MOsanthrope

Posted by Chris on November 29, 2005 at 8:34 pm.

After about a week of news isolation brought about by intensive deck-building, football viewing and turkey consumption, I caught the lead stories this morning.

Yesterday’s resignation of Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) led several newscasts. The story did not strike me as particularly newsworthy. Perhaps because recent sniping between Nick and Jessica and Brad and Jennifer transpired outside camera range, the media elected to report that a Republican congressman admitted receiving millions in bribes from defense contractors. Shocking, I know.

In case you’ve lost track, The Fix has a compendium of political scandals involving current members of Congress. An odd Democrat or two even managed to make the list. Either because of pity or fear of redundant reporting, the author omitted the White House. The post’s commentators noted that oversight and others.

In 2000 Bush campaigned on ethics and a promise to restore “honor and dignity” to Washington. After a wave of brazen corporate crimes in 2002, the President spoke in New York and called for “higher ethical standards, standards enforced by strict laws and upheld by responsible business leaders.” Now, in the wake of Plamegate, he’s ordered White House staffers to take an “ethics refresher course.”

Cronyism and corruption is an ethic of sorts. Maybe we just misunderstood. Perhaps what he meant by “ethics” was an administration of cabinet positions held by corporate lobbyists and industry executives, patronage appointments and ambassadorships for fundraising “Rangers” and “Pioneers.”

I remain astonished that anyone in this country still buys this administration’s shtick. By any objective account, the Iraq war was ill conceived and poorly executed. Moreover, while the GOP professes as its core values ideas which I find commendable — smaller government and fiscal responsibility — the crowd currently running the show has failed miserably on both accounts:

President Bush [claimed]… that the growth of discretionary federal spending has slowed markedly since he took office. But in fact, annual growth has been in double digits for the past three years, far higher than in any year of the Clinton administration.

The White House released budget figures yesterday indicating that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003.

The average U.S. household has already spent almost $1600 on the war in Iraq, according to a report presented in Washington Wednesday. The final bill will be an estimated $3,415, based on the U.S. military’s prediction of a three-year military occupation….

The highway bill seemed like such a good idea when it sailed through Congress this summer. But now Republicans who assembled the record spending package are suffering buyer’s remorse.

The $286 billion legislation was stuffed with 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers’ districts, including what critics denounce as a $223 million “Bridge to Nowhere” that would replace a 7-minute ferry ride in a sparsely populated area of Alaska. Usually members of Congress cannot wait to rush home and brag about such bounty — a staggering number of parking lots, bus depots, bike paths and new interchanges for just about every congressional district in the country that added $24 billion to the overall cost of maintaining the nation’s highways and bridges in the coming years.

Even the libertarians are aghast.

Thankfully, the stench of the right’s “we’re so ethical and pious” rhetoric has become so overpowering that even our anosmic electorate is beginning to catch the drift.

We can only hope.

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