Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (12 page)

On October 18, 2007, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut—who for months had been emphasizing the need to restore the rule of law and our constitutional framework as the centerpiece of his presidential campaign—responded by announcing that he would place a senatorial “hold” on any telecom amnesty legislation and would actively filibuster it if necessary. Dodd tied the attempt to grant telecom amnesty to the litany of abuses over the last six years and proclaimed:

The Military Commissions Act. Warrantless wiretapping. Shredding of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Extraordinary Rendition. Secret Prisons.

No more.

I have decided to place a “hold” on the latest FISA bill that would have included amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the President’s assault on the Constitution by illegally providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization.

I said that I would do everything I could to stop this bill from passing, and I have.

It’s about delivering results—and as I’ve said before, the FIRST thing I will do after being sworn into office is restore the Constitution. But we shouldn’t have to wait until then to prevent the further erosion of our country’s most treasured document. That’s why I am stopping this bill today.

Dodd’s pledge triggered intense enthusiasm and passion among tens of thousands of Americans hungry for anything resembling actual leadership on these issues. As
Time
’s Karen Tumulty reported,

Senator Dodd’s campaign communications director Hari Sevugan tells me that $150,000 in small contributions have poured into Dodd’s campaign in the past 24 hours…. Dodd has raised
more small-dollar contributions in the last 24 hours than he did in the previous month.
Sevugan also says the number of visits to his website is up tenfold, as is the number of people registering their e-mail addresses there.

It is difficult to recall any single act by an American political leader over the last several years that generated such impassioned support at the grassroots level. Indeed, it was an exercise of democracy that is as noble as it is now rare—American citizens calling for their elected representatives to take a stand on a vital issue in defense of basic constitutional protections, and having an elected official actually respond.

Shailagh Murray wrote about this story on the
Washington Post
’s political blog the day following Dodd’s announcement. As had been true from the moment the controversy over telecom amnesty erupted, Murray had absolutely nothing to say about the substance of the issue—zero. Is amnesty a total evisceration of the rule of law? Do the hundreds of millions of dollars telecoms pour into the Beltway enhance their ability to obtain such extraordinary legislative license to break the law? Why are lawmakers from both parties so willing to grant such extreme protections to these companies, even though the Bush White House continues to keep them completely in the dark about what these telecoms actually did in enabling illegal spying on their customers? After six years of radical lawbreaking theories emanating from the Bush White House, what signal would amnesty send about the rule of law in America?

None of those issues was addressed in most of our establishment press’s examination of this matter, when they bothered to examine it at all. And those issues were certainly nowhere to be found in anything Murray wrote about it. Instead, Murray—as is virtually always true of her and most of her colleagues—spewed only the pettiest, most substance-free commentary.

Lip-curling mockery was her opening sentence: “Here’s a first for a Senate presidential candidate: blocking a bill that doesn’t exist yet.” In her next sentence, she derided Dodd’s tone, referring to his “announce[ment] in a breathless press release this after-noon”—as though only someone shrill and overwrought would possibly get worked up over the rule of law, warrants for spying on Americans, and retroactive immunity for an entire lawbreaking industry. Murray’s snide derision of Dodd’s purportedly “hot rhetoric” was not accompanied by a single substantive comment.

She concluded her column with a most revealing insinuation—that there was nothing remotely authentic about Dodd’s stance, but that instead it was merely a desperate attempt to salvage his failing campaign:

Assuming all goes smoothly, the legislation could hit the floor in mid-November, although senior Senate aides said late November or early December is a more likely time frame.

Whenever that big day comes, Dodd—as the keeper of the “hold”—must return from the campaign trail to officially block debate on the bill. That entails standing around on the Senate floor, forcing procedural votes, avoiding the furious glares of colleagues who don’t share the same concerns. The standard duration of such showdowns is about a week—time that Dodd, who is trailing badly in early primary polls, can scarcely afford.

That Murray wrote a jaded and outright snotty dismissal of Chris Dodd’s stance against warrantless spying on Americans and amnesty for
lawbreaking telecoms
reveals all one needs to know about our sorry Beltway media culture. So, too, does the fact that she views as “breathless” and “hot rhetoric” Dodd’s calmly stated objections to things such as “The Military Commissions Act. Warrantless wiretapping. Shredding of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Extraordinary Rendition. Secret Prisons.”

Our Beltway media elite believe that their petty, above-it-all, junior-high coolness is a sign of their sophistication and insight. Conversely, they think that political passion and conviction is the province of the lowly, ignorant masses, the overly serious nerds. Moreover, mere citizens have no role to play in our political system other than to keep quiet and allow the Serious Beltway Officials and Experts—the ones who whisper gossip into Murray’s hungry ear and flatter her with access and attention—to make the right, Serious decisions. As Murray explained once before, during a January 2007
Post
chat, when the President announced he would escalate the war in Iraq despite pervasive opposition to the war among Americans:

Washington, D.C.:
I am somewhat surprised at the debate about the surge. In October, the
Post
’s own polling showed that 19% of voters favored an immediate withdrawal. Yesterday, CNN reported that more than 50% want an immediate or by year’s end withdrawal. Still, the politicians debate more or less, not sooner or later. Why won’t the politicians follow the polls when it comes to leaving Iraq?

Shailagh Murray:
Would you want a department store manager or orthodontist running the Pentagon? I don’t think so.

The snickering over Dodd’s stand and the enthusiasm it triggered are quite similar to how the Beltway media spent all of 2006 reporting on Senator Russ Feingold’s lonely attempt to impose some accountability on the Bush administration for its blatant lawbreaking in eavesdropping on our conversations with-out warrants. When Feingold endlessly protested the NSA lawbreaking, then announced his intention to introduce a resolution censuring Bush for
breaking the law,
in unison the establishment political press chuckled oh-so-knowingly and dismissively.

Nothing could interest them less than matters of constitutional safeguards on government spying, or Republican lawbreaking at the highest levels of government. With regard to the weightiest issues, those who dwell in Matt Drudge’s kingdom are capable only of jaded, adolescent mockery of those who do care about the erosion of the Constitution and expansive executive-branch lawlessness.

Our very sophisticated Beltway media stars explained to the masses that this was nothing more than Feingold’s cheap political ploy to pander to the “Far Left” in order to gain their support for his presidential campaign. The very first line of an Associated Press article on Feingold’s censure resolution asserted: “The idea is increasing his standing among many Democratic voters as he ponders a bid for the party’s presidential nomination in 2008.”

The
Washington Post
reported that Republicans “denounced the censure resolution as a political stunt by an ambitious lawmaker positioning himself to run for president in 2008.” And even some Senate Democrats got into the act, with Minnesota’s Democratic senator Mark Dayton claiming that Feingold’s move is “an overreaching step by someone who is grandstanding and running for president at the expense of his own party and his own country.”

As is so often the case, the Beltway establishment’s contempt for political passion and opposition to GOP lawbreaking was expressed most vigorously by those assigned to play the role of “liberal pundits.” As they so reliably do in almost every case, they led the way in cynical mockery of Feingold’s motives, as well as any other efforts to hold the Bush administration accountable for its radical actions. In
Newsweek,
Eleanor Clift insisted that Feingold was pursuing a frivolous agenda solely in order to advance his own political interests:

Republicans finally had something to celebrate this week when Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold called for censuring George W. Bush. Democrats must have a death wish. Just when the momentum was going against the president, Feingold pops up to toss the GOP a life raft.

It’s brilliant strategy for him, a dark horse presidential candidate carving out a niche to the left of Hillary Clinton…. There is a vacuum in the heart of the party’s base that Feingold fills, but at what cost?…

The broader public sees it as political extremism. Just when the Republicans looked like they were coming un-hinged, the Democrats serve up a refresher course on why they can’t be trusted with the keys to the country.

Time
’s Joe Klein echoed these sentiments in a January 2006 article titled “How to Stay Out of Power,” warning that opposing Bush’s illegal eavesdropping would be politically fatal for Democrats: “Until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.” And
The New Republic,
courtesy of Ryan Lizza, chortled at the political stupidity of Feingold’s censure resolution, but Lizza of course understood the base and cynical motives driving Feingold:

Feingold is mystified by the reaction. Democrats, he said this week, are “cowering with this president’s numbers so low.” The liberal blogosphere, aghast at how wimpy Democrats are being, has risen up in a chorus of outrage:…

The nature of the split is obvious.
Feingold is thinking about 2008. Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, and other Democrats are thinking about 2006. Feingold cares about wooing the anti-Bush donor base on the web and putting some of his ’08 rivals—Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Evan Bayh—in uncomfortable positions.
Reid and Schumer care about winning the six seats it will take for Democrats to win control of the Senate.

Our most influential political journalists do not express a single thought of substance. Over the last seven years, the most they have been able to say about any legislator’s efforts to stem the tide of Bush radicalism and warmongering is to spout platitudes about the political implications and insist that such efforts are motivated by cynical and base self-interest. The substance of those issues bores them.

That Feingold represents a decidedly unliberal state (Kerry barely won Wisconsin in 2004: 50–49), and thus takes real political risks by pursuing these positions in defense of the rule of law and constitutional liberties, never causes the Beltway parrots a moment’s thought about whether he actually believes in what he is saying. Additionally, when Feingold, a few months after announcing his censure resolution, revealed that he actually
did not intend to run for president,
yet continued to pursue these positions with equal vigor, the idea that perhaps he believed in what he advocated still never occurred to the media elites.

That realization
cannot
occur to them. The idea that Feingold—or Dodd or any other political figure of significance—actually believes in what they are saying and doing is beyond the comprehension of Beltway journalists. For they are empty and self-absorbed, abiding in the world Drudge rules, and thus are consumed with pettiness; they believe in nothing, and thus assume that everyone else is as barren and vapid as they are. Hence they see no distinction between catty chatter about Edwards’s haircuts, on the one hand, and alerting Americans to how radical this government has become on the other. Indeed, those who harp on the latter are dreary killjoys who ruin the fun and ease of wallowing in the former.

This
is why we have become a country that has stood by passively while the President has seized the power to
imprison American citizens with no charges,
has tortured and broken the law at will, and has endlessly pursued a war agenda that most of the country opposes. Most of our political journalists are largely uninterested in such matters. As Murray put it: YAAWWN.

Media Hypocrites Love a Beauty Contest

The core attitude of the political press—and the dominant theme of our political dialogue for the last two decades—was summarized perfectly by the media’s unrestrained id, Chris Matthews. While speaking with Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean in September 2007, Matthews lamented that Democrats continuously nominate “weird” geeks and losers while the Republicans put forth strong, “charming” tough guys: