We’re seeing a new era in Washington DC. Probably nothing makes that more clear than Glenn Kessler’s outstanding slapdown of the President’s misleading use of rhetoric in his SOTU speech that appears on page A13 of today’s Washington Post. When such articles begin appearing on page A1 of the Post then we will have reached critical meltdown territory. As it stands now, we are not quite to a Three Mile Island situation, but I still wouldn’t drink the milk.
The Washington Establishment is a curious beast. It sees itself as responsible for the success of American foreign and business policy. Those are its first and highest priorities. The truth comes somewhere further down the line. Because they put their priorities in this order, they are vulnerable to making the same mistakes that the intelligence community, especially the CIA, repeatedly makes. The CIA answers to the President and the National Security Council. The Congress has some oversight (not nearly enough) and they can ask the CIA to give them information. But the CIA exists to serve the executive branch. And if the executive branch decides that New Zealand is the most evil, dictatorial, terrorist supporting, WMD proliferating, drug-running regime in the entire world? Well, then the CIA is damn well going to do their darnedest to convince the world of the evils of New Zealand.
They won’t do it easily. They’ll gripe. They’ll leak. There will be resignations. But they’ll do it because once the President sets a policy, no matter how hare-brained and delusional, it is their duty to try to make it work. And that is, albeit to a much lesser extent, also the view of the Washington Establishment.
But, after four years of disaster after disaster and deterioration after deterioration, the Washington Establishment finds themselves in a bind. The people have decided that the national interests are not the President’s interests and that the nation’s interests cannot be advanced by following the President’s interests. Congress is beginning to respond to this and we see the evidence most plainly in the competing resolutions in the Senate against any increase in our troop levels in Iraq.
The Bush administration lost the editorial board of the New York Times a long time ago. The NYT’s editorial board has become increasingly shrill and vituperative in their criticism of torture, detainee treatment, habeas corpus, the war in Iraq, and domestic surveillance. The Washington Post editorial board, however, has more nearly parroted Joe Lieberman’s advice that we criticize a President in a time of war at our peril. But the nation and, yes even the Senate, has passed the Washington Post by. And they still don’t get it. Here’s their review of Bush’s SOTU speech.
He missed key opportunities to put forward areas for such cooperation — and in the past six years, he’s done much to persuade Democrats that they have little to gain from partnership. Nonetheless, in the new political order that will dominate the final two years of the Bush presidency, it may be in the Democrats’ interest as well as the nation’s to seek bipartisan accomplishment. On energy, health care, education and immigration, Mr. Bush last night offered at least a reasonable basis for further discussion. Congress should engage, not reflexively dismiss.
Without getting into the details of Bush’s individual proposals, the fact of the matter is that his proposals are not reasonable. Teddy Kennedy, for example, has no incentive to even discuss Bush’s health care proposal. He wasn’t consulted, he doesn’t support it, his base doesn’t support it, and it’s terrible policy.
This is just a symptom of the greater problem, which is increasingly the elephant in the room. The Bush administration cannot govern. They are detached from reality. They are a liability to everyone that associates with them, including all of our allies around the world. Every day they remain in office is a day where American interests are damaged. They need to be impeached and thrown into Nixon’s scrapheap of history. Anyone that doesn’t know this is also detached from reality.
Bush has almost impossibly low approval ratings. The Washington Post and the Washington Establishment’s poll ratings must be similarly low and it is a direct result of their confusing their role. Their role has never been, like the CIA, to carry water for the executive branch. By acting like that is their role, they have helped lead this nation down a rathole. And their reputation, diminished as it is, is well deserved. Journalism is about the truth. A free press is our guarantor of good government. When our Establishment press fails to do their job, our current circumstances are the result.
When articles like Glenn Kessler’s start appearing on the front-page of the Washington Post I will begin to believe that the Washington Post gets it. But until they begin agitating for impeachment I won’t have much respect for them. Impeachment is the absolutely essential prerequisite for restoring faith in the U.S. government and the U.S. Establishment press.
