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Mickey of the Day

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Ah, it’s been a while. Mickey:

Just a reminder: Rep. Henry Waxman, the aggressive incoming liberal chair of the House Government Reform committee–who is chiding his Republican predecessors for not investigating (in AP’s words) “the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the controversy over the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name, and the pre-Iraq war use of intelligence”–voted for the war. … All future beat-sweeteners about Waxman should be required to (unlike AP) mention this fact before reporting Waxman’s righteous indignation. [Maybe he was duped by all that manipulated pre-war intelligence–ed. Please. He’s a smart, well-connected guy. I think he’s hard to dupe.]

I know it’s hard, Mickey, but would you mind explaining that to me one more time? The fact that Waxman voted for the war means that he ought not to be asking questions about it? That’s rather an odd theory of democracy, now isn’t it? I mean, if I had supported the war, I sure as hell would want to know why it had gone wrong, why Abu Ghraib had happened, and why the Bush administration had played around with bad intelligence. Indeed, if I were a Democrat who had voted for the war I would really want to know those things. So what gives, Mickey?

If I may hazard, Mickey is either putting forth a theory of democracy that allows a remarkable degree of executive authority (we give up our right to question the executive on the day that we vote for him) and that’s just a little bit reminiscent of an odd combination of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, or he’s engaging in sniping so transparent a fourth grader could see through it. In short, if Waxman voted for the war the he must have supported the way in which it was conducted, which means that his decision to question the war is nothing but dirty dirty liberal Democratic liberal political sniping, and IN A TIME OF WAR no less.

Mickey cut his teeth in the 1990s on fairly complex policy questions, but now he can’t manage to sort out the difference between political sniping and good governance. He’s still pimping the argument that immigration reform should have been critical to the election, going so far as to argue that the failure of the Republicans to adopt his strategy for victory means that, in fact, George Bush wanted the Democrats to win. The possibility that the disastrous execution of the war on the part of the administration might have mattered even to those initially supportive doesn’t, apparently, even cross his mind.

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