Washington implodes
Spending your tax dollars in Iraq: "While the [75th] Exploitation Task Force [the first postwar US group to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq] worked out of an abandoned palace and the servants' housing quarters near Baghdad airport and remained short of vehicles, air support, computers and even electricity during the initial months of the weapons hunt, the Iraq Survey Group spent its first weeks installing air-conditioned trailers, a new dining facility, state-of-the-art software and even a sprinkler system for a new lawn, according to officials and experts who worked with the group this summer.
"'They kept unloading crates and crates of new Dell laptops,' said one Pentagon official who complained that the exploitation force lacked resources." (James Risen and Judith Miller, Officials Say Bush Seeks $600 Million to Hunt Iraq Arms, the New York Times,. Note that Times reporter Miller, who is now regularly paired with another reporter, almost single-handedly helped perpetrate the myth of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in the postwar period to the delight of the administration. On Miller's feckless reporting, check out, William E. Jackson, jr., Miller's Star Fades [Slightly] at NY Times, Editor & Publisher)
Guarding your tax dollars in Iraq: "We are usually quiet individuals, expressing little about world events and politics, etc. However, we have to stand up and say something now. Our son-in-law is in the Army, serving our country for several months in Iraq. He was recently authorized to return home for two weeks. We are all grateful for this news! However, there is one catch -- he has to pay for the journey!
"How can the government expect him to pay his own airfare? It seems unfair the government won't foot the bill to send troops home, after they risk their lives for our country. They have had to leave their families struggling emotionally and some financially. Then when they do have the opportunity to come home briefly, they are expected to pay their own way." (Part of a letter from Randy and Pam Forcier that appeared in the Spokane Spokesman Review, )
So Washington is imploding. We've evidently reached something like the tipping point. This has been building for what seems forever. Suddenly, the press -- even the front-page of my hometown newspaper -- has burst forth with what increasingly looks like the unvarnished news. Prime-time TV news shows are now litanies of bad tidings for the Bush administration. Charlie Rose, whose range of elite political guests for most of the last year extended from those who thought we should bash France to those who thought we should be slightly nicer to the French but ignore their opinions, actually had a full hour of oppositional talk about Iraq. The economist Jeffrey Sachs (who has clearly had a brain transplant since trying to privatize Russia single-handedly) directly stated that this had been an oil war and insisted that we should simply get out in short order. (Hardly weeks before, I heard Charlie Rose assure his audience that no figure of significance had called for or would call for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.)
And last week, Ted Koppel, whose war coverage gave government-line new meaning (and who managed night after night from Iraq to look like Michael Dukakis without the tank), pulled off a trifecta plus one on Nightline. He (and his colleagues) conducted lengthy interviews with a critical General Anthony Zinni, with ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, with five CIA agents (four retired) defending Wilson's wife (on which more below), and also offered a devastating rundown on what that $87 billion dollar request to Congress actually means.
Are we talking change in the zeitgeist here? You bet. And don't confine it to the "liberal" media either or, for that matter, the Democratic Party whose candidates, Dean and Kucinich aside, are still scrambling to catch up in their denunciations of the Bush administration, attacks on its wartime policies, and calls for a special prosecutor in the Wilson case (though - and here's that sign that they're still avoiding the hard questions - not calling for serious reconsideration of that $66 billion in military money destined to bolster military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan until the end of time).
Take Robert Novak, the conservative columnist who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, ex-Ambassador Wilson's wife. He's now moved on, at least temporarily, to outing the administration itself. In a column entitled, George W in Trouble, he writes:
"Replacing the old mantra that there is no way for Bush to lose, panicky Republicans studying the electoral map wonder whether there is any way that they can win. Dramatic deterioration in the outlook over the last two weeks is reflected in the experience by a Republican businessman in Milwaukee trying to sell $2,000 tickets for Bush's only appearance this year in Wisconsin Oct. 3. In contrast to money flowing easily into the Bush war chest everywhere until now, he encountered stiff resistance. Well-heeled conservative businessmen offered to write a check for $100 or $200, but not $2,000. They gave one reason: Iraq…
"Another domestic issue is continuing loss of industrial jobs, and that does not ease Republican anxiety. It causes hard analysis of electoral maps that poses difficult questions…. No wonder the arrogance quotient at the White House is diminishing. Reporters regularly on that beat say they have been getting their telephone calls returned the last two weeks."
Boston Globe columnist Robert Kuttner noticed the same thing. Commenting on recent GOP Congressional votes, he seconded Novak's analysis White House Facing Revolt in GOP:
"Why this shift [in Republican congressional voting patterns]? Suddenly Bush's own reelection is seen as at risk, and Republican legislators are more worried about saving their own seats. They have walked the plank for Bush one time too many.
"Until recently Republican control of Congress in the 2004 election was seen as a sure thing. Now, however, it looks as though both chambers are up for grabs, especially if Bush's own reelection is in jeopardy. Congressmen and senators are keen detectors of shifts in voter sentiment since their own survival depends on it. Bush's reversal of fortune is occurring on multiple fronts… Finally, the press has stopped giving Bush a free ride, and 9/11 no longer serves as a mantra to turn aside all challenges… Those days are simply gone. Nothing succeeds like success. And nothing fails like failure."
Someday scholars are going to have a field day studying exactly how this transformation came about. In the meantime, this - if you'll excuse an analogy from the Neolithic age - feels a bit like the moment after the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, yet it only took six months and there was no offensive. Explain it as you will (and I'll offer a few provisional thoughts of my own below), there's something new in the air - and in the very style in which pieces are now being written. Have you noticed that something about the moment almost calls for a bit of heated imagery?
Here are just two examples. Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe columnist, began a recent column, largely on job loss and the strip-mining of our society by this administration, with the following paragraph (Bush's Bitter Harvest):
"It is October and the harvest from the spring's planting of troops remains a grapeless vine, withering into winter compost. Without weapons of mass destruction, Tikrit has given way to Texas, Fallujah is fading into Florida, and the idiocy of another $87 billion for Iraq is rapidly becoming apparent in the latest news from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. In the season of pumpkins, Bush is turning into one, with millions of Americans feeling like Cinderella after the ballyhoo of violent, vengeful patriotism. Bush hoped he could sneak back into the White House in 2004 before the clock struck midnight. It is too late. The original support for the war is waning as Americans realize that they have also waged war against themselves."
The ordinarily sober reporter Jim Lobe launched a recent piece this way and perhaps it's exactly what it does feel like in Washington right now (The sharks are circling in Washington):
"To say that there's blood in the water and the sharks are circling around the Bush administration's Iraq policy would be understatement at this point. It's more like a blood bank that's been dropped into the water, the sharks have taken the first bites, and Amazonian piranhas are clamoring for visas on an expedited basis."
In the same piece, Lobe sums up the new atmosphere in our capital thusly:
"With the exception of practicing extramarital sex in the Oval Office, Bush and his Iraq policy are now being charged with violating just about every imaginable tenet - from deceit and corruption, to incompetence and betrayal - of what has come to be called 'good governance.' That many of these charges have moved in just the past few weeks from the alternative to the mainstream media and from grassroots activist groups to Capitol Hill indicates the seriousness of the situation faced by Bush."
The Wilson affair:
In the context of the collapse of every explanation for the war in Iraq (other than the obvious strategic ones which were never expressed by the administration or discussed in the media), the looting of Iraq, the looting of this country, and the peril we find ourselves in, the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife certainly should have been a minor matter. And some Republicans, both inside and outside the administration, while fiercely attacking Wilson, have indeed tried to make light of it. The Washington Post, for instance, reports (Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, Outside Probe of Leaks Is Favored): "At the Capitol, aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) distributed paper sacks labeled 'Leak Hyperventilation Bags.'"
But of course neither loosing the attack dogs, nor brushing the matter off has shown the slightest sign of working, and the burgeoning scandal hasn't been eclipsed by other breaking scandals either -- from intelligence failures to a secret $20 million "slush fund" the Pentagon created by padding the budget of the U.S. Special Operations Command, a scandal reported this week by the St. Peterburg Times. ("It is unclear what the Pentagon intended to do with the $20-million, or what became of the money.")
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