Daniel Henninger profiles the 2005 year of hyper-unserious politics:
There are many criticisms one can make of Washington, and most of them, the result of the intended imperfection of our politics, fall under the heading of “it was ever thus.” But the men and women we send to the nation’s capital have always purported a certain pretense to seriousness on things that mattered–foreign policy and the larger domestic issues. The year 2005 was a large fall from seriousness.
Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, kicking off the campaign theme on which the Democrats say they will ask for the people’s vote in 2006, has just called this Congress “the most corrupt in history.” “Corrupt” is a word with more meanings than Senator Reid intended. In the world of software, something that is “corrupt” doesn’t work.
Pick a subject: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, national spending, advice and consent. The larger the challenge, the smaller our politics becomes. Washington’s man of the year is Jack Abramoff.
Washington’s response to Hurricane Katrina, a national catastrophe, was the clearest example of our incredible shrinking politics. The August hurricane reduced much of New Orleans to muck, ruin and misery. Almost as quickly, a floodtide of media-made melodrama and political recrimination broke the levees of perspective that once helped to keep volatile public events in manageable context. One recalls how TV’s anchors and reporters covered the Challenger disaster or even the Kennedy assassination. Now the media weeps along with the nation.
With images of the city’s bereft black population replaying hourly, the aftermath of a natural disaster was reprogrammed into an act of man-made racism. The nation’s politicians, rather than damp down this falsity, exploited it, falling on each other with long knives and hurling charges of incompetence, neglect and again, racism.
With TV and the press focused on politicians spitting at each other amid a natural catastrophe, average people in communities across the nation, aided by many can-do private companies, opened their doors to the genuine homeless people of New Orleans.
Episodes in the Year of Unseriousness abound: The bipartisan highway bill with its Bridge to Nowhere; the Abramoff lobbying sleaze; a truly feckless year-long media hunt to identify who “outed” Valerie Plame, a story with virtually no resonance beyond the Beltway and whose special prosecutor charged no violation of the supposed underlying crime; and now pretend outrage from the likes of Senators Reid and Arlen Specter over the “exposure” of the Bush surveillance program, which much of official Washington knew about and which turns out not to have violated anything. Like radio’s six-second delay to catch obscenities, maybe Washington needs a 12-hour delay on the public comments of senators to spare the public’s ears of offensive inanities.
Daniel Henninger profiles the 2005 year of hyper-unserious politics:
There are many criticisms one can make of Washington, and most of them, the result of the intended imperfection of our politics, fall under the heading of “it was ever thus.” But the men and women we send to the nation’s capital have always purported a certain pretense to seriousness on things that mattered–foreign policy and the larger domestic issues. The year 2005 was a large fall from seriousness.
Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, kicking off the campaign theme on which the Democrats say they will ask for the people’s vote in 2006, has just called this Congress “the most corrupt in history.” “Corrupt” is a word with more meanings than Senator Reid intended. In the world of software, something that is “corrupt” doesn’t work.
Pick a subject: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, national spending, advice and consent. The larger the challenge, the smaller our politics becomes. Washington’s man of the year is Jack Abramoff.
Washington’s response to Hurricane Katrina, a national catastrophe, was the clearest example of our incredible shrinking politics. The August hurricane reduced much of New Orleans to muck, ruin and misery. Almost as quickly, a floodtide of media-made melodrama and political recrimination broke the levees of perspective that once helped to keep volatile public events in manageable context. One recalls how TV’s anchors and reporters covered the Challenger disaster or even the Kennedy assassination. Now the media weeps along with the nation.
With images of the city’s bereft black population replaying hourly, the aftermath of a natural disaster was reprogrammed into an act of man-made racism. The nation’s politicians, rather than damp down this falsity, exploited it, falling on each other with long knives and hurling charges of incompetence, neglect and again, racism.
With TV and the press focused on politicians spitting at each other amid a natural catastrophe, average people in communities across the nation, aided by many can-do private companies, opened their doors to the genuine homeless people of New Orleans.
Episodes in the Year of Unseriousness abound: The bipartisan highway bill with its Bridge to Nowhere; the Abramoff lobbying sleaze; a truly feckless year-long media hunt to identify who “outed” Valerie Plame, a story with virtually no resonance beyond the Beltway and whose special prosecutor charged no violation of the supposed underlying crime; and now pretend outrage from the likes of Senators Reid and Arlen Specter over the “exposure” of the Bush surveillance program, which much of official Washington knew about and which turns out not to have violated anything. Like radio’s six-second delay to catch obscenities, maybe Washington needs a 12-hour delay on the public comments of senators to spare the public’s ears of offensive inanities. . .
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