fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Revelations

Is it me or is all hell breaking loose in this country’s politics? We’re in the last month of an election cycle and there are maybe four or five stories, each of which could totally dominate the national political news on their own. And each is flaming out of control at once. You’ve got the […]

Is it me or is all hell breaking loose in this country’s politics? We’re in the last month of an election cycle and there are maybe four or five stories, each of which could totally dominate the national political news on their own. And each is flaming out of control at once. You’ve got the Foley debacle. The revelations in the Woodward book. The NIE revelations that almost seem like old news now. A major part of the pre-9/11 story that somehow never saw the light of day and may bring down Condi Rice. And did I mention the election? ~Josh Marshall

Via Mickey Kaus

Kaus also suggests “the Densepack Theory” to propose that all of these individual revelations may actually end up effectively cancelling each other out in the way that the debris from one detonated ICBM would theoretically wreck other incoming ICBMs that are in close proximity to the blast zone.  If there was a deliberate strategy to release all of these things in close succession, they might all have less impact together than each one spread out over a couple months would have had.  It sounds vaguely plausible.

That said, I don’t really buy this theory, as I don’t accept Marshall’s characterisation of all of these revelations as being as significant as he claims they are.  I know it is satisfying to war opponents to hear the NIE statement that the war fuels jihadi terrorism, and there is a certain interest in knowing that Kissinger has been behind the steadfast stubbornness on Iraq in the administration, but if the Woodward appraisal of the administration is sharply negative and the NIE deflates certain jingo propaganda claims about the war they do not tell us anything really new and do not constitute the major political events Marshall makes them out to be.  The reason why these, and the claims about the “warning” Rice received about Al Qaeda attacks before 9/11, are not major political events is that each one of them only appeals to those who were already convinced of the administration’s perfidy.  Each one might dominate the news cycle for a week and then fade into the background.  For a brief time Fiasco was all the rage, but the people who were touting Fiasco were by and large political junkies who already knew most of what was in the book and were just excited to find their observations confirmed by Someone In The Know.  For those who were not inclined to learn more about administration incompetence, the release of the book was a non-event. 

Woodward’s book is more significant because of the media attention it has received, but even then this sort of thing does not have the capacity to dominate the news to the same extent as the Foley scandal.  None of these is “flaming out of control”–most have disappeared from view all together.  Woodward keeps the news about his book alive through excerpting and media appearances, but insofar as he reveals nothing new he would not dominate the regular news cycle sans Foley. 

Such is the pathetic state of our politics, I suppose, but where the Foley scandal differs is that it does not turn on accounts given by ex-administration officials with an axe to grind and does not quite have the potential aura of political payback that these others–such as the selective leaks from the NIE–do possess.  Where the claims in State of Denial can be contested by Bush supporters, the best Republicans can manage in the Foley matter is to laughably blame a conspiracy for their own failures; even if there was some premeditated coordination by the other side on this that the GOP was unable to counter effectively, it simply shows that Republicans are inept at policy and political maneuvering, which is not exactly something to boast about in an election year. 

I am very skeptical that the NIE revelations, Woodward’s book or the story about the “warning” to Rice would move many voters to one column from the other, and I am skeptical that any one of these would dominate the news.  They would be important stories, but they do not have the kind of legs that this scandal has, because the scandal has acquired a life beyond its original cause and metastasised into a full-blown implosion of the majority party. 

The others are not political earthquakes, even though they may be more significant on questions of substance.  Each one in itself would burn out fairly quickly, even if it was not smothered by other, larger revelations.  The Foley scandal is such a political earthquake precisely because there is not a ready-made, organised group deeply invested in a policy that has been questioned that they can rally around to defend, because no policy has been questioned and none stands in need of partisan defense.  The scandal really is monumental because it would, by its sensational nature, dominate the news cycle no matter which party it affected.  Because it affects the majority party and will doom their electoral chances, it gains that much more attention from the media.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here