PMC Commentary

Why is Al Franken bothering; or for that matter, Republicans?

I hope Al Franken possesses no illusions about grasping some impending rein of power; that as a high-profile Democratic senator, and a majority member, no less, he'll find himself neatly positioned to effect some of that social good of which he's always dreamed.

For the unblinkered know better ... and better, and better, with each passing day. They're learning that when it comes to slatternly party discipline, excepting that revolving around the most exquisitely refined campaign-finance techniques, the United States Senate in Democratic hands is a wholly individualized institution that simply cannot be beat.

In the absence, that is, of an iron-fisted majority leader such as Lyndon Johnson, Senate Democrats are but captives of a cat-herding corral, with predictable results: this one is owned by big pharma, that one by hospital associations, the other by profit-mongering physicians, and that other guy by HMOs.

Their constituents, or so they believe (and one must confess, with good reason), are the least of their worries. They need only one, indispensable thing: ready cash, to flood the airwaves every six years and to hire expert consultants to convince the poor, gullible, and otherwise disaffected boobs that it's time to pony up another pointless vote in support of their man, or woman, who's neatly positioned to effect some of that social good of which the boobs have always dreamed.

Franken, coming, as he does, from a swing state, is guaranteed a tough reelection fight. So he'll have to join in on the game -- the outcomes of which will almost invariably come down on the decisive side of the specially interested, well-heeled status quo.

All of which causes me to marvel not so much at Al Franken and the Democratic Party, but at the financial wastefulness of the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and a bevy of individual GOP senators. As the Politico reported yesterday, they have, combined, "over the past three months," pumped a mountain of cash into Sen. Norm Coleman's hopelessly quixotic survivalism, just to avert an immediate Frankenesque 60.

Why bother? I mean, it's not like Franken is off to join some deliberative chamber that threatens political mediocrity of the mind. You're safe, guys. Don't sweat it. Save your money, protect that cash.

The Michael Jackson media circus: My thoughts and yours

Yesterday morning the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," the Washington Post's media correspondent Howard Kurtz, asked his panel of CNN-anointed journalism experts if the media's carpet-bombing coverage of pop-star Michael Jackson's death was (is) professionally justified.

The brief exchange, which, exasperatingly, came at the segment's end rather than as a lead-in, unfolded as follows:

Kurtz: I only have half a minute here. [One panelist] mentioned the network newscasts, which led Thursday night, Friday night, of course, with Michael Jackson. Back in 1977, CBS led with another story, the Panama Canal instead of Elvis' death. And it just seems like everybody is on this Jackson bandwagon.

[Second panelist]: It's because people are talking about it. I mean, you know ...

Kurtz: Is that the standard? Is that the media standard, whatever people talk about becomes the most important story?

[Second panelist]: Yes. It is now. I mean, I'm not a 40-year veteran of TV journalism, but I can tell you that you cater to what everyone is talking about. That seems to be the new standard.

There is, of course, no "seeming" to it. That is the new standard -- the entertainment-driven, ratings-obsessed, profit-chasing standard that would make Howard Beale blush.

Yet it's not that cable-news networks have either forgotten or never understood the difference between hard, important news and pure, sensationalistic distraction; it's just that cable-news executives now report to corporate boards of directors and shareholders who are less than fussy about how profits are turned. If some executive fails to grasp that, the board, assuredly, will find someone who doesn't.

In this respect I tend to find philosophical harmony with Marx -- no, not Groucho -- in his (not very well-known) sympathy for the capitalist, who, wrote Karl, is as much a victim of impersonal market forces as the next guy; he does what he does, in general, not out of inhumanity or malice, but through the ruthlessly competitive need to survive.

In short, said Marx, blame the system, not the capitalist -- and I imagine that would have been his decree with respect to the Jackson media circus as well; there is no personal blame to be had here.

But what do you thing? In your opinion are network executives perpetrators of distracting madness, or merely helpless victims?

For Limbaugh, it's the net

I vaguely recall watching, as a kid, an old black-and-white movie in which this investigative journalist -- played, I think, by Stuart Whitman -- suspected sinister goings on inside the local insane asylum, so he managed to get himself committed to its "care" so that he could do some snooping around.

Well, you probably won't be surprised to learn the film's ending: He spent so long playing crazy, he actually went crazy, a tragic victim of too-clever-by-half, self-induced psychosis. So in the sinister asylum he remained, for the rest of his unnatural life.

Now, compare those fictive musings with the real-life ravings of Rush Limbaugh, who, by his own admission, has been playing it prodigiously over-the-top, for quite a number of years, in the pursuit, we are told, of a higher objective: to snake out and expose the evils of liberalism.

And here, from this week, is an example of how Rush is faring. In sorting out the why's and wherefore's of "this [Gov. Mark] Sanford business," Limbaugh said, he actually said:

This is almost like: I don't give a damn! Country's going to hell in a handbasket. I just want out of here! He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn't want any part of it. He lost the battle and said, "What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!"

Yes, it's one for the psychiatric record-books, folks: In Rush Limbaugh's increasingly dark, desperate and distorted mind, a $787 billion economic stimulus package is believable-enough stimulation to send a perfectly proper, right-thinking Southern governor into a follow-up exploration of Argentina's forbidden bush country.

So I put this to you: That's beyond strategic broadcasting; that's just plain nuts. And it just may be that Rush has been acting the lunatic for so long -- stridently bashing the left and absolving the right for ever-greater fun and profit -- he has finally become a genuine, certifiable one.

Now showing in the Democratic Senate: "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers"

The other day I was watching cable news between severe bouts of politico-clinical depression when on the screen up popped the melancholic Sen. Chuck Grassley in an interview, not exactly what the doctor ordered.

He was, naturally, first randy to do something more than what Obama is doing about Iran -- precisely what, remained a mystery -- and that part of the interview was harmless enough.

But soon there rolled around the issue of health care.

Grassley, as we all know, sits on Max Baucus' powerful, health-care-unreforming finance committee, and as such has risen to the top of what Baucus selectively, disingenuously calls his "Coalition of the Willing" -- a tidy, ideologically close-knit little band of arch-do-nothings, excluding, obviously, senators such as health subcommittee (of the finance committee) chairman Jay Rockefeller, who "has clashed with Baucus" for "advocating liberal proposals, such as a strong public-insurance option, that Baucus does not believe can pass the Senate."

And just why does Baucus believe so fervently that a "strong public-insurance option" can't pass? Because Baucus, in holding hands with the Chuck Grassleys of the so-called opposition, fervently works to see that it can't.

He wants, he says, bipartisanship.

So back to the Grassley interview, in which the network host finally comprehended the staggeringly manifest: Senator, are you saying that a bipartisan health-care bill must necessarily exclude even the consideration of a public plan?

"Absolutely," said Chuck, thereby reducing the bi-partisan to a singular GOP formulation, and thereby making a mockery of Baucus' "bipartisanship."

Which, in effect, makes Republican Senator Chuck Grassley not only the co-chairman of the Democratic-majority finance committee, but co-majority leader of the Democratic Senate, given the overarching importance of health-care reform -- all of which, as I discussed in this morning's column, will rightly cost the Democrats, big time, in 2010.

They just don't "get it."

Gov. Mark Sanford -- What else?

What else, or who else, indeed, would occupy this space this morning? -- although the "What else" question about Gov. Sanford is soon to enter the broader investigative realm of state finances.

But who, really, cares about that? Mostly this is a story that provides us yet another titillating, voyeuristic peek into the private mind and shadowy actions of yet another colossal hypocrite -- a genuine "Tartuffe," as Molière stylized these wretched creatures of furtive intent.

I won't deny my own rather embarrassing indulgence in schadenfreude; nevertheless last night I sat and watched two virtually uninterrupted hours of Sanfordology, on "Hardball" and "The Ed Show," with a discernable degree of sorrow, of uneasy participation, of loss.

Why loss? Because there they were, prominent political network hosts engaged in breathless analysis of a ruined Suuthrun governor -- was, for instance, Sanford's press-conference stage-management of first order?; is it better to have the jilted, humiliated little lady accompanying the scalawag pol?; has his anonymous staff distanced itself enough from this clown? -- just as sinister manipulations of the most historic domestic legislation since Medicare were taking place in the cloakrooms of Congress.

Sinister, and, for at least two hours (which stretched well into the night, I'm sure), silent.

Yes, we get it. Mark Sanford is a hypocrite, as is John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley ...

And, yep, these jerks are family-values hypocrites, no less. Oh, the disgusting irony of it all -- which I, too, from time to time have invested stale space in discussing, as though that thought hadn't already dawned on every conscious, vein-pulsating American.

As for Sanford's once-upon-a-time criticality as a 2012 presidential candidate: does that not justify all the coverage? Hey, we've three more years for yet other hypocritical GOP kingpins to fall, and if we endlessly convulse over each one of them, we'll lose track of what the 2012 race is even about.

The only upside to this psychologically predictable story is that we, as a political society resting on often questionable platforms, are yet one step closer to removing personal morality as an unsteady plank.

The GOP's Kool-Aid: It's what's for breakfast!

Many of us are beginning to wonder if there really is something in the GOP's Kool-Aid -- not just some metaphorical substance of like-minded policy daffiness, but possibly some actual, chemical pathogen of debilitating mental disease.

I mean, come on, it's getting otherwise inexplicably weird out there, leading the Politico this morning to ask, for instance, of the mysteriously peripatetic S.C. governor Mark Sanford, "Just how strange is too strange?" -- and "is the straight-laced Republican base ready for a candidate whose idea of relaxation is leaving his wife and kids on Father’s Day weekend to commune with [either] nature [or, as is being reported as of this writing, 'exotic' South Americans]?"

Yep, that's strange. Very strange.

But no stranger, perhaps, than almost anyone else on today's GOP side of political prominence.

Just yesterday, in this space, Dan Burton was being fitted for a well-earned straitjacket (if you missed it, he recently and publicly pined for some sort of "Get Smart," protective plexiglass dome in the House chamber to spare, for presumably good reasons left unexplained, 435 politicians from physical assault), and that was merely the latest act in a long, long series of manifest mental decline, virtually GOP-wide.

Or at least it seems that way. Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney and others of their neocon ilk are, of course, only as malevolently goofy as ever, but we must also note those more recent emanations of pure goofiness -- those utter, certifiable crackpots such as Michele Bachmann, Michael Steele and Sarah Palin -- all of whom get blended into an indistinguishable and accompanying mass of superlative hypocrisy and perversion -- Larry Craig, David Vitter, and Mark Foley, among others.

They've simply got to be ingesting the same stuff. Right? I mean, what are the coincidental odds that they would all simply find themselves in, and rise to the top of, the same political party?

It's the Kool-Aid I tell you. It's gotta be.

The shooter, Dan Burton, is back

"Watermelon Dan" is back (OK, so a former aide says he used a cantaloupe; not nearly as poetic), "still tilting at windmills, or large fruit as it were," reports the Post's amused Mary Ann Akers in her regular slot, "Behind the [Abnormal Psychology] Scenes in Washington."

Last Thursday, just in case you missed this, Indiana's 5th Congressional District crackpot "tried to offer one of the wackier amendments to the legislative branch appropriations bill," writes the intrepid Akers, "a measure that would order a cost-benefit analysis of building a transparent shield around the House chamber to protect members from getting killed."

"What this bill does," the neurotic Dan Burton pleaded to the House Rules Committee, "is it would authorize a study to look at enclosing the chamber, the gallery chamber, with Plexiglas so that somebody can't throw a bomb down on the floor and kill a lot of us."

Just before the committee -- sitting "dumbfounded, according to sources in the room" -- rejected Burton's evidential insanity, the paranoid pol helpfully detailed just how the dastardly crime could be committed:

"[A terrorist] could come in and kill half of the members of Congress right now. [He] could take a detonating device that looks like a watch so you could get through the metal detector. And when everybody was on the floor, as many as you wanted, you could put that into the plastic explosive, toss it out on the floor, and there is no way you would[n't] lose half of us if we were on the floor, at least, or more. I don't know how much damage it would do."

But that, of course, isn't the question.

No, the question is how much damage has already been done among the scattered synapses of Dan Burton's brain -- and, is it too late for Dan to avoid relocation from one large institution to another; a much, much happier institution where he'll be met not by dumbfounded looks, but by very pleasant and understanding smiles.

Speaking of "witless," I give you the virtuous William J. Bennett

It was years ago, and I don't recall what the television program was, but there sat on a panel both Michael Kinsley, the liberal columnist, and William J. Bennett, author of the then-recently published Book of Virtues. After listening to Bennett prattle on for a while with insufferable arrogance about this thing and that, Kinsley got off one of the best zingers ever: "I never realized that 'smugness' was one of our virtues."

One would think that for Bennett that would have been -- what do they call it? -- ah, yes, a "teachable moment." But no. His pomposity is indefatigable. He has never hit the pause button, not even for the briefest moment of self-reexamination, on his bumptious absolutism. Bennett always knows best -- about everything.

But he's been righting this sorry world more on talk radio, and not so much television, lately. I've missed him. So it was with a considerable serving of fulfilled nostalgia that I watched him yesterday morning on CNN's "State of the Union" (maybe he's a regular there; I don't know, I'm not much of a CNN viewer) -- and, I'm pleased to report, he's as pompous as ever.

Now you know what Bill and his buddies in the neoconservative world have done for us lately, which would lead most anyone to another teachable moment. But not William J. Bennett.

No, he was, in his criticism of Obama's Iran policy, as strident as ever; it was a tour de force of silly self-assuredness gone wild. The president, in failing to follow neoconservatives' instructive lead, is being "feckless," "gutless," "pusillanimous" and "witless," said Bennett -- shrillness, apparently, being another virtue which Bennett fears we're on the verge of losing (though I can't imagine why).

If Obama, he said, won't condemn (which he in fact has, by the way, absent the Bennettesque stridency) a foreign regime's tendency to "beat the hell out of people ... then what's the point of being a moral leader?"

Well, Bill, let's just say you've already shown us the point. Let's try intelligence, for a change.

Why a Bush-Cheney impeachment probe was absolutely essential

In a way, one cannot fault the Obama administration for presently exercising in federal court what can only be deemed an idiotic argument. Because presidents never, ever relinquish acquired powers, no matter how idiotically counterposed they might be to the U.S. Constitution or just plain common sense.

For that matter, one cannot really fault the Bush administration for, uh, let's say, taking liberties? with the Constitution. Because Congress, the principal Constitutional check and balance against the executive -- and for Bush-Cheney's last two years a Democratic Congress, no less -- simply allowed the White House to have its way, which always means an upward concentration of power.

And that power always stays put, unless vigorously challenged in its infancy. Which, as mentioned, it decidedly wasn't.

Hence Obama's Justice Department's argument before a federal judge Thursday "that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney's statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret, partly so they do not become fodder for Cheney's political enemies or late-night commentary on 'The Daily Show.' " And Obama's Justice Department was kidding us and the judge not.

The latter of whom "expressed surprise," reports the Washington Post, although the real surprise is that there's no reportorial mention of outright doubled-up laughter from the bench.

The (by now) old argument from the Bush administration was that disclosure of the Cheney documents would be unwise because such an act "could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings." The current Justice Department argued the same this week. Nice, said the judge, but there aren't any criminal probes in progress. So what the hell is your point?

At which point the Obama administration further crooned "that any White House official, from the president on down, could indeed be compelled to testify but ... it would be 'somewhat unseemly' to use a subpoena for vice presidents."

"Unseemly" -- the pursuit of open government and exposure of official wrongdoing; logic turned on its head.

But what did we expect? For two years the Democratic Congress stifled its Constitutional obligation (naturally it's pointless to ponder the prior Congress) to bring impeachment proceedings against the criminally culpable Bush administration; it merely sat and twiddled its political thumbs instead. Such proceedings would, of course, have gone nowhere in terms of actually removing the criminals from office, but impeachment stirrings would have at least announced with unmistakable clarity that lawmakers would no longer sit muted and watch the U.S. Constitution be abused by the idiotic arguments of some "unitary" biumvirate.

And so it goes, and so it shall continue. Because presidents never, ever relinquish acquired and uncontested powers.

George W. Bush, proving again he was the worst ever

George W. Bush is once again at the deceptive podium, trying his best to sink both the pathetic vestiges of his party and his own reputation to ever-greater historic lows. And Georgie is doing a helluva job.

Wednesday night, as you know, he spoke gibberish for what must have seemed like an interminable hour in Erie, Pennsylvania to the Manufacturers and Business Association, proving that those on both sides of the lectern have far greater stamina than normal folks.

He came loaded for bear and, characteristically, was chock full of virtually everything nonsensical that the American electorate just rejected, perhaps for good.

For example he hauled along this standard rhetorical chestnut: "You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money." On dinner and a movie, absolutely. But what about, say, health care? -- where it just might help to have 300 million others buying into the same government-owned-and-operated insurance pool as you.

Yet Bush, as he put it, "worr[ies] about encouraging the government to replace the private sector when it comes to providing insurance for health care" -- nice, since he has a government pension, complete with a government health-care package.

And, besides, he's still in pretty darn good physical shape, largely because of those eight years he spent exercising on a government salary rather than worrying about your health care.

When asked if he thought Barack Obama is a socialist, Bush said, "We'll see." But it would have been of greater benefit to us all if the questioner had instead posed, "Do you regard yourself as the halfwitted fascist the entire world with profound justification came to see you as?" At least we could have seen the famous Bush smirk.

He was the worst ever, hands down. Worse than Buchanan, worse than Pierce, far worse, even, than the brazenly criminal Nixon. And no number of speeches can ever reverse that.

Obama: An FDR progressive, whether hard-lining progressives believe it or not

A few days ago, in this space, I referenced, in partial defense of Barack Obama's economic policies, for which he's often taken a sound drubbing from the left, FDR's similarly cautious progressivism as perceived conservatism (and referenced again in this morning's column).

Indeed, some of Roosevelt's policies, notably the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the much-criticized and Supreme Court-outlawed National Recovery Administration, were unabashedly "corporatist."

For this effort I received, via email, considerable grief. FDR, I read more than once, was a man of the people, he fought for the little guy, he was a true progressive in finest form and I'm an idiot, and so on and so on.

There was a disconnect: I never denied FDR's progressivism or his historical place among "the people"; I was only pointing out that he approached it with ingenious caution -- at the time, the intellectual left labeled it insufferable "conservatism" -- much as Obama is doing today.

The New Deal, as radical 1960s historians rediscovered but disapproved of rather unenchantingly, was indeed strategically conservative in its progressivism. Because to move quickly, FDR was forced to rely on the (hoped-for) good intentions of those being regulated, whether they were banks, businessmen, farmers, or state relief agencies, while circumnavigating as best he could a prodigiously conservative, Southern Democratic Congress.

In general, FDR's Depression policies came to be seen by historians as a "holding operation" (as Cambridge University's American scholar Anthony Badger put it in his 1989 recap perspective, The New Deal).

Roosevelt could not have known this in 1933, but what he was holding for was the Second World War, which really did fundamentally alter the relationship between the federal government and the citizenry: war-production full employment, huge profits for big businessmen, the secure entrenchment of trade unions, new job opportunities for women and African Americans, and massive defense spending in the South (and West) that launched a regional face-lift.

I myself tend to view FDR's New Deal as a trifle more radical than Badger and others have, but there's one aspect of it that cannot be disputed: The hard left, at the time, detested much of it as an unconscionable sellout to the powers that be.

Sound familiar?

Long John Ensign, unhappy homemaker, typical GOP hypocrite

Yes, as the Washington Post reports to absolutely no one's surprise, yet another fallen Puritan slithers among us: Sen. John Ensign, "considered a rising star in the Republican Party, yesterday acknowledged an extramarital affair with a former campaign staffer who is married to one of the lawmaker's former legislative aides."

But here was the choice part: "He flew home yesterday morning after informing GOP leaders on Capitol Hill of his impending announcement" -- to which those GOP leaders almost assuredly responded, Oh, is it your turn this month?

We simply never realized, until the advent of the modern GOP, that the protection and preservation of family values entails porking every willing and available lass within grabbable sight, or, if the family-values protector so prefers, as has sometimes been the case, every laddie within sight.

It's sickening. Not the adultery part -- most among us couldn't care less about that. John Kennedy, for instance, perhaps the all-time greatest debaucher, tried setting an unbeatable record for getting illicitly laid, and no one in the know cared then, or now, but only because he refrained from lecturing you about keeping your pants on (my apologies, ladies, for the gender-exclusiveness, but it always seems to be the male politician who strays) and devoting yourself to the idyllic fireside contentment of family warmth.

In short, to each his own, although I can't say I'm an advocate of Kennedyesque comportment. I tend to agree with his predecessor Harry Truman, who contended that if you can't trust a man to keep his zipper up while away from his wife, you can't trust him on anything. But, whatever. I have my own swinish faults to conquer.

What really rankles, though, are folks like some right-wing apologist I suffered on some news show last night, muddling, as he did, the partisan distinction.

Oh, boys will be boys, he said, whether Democrat or Republican. The first part is true, but only one of the latter is likely to croon moralistic sermons in your bedroom, after having just banged "a former campaign staffer who is married to one of [his] former legislative aides."

Goodbye, Mister Schultz? Dick Cheney is about to (try to) eat you alive

Last night Ed Schultz, the genuinely populist host of MSNBC's appropriately named "Ed Show," forcefully proffered that in his opinion former vice president Dick Cheney wants to see another terrorist attack on U.S. soil so that he can be vindicated in his relentless attacks on President Obama's changes to Bush-Cheney's national security policies.

This morning, before what is likely a much larger audience, that of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," its host, Joe Scarborough, asked Schultz if he really believed his own speculation.

Whereupon Mr. Schultz batted not one eyelid: Absolutely, he said.

Whereupon the melodramatic Mr. Scarborough said, "I'm shocked."

Whereupon Mr. Schultz responded with chilling honesty: "That's Dick Cheney."

Schultz proceeded to characterize Cheney as a "ruthless" politician who's willing to welcome any national tragedy that would both vindicate his scurrility and, more important, help usher in yet another era of right-wing dominance.

At their theatrical best, "Morning Joe" 's regularly attending ensemble sat speechless, and then confessed to their speechlessness, shock, and horror.

I grant you, what Schultz said both last night and this morning was the roughest of rhetorical stuff. But who, in a truly honest moment, would question it's lethal validity?

Not even the far right would, but remember, I qualified that question with "honest," and my guess is that they, on behalf of the gallantly innocent Mr. Cheney, will hereupon launch a bloody jihad against Mr. Schultz (Leon Panetta was too formidably unassailable, Schultz isn't) that will vigorously test MSNBC's corporate dedication to free speech -- which, in Schultz's case, I did not find irresponsible.

Because Cheney comes with too much evil baggage.

James von Brunn and the countervailing power of the human heart (by some)

As wrenching proceedings commence in a U.S. district court today on the legal disposition of the aged psychotic and fervent hate-peddler James von Brunn, the matter's more human disposition has taken a heartwarming turn.

Reports ABC News this morning, Brunn's son is "now speaking out. Erik von Brunn tells ABC News and the Washington Post that 'I cannot express enough how deeply sorry I am it was Mr. [Stephen] Johns and not my father who lost his life."

So not every corrupted gene pool is uniformly destined for the gutter. Just as poignant was this observation from son Erik directed at "extremists like his father. He said that anyone who considers James von Brunn a hero should understand that what he did was an act of cowardice."

I wanted to note that, because almost immediately after the Holocaust Museum murder of security officer Johns I decided to visit, at random, some rootin-tootin, anarchism-uber-alles, anti-Semetic websites to see what their brave readers had to say. The very first comment I encountered? That James von Brunn was a "patriot."

Like I said, I had intended to visit other, likeminded websites, just to get the full effect of untrammeled online hate and ignorance, but to tell the truth that one comment alone so sickened me that I hadn’t the stomach to go on.

But back to the heartwarming, the very meaning of which I found further exemplified by this: Stephen Johns' mother, Jacqueline Carter, said "I can’t hate the man. If I hated I wouldn’t be any better than he. Don’t need to harbor hate. If [Brunn] does survive maybe he can get rid of the hate in his heart."

It's people like Jacqueline Carter who make me realize just how little higher humanity I myself harbor. Because if that had been my son shot and killed by the inhuman likes of a loathsome James von Brunn, my towering and probably inalterable instinct would have been to rip his internal organs out.

Blowing with the vomit-inducing wind

This morning the Politico reports that although Sen. Mary Landrieu, conservative Democrat from a hurricane-ravaged hell, "signed a letter in November affirming support for a public [health] insurance option," she now says, through a spokesman, that she didn't "necessarily look at it word for word."

No, she only "skimmed" the November, full-campaign-mode letter to Health Care for America Now, and, thinking that by and large it looked OK, she signed it, thereby "agree[ing] to back its principles, 'including the right to keep your current insurance, choose another private plan or to join a public health insurance plan.' "

Now comes "clarification." This Thursday Sen. Landrieu "seemed to contradict the pledge when she told reporters that she doesn't support the public option." Yet seemingly, there's no seeming to it. She either supports it or she doesn't, and her latest, quite unambiguously, is that she doesn't.

That, however, doesn't mean she can't fudge again with the best of them, among whom the very best in my opinion is Rep. Loretta Sanchez, conservative Democrat from a fiscal basket case. Ms. Sanchez is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, and as such signed its letter of principles opposing a public health care option for the time being.

But this week she appeared on MSNBC with David Shuster, and, considering as she did, I guess, MSNBC's rather left-leaning demographics, she declared all that earlier stuff about opposing a public plan to be just a big and silly misunderstanding. Oh yeah, sure, she said, she signed the letter all right, but heavens that doesn't mean she actually agrees with it.

Shuster didn't know whether to laugh or vomit. Since he was on the air, he laughed. I vomited.

So as a Democratic member of the United States Congress you can first support a public health plan and then oppose it, or you can oppose it and then support it, or you can simultaneously sort of oppose it and sort of support it -- depending entirely on the hour of day, place, and audience.

Integrity. Always integrity. That's what sustains us through these troubled times.