PMC Commentary

Rudy "Boo-Boo" Giuliani

I never liked the "character" issue's rude interference into American politics. Other than it usually being just plain rude, I never liked its cast-the-first-stone quality, either. But I chiefly dislike character's interference for the simple reason that it's commonly raised by political thugs who intend it as an irrelevant distraction from what actually matters -- that being the targeted character's policy positions.

Whatever Thomas Jefferson did or didn't do with a certain Sally at night had nothing to do with whether or not he might be inclined to unilaterally double the size of the United States; "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa" hardly addressed how Grover Cleveland might confront a deep economic depression, which he eventually did (poorly); and Bill Clinton's advertised dalliances were, of course, about anything and everything but his fiscal and foreign policies, two little items that normally influence this nation more than the particular lovemaking techniques of a bimbo from California.

Yet each of the above had his enemies and each of the above's enemies dwelled on the personal. The personal may have been titillating, and it may have aroused the wrath of the moralistically motivated, but it had nothing to do with the nation's business. And our business is, simply, what it's all about. Give me the William James School of Pragmatism kind of politics any day over any Freudian interest in a president's metaphorical thoughts on cigars. Who cares.

But every now and then comes a candidate with a personal history that rocks even the most pragmatically inclined. And Hizzoner Giuliani is one such candidate.

"Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani acknowledged again Friday that he made a mistake when he recommended Bernard Kerik to be the nation's homeland security chief," understated the New York Times on Rudy's understatement.

"The acknowledgment followed a report ... that the former New York City mayor was warned about Kerik's relationship with a company with suspected ties to organized crime even before Giuliani appointed Kerik as New York City police commissioner."

A mistake? No. A mistake is forgetting to tell your wife you'll be late for dinner. A mistake is misfiling your car insurance bill. A mistake is inattentively showing up for a 10AM dentist appointment at 11AM. The parameters of "mistake," however, most decidedly do not encompass your naming a mobbed-up character as police commissioner, then compounding said ill-defined mistake by recommending said mobster to be the nation's top security guy.

No, that sort of thing transcends mere "mistaken-ness." Indeed, it's that sort of thing that gives "mistake" a good name. So let us not conspire with Rudy "Boo-Boo," as his mob buddies might nickname him to great amusement, in abusing "mistake" by agreeing that his actions were anything but outright dishonest, shady, unscrupulous, fraudulent and borderline racketeering.

Now that's personal -- and for once, utterly relevant. Those adjectives may say nothing about what Rudy might do about taxes or Iraq, but they say a lot about Rudy the administrator, the executive, the man.

All we have to fear is their fear itself

The all-consuming, addictive question in every political junkie's mind is how Republicans will fare in 2008. An Intro to Govt text would profess the two majors parties are squaring off with roughly equal power today, but since the White House wields the veto pen, and since Democrats have thin Congressional majorities, and since senate Republicans can block at will any Democratic legislation from floor consideration, the GOP retains a kind of unbroken, de facto control till the next election cycle. Ergo, it's the next cycle that determines the GOP's national power, not the most recent one.

The Politico has a good overview of internal worries over "increasing public discontent toward President Bush, the Iraq war and the GOP brand in general" in "Republicans Fear 2008 Meltdown." Their troubled landscape, however, instills me with more nervousness than delight.

For the GOP the bad news seems to be mounting:

Polling data released this month confirm what GOP officials are picking up anecdotally: Swing voters are swinging away from Republicans at high velocity. Most alarming to GOP strategists is a new survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center that found 50 percent of those interviewed consider themselves a Democrat or leaning that way; only 35 percent tilt Republican.

For others, that of course is the good news. Any tectonic shift in party identification at this stage spells organic trouble for the "conservative" party of massive deficits and reckless interventionism two years down the road. What to do? "That's what we're struggling with, honestly," Republican Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito. "Do you positively brand yourself, or do you negatively brand the other side?"

Whoa -- there's a puzzler, and one they won't struggle with for long, since honesty does battle with conservatism as the party's least genuine characteristic. My predictive powers are as feeble as anyone's, but I'll go out on a limb here and venture that negative branding will triumph in this half-hearted struggle. Care to bet, Congresswoman?

And that branding will be a whopper; a thing of actual beauty to propaganda lovers everywhere fascinated by the dark art's creative ability to remake day into night.

Already, there are some troubling trends on the money front, according to GOP fundraisers.... Corporate PACs gave almost 60 percent of their money to Democrats in the first two months this year, a striking shift away from Republicans.

There you go. There's a minor propagandistic opportunity right there, a trend that seems bad but can actually be converted into a positive (for the GOP) negative (for the Dems): The Democratic Party is the party of corporate greed and influence. Now, no doubt there is authentic merit to the argument of shifting graft, yet when the recipient is proferred as the party of corporate influence, as opposed to a party of corporate influence -- well, the definite over indefinite article makes all the difference.

Hammer away at that message hard enough and long enough and you're bound to win converts, all of whom will gradually forget the GOP's own history as corporate whore and come to believe it's now the paleoconservative party of anticorporatist Pat Buchanan. Don't believe it? Just look at their paltry corporate contributions. Corporations don't much like Republicans. But, dear workers of the world, they love the Dems.

Again, that would be a rather minor arrow in any propagandistic quiver of misleading garbage, and even, admittedly, a rather far-fetched one, even for the most propagandistically talented. But one musn't dismiss the power of that fundamental tenet of effective propaganda: the bigger the lie or distortion, the better.

That's why "Republicans Fear 2008 Meltdown" left me more nervous than delighted. For it follows that the greater their fear, the more propaganda they'll spew, the bigger the lies will be, and all the better for them.

Decades ago the GOP had the organizational foresight to create a vast network of Orwellian-Machiavellian think tanks to feed conservative media outlets and infuence the mainstream, all of which enables them to mobilize the base and sway swing voters with a professional flair and immediacy that Democrats still only dream of.

In short, given enough time and motivating fear, they have the proper resources to sell anything.

The Agony of Victory

Sometimes defeat comes wrapped in "a surprise victory," which is how the Washington Post described Senate Democrats' "bid to force President Bush to end the Iraq war, turning back a Republican amendment that would have struck a troop withdrawal plan from emergency military funding legislation."

Furthermore, and less speculative than defeat wrapped in victory, any time the modern GOP appears to be acting reasonably -- such as not filibustering the Democratic funding-plus-withdrawal plan, whose "language was nearly identical to that of a Senate resolution rejected 50 to 48 two weeks ago" -- then it probably has something colossally nasty up its sleeve.

In short, the recent Democratic "victories" -- whether labeled minor, major, or surprising -- would seem, when all is said and done, to be the product of a rope-a-dope strategy.

The opposing view, which has emerged as near-prevailing wisdom, is that Congressional Republicans have thrown the White House from their train; saying, in effect, the war is Bush's problem and they won't be weighted down by this unpopular, uncooperative administration any longer.

I don't buy it. However embattled and besieged it may now be, the GOP understands that solidarity has always been its singular key to success. A monolithic mindset -- conceived, xeroxed and disseminated by its strategic Machiavellis -- has for decades managed to trump internally independent thought and action for the simple reason that solidarity has repeatedly proved itself. Which is to say it has been, by and large, electorally successful. The alternative -- the Democratic version of party politics, which is to say, the herding of cats -- speaks for itself.

The Post article went on to report that "Democratic leaders think [Tuesday's] 50 to 48 victory greatly strengthens their negotiating position as they prepare to face down a White House that yesterday reiterated its threat of a presidential veto."

A veto, it should be added, that for the White House and supposedly demoralized GOP comes with the happy "So what?" of insurmountability. V-e-t-o doesn't normally spell victory, and v-e-t-o p-r-o-o-f, in this instance, likely spells trouble for you know who.

Knowing that the war's funding is inevitable, Democrats will divide and desert their present unity in the post-veto phase. Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, will hang together -- funding, yes; withdrawal date, no -- giving the appearance of principled and consistent unity.

Meanwhile the White House will be the one declaring victory -- naturally "in support of our troops," no matter how many must die to affirm that support.

From now through 2008 the president and his still-enabling Congressional minions will demagogue the Democrats into scorn and humiliation. How dare they attempt to "micromanage" our brave boys. Sadly, the public's enthusiasm for this sort of balderdash is all too durable and easily rekindled.

And the Democrats, having finally refinanced the war, will project more than just the appearance of weakness, division and rudderlessness. For they will be, in striking fact, weakened, divided and rudderless.

So, a "surprise victory" for the Dems? I'd wager their real and biggest surprise is yet to come, however much I may earnestly hope I'm wrong.

Senatorial silliness

Whatever it is they're smoking in Arkansas these days, Senator Mark Pryor is smoking more than his share.

"The Arkansas Democrat [was] a key holdout on his party's proposal to approve $122 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while setting a goal of March 31, 2008, for winding up military operations in Iraq," said a front-page story in the WP. "Pryor wants a withdrawal deadline of some kind. He just doesn't want anyone outside the White House, Congress and the Iraqi government to know what it is."

Yes, a literal "secret plan"; a secret withdrawal date, secretly held by about 600 individuals, at an absolute minimum, all of whom make a living with their mouths.

To make it through life in this uncertain world, we all cling to certain fictions meant to provide some level of emotional security. One of those communal fictions is that to rise to the U.S. Senate one must have at least a modicum of mature judgment, no matter what ideological plane he or she operates from.

Then comes a senatorial idea like Mark Pryor's to shatter it all.

"My strong preference would be to have a classified plan and a classified timetable that should be shared with Congress," said the senator Monday, with moronity aforethought. To announce a deadline would clue in the hostiles, "who might just bide their time and wait for us to leave. Then you'd have chaos and mayhem and instability."

The collective boneheadedness of those mere three sentences is awe inducing. It was no trifling, off-the-cuff concept, after which one quickly apologizes on grounds of hastiness. No, it was "thought" out, presented to the media and proffered for his colleagues' consideration in amendment form.

It seems almost silly to even bother countering such silliness, but on the other hand, silliness seems to have a way of assuming the armor of seriousness these days, so perhaps it is best to do so.

The thought that all 535 members of Congress would hold secret some fixed date of withdrawal is positively otherworldly. Yet the belief that Iraqi government officials -- most of whom are self-interestedly aligned with a warring sect -- would do likewise resides exclusively in some parallel universe. And if nothing else, wouldn't someone notice when the Humvees, one by one, every few days, started rolling back to Kuwait?

As for the combatants "biding their time" if given an announced withdrawal date, by and large that happens to be what they're doing now, which makes any withdrawal date -- scheduled or not, public or not -- meaningless. Which is to say, sooner or later we'll leave; and the combatants know that. Any secrecy behind the "when" makes not a whit of difference as to its inevitability, making a sectarian intermission, as things are, a reasonable strategic choice.

Finally, of course, the sheer blindness underlying a prediction of "chaos and mayhem and instability" unless we hang around for a while is nothing less than breathtaking -- prima facie evidence of the senator's sure and steady consumption of a reality-altering substance.

What's even more breathtaking, however, is that anyone would have to point these things out to a United States senator.

Mark, I understand Britney is out of rehab. So there's a bed open.

Holster that brochure!

Here's my favorite: "Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda. Police departments [in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston] have been contacted regarding this event."

That's from a superspook memo by New York City's undercover operation created to make the world safe for the 2004 Republican National Convention. "Between musical sets," the memo continued, "there would be political speeches and videos."

Oh, the "sophistication" of it all -- videos, music, rhetoric and, most ominously, an unspecified "specific agenda."

Battle stations!

The "well-organized network" so cleverly infiltrated and exposed by NYC sleuths was "an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush," which was "planning concerts." Somehow, in some way, those concerts threatened peace and security in the political summer of 2004.

Or so thought the Big Apple's Band of Imbeciles, the sherlock "operation ... mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity."

And just who and what were snared by NYC's watchful dragnet of "criminal activity"? Those nefarious musical groups, of course, wielding videos and rhetoric; also "members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies."

Now keep in mind that these theatre companies and church groups armed with two-color brochures (which, after all, can inflict serious paper cuts) were nevertheless planning peaceful protests against the truly well-organized network of the right-wing booboisie meeting in praise of the other well-organized network of officeholding war criminals. But naturally, little wannabe J. Edgars everywhere were on guard.

Just as naturally, their municipal keepers now protest that their supersleuths' supersecret findings "were not written for consumption by the general public"; hence the public has "no right of ... access," especially since the entire heap of paranoid garbage might very well be "misinterpreted."

No, I think we get it. But then again, we're amateurs, you see. So said the city's senior counsel, who's now besieged by civil lawsuits stemming from his city's 2004 Red Scare arrest of 1,806 music-playing, rhetoric-spewing, brochure-toting national security threats: "The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information."

Besides, special decoder rings and armbands are required.

What's not required here is a lecture on this disgrace. Its police-state essence is all too obvious. I will note, however, that there are eight, highly competent but unemployed U.S. attorneys available to represent the plaintiffs against Mayor Bloomberg's Band of Imbeciles -- a mere monkey-see, monkey-do subset of our federal imbeciles.

It's good to see the "war on terror" is focused.

All the Presidents' Stonewallers

"Attorney-gate" doesn't quite capture the historical tediousness of the current White House-Justice Department scandal.

Sure, it has the ubiquitous "-gate" suffix. But other than that, there's nothing to indicate that we're watching a familiar replay of Richard Nixon's ineluctable comeuppance, complete with a justice-obstructing White House; a comically inept attorney general more presidential friend than top cop; the drip, drip, drip of "Oh, did we forget to mention that?"; an increasingly angry and aggressive Democratic Congress; and a withering of Republican Congressional support.

Every morning I expect to read that some White House flunky named Alex has George W. on tape saying "Stonewall 'em" and offering Kyle Sampson a million in hush money.

Yet there is one major and fundamental difference between Watergate's genesis and the current "hubbub" -- and it's telling.

The Nixon gang was at least trying to cover up the cover-up of an actual crime: the aluminum-foil-wearing B & E of Democrats' national headquarters. And, contrary to the forewarning axiom ever since -- "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" -- it's questionable that Nixon had much of a realistic choice in concealing the accumulated stupidities. To have done otherwise would have instantly exposed an organically corrupt administration engaged in all manner of long-standing dirty tricks and illegal maneuvers with purely political objectives.

For Dick Nixon, coming clean would have meant the effective end of his administration's legitimacy and all his global dreams of remaking the world in eponymous terms. Better to hang tough, let a few lieutenants fall, and try to keep the dream alive.

And, to repeat, there was, after all, an actual crime at the root of it all. Quite a few, in fact. Which is to say, Nixon had good, self-protective reasons to cover up.

John Mitchell, his good-buddy attorney general, had been signing off on all manner of criminally deranged, covert political operations. It tortures the imagination to picture Dick and John sitting around at night over bonded bourbon and not discussing the knee-slapping details of the president's favorite pastime -- screwing his enemies.

But, true to form, George Walker Bush can't even get presidential crime right. No, George had to go and get himself into an obstruction of justice mess of technically legal origins. He managed to take the contemplation of a routine act -- the replacement of political appointees -- and turn it, step by agonizing step, into a mound of felonious curiosities.

The man is an insult to quality gangsterism.

Not to minimize the scandal's disturbingly dark intent, but if Congress winds up nailing Bush Inc. on what began as a lawful shenanigan, rather than the White House's long history of nothing less than war crimes, it would also be an insult to legislative oversight, akin to the feds nailing the murderously extorting Al Capone on ... plink ... tax evasion.

The Yoonitary Executive

If ever there were a spectacular example of how the logic of authoritarianism inexorably creeps from A to D and ultimately Z, John Yoo is it.

Mr. Yoo, the torture-adoring, Geneva Convention-denying, law professor servant of "unitary executive" power has put his mind to work on the U.S. Attorney scandal and finds it all a mere "hubbub": Wouldn't things be simpler if we just extended the president's virtually unfettered war-making and foreign-policy powers to the domestic realm as well?

Spectacularly simplistic and simple-minded also come to mind. But, for the right, simple is good. Simple is understandable. Simple sells. The Wall Street Journal is always a willing vendor, and Thursday it published Mr. Yoo's simplistic and simple-minded "think-piece" that is, simply, a bunch of hooey.

First, according to Mr. Yoo, the scandal is just politics -- neglecting that more than a handful of Congressional Republicans are less than amused. But what the hell. That sort of complication only complicates; better to sweep it under the rug so we can keep arguments tidy -- and simple.

And how reassuring it is to simply snicker about those notoriously political Democrats simply wanting to watch "Karl Rove squirm before a congressional committee" while "placing bets on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's tenure in office," all of which "is great political sport."

Well, frankly, yes it is, Mr. Yoo. But so was Watergate, which also happened to double as something of a real problem.

But then, Mr. Yoo gets serious. He furrows his brow in preparation for making us wake up and realize that "much more than partisan circuses is at stake."

Are you ready? Are you now as sober as Mr. Yoo? Good. We've had our fun, but it's time to recognize that dark, incendiary forces loom and "those who toss more fuel onto the fire threaten the nation's unifying force in law enforcement and well-run government -- the president's core constitutional prerogative to fire his subordinates."

Which government is that? Is there some "well-run" outfit around here we haven't noticed? And hasn't this president repeatedly soiled himself precisely because he didn't fire every Tom, Dick, Donald and Brownie as boneheaded as he?

Still, all of that "constitutional prerogative" garbage was just filler for Mr. Yoo. To justify an article of respectable length he had to write something other than that one word, the object of his political affection and the mere thought of which really pumps him erect: and that one word was, of course, unitary -- meaning, once disrobed, "dictatorial."

There is nothing, no national ill, which in the opinion of Mr. Yoo's ilk cannot be cured by one-man rule. From singlehandedly interpreting treaties to launching preemptive wars to deciding the contours of prosecutorial matters -- if only we had just one authority, we'd have no fuss, no muss. Simple as that.

I saw John Dean in a cable-news interview the other night and he was recalling that when he became a conservative, conservatism meant limiting one man's rule. He seemed genuinely perplexed as to what's happened. Mr. Yoo happened, Mr. Dean.

But I'll end where Mr. Yoo began: "Since the very beginnings of the Republic, presidents have always had the constitutional right to remove their political appointees, for any reason or no reason at all."

What that historical overview profoundly failed to take into account is that "since the very beginnings of the Republic" most presidents haven't abused their constitutionally granted powers, invented new ones, elbowed all other constitutionally limiting authorities and generally made an absolute mess of everything.

I've got some news for yoo. The "hubbub" really is as simple as that.

The paper chase

This from the "Everybody knows ..." department: When it comes to courting lawmakers, corporations are more gold digger than lover, but at least with "the party of the people" back in power -- largely because the 12-year Republican-corporate fling was so unseemly, amoral and instructional -- those corporate come-hither looks will now be met with judicious leariness. Right?

Yeah. Tell us another bedtime story. For the gold-digging gun has sounded and this race looks mighty familiar.

"Campaign finance data reported this week show that this year's top-giving company PACs are shifting course," reports Politico.com. "That contribution shift is particularly pronounced among committee leaders, which offers some clues about how big companies may seek to navigate the new Congress."

Their navigation, however, doesn't go without considerable co-piloting. Freshly installed and hungry Democratic chairmen are more than willing to show the way and pocket the cash. Follow the money? Hell, you can't miss it for stumbling over it.

Here -- again, from Politico -- are just a few of the dispiriting facts to date.

The top Democrats on the 20 most business-related congressional committees hauled in nearly $240,000 from the 35 most active corporate political action committees in the first couple of months of the year. Their Republican counterparts -- the committees' ranking members -- received $182,200 from the same industry committees.

That's an early 32-percent advantage for "the people's party," and sure to grow. Any guess as to how important "the people" are in big business' calculations?

With Democrats looking to rein in defense spending, the three biggest-giving defense contractor PACs this year have given to Democratic chairmen of the committees with military spending oversight, but not to the committees' Republican ranking members.

I wasn't aware that Democrats were looking "to rein in defense spending"; if anything, they long ago joined the chorus of Pentagon boosters, generally out of fear of demagogic assaults and especially since the opposition party has gutted the Army, Marines Corps and National Guard. Democrats will heftily refinance the armed forces -- plus some -- so that in 10 years another Republican administration can gut it again. And so it goes, particularly when you're getting all the defense-contractor goodies.

Democrats are also reexamining corporate tax structures, which has business nervous. The chairmen of committees handling those issues -- House Ways and Means and Senate Finance -- have pulled in nearly $110,000 from the top corporate PACs, while the top Republicans have tallied $51,500.

I doubt they're really all that nervous. Not any longer.

Many Democrats pledged to refocus energy policy on alternative fuels, and the five most active energy company PACs ... have lavished contributions on one of the key Democratic leaders on the issue, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.). He raked in $12,500 from the PACs for Exelon, American Electric Power, Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy, while his ranking member, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), received nothing.

John Dingell has been in the House since 1955. He last won reelection with 87.91 percent of the vote. Is there some threat to his seat that only $12,500 from the likes of Florida Power and Light will forestall?

I have no problem with Aunt Bea throwing a few bucks her congressional candidate's way. But when multiple corporations of like self-interests can each toss $10,000 onto the table, then you have an electoral system of barely veiled wholesale graft that screams for mandatory public financing.

Rather than spending countless hours "hauling in," "pulling in" and being "lavished on," how about Congressional Democrats devoting some serious time to ending the cyclical madness?

The Age of Chaos

The document dumps heaving from the Bush administration in relation to the Department of Justice scandal reveal, according to press reports, an internal mindset of unorderly incompetence. One "e-mail exchange -- part of about 3,000 pages of internal documents turned over to Congress this week -- show[ed] a confused and divided Justice Department under siege in a political crisis largely of its own making." A bit farther down the news account reiterates that "the dismissal process itself ... was chaotic and spiked with petty cruelties."

Those items reminded me of a book I had read a few years ago -- whose title and author, unfortunately, I cannot recall -- that devoted itself to dispelling the myth of the "ruthlessly efficient" totalitarian government of Hitler's Germany. No, we don't live in a Nazified U.S., and I'm not suggesting we do. But there's no question that the boys in charge today envy the kind of total control wielded by that one-party government of yesterday. If only they could do everything their way, things would be tidy.

That's what Nazi bureaucrats thought, too. But things, as they turned out, didn't quite hum along. Instead, because those boys in charge represented, fundamentally, a bunch of unaccountable political thugs who needed not fear any checks and balances, the day-to-day operations of the Fueher's government rapidly devolved into a cauldron of confusion, division, crises largely of its own making, chaos and internal cruelties. Nazi Germany was, in short, a bureaucratic mess -- an inept, official free-for-all; anything but an operation of the "ruthless efficiency" so commonly associated in the mind with totalitarian governments.

The Bushies operated with similar freedom for six years, and we're seeing similar results. Which serves to reconfirm a simple paradox that the Founding Fathers understood but is too often suppressed, with the electorate's approval, in efforts to "get things done": For a people to be free, their leaders can't be. Simple as that. They should be made to look over their shoulders every minute with a cautiousness that borders on the paranoid.

Some of this was at least tangentially related to another book I just read (and rather belatedly, seeing how it was published in 1999). But since I just read it, I can at least tell you the author and title. It's George Stephanopoulos' All Too Human: A Political Education, whose personal journey through the Clinton years is irrelevant here, but whose observations about the early '90s Democratic Party -- the one still charged with bodyblocking ... see above -- are still quite relevant.

"After forty years of dominating Congress," wrote Stephanopoulos, "our party had become a complacent feudal kingdom no longer bound by fervent belief.... Each member was master of a barony, each chairman, lord of a duchy. Our majority was more a tactical alliance of autonomous factions than a political movement based on shared values and a coherent governing philosophy."

For those reasons "Republican strategists were able to [strike] at our weakest seams" -- "North against South, suburb against city ... Our various factions didn't trust each other, and we were deeply divided on matters of tactics and strategy."

Stephanopoulos experienced firsthand the consequences of his party's incoherent governing philosophy, its muddled tactics and strategy -- and all of us lived with the opposition's yearning for totality for six years, followed by another hair-raising six years of realized totality. The results? Again, see above.

Republicans can't govern because government itself is anathema; but they know how to win. Democrats, on the other hand, usually govern with at least some semblance of competence; but their competing philosophies, combined with factional tactics, inhibit their ability to soundly check a unified opposing front.

All of which leads to another paradox: For the Democratic Party to effectively counter the opposition's peculiar tendencies, its leaders must be free to limit the freedom of its members. Internal control is vital, yet lacking; hence the party's still-scattered positions on urgent matters, such as war, sadly suggests we're on a long, chaotic, two-way road.

Democracy's "death spiral"

In the reputed cause of keeping us safe, the Bush administration has gutted our defenses and left us more vulnerable than ever.

Is that merely some rabid charge thrown about by the irresponsible liberal blogosphere? No, that's the U.S. military talking, which goes even farther by depicting its readiness condition as a "death spiral."

In a perverse way, it's a good thing we're fighting them there, because we have very little to fight them with anywhere else, according to an eye-popping account from the Washington Post: "Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge."

Who, specifically, is this doomsaying band of brothers that sounds like the Bush-hating, Bush-bashing blogosphere in throwing around phrases like "death spiral"? Well, there's the Army chief of staff: "We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it." There's the Army's vice chief of staff, who describes his forces' readiness capability as "stark." And there's the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, who, when "asked last month by a House panel whether he was comfortable with the preparedness of Army units in the United States," replied bluntly, "No ... I am not comfortable."

"More troubling," the report continued, "is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover." In response the Pentagon has recommended the Army and Marine Corps' expansion by 92,000 troops. And that's just for starters.

But here's what's even more troubling to me and what seems like only a few others. The real death spiral we find ourselves in is more along the lines of what economist, historian and political scientist Chalmers Johnson gloomily outlines: something you might call "democracy's death spiral."

In an excellent, don't-miss interview with BuzzFlash.com, the Blowback-trilogy author goes back to the future with this profound and, I think, prophetic caveat: "History tells us there’s no more unstable, critical configuration than the combination of domestic democracy and foreign empire. You can be one or the other. You can be a democratic country, as we have claimed in the past to be, based on our Constitution. Or you can be an empire. But you can’t be both."

Yet "both" is what we're led to believe we're nobly pursuing, as we not only rebuild but now rapidly expand our military forces -- for our own good. And our "own good" will entail an ever-swelling military-industrial complex in support of an ever-inflating global fighting force engaged in increasingly numerous conflicts at deficit-bloating, economy-destroying costs.

Oh, and democracy-destroying costs, too. For empires demand unidimensional direction. They need one voice, one leader, one "decider." They cannot and will not tolerate 535 elected representatives and scores of constitutionally conscientious magistrates forcing their two-cents' worth into the mix. That system spells "messy" -- just about the only thing Donald Rumsfeld got right in six years -- and empires don't do messy. They are, rather, exceedingly unilinear in purpose and thought.

In the third of his trilogy, Nemesis, Professor Johnson writes that the United States "is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences."

That path is getting shorter by the day.

Of witch hunts and wagers

Another of those Watergate "constitutional crises" is looming, with another Democratic Congress squared off against another Republican executive branch. But this time, I'm afraid, the deck is stacked against the challengers.

Pat Leahy, the Senate Judiciary chairman, has said his committee will demand that Karl Rove and other Bush Inc. aides testify publicly and under oath about their role in the deepening U.S. Attorney scandal. Naturally, to give the appearance of cooperation a few Republicans have counterproposed that Karl & Friends have one of those 911 Commission sit-downs, in which tea and crumpets are served while administration officials chat with "investigators" privately, disingenuously and with legal impunity. You know, a real barnburner of Republican-style, let's-get-to-the-root-of-this probes.

Just as naturally, Mr. Leahy is less than enthralled by the suggestion. "I do not believe in this 'We’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,' and they don’t," he said on ABC's "This Week." "I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this."

Half-truths? Pat, look at the bright side: Coming from this administration, that would be 50 percent progress.

One administration spokesman, however, has already declared the prospect of sworn testimony as "highly unlikely," killing the suspense.

But just in case there was any doubt about the meaning of "highly unlikely," a White House-allied party strategist put it this way: "Forget that. They might agree to do an informal interview, but they’ll never testify." And it is highly likely, as they say, that that will be that.

The best line, though, has come from Republican Senator John Cornyn, who, with the highest indignation he could summon, charged that Congressional Democrats are wading "into basically a political witch hunt." Political witch-hunting is of course a foreign, not to mention repulsive, avocation to the likes of Mr. Cornyn, so on principle they're on guard.

Democrats are screaming that the Republican Congress during the Clinton administration had no such qualms about subpoenaing White House officials; 47 of whom, in fact, testified -- under oath, and in public. But that was different. Oral sex -- the scourge of representative government -- was involved then, not piddling matters of eradicating the separating line between the executive and judicial branches and overturning the U.S. Constitution. So let's get our play things straight, if you'll excuse the double entendre.

But to pick up where I began, I'm afraid the deck is stacked against the Democrats. Prediction is often a losing game, but the smart money says the fix is in on this one.

Issue subpoenas they will, but the drama pretty much will end there. Stentorian claims of executive privilege will ensue, Democrats will sue for judgment, the matter will work its way through a Republican appellate court, and the supreme Republican court will then finish it off by saying it's not their department. Case closed.

Hence the final judgment will be left in the hands of historians fifty years from now, damn them. They'll get all the fun and none of the pain -- assuming that by then honest history isn't punishable by death, courtesy Karl Rove Jr.'s U.S. Ministry of Justice.

Shameless

I couldn't let Valerie Plame's House testimony flow into the sewer of the Bush administration's forgotten crimes without comment. And they do tend to become forgotten, since each one is so quickly supplanted by two -- or three, or four -- more. Trying to keep up with the sordidness reminds me of that old 'Lucy Show' clip in which she tries to keep pace with the accelerating chocolate-factory line. It just ain't possible. There's too much. But we try.

While the 'Plame Incident' was routinely similar to others in the administration's bulging bag of ultimately prosecutable felonies, it also demonstrated -- and continues to demonstrate -- with a certain uniqueness just how aggressively shameless the White House and its dreary band of supporters can be.

Forget for a moment the duplicity involved, the underhandedness engaged, the personal retribution unleashed, and most of all the conversion of national security into a political play thing. Forget all that, and ponder for a moment only the shamelessness of the right's ongoing semantic denials.

In her testimony Plame made ringingly clear -- under oath -- the sensitive status of her position at the CIA. "I am here to say I was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency," she told the oversight committee. And what she did on the job, she said in rebuttal to the right's reputation-smear machine, "was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit."

Clear enough? Maybe not. So let's give it another go for the perpetually thickheaded.

"Saying she could reveal only limited information about her former job, Plame testified that, just before the Iraq war, she was 'still a covert officer' working to 'discover solid intelligence for senior policymakers on Iraq's presumed weapons-of-mass-destruction program' and that she 'traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.'"

Let's see. She couldn't reveal all. She worked at the CIA. She focused on uncovering usable intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD. Her work filtered up to senior policymakers. She went on secret missions.

Now let's put our thinking caps on. What does one normally call this kind of work?

You got it. Covert.

As if all that wasn't enough, "the covert nature of her job was buttressed by a statement that [the committee chairman] read at the hearing's opening which, he said, was approved by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the CIA's director. The statement said that Plame worked in a covert capacity at the time of [Robert] Novak's column and that her employment status was classified under an executive order."

OK, let's review. If a CIA agent says her work was covert, and the CIA director confirms that her work was covert, what do we call it?

That aside, speaking for the vast right-wing nincompoopery, here's what the House "committee's ranking Republican" called it: a CIA screw-up.

Rep. Thomas Davis III of Virginia "sought to deflect blame from the administration," charging that "this looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem." Quoting now the WP's coverage: He said "the agency should have made sure that White House officials who inquired about Plame knew that her position was classified."

And notice he didn't add, simply couldn't bring himself to add, "covert."

Shameless.

And the right will keep right on being shameless, quibbling about her status with the most lawyerly semantic hairsplitting imaginable and making what Bill Clinton's "meaning of is, is" look like an Oxford Dictionary entry of rectilinear precision. Why?

Because they're shameless.

McCain performs self-testectomy

While tooling around Iowa yesterday on the increasingly oxymoronic "Straight Talk Express," Republican Senator John McCain emasculated himself right before an audience of journalist spectators, one of whom happened to be the NYT's Adam Nagourney, who recorded the bloody details of the excruciatingly painful self-procedure.

Who suffered more -- Mr. McCain, his surgical assistants, or the reporters -- may be debatable, but suffering was indeed the nut of it, as the presidential candidate squirmed and hesitated but nevertheless proceeded to excise his manhood, right there, right there on the bus, in deference to the Christian right's vigilant eyes.

The complex and elective deballsification came somewhat unexpectedly in response to a reporter's simple question:

Should U.S. taxpayer money go to places like Africa to fund contraception to prevent AIDS?

"Well I think it’s a combination. The guy I really respect on this is Dr. Coburn. He believes – and I was just reading the thing he wrote– that you should do what you can to encourage abstinence where there is going to be sexual activity. Where that doesn’t succeed, than he thinks that we should employ contraceptives as well. But I agree with him that the first priority is on abstinence. I look to people like Dr. Coburn. I’m not very wise on it."

Mr. McCain could have, and should have, stopped right there, with his manhood intact, leaving the controversial matter in the capable and saving hands of the good Dr. Tom Coburn, who moonlights as a Republican U.S. senator with a sterling 100-percent Christian Coalition rating. But that level of approved perfection is impossible to achieve if one thinks for himself like a man, so the self-conscious Arizonan grabbed his crotch with one hand and reached for a scalpel with the other.

The squeamish may not care to read on.

Mr. McCain turns to take a question on Iraq, but a moment later looks back to the reporter who asked him about AIDS.

"I haven’t thought about it. Before I give you an answer, let me think about. Let me think about it a little bit because I never got a question about it before. I don’t know if I would use taxpayers’ money for it."

By now, however, the reporter smelled the coming blood. Poor Mr. McCain was slinking in his seat and splashing the Betadine on his privates like Aqua Velva.

What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?

"(Long pause) 'Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.'"

So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?

"(Long pause) 'You’ve stumped me.'"

Not quite. For Mr. McCain was actually in the process of "stumping" himself.

I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?

After some damn-the-torpedoes still-manly laughter in the face of self-mutilation: "Are we on the Straight Talk Express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it in the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian [his press secretary], would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it."

But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: "No, we’re not going to distribute them," knowing that?

(Long pause) "Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver [a senior adviser] to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before."

With that, it was over. Done .. with Mr. McCain now speaking a couple octaves higher -- a self-inflicted condition never to be reversed.

It is odd and sad, is it not, that the Christian right extols rugged manhood, but shuns all those who dare to behave with anything less than eunuch-like slavishness. It is even odder -- not to mention sadder -- when a real man, which John McCain indisputably was once, bows to its self-righteous demands for self-emasculation.

Goodbye, Mr. McCain. And if it's any consolation, at least in impotent retirement you'll be able to look back and recollect the precise moment at which you kissed your own goodies goodbye. You won't have to sit and wonder about why, when, where, and how you lost them.

Bang your head slowly

Here we go again.

Nothing betrays the Bush administration's Iraq shell game like the administration itself, "which six months ago issued a series of political goals for the Iraqi government to meet by this month [and] is now tacitly acknowledging that the goals will take significantly longer to achieve."

Well blow me away. Things aren't going according to plan. So what do we do? Why of course. Extend the plan. Which actually means that things are indeed going according to plan, because to work it only requires an extension. Got it?

If not, just bang your head against a sturdy wall until it spins into a circular-thinking mode.

The beauty of the administration's plan is that it's always a sure-fire winner, because success always lies months down the road. How can one possibly oppose the triumph that awaits us just over the next hill? What kind of defeatist attitude is that?

The chief planner knows. It's a shortsighted one buried in "a culture of seeking [that seeks?] instant results."

Now, until you've sufficiently banged your head, you may find that insulting. You're now labeled an attention-disordered child for expecting "instant results" -- presently defined as those coming within a half-decade or so -- although you were praised for being made of stronger, more adult neocon stuff when believing in the fairy-tale instant result of an instantly accomplished mission four years ago.

Hey, chump, we're talking neocolonial imperialism here, and the experts know that Rome didn't disintegrate overnight. It took a good long while to implode, and not one of its expert planners expected or sought instant results in the process.

Wait ... This line of thinking seems to be headed in the wrong direction. Perhaps Rome isn't the best example to pull out of our imperial hat. Here's a better one ...

Uh, they'll get back to you on that.

Look, the important thing is this: The plan that didn't work, isn't working, and has no reasonable expectation of working needs to be extended so that it can work.

After all, they're really just now getting started. Their crack analysts -- no jokes, please, about analysts on crack -- recently determined in a flurry of professional insight that we need to "create the conditions for achieving the objectives."

Now you, of childish and insufficiently banged mind, wouldn't have thought of that. They did. And that's why they hold the exalted reins of power, and you don't.

OK, step two. (They're very methodical.) The aforementioned conditions will -- not should, will -- "be fully in place [by] June." After that, we coast, because "all of the objectives" will then "be fulfilled [by] year’s end."

See? What's to worry? Not a thing, as long as you hug that wall and start slowly but forcefully banging your head.

Creeping fascism, stagnant public concern

The uproar over the White House-orchestrated firing of conscientious U.S. attorneys stirs mixed emotions. It would be nice to believe it's grounded in public outrage, but such outrage would have been searingly befitting years ago -- and it never came. If an illegal war didn't merit the public's unforgiving disgust then, what possibly could now? The canning of government lawyers? Come on. Let's get real, even though these days that is a sad exercise.

My guess, proffered as an empirically based one, is that Americans at large could name more contestants on "American Idol" than those principals behind the latest subversion of the U.S. constitution. I would further guess -- again, empirically -- that if stopped on the street and asked about the current "uproar," a depressingly statistically significant number would respond, "What uproar?" Indeed ... "What scandal?"

No, the furor is mostly taking place in the Washington bubble, and politicians from both sides of the aisle are merely trying to stay ahead of the issue as an electoral one in a year or so from now, just in case. That's why we read comments coming even from the right about the administration's behavior being "troubling" and "dysfunctional." It's not that the pols themselves are deeply troubled by the democratic dysfunction, however. They're just nervously cautious, which often renders their somber comments on the matter as laughably calculating.

Republican Congressman Thomas Davis III, for instance, said "This is going to be a rockier year for the White House because every time there is a perceived mistake, they can fire up an investigation. It puts the White House on the defensive." Now there's a statement intended to please just about everybody in its CYA cautiousness.

"Mistake" is snuggled in there as a partial reality check, but preceded by the thoroughly modifying "perceived" for the reality-denying crowd. Then the "fire up" is meant to make any investigation sound like nothing more than a politically motivated shot from the hip by the irresponsible opposition. Last, the White House is on the "defensive": meaning the Democrats are executing a wicked offense, meaning by implication that the scandal's genesis lies somewhere separate from the corrupt little buggers who actually spawned it.

Nice tricks. They may cover Mr. Davis' rear, but did they really suggest he is "troubled"; that White House "dysfunction" is the least bit intolerable? Nah, it's all just politics, something those incorrigible Democrats play.

But consider the real and ultimate reality check: Fundamentally what the White House attempted was a covert, political revamping of the American legal system. The occasionally attentive may think it was just petty politics, but in some respects its potential consequences loomed greater in terms of constitutional subversion than even an illegal war.

When one thinks more than one move ahead in the White House's game of political chess, one can easily imagine a future legal system in which there are excusable, unprosecuted crimes committed by "good" Republicans and inexcusable, prosecutable crimes committed only by all others. Taken to its logical extreme: did Unitary Executive Adolph's political supporters have to fear prosecution -- for anything?

In the study of comparative political systems there's a name for the particular one that accommodates that sort of selective jurisprudence. Yet I seriously doubt the at-large public is giving more than a minute's thought, if that much, to the White House's attempt at Move One, let alone Move Six, or Eight. And therein lies the deeper danger -- today, and tomorrow.