that only hypercritical naysayers would condemn as serious.

Remember how, according to Republicans, the national sky was falling when Bill Clinton hit these same bumps? His perjurious ways – and over sex, mind you, not national security – were a bane on our national reputation, an intolerable blight on the presidency and demanding of the harshest punishment: impeachment.

But so much for that. It’s a new age.

Chris Matthews, in a rare moment of actual political hardball, recently played two clips of Texas GOP Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison - a kind of before and after thing. On the one hand were her previous and dire warnings about the dangers of ignoring Democrat Clinton’s awful legal sins way back when; on the other hand was her present-day enlightenment about what a picayunish matter perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges would be if filed against Republicans Rove and Libby. My, my, she implied, what kind of nitwitted, nitpicky prosecutor would bother the national conscience with such petty technicalities.

In both instances Hutchison was merely floating her memorized Republican talking points. But framed in her party’s self-righteousness, the juxtaposed talking points spotlighted nothing but ethical depravity. Adding to the rehearsed sham on another Hardball program were representative conservative voices such as Byron York of the National Review - ho-hum, what Rove and Libby committed was pure and simple politics played and loved by all; and MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson – not many Americans are even paying attention to this stuff. Ho-hum again. Lower the criminal bar. Boys will be boys. Bore the audience. Yawn.

GOP feats of triple-axel hypocrisy over this self-inflicted disaster are just gearing up, but they’ll soon be an inventive sight to savor for every political junkie. For that much, and that much only, we thank the sterling party of Tom DeLay, Bill Frist and George W. Bush.

Hypocrisy, of course, is an old and venerated tradition in politics. No organized group of politicos could survive long without its infectious necessity. But what talking-head Republicans are in the process of unveiling goes more to fundamental dishonesty – their true nature as also unveiled in cooked-up stories leading to an unnecessary war, and their fraudulent economic policies sold as populist benefaction, but dripping in plutocratic favoritism.

The deeper transgression, however, lies in the American electorate’s willingness to put such naked dissemblers in office to begin with. Quite aside from Bush II’s initial theft of the White House, it’s been the American voter who empowered Republicanism to launch a bloody travesty in the Middle East and suck the working classes into an abyss of helpless servitude.

So, fundamental Republican dishonesty? You bet. But at another fundamental level we have only ourselves to blame. That’s a point that seems almost too obvious to mention, but it’s also a point that all too frequently goes overlooked in times of exposed political obscenities, as well as a point we should all remind our GOP-inclined friends of, right up to Election Day 2006.

I am in the delightful process of moving this week. I'll be back soon. Thank you.

P.M. Carpenter

The gruesome overview

For the Bush administration, Iraq is no longer a democratic test tube, or tabula rasa for geopolitical mapmakers, or even a Rovian opportunity to whip injured nationalism into a vengeful froth. It is way beyond that. Iraq has become, instead, nothing more than the administration’s tar baby of Hobson’s choices, Catch 22s, vicious cycles, and proverbial rocks and hard places amidst the desert.

The one bright spot is that Iraq as an immediate problem could very well be thrown out along with Bush’s other fetid bathwaters in 2008. The dark side, however, is that this criminal war has made an international rogue of the United States and the self-made image will linger in the world’s mind for years to come. Furthermore, the neocon Bushies who were intent on flexing America’s muscle to intimidate global girlie-men have instead shown (once again) that raw military power is a 98-pound, counterinsurgent weakling. Indeed, Bush’s excellent Iraq adventure has been an inspiration to the bin Ladens and Zarqawis everywhere waiting to kick sand in our face.

What’s more, Bush has demonstrated to the world that U.S. foreign policy is often more an instrument of political opportunism at home than that of grounded principles in play overseas. In brief, the U.S. can’t be trusted to do the right thing - only the momentarily popular thing, which can be easily fabricated and cynically marketed.

What’s worse is the Bush administration’s further destabilization of a region indispensable to the world’s economy, hence critical to the world’s political stability, nation by oil-dependent nation. Destabilization’s long-term downside is incalculable as well as unpredictable, the latter being the worst of all possible worlds for international planners.

Finally, the Bushies never understood there was no appropriate testing ground on which to reverse the lessons of Vietnam. Its lessons were transcendent. But in choosing Iraq - a tribal, ethnic and sectarian basket case in the midst of a regional basket case of global implications - to disprove those lessons, they gambled on the least amenable test case - and at a cost of thousands of innocent lives. Add to that the administration’s unprecedented but routine incompetence in the execution of a wholly wrongheaded policy and you have the makings of this nation’s worst foreign policy blunder ever.

The ever-lower depths of this uniquely disastrous policy are revealed almost daily. Merely the latest revelation is the dilemma posed by Iraq’s upcoming constitutional referendum. As the New York Times reported last week:

“Senior American officials say they are confident that Iraq’s draft constitution will be approved in the referendum to be held Oct. 15, even though Sunni Arabs in Iraq are mobilizing in large numbers to defeat it. In testimony before Congress on Thursday, the senior American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. of the Army, said the most recent analysis of intelligence from across the country supported the Bush administration's optimistic predictions that the referendum would pass.”

Some good news after all, you say? Hardly. In terrible fact, it’s the opposite:

“But no matter how the vote goes, several officials said in interviews, the violence in Iraq is likely to increase significantly…. Officials say that if the constitution is defeated, insurgents will most likely believe that they have won a significant victory and be encouraged to fight on. Conversely, it is said, the insurgency will grow stronger if the voters approve the constitution, because that will anger Sunnis who opposed it and empower Sunni insurgents who can claim that their views were ignored.”

In their eagerness for war, the Bushies have forged a lose-lose, no-matter-what-lose situation. It is the naturally bitter fruit of a corrupt design and truly one for the history books - although we can’t yet know just how bad and how lasting the damage done will be.