From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Has Washington Gone Insane?
The Plame kerfuffle and the decline of rational problem-solving.
With President Bush away for a week in Asia, the rest of Washington has had to find something to do with its time other than run amuck over the latest piddling folly. That means the news from Washington this week is close to zero. Still, like many Americans in our time, on returning home after work the past week I paddled my surfboard across the ocean of cable TV channels in search of a wave of public interest more than two feet high. And so it came to pass on these still waters that I discovered Jon Stewart seated across the table from Larry King. Mr. Stewart is the host of "The Daily Show," Comedy Central's satirical TV news program. This looked like a wave worth waiting for, and it was. The subject was Washington.
Larry King suggested to Jon Stewart that the current low ebb of the Democrats and Republicans was good for Mr. Stewart's business.
King: So, in a sense you're happy over this.Mr. Stewart replied that if government "began to solve problems in a rational way rather than just a way that involved political dividends, we would be the happiest people in the world to turn our attention to idiots like, you know, media people, no offense."Stewart: No.
King: This gives you fodder.
King: So, you don't want it to be bad?Insane? Spend too much time close to politicians nowadays and suddenly that's a good question. This week the New York Times in the course of deconstructing the bad relationship between the Bush White House and the pressies who shout questions at it quoted a clinical psychologist who claimed to have had as patients several White House correspondents--all suffering from what she calls "White House reporter syndrome." Something about being "emotionally isolated."Stewart: Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad?
King: Yes because you--
Stewart: What are you--I have kids. What do you think? I want things to corrode to the point where we're all living in huts?
King: You don't want Medicare to fail?
Stewart: Are you insane?
This story already has plenty of clowns, so by all means, send in the psychiatrists.
It is not my intent to plumb the possibility of mass psychosis in Washington, but nonetheless we must come to grips with the phenomenon of the world's most powerful capital spending so much of its intellectual energy chasing nightmares of its own imagining. Exhibit A here would be the fascinating case history of Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame.
If memory serves, those of us who expect to find value in tracking public events spent more than two years on an obsessive Beltway press search for who "outed" Valerie Plame. And this was a high crime insofar as Ms. Plame was a "covert agent" for the CIA. In someone's notion of political reality, this was a big deal. Its actual size was revealed in a federal court hearing last Friday, as described by National Review's quite grounded White House correspondent, Byron York:
"CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued . . . that as far as the perjury charges against former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby are concerned, it does not matter whether or not Valerie Wilson was a covert CIA agent. . . . 'We're trying a perjury case', Fitzgerald told Judge Reggie Walton. Even if Plame had never worked for the CIA at all, Fitzgerald continued--even if she had been simply mistaken for a CIA agent--the charges against Libby would still stand. In addition, Fitzgerald said, he does not intend to offer 'any proof of actual damage' caused by the disclosure of Wilson's identity." No damage?
So setting aside the catastrophic personal tragedy for Scooter Libby (and the possible erosion of confidentiality protections for the press), the Plame affair all those months was a forced march down a blind alley. Still, I think the Plame case has value as a window to understanding why Washington today spends more time bouncing off the walls than sticking to Jon Stewart's apparently archaic attachment to solving problems "in a rational way."
Rational problem-solving generally requires adhering to the rules of the game, and in politics those rules are often informal. One such rule in Washington is that a politician is as good as his word. Perhaps nothing has been more destructive to Washington's current ability to function than the belief that "Bush lied" about WMD, most notably Joe Wilson's foundational charge in the New York Times that Mr. Bush lied about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger.
This persistent belief that George Bush committed a major moral crime, which was refuted by the Robb-Silberman Commission, had consequences. It has led many people in Washington's standing institutions--Congress, the press, the intelligence and foreign-policy bureaucracies--to think they've been released from operating inside the normal boundaries that allow political Washington to function, that allow partisans to do business, whether on foreign policy, Social Security or homeland security.
Over the Bush years that code has been displaced by a new ethos that to resist policies that flowed from such a "lie," anything goes--such as leaks about the most sensitive national security programs or published "dissents" by recently retired CIA officials like Paul Pillar. Compare this ethos to that of the U.S. intelligence community that ran the Venona program, producing invaluable signals intelligence on Soviet espionage activities from 1943 onward without any participant revealing its existence. No such achievement is imaginable now.
Instead every issue that emerges becomes an illegitimate extension of the original "lie"--the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo detentions, Abu Ghraib, terrorist interrogation techniques, the Plame affair. This is a dangerous game. Raised to this level, policy becomes a super-heated moral Armageddon that makes mere politics impossible to manage. One then might ask: Do you want this government to fail? To which a tragicomic response is appropriate: Are you insane?
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
