Scandals

As I was about to write a piece about the Colbert embarrassment of the president (which I will do below), came the announcement of Porter Goss' resignation as Director of the CIA. The bloggers are having a field day with this one. From the outset I thought Goss' appointment was one more stick in the eye of Bush's opponents - a habit he has, like his father's appointment of Justice Thomas to the Supreme Court, more to vex his enemies than to make a god appointment. Goss was a political hack who had ties to the intelligence community because of his seniority in the House, and it looked, and still looks, as if his appointment was more about clearing the agency of those who were not Bush loyalists than about serious beefing up of our security.

But the bloggers smell a political scandal linked to the disgraced and now jailed congressman Randy Duke Cunningham who, with his cronies, apparently kept an apartment where they drank, whored and made mischief for their liberal Democratic opponents while they posed as true blue conservative guardians of American values. We'll see.

But it isn't good news for the fortunes of our nation, this ongoing circus as the Bush presidency unravels. If it were true, as Bush has told us for the past five years, that we are in a war of attrition - which I regard as a misapprehension about the nature of the threat posed by Al Quaida and Islamist extremists - we would likely have lost it by now with the ineptness with which this administration has waged this so-called war.

Now, as for The Colbert performance with the president sitting miserably captive, I am of at least two minds. On the one hand I think the breakdown of human contact between political opponents in Washington as a terrible thing. When I lived in D.C. in the late 60s and early 70s, those who opposed each other bitterly on the floor of Congress during the day would often spend the evening together eating, drinking and exchanging in a friendly manner. And the Press Dinner was always a chance for that to happen on a large scale. So I hate to see it become bitterly partisan.

On the other hand this president has become so isolated, and seemingly oblivious to those who differ from him, one can hardly blame Colbert for using the occasion - the only one possible - to insert some reality, albeit sarcastic. I actually thought his biting criticism of the press' fawning coverage of Bush was more to the point even that what he said about Bush himself.


I have to admit that I enjoyed watching it. But that it had to happen says bad things about the climate in our nation.