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October 30, 2005
The Scandal etc.
Frankly, from where I look, the acute "scandals" are over, as far as the Bush administration is concerned.
Lewis Libby is a person of very little consequence, in the larger scheme of things. He'll go down, perhaps even be convicted -- and promptly pardoned.
Miers has bowed out and will now likely be replaced with someone much smarter, also someone whose more developed ideology better masks their humanity -- Miers merely seemed a bit slow and very much a loyal team player. She would have voted along the party lines, but that's not enough. They need someone who can justify torture with long words, someone who can throw out the constitution while producing coherent sentences littered with Latin.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of someone who will put their loyalty to this team in power above their sense of decency. Still, my impression of the argument over Miers in the right wing was that they feared that she was still a bit of a human. "Movement conservatism" seems more and more to demand that one accept a theory, a cold and cruel theory, above and beyond everything. By "constitutional scholar", they mean someone who has digested the theory so deeply that they will not be swayed by consequences.
Assuming Lewis Libby is not an idiot, a safe assumption I would say because you have to be very, very, very stupid to lie so very, very, very stupidly, I figure this is it. He's covered up whatever it was he was trying to cover up. Most likely Cheney's involvement. He'll go down, and he'll probably feel good doing so he'll convince himself this is just one more sacrifice that a man has to make in the big battle against evil.
The problem for the administration, however, isn't that these scandals are here to stay. Their problem is that people don't trust them anymore. It is not that people supported their Iraq policy because they understood or cared. Most of their support came from people who assumed that these guys knew what they were doing. Hurricane Katrina, continuing carnage in Iraq, Miers nomination, etc. has shattered this impression; many people now seemed to have lost their confidence in the ability of this administration to steer things.
That is very hard to fix for any political party, so, yes, the administration is in trouble. But that is not necessarily good for progressives because I see no evidence that values we care about have been or about to be injected into the debate. And no amount of waiting for Fitzgerald to expand his investigation and/or indict Rove and/or look into the Niger documents will accomplish that.
Posted by zeynep at October 30, 2005 05:52 PM