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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?
Anyone familiar with their educational backgrounds and Larry King's book reviews does know that Stewart, a grad of William & Mary, occasionally blurts out the truth. And the truth is that Larry King may have a thought once or twice a month, but it's not recorded in on-air media time. Sort of a very dumb Don Imus. And 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.
Henninger then comes to the prime mover, the fable that "Bush lied" about WMD:
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?
There's an interesting parallel between cosmic egomaniacs Joe Wilson and Howard Dean: both spent many years as ski bums before getting a "legitimate" job. But I digress.
Actually, there is evidence that Saddam Hussein removed the WMD to Syria and Lebanon almost a year before Bush invaded. But the left-leaning media, led by media Agitprop Czar NYT, never reports the fact that these allegations exist. The media might get hoist by its own petard, as the leaks to James Risen were on a crime level ten times more serious than anything about Wilson spouse Plame.
The truth is that the Bush White House is running scared, and the Democrats sense through Scott McClellan's mute inability to retort to the ridiculous pie-throwing contests of the White House Press, that GWB is as wobbly as his Daddy when it comes to standing up for something when the going gets tough.
Why doesn't the DOJ prosecute the NYT for the NSA leaks? GWB is ending with a whimper, not a bang.
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