Where’s the outrage?

Your Humble Blogger has been laying off the outrage, of late, in favor of common or garden crankiness, but I now I really must protest. And, in my own imitable style, I must protest at great length, starting with way too much background. So if you are in a particular hurry, just register this post as Outrage at the behaviour of the Republican leadership and move on.

Still here? Ah, well, let’s start, then, with the Downing Street Memo. This is, in case for whatever reason you haven’t heard it, a leaked copy of the minutes of a debriefing in July 2002 of top-level British officials, most notably their head of intelligence, on their return from Washington. It records the head of intelligence (particularly) informing Tony Blair that it seemed to him that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” It gives a clear picture of what I eventually (and many others far more quickly) concluded: This administration wanted to invade Iraq, and was willing to believe, or at least pretend to believe, whatever appeared to necessitate such an invasion. It was not negotiating in good faith, nor was it attempting to find out the facts and create an appropriate response to those facts. It was maneuvering circumstances to bring about the invasion. The White House chose the invasion, and did so without due deliberation.

Now, the memo proves none of that. The memo merely tells us that high officials in the government of our chief ally believed that to be true. It’s not a smoking gun, as far as I understand the term, but it has, ad hominem, a certain rhetorical power. That is, it repeats what many people were saying at the time (and since), but brings a new authority to the opinion. As such, it is reasonable for the Congress to inquire into the allegations, as even though the allegations are not new, they have a new force, and they were not investigated at the time.

I will add, by the way, that I had initially thought the Downing Street Memo to be only marginally newsworthy. Even I, after all, had come to the conclusion that the President and his cabal of incompetent thieving cronies were not negotiating in good faith. It was pointed out, though, on one or another of the lefty blogs, that the newspapers and broadcasts hadn’t really reported on how widespread that belief was, at the time, and for them to now claim that this is old news is for them to have abdicated all responsibility for the news. If you don’t report the news when it’s new news, the age of the news isn’t really a good argument for failing to report it, right?

Anyway. The Honorable John Conyers, D-MI, and several House Democrats wanted to hold a hearing on the Memo and the allegations contained in it, but naturally the House Republican leadership did not want to hold any such hearing. Well, and Rep. Conyers decided to hold a forum, and to make it as much like a hearing as possible. No Republicans chose to participate, which should be not really surprising or appalling, as the forum was certainly a political and partisan stunt. It was a serious and honorable partisan stunt, but a partisan stunt nonetheless, and I don’t expect the other party to be party to it.

On the other hand, it seems petty and stupid for the Republican leadership to deny Rep. Conyers the use of a decent-sized room for his stunt. Relegating the forum to a smallish basement was not very nice, and sets a bad precedent. But fine. It’s not technically going out of your way to be petty and small, it’s merely the same amount of effort as being a trifle less contemptuous would be. But then, according to a letter purportedly written by Rep. Conyers and reprinted at Eschaton and at Stakeholder among other places, “at the very moment the hearing was scheduled to begin, the Republican Leadership scheduled an almost unprecedented number of 11 consecutive floor votes, making it next to impossible for most Members to participate in the first hour and one half of the hearing.”

Now, you see, there are these things called reciprocal norms. And they have to do with how people treat each other. And when people in power treat people with really only slightly less power with that kind of deliberate contempt, when they change their ways of doing business simply and clearly in order to screw their colleagues, it destroys those norms. And they aren’t easily rebuilt. Many people have noticed that the Republican leadership acts as if they will never again be the minority party. They treat the current minority party far, far worse than they were treated over their long stretches of minority status. They are creating a new set of norms, ones that emphasize hostility, conflict, and contempt. And, you know, I’m agin that.

The way I look at it, there are three possible interpretations of this mindset they seem to have, that they will never be out of power. The first, of course, is that they somehow really do believe that, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, they will remain popular with the electorate forever. It’s hard for me to believe they are that ... faith-based, but it’s possible. The second is that they believe they will never be out of power because it won’t be possible to vote them out, either (the paranoid view) because they will rig enough elections to maintain single-party rule or (the other paranoid view) because some millennial change will upend the entire system. The third is the view Theresa Nielson-Hayden suggests, which is that they really are just individual scam artists, and once they have plundered the nation’s treasure and put it in the pockets of their associates, they will leave the Congress, collect, and if the Republicans of 2012 are treated with contempt and hostility by the Democrats of 2012, well, who gives a fuck about them, anyway? I got mine, Jack.

Now, I go around and around as to which of these explanations seems most plausible, and of course different Congressmen may well adhere to different ones or different combinations of them, or in fact simply be entirely blind to the consequences of their actions. And, I suppose, it’s not as if any of the explanations or any combination of the explanations would be good for the country I love, and the constitutional system I adore. But ... dang! I mean ... dang! What the hell goes on?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.