You can keep'em

Andy and I have quarreled mildly over my dedicated contrarianism, but even he, a sincere liberal, must be devastated at the ease with which the Democrats have folded since their victory last November. Sure, they got the power to start investigations, but, as Alexander Cockburn remarks in this devastating critique, what good is this power when you vote to give the President the warrant-less wiretapping he sought by a comfortable margin? With the exception of Senator Russ Feingold, who's been pretty good in the last several months and a consistent critic of the Bush administration for years, it's been business as usual. No, worse:

The Democrats control the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she’d really wanted to. But she didn’t. The Democrats’ game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base about to their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.

The row over the U.S. attorneys and the conduct of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has always been something of a typhoon in a teaspoon. The Democrats love it since they imagine it portrays them to the public as resolute guardians of the impartial administration of justice, a concept whose credibility most Americans sensibly deride. The Democrats now plan to track Gonzales’s firing of the US attorneys back to that comic opera villain of the Bush era, Karl Rove, another great provoker of dust storms.

Democrats I know are sanguine about their party's presidential prospects next year, but there's little to gloat about. When the prospects are not-a-liberal-bone-in-her-body Hillary Clinton, grotesque Reagan parody Mitt Romney, and a genial gay-loving, ferret-hating fascist like Rudy Giulani, they're mighty grim indeed. Is it any wonder that the genuinely weird Ron Paul -- a bizarre fusion of Arthur Vandenberg and Ross Perot -- has generated so much excitement? It's so simple that, of course, our elected representatives don't get it:

A war people hate, Gitmo, Bush’s police -state executive orders of July 17 -- the Democrats have signed the White House dance card on all of them, and guess what, their poll numbers are gong down. Bush’s, on the other hand, are going up by five points in Gullup from early July. People are beginning to think the surge is working, courtesy of The New York Times. So, are we better or worse off since the Democrats won back Congress?

Speaking of the Gray Old Lady, there was no greater demonstration of the way in which our national press fawns over those in power than the wet, dreary obits written for the long, happy political life of Karl Rove. The tone of most of the coverage emitted a barely suppressed nostalgia for the days when Shitflower snapped his fingers and the Republican hordes threatened to hold the three branches of government forever (Rove, no fool, was even making William McKinley allusions). As usual, the Washington press understands just thing: who's in power and who's not. The Democrats mattered in 2006 because they won the Congressional elections and the GOP did not. Thus, the narrative required that the evil genius moniker that Rove wore rather better than his jackets be stripped from him.

I told a student, a potential MoveOn.org recruit, last week: "Harry Reid doesn't give a fuck about you." This was a couple of days before the House voted 227-183 to give the President the powers he sought. Cynicism is an ugly thing.

EDIT: Jane Dark is even more blunt.