Any Idea How Jade Comes to be Green?

I hope I'm not getting jaded (sleepy?). The Safavian indictment was certainly gripping, but otherwise didn't do a whole lot for me. I'm now thinking it should have; thank goodness we have folks with more than a handful of remaining operable synapses in place. Meanwhile I have a date to wrap up reading of "Assassin's Gate."

I'm pasting whole post, given comparative brevity:

It's not every day that a former White House official is convicted on felony charges. But yesterday's verdict was far more significant than that.

For months, the Abramoff investigation has hummed quietly along, showing up in headlines only for the occasional guilty plea from a former lobbyist and staffer. But bagging David Safavian is ample encouragement to put the pedal to the metal. We're talking Tokyo Drift, baby.

That's the consensus not only among legal experts, but also possible targets in the case. From The New York Times:

"Safavian was a little fish," said a lawyer for a former government official who has also become entangled in the investigations of Mr. Abramoff. The lawyer, who was granted anonymity to speak because he did not want to bring unnecessary attention to his client, added, "I think this makes it easier for the prosecutors to ask permission at the Justice Department to go for the bigger fish."

So who are those bigger fish?

Of course, Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) -- whose political ad is ironically featured in this Ohio paper's story on Safavian's conviction -- is next, virtually everyone can agree, despite his flack's absurd insistence that "The Safavian case had nothing to do with Congressman Ney."

Also with a big bull's eye is Ed Buckham, Tom DeLay's right-hand lobbyist, a man possibly even more dangerous in his level of knowledge. Here's a guy who knows where the bodies are buried -- AND where they hid the shovels. Buckham was right smack at the center of DeLay's money machine for almost a decade, and he also lobbied for Duke Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes. As Roll Call notes: Buckham "is the next logical target for federal prosecutors, and one who could help them make a case against any lawmakers tied to Abramoff." Buckham has already been implicated by his old DeLay colleague Tony Rudy - if he flips, the Abramoff scandal will be back with a vengeance.

The feds aren't short of potential targets. That "former government official who has also become entangled in the investigations of Mr. Abramoff," for instance -- might that be former Deputy Secretary at the Interior Department Steven Griles, Abramoff's "in" at Interior? And let's not forget the rest on the scandal roster: Tom DeLay, Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT), Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), and others whose political careers could be derailed.

We're just getting started here.

When We Officially Started Bragging of Sponsoring Darkness

Having had enough (see prior post), I plugged into PBS' "Frontline" show tonight. I'm not sure I ever purposely watched this program before. Based on the trailers, at least one of my contacts noted they didn't want to hear more. But what I saw was pretty gripping. Little really new information I suppose for those of us who have found current events tending to monopolize our reading. But it was a reminder of what television occasionally used to do in disseminating vital information well beyond the limited community of those aggressive knowledge-hunters who track down and actively manage their own education. Of course this was before marketing, sex appeal, and neuroses over market share came to exclude informing the citizenry from the stage. Not the sort of thing the networks bring us anymore, that's for sure (with few and brief exceptions).

This is the sort of cheerleading that caused me to rearrange my evening to where a normal 10PM post is still fermenting at 12:30PM (but worth it!):

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Sam Allis writes in a Boston Globe review: " 'Frontline' delivers a devastating look tonight at the efforts of Vice President Dick Cheney to gain control of the war on terror after 9/11. In doing so, the show purports, he compromised the integrity of America's intelligence system. . . .

" 'Frontline' chronicles the brutal campaign by two consummate political in-fighters -- Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- to decimate the CIA, politically emasculate Secretary of State Colin Powell, and construct a near-limitless concept of executive power during war. While many of these strands are familiar, they have not been assembled as effectively before on television to present a coherent picture of what happened after 9/11."

David Bianculli writes in the New York Daily News: "Simply by underlining in red the names of Cheney loyalists on the organizational flow chart of the George W. Bush administration, 'The Dark Side' shows how deep Cheney's influence stretches."

Glenn Garvin writes in the Miami Herald: "Precisely because it avoids looney-tune conspiracy theories about Halliburton and oil pipelines, and stays away from name-calling in favor of old-fashioned journalism, Frontline presents a powerful indictment of the White House's decision to go to war."

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I hope you had or will have the opportunity to screen this - it was a very well-done 90 minutes. Not nearly as polemical as I would have liked, but perhaps that is just as well, in the interests of keeping those with some embarrassingly bad recent voting choices to answer for still nibbling at the bait. If only it came on in prime time instead of at 10PM!

However, there was at least one mini-revelation for me involving the disgusting award given to George "fall on the sword" Tenet (more and more now to me a full anti-patriot only a couple short notches below the powers that be in terms of criminality and actions traitorous to our nation's primary founding principles). The occasion on which Bush awarded Tenet the highest civilian honor, namely the Presidential Medal of Freedom, also involved award of the same to Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer. What a remarkably uniform band of dysfunctional, anti-democracy, representative-government-and-honesty-bedamned blackguards! Couldn't we have varied the seasoning mix with at least a weak-spined-but-well-intentioned Powell or other minor semi-competent diplomat?

Had Enough?

Josh at TPM cites a Frank Rich column in the NYT that appropriately chastises the unruly, freewheeling Dems for their scarcity of inspiring counter-program, leaving the field too open for Rove's machiavellian machinations. But I greatly appreciate Josh's opinion that slogans and programs (or, in present case, insufficiency of same) are commonly overrated as factors in political campaigns. Or, in present instance, possible regime change. But see what you think:

The results seem to be in, from pretty much every quarter: Congressional Democrats' new theme or campaign program or whatever it is it's supposed to be exactly is just embarrassingly lame. Frank Rich says so. Jo-Ann Mort says so. If you haven't heard, it's A New Direction for America. So you can see what they mean.

In his Sunday Times column, Rich quotes Tony Fabrizio's line from last April: "The good news is Democrats don't have much of a plan. The bad news is they may not need one."

I don't want to pump this line up too much because it plays to this pattern of Democratic hang-wringing, that Republicans play up, knowing that it feeds ingrained perceptions of Democratic haplessness, indecisiveness and thus unworthiness to hold office.

But I take some solace from the fact that I think it is largely true, especially in the second clause, though not in just the way Fabrizio thinks.

Political insiders consistently overstate the importance of slogans and programs. Political tides aren't unleashed or weathered because of message discipline or thematic fine-tuning. They come about because of failures or victories abroad, big motions in the economy, or judgments coalescing in the public mind in ways that are as inscrutable in their origins as they can be transparent in their effects.

1994 is a classic example. The Contract with America is now judged a seminal political act whereas in fact, I would say, it had little if anything to do with the result of that watershed election. 1994 happened because Bill Clinton was very unpopular two years into his first term. A new wave of right-wing politics -- bound up with but not limited to talk radio -- had been building steam since the beginning of the Bush years. Clinton's unpopularity both stemmed from that wave and helped crystallize it. Add to these factors the fact that redistricting, a wave of retirements and unified Democratic control in Washington for the first time in a generation all made the South ripe for finally flipping over into the hands of the Republican party at the Congressional level.

In saying this I'm not suggesting that anyone just sit back and let history happen. Politics matters. Organization matters. Message matters. But there's a line from Seneca in which he says, "Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling." And there's a political corollary to this as well. Voters are making a decision about Bush's presidency and the Republican ascendency in Washington. If voters aren't happy with them, Nancy Pelosi's unoriginality or tone deafness won't be able to stop that judgment any more than President Bush's handlers can goose his poll numbers.

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That's why Newt Gingrich was so on the mark, ironically, when he suggested the Democrats' slogan should be "Had Enough?" (As a way of understanding Gingrich's particular genius, consider that "Had Enough?" and "A New Direction for America" are actually two ways of saying the exact same thing -- with the first forceful and infectious and the second limp and denatured.) Everything else the election is allegedly about is chatter. The details are so many fine points about making the sale, framing the question. And, yes, those are important. But that is the question. And nothing the geniuses on either side do will change that from being the question.

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