March 3, 2006
Has Washington Gone Insane?
By
Daniel Henninger
With
President Bush away for a week in Asia, the rest of Washington
has had to find something to do with its time other than
run amuck over the latest piddling folly. That means the
news from Washington this week is close to zero. Still,
like many Americans in our time, on returning home after
work the past week I paddled my surfboard across the ocean
of cable TV channels in search of a wave of public interest
more than two feet high. And so it came to pass on these
still waters that I discovered Jon Stewart seated across
the table from Larry King. Mr. Stewart is the host of "The
Daily Show," Comedy Central's satirical TV news program.
This looked like a wave worth waiting for, and it was. The
subject was Washington.
Larry
King suggested to Jon Stewart that the current low ebb of
the Democrats and Republicans was good for Mr. Stewart's
business.
King: So, in a sense you're happy over
this.
Stewart: No.
King: This gives you fodder.
Mr.
Stewart replied that if government "began to solve
problems in a rational way rather than just a way that involved
political dividends, we would be the happiest people in
the world to turn our attention to idiots like, you know,
media people, no offense."
King: So, you don't want it to be bad?
Stewart: Did you really just ask me if
I want it to be bad?
King: Yes because you--
Stewart: What are you--I have kids. What
do you think? I want things to corrode to the point where
we're all living in huts?
King: You don't want Medicare to fail?
Stewart: Are you insane?
Insane?
Spend too much time close to politicians nowadays and suddenly
that's a good question. This week the New York Times
in the course of deconstructing the bad relationship between
the Bush White House and the pressies who shout questions
at it quoted a clinical psychologist who claimed to have
had as patients several White House correspondents--all
suffering from what she calls "White House reporter
syndrome." Something about being "emotionally
isolated."
This
story already has plenty of clowns, so by all means, send
in the psychiatrists.
It
is not my intent to plumb the possibility of mass psychosis
in Washington, but nonetheless we must come to grips with
the phenomenon of the world's most powerful capital spending
so much of its intellectual energy chasing nightmares of
its own imagining. Exhibit A here would be the fascinating
case history of Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame.
If
memory serves, those of us who expect to find value in tracking
public events spent more than two years on an obsessive
Beltway press search for who "outed" Valerie Plame.
And this was a high crime insofar as Ms. Plame was a "covert
agent" for the CIA. In someone's notion of political
reality, this was a big deal. Its actual size was revealed
in a federal court hearing last Friday, as described by
National Review's quite grounded White House correspondent,
Byron York:
"CIA
leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued . . . that as
far as the perjury charges against former Cheney chief of
staff Lewis Libby are concerned, it does not matter whether
or not Valerie Wilson was a covert CIA agent. . . . 'We're
trying a perjury case', Fitzgerald told Judge Reggie Walton.
Even if Plame had never worked for the CIA at all, Fitzgerald
continued--even if she had been simply mistaken for a CIA
agent--the charges against Libby would still stand. In addition,
Fitzgerald said, he does not intend to offer 'any proof
of actual damage' caused by the disclosure of Wilson's identity."
No damage?
So
setting aside the catastrophic personal tragedy for Scooter
Libby (and the possible erosion of confidentiality protections
for the press), the Plame affair all those months was a
forced march down a blind alley. Still, I think the Plame
case has value as a window to understanding why Washington
today spends more time bouncing off the walls than sticking
to Jon Stewart's apparently archaic attachment to solving
problems "in a rational way."
Rational
problem-solving generally requires adhering to the rules
of the game, and in politics those rules are often informal.
One such rule in Washington is that a politician is as good
as his word. Perhaps nothing has been more destructive to
Washington's current ability to function than the belief
that "Bush lied" about WMD, most notably Joe Wilson's
foundational charge in the New York Times that
Mr. Bush lied about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from
Niger.
This
persistent belief that George Bush committed a major moral
crime, which was refuted by the Robb-Silberman Commission,
had consequences. It has led many people in Washington's
standing institutions--Congress, the press, the intelligence
and foreign-policy bureaucracies--to think they've been
released from operating inside the normal boundaries that
allow political Washington to function, that allow partisans
to do business, whether on foreign policy, Social Security
or homeland security.
Over
the Bush years that code has been displaced by a new ethos
that to resist policies that flowed from such a "lie,"
anything goes--such as leaks about the most sensitive national
security programs or published "dissents" by recently
retired CIA officials like Paul Pillar. Compare this ethos
to that of the U.S. intelligence community that ran the
Venona program, producing invaluable signals intelligence
on Soviet espionage activities from 1943 onward without
any participant revealing its existence. No such achievement
is imaginable now.
Instead
every issue that emerges becomes an illegitimate extension
of the original "lie"--the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo
detentions, Abu Ghraib, terrorist interrogation techniques,
the Plame affair. This is a dangerous game. Raised to this
level, policy becomes a super-heated moral Armageddon that
makes mere politics impossible to manage. One then might
ask: Do you want this government to fail? To which a tragicomic
response is appropriate: Are you insane?
Daniel
Henninger is deputy editor of The
Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
