Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.
Otto von Bismarck
One of the ways our freedoms have been preserved has been a direct result of the inherent tension between the branches of government and between the parties. A tri-partite government will naturally have significant tension between the branches, and the tension will wax and wane in relation to the kinds of problems facing the Nation. During times of war, the executive will accumulate significant power and when the immediate thereat has diminished, the legislative and judiciary will naturally assert their prerogatives and act in ways to diminish the power of the executive. This is effectively a built-in and quite necessary structural impediment to tyranny.
One outgrowth of this natural tension is reflected in the Bismarck quote. Legislators and the Executive, even when there is significant personal animus, must find ways to work together if they want to enact any meaningful legislation. Unfortunately, we are currently facing a perfect storm of governmental animus, fecklessness, and incompetence. If we were still living in the roaring 90s, with a Dow heading toward 25,000, history at an end, and the Charmer in Chief in the White House, this would not be cause for concern. After all, the split government of the 90s, despite the rancor in Washington, did minimal damage to the country's institutions and if not for 9/11 would have left a legacy of exuberant economic activity amid attempts to diminish some of the worst excesses of government, marred by Republican over-reach in misguided attempts to fashion impeachable offenses out of moral laxity.
Our current circumstances are far more parlous. We have a sizable investment in lives and money at risk in the Middle East, a growing movement of Nihilistic sadists marching under the banner of Islam, severe weakness in the elite institutions of democracy, and a pace of empowerment of the worst among us that is accelerating. This is a poor time to be quarreling about ephemera in Washington, yet the leadership in Congress seem more than content to substitute venom for accomplishment.
Mick Stockinger wrote a very insightful piece on Saturday that underlines the danger of the Democrat's approach to governance. The fact that the Republicans practiced the art of demonization in the 1990s should not blind us to the fact that while this time honored approach may be business as usual for Washington, it is particularly dangerous now:
I feel like I've been in a master course on sliming for fun and profit these past few years as I've witnessed how Democrats, the media and their fellow travellers have destroyed the trust of the American people in the Bush administration.
What needs to be understood is that 9/11 was a shock to the system in more ways that generally discussed. Careers, doctrines and political infrastructure were in the balance. The Bush administration saw immediately that al Qaeda wouldn't be the only enemy they had to deal with. Decades of Democrat control of Congress had development huge constituencies in every corner of government. Bush senior counseled his son to make sure that everyone was going to pee outside the tent--a policy diametrically opposite FDRs approach to the post-Pearl harbor in which he fired old-schoolers willy-nilly. Dwight D. Eisenhower was promoted over five levels of senior officers to run the show in Europe.
Bush's mistake, ironically, was in being a "uniter" and not a "divider". He really needed to fire any and all Clinton holdovers, and his failure to do so was directly responsible for the Wilson-Plame conspiracy.
Wilson was lying early and often, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in the pre-war intelligence investigation, concluded that Plame was in fact responsible for having Wilson sent to Niger in a fifth column attempt within the CIA to discredit the rationale for the war.
The conspiracy really got legs, meaning that it received the Democrat's political sponsorship and the media's collaboration, during the state of the Union address over the now famous 16 words. Ted Kennedy thundered and the New York Times erupted into a journalistic frenzy--Bush lied, and a shibboleth was born.
Ironically, while the intelligence community got many, if not most things wrong about Iraq, this was one thing they actually got right--Saddam Hussein's regime was in fact trying to buy yellowcake from African sources.
So how come you don' t know this? Because of a tried and true tactic--bury the refutation. For the New York Times, you put it in the back of the paper somewhere, so technically you published the news, but effectively you've produced the desired "impression" in the public mind. It works on the internet as well--the shear volume of web pages criticizing the 16 words, means that you'd have to dig deep into the bowels of Google search page results to get to the part where it says, "oops, it seems they were trying to buy yellowcake..."
It has become received wisdom on the Left and in much of the MSM that "Bush lied!" Yet, this is not the worst of the problem. If the public has only lost trust in Bush that could be alleviated by simply electing a non-Bush in 2008. Of course anyone who has noted that Congress has even lower approval ratings than Bush will immediately recognize that the problem is not going to be so easily solved. More from Mick Stockinger:
Democrats have destroyed the trust of the American people in government, not just the Bush administration. As I speak, New Yorkers are refusing to accept assurances that the air is safe in the wake of a steam pipe explosion. The assumption is that the city government is lying--why? Because Hillary Clinton, in an effort to slime the Bush administration, told New Yorkers that "she knew how it worked in the White House", which meant of course that she knew how it worked in the Clinton White house. Democrat have won a Pyrrhic victory--even as the Bush administration has a 30% approval rating, Congress "enjoys" a 14% rating. Nobody wins in a situation like this, except perhaps the nation's enemies. [Emphasis mine-SW]
To get out of this morass of mistrust, we need a statesman, and the Democrats are simply psychologically and philosophically incapable of producing such a candidate. We will need a Republican president and less gullible Americans. The former is easier to do that the latter.
Compounding our problems, it has become clear that the MSM is not to be trusted, that their agenda distort their reporting; the Left doesn't trust Fox News and the Right doesn't trust the MSM. Dean Barnett indirectly suggests how this is going to effect the dynamics of our political discourse. He has a summary of the most recent ways in which the Left, in the person of Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic, "support" the troops by insulting, libeling, and denigrating them at every turn:
BUT HERE’S THE REAL KICKER – let’s assume that The New Republic, from the lowliest intern all the way up to the imperial Franklin Foer, believed that the “Diarist” was gospel truth. Isn’t it odd that they didn’t think they had a monster scoop on their hands? What’s more, why didn’t the New Republic feel any responsibility to protect innocent Iraqis (not to mention innocent Iraqi dogs) from this depraved platoon that mocks IED victims, uses the skulls of small children as playthings and employs armored vehicles to run over dogs?
The answer, of course, brings us back to where we started. The New Republic as an institution obviously found nothing remarkable about this story. While the rest of us found the stories shocking because they so stood out from the norm of our military’s behavior in Iraq, the “Diarist” clearly didn’t hit The New Republic that way. The story’s details didn’t surprise TNR’s editors. They didn’t put the story in context of the 160,000 American men and women who are serving their country nobly precisely because The New Republic didn’t consider the men in the “Diarist” to be part of a rogue platoon. The New Republic obviously found it easy to believe that the typical platoon in Iraq is composed of sociopaths and lunatics.
But don’t forget – they support the troops.
During the Vietnam War, the Left famously slandered the troops and the MSM eagerly served as their "force multipliers." Most people had no way of questioning the reportage of the New York Times or CBS News. Those who may have had questions about the veracity of the reports had no real mechanism by which to raise questions. If John Kerry accused our troops of raping and killing, who was in a position to gainsay him; after all, he was there and the news reporters who were also there seemed not to raise objections. We are in a very differert news environment now. The TNR story will not just recede into the mist. Those who were unsurprised to read of American atrocities will be forced to defend the stories, and when they cannot, the slow response of the TNR to their, at best, unethical and substandard reporting, will become one more victory for those of us who still believe that the news should be reality-based rather than "reality-based".
The Democrats may well be fully in charge of our nation in 18 months. Their success will have been accomplished in large part by demonizing the President and the Republican party. They present themselves as the polar opposites of the Republicans, more moral, more ethical, more concerned with the people; when it inevitably comes to the attention of the American people that they have bought a pig in a poke, the Democrats will reap what they have sewn. Does anyone credibly imagine that Hillary Clinton, once she has begun to ruin the health care system, or alternatively, failed in her attempts to ruin the health care system, all in the name of fairness, will then be able to have an effective administration? Once she has either abandoned Iraq to the tender mercies of the torturers and murderers of Islam, or failed to abandon them having discovered upon taking office that leaving Iraq is easier said than done, can anyone imagine she will be unblemished in the court of public opinion?
The great blunder the Democrats are making (and that the Republicans made during the last election cycle) is that they offer lip service to the idea that the internet has changed everything, while at the same time acting as if that were not true. Yet, when Republicans talked about changing the culture in Washington and then gorged at the trough, the Blogosphere noticed and attended to their perfidy. The idea that Republicans were not fiscally responsible but were in reality pigs became an important part of their defeat in 2006. Stories that could traditionally be easily hidden (omitted) by the MSM, can no longer be so easily avoided in our current media environment. (This is the main reason the Democrats would like to restore the [un]fairness doctrine.)
Our problems today are not caused by the coarsening of our political discourse; we have had many times in the past when political discourse was worse than it is now; what is different is that more and more people are noticing how are institutions are failing, and as Mick Stockinger pointed out, "nobody wins in a situation like this, except perhaps the nation's enemies."
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