It is hard to overstate how ignorant and wrong Beltway pundits are about everything, and how barren and corrupt inside-Washington conventional wisdom is.
Russ Feingold has spent his entire idiosyncratic political career espousing views because he believes them, even when those views are so plainly contrary to his political interests. He infuriated his entire party by being the only Democratic Senator to vote against dismissal of the Clinton impeachment charges prior to the Senate trial. He pursued campaign finance reform hated by incumbents in both parties.
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Despite all of that, when Feingold stood up and advocated censure -- based on the truly radical and crazy, far leftist premise that when the President is caught red-handed breaking the law, the Congress should actually do something about that -- the soul-less, oh-so-sophisticated Beltway geniuses could not even contemplate the possibility that he was doing that because he believed what he was saying. Beltway pundits and the leaders of the Beltway political and consulting classes all, in unison, immediately began casting aspersions on Feingold's motives and laughed away -- really never considered -- the idea that he was motivated by actual belief, let alone the merits of his proposal.
That's because they believe in nothing. They have no passion about anything. And they thus assume that everyone else suffers from the same emptiness of character and ossified cynicism that plagues them. And all of their punditry and analysis and political strategizing flows from this corrupt root.
Not only do they believe in nothing, they think that a Belief in Nothing is a mark of sophistication and wisdom. Those who believe in things too much -- who display political passion or who take their convictions and ideals seriously (Feingold, Howard Dean) -- are either naive or, worse, are the crazy, irrational, loudmouth masses and radicals who disrupt the elevated, measured world of the high-level, dispassionate Beltway sophisticates (James Carville, David Broder, Fred Hiatt). They are interested in, even obsessed with, every aspect of the political process except for deeply held political beliefs -- the only part that really matters or that has any real worth.
For that reason, when Feingold announced his censure resolution, the merits of it were virtually ignored (i.e., should something actually be done about the President's deliberate lawbreaking? What are the consequences for our country for doing nothing?). Instead, Feingold's announcement was immediately cast as a disingenuous political maneuver and discussed only in cynical terms of how it would politically harm the Democrats.
They believe in nothing, so they think anyone who is passionate and believes in something, is a simple-minded fool.
They also can't believe that anyone would act out of anything other than personal political gain.
F them.
They pollute our political discourse.
They embrace and promote politically manipulative and unserious people like St. John McCain and Last Honest Man Lieberman as "sensible" statesmen, who still want to send more kids to die in Iraq for Bush's folly, except they want the Democrats to own part of the folly.
At which point McCain and his ventriloquist's dummy, Joe Lieberman, will whine that if only we'd sent MORE troops we would have found the pony. Of course, the president has had the option to send more troops forever and hasn't done so. In fact, there's little the Democrats are likely to do which would stop the president from sending more troops. So McCain/Lieberman will pretend the Dems thwarted the plan for victory, even though the president will be the one who won't let them find the pony in Iraq.
Lovely game they're playing. Lovely that they feel this is a game.
Hopefully, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are smarter than that. Pelosi is supporting Murtha for majority leader and Carl Levin said this today, so those are good signs.
Thanks to the pundits and the irrational Democratic fear to challenge their idiocy, it took the American people 6 years to make Bush pay a political price for his corrupt and incompetent administration, not to mention for his offensive demonization of dissent in this country.
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