Democrats Fiddling as the World Burns

By the time Richard Milhous Nixon goes on trial in the Senate, the only real reason for trying him will be to understand how he ever became president of the United States at all ... and the real defendant, at that point, will be the American Political System. -- Hunter S. Thompson, 1973.

The top three political leaders in America are in the legal hot seat.

George Bush's White House has been served with an indictment on five counts against the chief of staff to the Vice President. Tom DeLay's trial is under way. And Bill Frist is the subject of a formal investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling off his family's stock.

And there are more investigations against Republicans lurking just below the surface. Powerful House member Bob Ney is wrapped up tightly with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff; Congressman Randy Cunningham is in bed with a defense contractor; House Republican Richard Pombo, who chairs the House Resources Committee, has gone on travel junkets paid for by a shady private foundation.

Outside of D.C. there's Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher, who is going down for having a GOP-only hiring practice. And the Ohio Republican Party has collapsed: Governor Bob Taft has been reprimanded and fined for playing golf on lobbyists' tabs, and big-time donor Tom Noe has been indicted for funneling cash into George Bush's re-election and stealing from the public purse to pour money into his rare coin investments.

Each crime is a fitting symbol of each Republican's particular brand of political criminality: George Bush's team got busted in a smear attempt against an Iraq war opponent -- but the entire case for war was a crime if there ever were one. DeLay's case is about him funneling corporate money to political causes to scorch Texas' political landscape with R's in every district -- but he's done nothing but funnel money from corporations for pork and political advantage every year he's been in Congress. Richard Pombo was found to have taken money from a group funded by whalers, mink farmers and veal barons -- poetic justice for a guy who has tried to sell off our national parks to mining and lumber interests. And so on.

It's time for the Democrats to seize the political advantage, right? Every single political branch in D.C. is on fire. The world is also on fire, or drowning: the American public has clear, massive majority positions on Iraq, Katrina, our $8 trillion national debt, world poverty, $3 gallon gas and rapid climate change. Yet what we've gotten so far from the Democratic leadership is meaningless sloganeering.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and power-hungry Hillary Clinton's big rhetorical banner for 2006 -- as good an indicator to the Democrats' predictions of where all this scandal and disaster is going to take them in the next election as any -- is, America Can Do Better.

Here's where I part from those who have taken the time to criticize the D.C. Democrats for such a feckless response. Step back and look at the political climate for a moment before passing judgment on America Can Do Better. The legal investigations listed above have been the driving engine of the political process for months now. Political advantage is currently determined by the ups and downs of pending cases; we're bringing the courts into the political process on a comprehensive scale far beyond what we saw with Ken Starr in the '90s -- a trend that, if treated by political leaders as appropriate politics, as the Roman historian Tacitus attested, is proof of a deceased republic.

Democrats and their partisan supporters are relying on prosecutors to do what they couldn't at the ballot box. Patrick Fitzgerald would not be in the spotlight today if John Kerry hadn't been such a squeamish collaborator in our rush to war in Iraq, and such an unrepentant coward leading up to the 2004 election (and he still is a year later).