Bad Intersection

On the corner of Downing Street Memo and K Street Project, we find a dangerous intersection of presidential arrogance and willfull power-mongering, something referred to in earlier times as Imperial Presidency.

That the president and his hell-bent co-conspirators were already pre-agreed to invade Iraq was obvious at the time, despite the statements to the contrary by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. But to see it stated so starkly in the Downing Street Memo, how the invasion was a pre-scripted fait accompli, and the intelligence was about to be "fixed" to fit the plans, was a bit of an eye-opener. We got into the Vietnam War in a similar way, with Lyndon Johnson deciding to have the war, then over-hyping the paltry event in the Tonkin Gulf to get the Congressional vote.

The K Street Project, meanwhile, is an attempt, so far very successful on the part of the Republicans, to turn all the Washington lobbying firms into enclaves for their fellow party members, especially retiring administration officials who then move into the private sector with a high-paying lobbying job. This contemptuous "project" is headed by Grover Norquist, one of GWB’s top henchmen.

The way this highly dishonorable activity has been run is that all the Washington lobbying firms, representing as they do thousands of corporations, conglomerates and special interest groups, were informed several years ago by the weasels at the K Street Project (with the Republican power structure fully backing them up) that the more Republicans who were employed by these firms, the more "access" they would receive to the Republicans in the Congress and the Executive branch. So, when a leadership job would open up in one of these companies, they would be urged to hire a Republican ... or else, the or else being less face time with the powerful office-holders, and less favorable legislation.

One example (and there truly are only a few) of a company that went ahead and hired a Democrat to fill a top company position was the Motion Picture Association, for which there "or else" amounted to losing a tax break worth many millions of dollars.

I’ve known about this scurrilously Un-American practice for a few years, but considered that most lobbyists are jackals, so what do I care how they’re getting reamed. But recently the Norquist group, drunk with their success in getting Republicans in upper and middle management in these firms, has decreed that the secretaries have to be party members as well, and a lot of these women, sometimes long-time loyal employees, have been summarily dismissed. Now that’s just going too damn far, and makes me wonder what’s next for this bunch.

Maybe they’ll start doing a similar number on the Washington media covering the Congress and White House. Wait, they’re already doing that, in effect, by denying interviews and press passes to liberal and moderate media outlets. Journalists like Maureen Dowd of The New York Times can’t get into a press conference, yet the recently disgraced gay prostitute who had a website praising everything Bush did got in many times.

All I can conclude is that woe be to this country if this odious pack of scoundrels isn’t thrown out in 2006 and 2008. Woe, woe, and triple woe.