A Forgiving Escalation

I was in DC last week, and let me reiterate, for the record -- one more time! -- how much I loathe that town.

To be fair, its restaurants are fine and its nightlife entertaining, in a bemused art-student-at-a-frat-party sort of way; and certainly the cherry blossoms blooming in January added a charming lift to people's gait as they strolled down the street.

But our nation's capital is, to put it mildy, insular, if not downright self-obsessed. We live in a time when the world is on fire, and the only heat felt by the DC elite is the burning envy that someone else gets to hold the fiddle for a while.

But if we didn't have the madness of the chattering classes, would we have to invent it? Perhaps. If we could. I think it would take a good deal of psychotropics and days upon days of staring at Rorschach inkblots to even begin to make the connections that many of our best and brightest pundits make in explaining the world to us.

Digby has been tracking their latest erudite observations, and their brilliant ability to make connections between dots that most of us don't even see:

One of the sillier theories I'd been bouncing around was that the punditocrisy and the reporters had spent so much time riffing and boozing during that interminable period of mourning for Ford that they somehow conflated their tributes to his moderation and bipartisanship with some sort of mandate from the American people in this last election.

Up to that point, the media had seen the Democrats' post-election promises to "work with the other side" --- as a rhetorical rebuke to the way the Republicans had governed. They were right. While I'm sure the Democrats had no intentions of running the congress like a plantation as the Republicans had, nobody thought it meant that they would follow the president's agenda or compromise on issues on which they had run, like the war or preserving social security. The election, after all, was a referendum on a party that had had six years of total power and who's approval ratings were hovering in the low teens. The press had had to extract assurances that the Democrats wouldn't impeach the president, for crying out loud. Bipartisan kumbaaya was clearly not on the agenda.

Suddenly, Jerry Ford died and it seemed to me that days and days of eulogizing Ford's legacy just prior to the new congress taking over (and during the holiday drinking season) had caused the media to literally confuse the Ford ascension in 1974 with the election last November.

As Woody Guthrie said, any fool can make something complicated; it takes a genius to make it simple. Expect to see a great deal of foolishness in the coming days as the talking heads explain to you how George Bush's escalation of the war in Iraq is precisely what the American people voted for when they voted Democratic last November. We were, after all, already pining for the Ford Era. We just didn't know it yet.