Got to Give it Up

In my last post, I talked about the hypocrisy of Republicans who are setting a timeline in September after dragging every other proponent of a timeline through the mud for years. Well, this may shock you, but I found some more Republican hypocrisy since then. This time they're trying to harass the Iraqi politburo, or whatever joke of a legislative body "runs" their country, into giving up its two month summer vacation.

In order to think this is an important problem, you have to assume that the legislative body there actually controls anything about the country. But from the violence and failed infrastructure, combined with the foreign military occupation and mass resignations, I would say they don't.

But Dick Cheney says they do. Specifically, he was scheduled to say that on his visit today. At the press availability this morning, the US Ambassador to Iraq mentioned that Cheney would talk about the vacation:

"The reality is, with the major effort we’re making, the major effort the Iraqi security forces and military are making themselves, for the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer if [sic] impossible to understand," [US Ambassador Ryan] Crocker said.

I would have to say I agree with that. But I'm quite surprised to hear about it coming from this party. The 109th Congress (last term's; dominated by Republicans) worked the fewest days AND failed to even complete its most basic legislative duties. Bush set the record for laziest President ever (measured by vacation days) almost two years ago. Most famously, Bush insisted on prolonging his vacation while thousands died in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

But this problem of vacations just dovetails with the larger Republican problem of connection with reality. Guys: it's too little too late. Sing it with me now: you got to give it up. If working on this pressing problem (so pressing that approximately 3,400 Americans are dead because of it) was so important to you, why did you take all those vacation days? And that brings us to Cheney's other statement. Apparently today he was scheduled to say, among other things, that:

We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time.

As others have pointed out, what is it about a war ravaging through the Middle East for the last four years that makes it "game time" only just now? Was there a time when this was not important? Were you only giving this partial effort before, since it wasn't game time? Up til now, have we just been talking about practice?

I Gotcha Politics Right Here [gestures]

Have you noticed how people keep using this phrase "play gotcha"? (You may have noticed it here, here, here, here, or here, for example.) Sometimes it's even varied as "gotcha journalism". Using this term is basically a defensive tactic for when you believe your side is not getting a fair shake. For example, you could accuse Tim Russert of playing gotcha when he asks deceptive and irrelevant questions that he knows Howard Dean won't have an answer for. In this sense, it expresses the frustration of being marginalized by someone who isn't playing fair but controls the discourse anyway.

However, there is a much more insidious use of the term. And wouldn't you know it, our old friend Joe Lieberman is at the forefront. Lieberman recently used the term in response to a heckler. Seems this gentleman was disappointed that Lieberman promised so earnestly to investigate the Administration's response to Katrina during his campaign, only to refuse to do anything about once he had won. GOP Joe, I mean 'independent Democrat' Joe, seems to think Congress has no role in placing blame. Quoth the slimeball,

"We don't want to play `gotcha' anymore," Lieberman said. "We want to get the aid and assistance to the people of the region who need it."

Now, no one is here to say that aid and assistance should not go to the people of the region who need it (sic). But decrying gotcha politics when you're Joe Lieberman is like decrying the need to know how the nation was misled into war when you're Tony Snow. The Administration has been pretty consistent in wanting to talk about how we're going to win in Iraq instead of talking about why we're there, which makes sense because they look really bad when the conversation shifts that direction.

Gotcha politics, focusing on the present, looking forward. Whatever you want to call them, these terms all denote the tactics of people who wouldn't look so good if we focused on the past. But, as Josh Eidelson points out, gotcha politics is a pretty good thing for Washington because of one simple virtue: accountability.

If no one ever played gotcha politics, no one would ever be calling anyone on their mistakes. Entrenched beltway insiders like Lieberman would be free to make mistakes all the time, constantly undermine the fellow members of their party, and generally behave in the most selfish ways possible without ever having to answer for it. W would be within reason when he asks us to trust him on Iraq. I hope I don't need to flesh out this nightmare scenario any further.

This is where politics starts to seem like a mutual fund. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, we are constantly told. And while technically that is true, it's also pretty much the only thing we have to go on when choosing mutual funds, unless we have inside (and idiosyncratic) information on how some of the stocks in the fund will be performing. So, Joe and George, I'd love to not bother assigning blame, but you guys just keep screwing up. I personally don't have any reason to think your future results will differ greatly from your past performance.

I agree that it would be nice not to have to play gotcha politics all the time, but the solution to the problem is to stop people from screwing up. Running around whining about how much we dislike it is a deceptive, ad hominem, disingenuous tactic that ends up hurting productive political discourse more than it helps. Therefore, here here for gotcha politics.