Congressional Republicans thought labeling this week’s Democratic Senate shutdown a “stunt” would be damning. Majority Leader Bill Frist summoned his formidable acting abilities to appear livid and sincere: “This is an affront to me personally,” said Frist. “It’s an affront to our leadership. It’s an affront to the United States of America.” It was nothing but theatrically unrighteous politics, he of unwaveringly righteous politics declared.
Frist further huffed that the Senate had been “hijacked by the Democratic leadership.” Why the felony? Because Democrats “have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas.”
That’s generally true these days, Bill. But this time Democrats did have an idea – an excellent, albeit imitative, one: Use a baseball bat to pull a Republicanesque stunt, one that would get the elephant’s attention and that of the circus barkers, a.k.a. network-television journalists.
It’s taken me some time to succumb to the siren song that Democrats should adopt the cheap, lowbrow tactics of Republicans. But Tuesday’s press reaction convinced me. Journalists were thrilled to cover cheap, lowbrow tactics coming from someone other than GOPers for a change. Apostate Chris Matthews even brushed aside an MSNBC anchor’s question about the propriety of the Democratic maneuver. To paraphrase, Matthews asked who gives a rip how Democrats got Frist’s attention, as long as they did; and upholding Senate protocol, he added, doesn’t begin to compare in importance to uncovering administration lies.
If stunts can get Chris Matthews’ attention and add to the demands for accountability, then I’m for stunts.
The next day the NYT reported this comedy: Senator Pat Roberts, un-chairman of the Senate un-Intelligence un-Committee, “denied having done anything to slow the inquiry [said slowness causing said stunt-affront]. In fact, he said, Intelligence Committee staff members were aggressively working on what is known as the Phase 2 intelligence inquiry.”
Uh-huh. The Washington Post reported that same day: “Sources familiar with the committee’s work said there has been little examination … to date.” That’s the stone wall that Senate Democrats have been up against.
And consider this from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, dated May – as in five months ago – 2005:
On July 9, 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its 511-page report on intelligence failures before the Iraq war…. Questions about whether White House officials manipulated the intelligence to build the case for war were waved off to … sometime after the November election.
“We simply couldn’t get that done with the work product we have put out,” Republican committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts said at the time, promising speed. “That is a top priority,” he added. “It is one of my top priorities.”
“To keep going over this, over and over again – I’m more than happy to finish this, and I want to finish it, but we have other things that we need to do,” Roberts told NBC’s Tim Russert last month.
So much for Roberts’ claim of “aggressively working on … the Phase 2 intelligence inquiry.”
Since Watergate it’s been a Beltway truism that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. That wisdom doesn’t hold true for the Bush administration, for nothing could be worse than manipulating intelligence to launch a bloody, costly and needless war. But it certainly is shaping up for this Republican Congress – and surprise, it has come at the hands of the usually hapless Democrats.
And in case there’s any doubt about the effectiveness of this week’s Democratic extreme, consider this as well. On Wednesday, CNN’s Lou Dobbs asked Democrat and Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Jay Rockefeller about the “stunt’s” propriety. Rockefeller said he knew just one thing: The tactic accomplished more in two hours than Democrats had accomplished in 20 months of proper pleading.
Stunts work – well, they do when the opposition’s approval rating stands at an overall 35 percent.