Fitzmas, Wargate and Beyond: A Plea for Balance

by RonK, Seattle

The goose is cooked, the ox is gored, the chickens are coming home to roost. The kiddies are giddy with visions of sugarplums, marching frogs, TV specials, seasonal trappings and wrappings piled so deep you can't find the dog in the living room.

Fitzmas is coming -- all holidays rolled into one! The extravagance of Mardi Gras plus Thanksgiving plus Boxing Day plus Purim plus Halloween ... the weightier meditations and rededications of 4th of July, Yom Kippur, New Year's Eve, Good Friday, Memorial Day and Pesach (not to mention St. Swithin's and Groundhog's Days, with their traditional over-reading of omens).

Most of us celebrate the shallow Fitzmas, a fireworks-and-mincemeat festival of over-indulgence. Sweet revenge, fat targets, overcooked intelligence. Eat, drink and be merry, tomorrow we diet.

But I beg your indulgence for a note of perspective, a look at the deeper meanings of Fitzmas. Sure, the Big Day looms big ... until you look at the monumental developments that surround it. Fitzmas is not the beginning nor the end, just one spike in a sawtooth chain of events that lashed back and wrapped around the ankles of reckless vandals who came to DC to tear the town a new one. (They'll wish they'd stuck with ordinary hatchets.)

For starters, balance your expectations. Anticipation can bring disappointment, especially if you write too much detail into your Fitzmas Wish List.

• You don't know who Fitzgerald will indict. I don't know. He may not know ... yet. A target-rich environment means immense discretion, not just in intensity (what to charge, to what degree, for what penalty) but tactical and even stylistic. Who will he turn against whom, and in what sequence? Public ambush, or slow, crushing constriction? Let them plead out and leave in disgrace, or lay out the whole record in formal court?

• First-round indictments will not be the last. Fitzmas is the first scouring breach of a system of levees that protected a regime sunk below ethical sea level. The first break leads to more breaks in quick succession, followed by slow, desperate struggles for survival ... and for status among the ruins.

• Things take time. The first trophy kills strike fear into the unindicted, who become more malleable. Rats eagerly spill their guts, taking the story in unexpected directions. Whole new scandals may surface. Defensive facades will crumble as reliable retainers desert their posts, and a new generation of prosecutors, journalists and politicians gets the hang of the enterprise.

• Remember, too, the Joys of Fitzmas could be followed by the agonies of a Saturday Night Massacre or a Parade of Presidential Pardons.

Again, balance. Let's not obsess on the Plame outing. They nailed Al Capone for tax evasion, but there are bigger crimes afoot. Burning a CIA NOC is only the tip of just one iceberg in a sea of troubles. America has been done real and enduring harm, on monumental scale, and the Plame Affair is a flyspeck in a shitstorm.

Sure, we want Rove's head on a pike ... but Cheney is the key to this Jenga pile.

• Cheney betrayed the national security of the United States. His PNAC cabal and White House Iraq Group led and/or lied us into a war that let Osama off the hook, motivated generations of potential terrorists, schooled them on our vulnerabilities, depleted our war-fighting capacity, discredited the career/volunteer force structure, and destabilized the international oil patch. The underlying scandal is Wargate, and the big war(s) may not have started yet.

• Cheney betrayed the public trust. He ran the Energy Policy Task Force (whose records have never seen daylight) and ran interference for Enron energy banditos. California cities went black as energy insiders joked about ####ing Grandma Millie up the ###. Hands off!, Cheney barked, the market is always right! ... price controls always make things worse! ... but when FERC at last gestured weakly in the direction of price regulation, the Crisis evaporated as though somebody had thrown a switch. Western rate-payers are left holding the multi-billion-dollar bag. America missed a valuable object lesson as Cheney was never held accountable for his unequivocal economic quackery.

• Cheney called the shots on US fiscal policy, declaring "tax cuts stimulate growth" and "deficits don't matter". We went into foreign debt instead of paying taxes, got addicted to living beyond our means, and we're 8 or 10 million jobs below normal trendline growth (and uncompetitive in global markets). Our $10 trillion real net fiscal reverse -- from Clinton surplus to Bush deficit -- is comparable to outright destruction of the entire US housing stock. The piper is out there and he will be paid.

• Cheney broke the Executive Branch. He was The Outfit's personnel chief, not just their policy boss. An ordinary machine would at least have installed competent cronies in key spots. Five years on, every agency is a disaster in the making. Litmus tests of personal loyalty and ideological purity left the recruiting pool depleted and subcabinet ranks decimated. If a crisis wells up in world financial markets, they'll look to the US Treasury Department -- and there's nobody home. In this environment, investigative reporting is barely sporting -- it's like shooting fish at the bottom of a barrel.

With less success, this same Outfit hacked away at the foundations of the American social contract -- making a concerted attack on Social Security, toying with a flank attack on universal public education, and planting a time bomb under Medicare.

Once again, balance. Cheney didn't create these reversals in American fortune single-handedly. It took teamwork to repudiate the global consensus on evreything from the Geneva Conventions to the Kyoto Accord ... to let nuclear mischief go unchecked in Korea, Pakistan and former Soviet Republics ... to construct a patronage army whose ranks extent from K Street to fundamentalist churches to the commercial news media.

Behind the bright lights of our Fitzmas procession, you can see the outlines of an Administration that stuck to campaigning and never took up the business of governing. There are debacles stacked up behind debacles, and scandals behind scandals, and some of the bills don't come due for years.

Can Bush get off the hook by scapegoating Cheney -- piling the Administration's cumulative errors on his back, ceremonially running him out of town, and declaring the remaining staff immaculate? Hardly.

That might have worked a couple years ago. Bush himself could have cracked the Plame case by calling people on the carpet and insisting on answers. Instead, he stonewalled. No matter how far the  prosecutions proceed, or in what direction, Bush now owns all the crimes committed in his name.

And again, balance. Bush didn't take us down this road to ruin without help. In a responsible Republican Party, or against a capable opposition, or under the watchful eye of a capable press or an engaged public, Bush could not have sought reelection, much less won a second term. He might not have finished his first term (and probably would never have taken office). The signs were there, but we were too self-absorbed to bother reading them.

No matter what the Fitzmas legends say, it won't happen overnight ... but we are going to see a government dissolve. Unlike Watergate, there's no reservoir of civic goodwill, no cadre of responsible statesmen, not even passably intact muddle-through bureaucracies. America lost interest in the essentials of democracy, and refused to shoulder its ordinary burdens. (We all had more important things to do, didn't we?) Bush is a symptom, and the thrill ride ahead of us is the one we bargained for.

For George W. Bush, damage control will play out over a couple of years.

He'll leave behnd an America with fewer friends and more enemies, fewer assets and more debts, less productivity and more agile competitors, less confidence and more con artists ready to sell us another round of cheap-and-easy solutions.

For America, damage control will play out over decades, or generations.

Merry Fitzmas to all, and a Happy New Era!

Comments

[DemFromCT]

It has to start somewhere. The real meaning of Fitzmas is that hopes and fears that it would never start... that Bush would be the Teflon Don.. are gone. Forever.

Visions of sugarplums. But we will sell no whine before it's time.

[crone]

Bravo... excellent piece of writing, sir.

Wonderful litany of Cheney's sins...

[oofer]

Very complete piece of forward thinking!! I have been making thee points for months with friends, but in piecemeal fashion. I appreciate your effort. There are still black days ahead both in the short term and long term. God knows, and he has presumably told Bush, that cornered aminmals react unpredictibly. We have just such a situation. There will be real shit hitting the fan in the next week or so, and that's just a first coat.

Longer term, we have to deal with the fact that we have committed war crimes, allowed our own people to starve during disasters, and flirted, no-petted heavily with the seven deadly sins. Chief among these are greed and gluttony. sloth is right up there, too, as you point out.

How this all plays out will be both painful and interesting. But mostly painful. To America's psyche, confidence, and well being.

[Meteor Blades]

Ah. I love to end the day reading a high-quality slam-down of the High Priest of the Oligarchs, Dick Cheney.

The right wing has been laughing up Plamegate as the tip of the ice cube. My cautious anticipation is that Traitorgate and Wargate will chill them to the marrow.

[reticulant]

good stuff along with good advice.

the smear machine has only just begun as fitzgerald v. gop takes center stage. you can count the hours until cable talking heads begin to ape the gop line. sunday, kay bailey hutchison called plamegate a "technicality." in a monday editorial (today), the wsj -- presumably with a straight face -- characterized plamegate as a "policy dispute" between antiwar partisans & administration hawks.

even judy miller issued a not-so-veiled threat from the newsweek piece cited earlier in a response to emptywheel:

Late last week [Miller] told NEWSWEEK she had every intention of returning to work. She also did some digging of her own. "Are you hearing anything about Fitzgerald?" she asked, before quickly hanging up.

apparently it's not enough to blackmail your publisher, destroy a newspaper, start a war just to advance your career; one must threaten an independent prosecutor assigned to preserve essential boundaries of national security with vague exposure of an undisclosed nature to deter said prosecutor from performing his duties.

miller is depraved. likewise the "grand old party." if and when republicans commence "swiftboating" fitzgerald, so will republicans increase public perception that they are the true terrorists, grave and gathering threat, clear and present danger undermining the safety and security of this republic.

[emptywheel]

Great post RonK (even for someone who probably hasn't maintained balance in this thing).

And if the McNulty promotion goes through, then we've got the makings of a Saturday Night Massacre and the jettisoning of the AIPAC spy case as well.

[TenThousandThings]

Yes. Nice job. It's hard to get excited when so much damage has already been done. And one has the sense that the shitstorm is not over.

I mean, they're going to bomb Syria, right? I got that sense when one of the biggest spokesmen in all this, Richard Myers (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, if I'm not mistaken, anyway he is basically the Pentagon's public face for the war, and apparently Rumsfeld's man), told a Senate hearing that Vietnam vets' experience is useless in Iraq. Hmm, yes, that's why this war has gone so well and Desert Storm went so poorly [Desert Storm being waged on the basis of strict adherence to the lessons of the "intervention" in Vietnam.] ... Anyhow, I got the sense that Myers was sending up a trial balloon for the political storm that will ensue when they escalate not by taking dramatic steps to try to stabilize Iraq but by bombing Syria and Iran.

When is Myers going to be told to step aside? I mean, one of the first things my father (I come from a long line of citizen soldiers) taught me about war is that basically, [1] when it starts there are lots of careerists in command positions who are basically incompetent, [2] that war is inherently chaotic [FUBAR, definition of ...], and [3] after soldiers start to die, the incompetents are pushed out by the survivors, i.e., the veterans. But that's not what seems to be happening here, at least not yet. That's why Bush II's docrine of political loyalty before all else is so dangerous, and that's why things will not improve anytime soon. It may take another John Kerry, ca. 1971. I'm sure Kerry has no regrets about what he did then. Myers' worst nightmare is an alliance between Vietnam vets like McCain and Kerry and so on and Iraq vets like Hackett.

[emptypockets]

Speaking of holidays:

Happy United Nations Day, everyone!

Be sure to send John Bolton a card.

[janinsanfran]

Great post -- too probably true. I can't help remembering that Iran-Contra, a previous go round with these guys, was a fizzle.

[RonK, Seattle]

TTT -- FYI, Gen. Myers retired in September (replaced by USMC Gen Peter Pace).

One positive side effect of Plan Iraq is that it took the "World Series" of imperial/transformational military interventions off the table.

Another is this: in the case that Bush's eviction proceedings come down to a constitutional impasse or a battle of wills, he is less likely to find the armed forces on his side (in contrast, perhaps, to Florida 2000).

[RonK, Seattle]

emptywheel -- You have special dispensation as the TNH gang's Designated Obsessor on the Plame Story.

My point is simply that the Plame Story is more than just the Plame Story ... it's the preeminent exemplar of a whole genre.

[TenThousandThings]

RonK, thanks. I'm an academic hermit focused on China, so I only make comments when I'm trying to make sense of something that has set off my "danger" alarms and thereby intruded on my little world. Of course, pretty much everything since the Clinton impeachment has done that!

So maybe Pace will be able to help get things done, like finding out what the people on the ground in Iraq really think. I never got the sense that Myers was listening.

[RonK, Seattle]

TTT -- Myers has received attention as a potential GOP candidate for Governor of Kansas, encouraged by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Dark Ages).

jan -- Iran-Contra may suddenly become retro-chic, as many I-C names pop up in the annals of Wargate, and as a cautionary example of the misuse of presidential pardons. I-C will be a hot-hot-hot topic this season if current buzz re the Niger yellowcake document forgery pans out.

[jonnybutter]

Great post, RonK. TNH continues to be awesome..

[Mimikatz]

Great job, Ron. The big picture is very scary, because it means that so much is really wrong here. but we have to keep our eye (and direct the public's eye) to the bog picture if we are ever to set started cleaning up this mess. Plame is the McGuffin, but the sins run so much deeper, and getting rid of Cheney is key.

[TenThousandThings]

Myers has received attention as a potential GOP candidate for Governor of Kansas

Ha! I knew it! Presidential ambitions! The surest route to military failure, via unwillingness to make decisions that might come back to bite oneself on the ass--and that is pretty much all decisions in war !!!

[DemFromCT]

How's it all playing?

"Both arms around the toilet bowl, throwing up green," is how a longtime GOP strategist with strong Bush credentials describes to us how he's feeling these days -- and not because of bird flu.

With the country's health increasingly threatened by weather and disease, President Bush flexes some bully-pulpit muscle with a 10:00 am Cabinet meeting today. But in Washington, the health craze is about Bush himself, and how his already weakened political standing may worsen upon the indictment of one or more top White House aides in the CIA leak probe.

Reuters has reported that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "is expected to give final notice to officials facing charges as early as Monday and may convene the grand jury on Tuesday... to deliver a summary of the case and ask for approval of the possible indictments... Fitzgerald could still determine that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges, but the lawyers said that appeared increasingly unlikely." The grand jury will expire on Friday unless Fitzgerald extends it. NBC's Tim Russert noted on NBC’s Today Show that an indictment of a sitting White House official, if it happens, would be the first in 130 years.

[RonK, Seattle]

"throwing up green" -- One open question: which brewer will be first to bottle a seasonal Fitzmas Ale?

[wilbersil]

I commend all of you here at TNH. Clearly you have stated well the case for regime change. But please... As we draw close to the lynching time could someone blog about the impending spin storm that the bush administration is sure to unleash. I am nearly alone among my west coast liberal friends in my obsession with these scandals. I am close to giving up landscaping for a couple weeks so I can go downtown with a cardboard sign asking everyone to wake up and smell the shit. How can the average Joe help invigorate our base and help to expose the impending media spin. I have been watching some main stream media and with some help from "Media Matters" and "FAIR" have had just a glimpse at the disinformation campain that is on the way. With EW's illumination of the Mc Nulty apointment on the horizon, how will our country avoid repeating Iran Contra. I'm sure if Watergate was revealed today Nixon would never have had to resign. The media would run with a front page story about a little girl reunited with her puppy and the american attention span would drift off into the next Michael Jackson story. How will we keep the American public on track.

[RonK, Seattle]

wilbersil -- The Bush team (after they decide who's still on it) will have a damage control scheme ... or a series of them. You've seen several already. ("Ongoing investigation", "Wilson's a partisan", "Wilson's a liar", "Criminalization of politics", "Technical violations")

Fine. Perjury is the new Truancy. It won't save them. It won't go away. Too many bodies, too many holes in the back yard, too much unavoidable stench, too many unexplained charges on the natioanl credit card.

The public will get it, but not all at once. And while some of them are getting it, others will already be forgetting. And many will convince themselves (in long retrospect) it was all politics.

Tend to your landscaping. It's genuine productive work. Reserve a day or two for wallowing in Fitzmas, and reserve time to talk to your friends when they raise the question: "What was all that about, anyway?".

[DemFromCT]

"What was all that about, anyway?"

It was about going to war on false pretenses, and getting caught lying about it. The rest is detail.

[wilbersil]

RonK
Thanks for reply. Your advice is good and will be well taken. Tomorrow I'll return to my shovel. I wanted to let you all know that the investigative work you guys do is really first class. But, Isn't this thing also about stealing elections, and not to sound like an extreemist but some of the reading I've done points out that the plane crash at the pentagon seemed pretty fishy too. Do you think society will revisit some of the 9/11 and election details that were so unpatriotic to discuss at that time?

[Mitch Gore]

Well written RonK. Outstanding blog entry.