Rob's Politics Blog

Tom DeLay's indictment, coming on the heels of the announced investigation into Bill Frist's sale of stock, marks the further degeneration of the Republicans' grip on power. DeLay will fight this indictment to the bitter end - it's doubtful that anyone will be able to persuade him otherwise. The question is how many other Republicans he will take down with him. How many other representatives will be tainted by association with Jack Abramoff and the other sleazy characters with whom DeLay has allied?

Who are the replacement leaders? Will DeLay's removal from power entail a civil war within the House GOP? Tensions tend to bottle up under a stable, tight leadership; with the Hammer on the sidelines, ambitious lieutenants may find themselves with a rare opportunity.

The ongoing collapse of the GOP's leadership affords Democrats with an opportunity to make 2006 an historic year - even with the gerrymandered state of things. The myriad failures of Republican governance only become clearer by the day; it remains for the opposition to deliver a concrete alternative message.

2005 has not been a terribly auspicious year for Bill Frist. Any elation he carried into the new year stemming from his role in ousting Tom Daschle must have dissipated by now. The winter and spring saw him getting embroiled in the entire Terry Schiavo mess and the concurrent battle over judges, in which he attempted to paint the Democrats as being opposed to "people of faith." To his eternal discredit, he attempted to diagnose Schiavo from the floor of the Senate (a poor second opinion that was invalidated by a subsequent autopsy).

Frist has an eye on the 2008 GOP nomination and, having preached to the Falwell/Robertson choir, tried to cross the aisle on the stem cell issue. This, more than anything, just incensed his former fans.

Now, the good doctor is being investigated by the SEC for the sale of stock from his own company two weeks before it took a major hit. He had claimed that the stock was being held in a blind trust, but it would appear that he received updates about it nonetheless.

With that, the GOP enters the 2006 midterm season with both of its Congressional leaders under investigation. Frist's own chances in 2008 are looking poor. At the rate he's going, he'll have managed to generate his own scandal cloud, his own reputation for crass partisanship, and his own PR problem with the religious right. Kudos to you, Bill.

I had high hopes for the German election. It seemed time for a change, and as a committed Atlanticist, the prospect of an Angela Merkel victory was tantalizing for me. Merkel is no Tony Blair, but she's a long way from being Jacques Chirac. Under her leadership, Germany could resume its old role as the continental balancer between Britain and France, rather than serving as a sidekick to Gaullism.

The election outcome seems baffling to Germans, and undermines the German case for their system as the happy medium between the US/UK "first past the post" and purer forms of proportional representation. The stability of the German system flowed from having relatively few parties and having tailor-made coalitions that could be formed between rival duos. Now that fifth party has crashed the scene - one that seemingly exists only as a spoiler and wants no part of a coalition with the SPD - Germany seems destined to endure some of the worse features of PR: thin majorities, petty squabbles within coalitions, and coalitions forming not as a consequence of a clear popular mandate but due to backroom finagling.

If I had to bet, I'd bet on a grand coalition, but not one that will last for very long. The only other options would be for LaFontaine's xenophobic Left Party to rejoin Schröder's SPD (which neither side wants very much), the Free Democrats to cross over and join an SPD coalition or the Greens to join a CDU government. Neither act of defection seems likely. The last scenario seems best to me; Merkel would benefit from having the experienced Joschka Fischer at her side.

Germany needed a clean break from the stagnation of the Schröder years and the current chancellor's dead-end approach to trans-Atlantic relations. At a time when the crisis with Iran is heating up, NATO needs responsible leadership in Berlin. Schröder was incapable of providing it - as demonstrated by his earlier declaration that force was not an option with Tehran. All we can do is hope for either (somehow) a lasting Green-FDP-CDU coalition, or a very short grand coalition. Germany and the West deserve better.

The culmination of the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was followed - almost immediately - by the burning of the synagogues left behind in the deserrted settlements.

At the eleventh hour, the Israeli government had decided that it would not demolish these buildings; this decision followed an emotional appeal to the cabinet by a panel of rabbis. The synagogues were entrusted to the tender mercies of the Palestinian Authority.

In so doing, Ariel Sharon showed that he still knows how to play the Palestinians.

Five years ago, Sharon's walk on the Temple Mount helped set into motion the destruction of the peace process. He has been accused of intending this all along, but he could only have achieved this with the witting or unwitting assistance of the Palestinians. Arafat took the bait, embraced the uprising like a long-lost relative, and never really looked back. He died four years later, the stir-crazy inmate of his own gilded prison. Sharon managed to fire both the first and the last shots.

Abandoning the synagogues gives the world the image of gleeful Palestinians destroying holy sites. It may be argued that these were the holy sites of settlers - a group not particularly liked in the West - but the image remains. Sharon values Gaza much less than he does the settlement blocs of the West Bank or the city of Jerusalem. Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's feeble defence of the arson - that there weren't synagogues, only abandoned unsafe buildings - will not help his hand.

The willful complicity of the Palestinian Authority in acts of desecration undermine its case for sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the case that it could respect other holy sites in the West Bank. The destruction of Joseph's Tomb in 2000 already made that clear, the Gaza burnings reconfirm it. Hamas and the PA have willfully traded a bargaining chip for the joys of destruction. It isn't the first time and it's not likely to be the last.

Some foolish things have been said in the wake of Katrina, and in that category, one must cite the utterances of Germany's Minister of the Environment, Jurgen Trittin, who lay the blame for Katrina at the feet of the Bush administration in an article for the Frankfurter Rundschau without so much as a word of sympathy for the victims. Trittin's cold analysis has prompted outrage on both sides of the Atlantic; in the midst of the German election, his unfeeling remarks have elicited strong criticism from the press and the parties of the right. Americans seeing Trittin as the emblem of an unfeeling Europe should read Der Spiegel's reaction before coming to a conclusion about German schadenfreude.

Katrina offers reason to look anew at global warming as one more element that could be exacerbating weather patterns, but amateur meteorologists of the Trittin or Cindy Sheehan ilk embarrass only themselves when they blame Bush for the actual hurricane. The hurricane-global warming linkage is fairly speculative in nature; we already have ample cause to concern ourselves with climate change without making these wild assertions. Had Bush belatedly signed Kyoto, does anyone think that Katrina wouldn't have descended on the Gulf Coast?

That said, the administration deserves the fiercest of criticism for its negligence in this matter. Since 2001, it consistently refused to allocate the funds requested by the Army Corps of Engineers to shore up the levees above New Orleans. It did this in spite of a 2001 FEMA report that listed the flooding of New Orleans as one of the three likeliest disasters to hit an American city. The engineers working to hold back Lake Ponchartrain had to work with a bare fraction of the funds they requested.

Peaceniks will cite the war in Iraq as the reason for this shortfall, but the Bush administration was skimping on funds well before that. This shortfall has everything to do with the administration's insistence on cutting the budget before all else - before homeland security, before foreign aid, before social security, before ensuring that our military can fight and protect itself. As was commonly repeated last year, this is the first wartime presidency in which taxes were cut. The administration ignored a compelling packet of evidence that New Orleans needed protection.

Would the levee improvements have been enough? The answer is unknowable, but then so was the path of Katrina. It might have spend its fury on shored-up levees or on more vulnerable ones. Team Bush had an opportunity to at least lessen the odds of a catastrophic breach and they failed to do so.

More proximate to the calamity, one has to ask why the response has been so ineffectual. Bush's vacation in Texas has to be one factor, but it still begs the question of why FEMA has reverted to its early 90s inefficiency. It would seem that FEMA's reinvention as a branch of Homeland Security has hampered its ability to respond to natural calamities. And that is just ridiculous. Did the White House think that hurricanes would cease while we worked to stave off dirty bombs and the like? Bush had a responsibility - enhanced since 9/11 - to keep FEMA muscular, agile, prescient, and quick to react. He no longer has Clinton's FEMA; it is indubiously his own, and clearly a failure.

The consequences of all this has been the destruction of a cherished American city. Inattention, stinginess, and a genuine failure of vision are to blame. The best that can be said for the administration is that one can never know what would have worked. It is clear that they did not think seriously of their responsibilities beforehand and the carnage of Hurricane Katrina will forever be linked to the second Bush presidency.

At this moment, diehard Al Qaeda types are undoubtedly celebrating the flooding of New Orleans and the devastation of the Gulf Coast, attributing it to Allah's vengeance against the Great Satan or somesuch. I say this because some deranged clerics last January deemed the tsunami Allah's retribution against the sinful beaches of Thailand (but isn't it odd that Allah smote so many devout Muslims in Indonesia to get at a few hundred Western tourists?).

Islamist schadenfreude over anyone else's misfortune isn't news, but I mention this to highlight the reactions of a couple of local boogeymen to the hurricane.

The Cuban parliament observed a moment of silence in memory of the victims, before beginning the day's business: condemning the US occupation in Iraq (Reuters).

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, though condemning Bush for his relative inaction, has offered soldiers and relief workers to aid in affected regions (AP)

There's something salutary about these gestures, even as they come from adversaries of the United States. I don't like either man especially - Castro has created a durable, vicious police state, and Chavez is on his way toward doing so. But it's worth recognizing a fundamental distinction between types of adversaries: those who accept a shared humanity, and those who don't.

Castro and Chavez, as bad as their domestic policies are, have reacted humanely to America's calamity. It might be best to thank them for their concern. Not because any lasting bond can be forged with them, but because the United States has no need to exacerbate relations with either Cuba or Venezuela and finding a way to stabilize ties - especially with Chavez - would avert the prospect of a disastrous oil shortfall. The loss of the Gulf Coast refineries, on top of the current high price of oil, is bad enough. The loss of Venezuelan sources from a continued degeneration of relations with Caracas could be disastrous (indeed this was the precipitating factor of a prolonged downturn in a forecast that appeared in a recent edition of The Atlantic).

I reiterate: in the long run, Latin America would benefit from both of these men leaving the scene, but that cannot be a leading priority for the United States with so much else at stake. A wise administration would accept the proferred olive branches, indicate an interest in dialogue, and do whatever possible to keep these conflicts on ice. Seriously evaluating the case of Luis Posada, a Cuban wanted in Venezuela for terrorism, would be a good start. Certainly, Posada appears far from innocent (CSM). The Bush administration's rigidity on Cuba and ties to anti-Castro hardliners probably preclude such an action, but it's helpful to think about how a wiser administration would formulate policy. These bozos only have another 3+ years left in office, after all. There are enemies who hate you reflexively and conditional adversaries. It would be nice to have an administration that could sense and exploit the inherent difference between the two.

# posted by Rob @ 8:58 PM