The film metaphor that springs to mind is that of the raging confrontation between Inspector Clouseau and the organ-grinder in the foreground, as a violent and poorly executed crime unfolds in the background. Our present-day reality isn't quite as comical, but it's close.
As the broadcast media engage almost exclusively the Democratic fiasco and Chief Inspector Hillary Clinton's fastidious lectures on the proper political rules, the overlooked crime of Iraq bubbles behind it all. And Republican nominee John McCain is happily getting away.
The print media, which tend to cover things like foreign wars and their domestic politics, have indeed noticed. But their coverage seems to overplay the importance of Iraq in the electorate's awareness. Reports, for instance, the New York Times: "The heavy fighting that broke out last week [in Iraq] is reverberating on the presidential campaign trail and posing new challenges and opportunities to the candidates.... The fierce fighting ... thrust the war back into the headlines and the public consciousness just as it had been receding behind a tide of economic concerns."
Reverberating? Not compared to the thrill of seating or not seating Michigan delegates, or the relative value of a pyrrhic primary victory in Texas, or how only one Democrat alive could possibly carry Massachusetts in the general. Now that's reverberation for you, against which the most stupendous blunder in American foreign-policy history could not conceivably hold a candle or merit much notice.
To the extent that it does, Senator McCain, of course, is calling both heads and tails. He "said he was encouraged that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's government had sent its troops to reclaim Basra from the Shiite militias." Had it been only American troops sent, that would have been encouraging, too -- an admirable sign that we're staying the course, as we should. He likes to feel needed; does Iraq ever need him, and boy does he ever need Iraq.
Senator Obama, on the other hand, said Saturday that "the news from Basra highlighted his contention that American military involvement could not solve the deep-seated problems facing Iraq," which he anticipated and warned against years ago. But I put it to you: How many times did you see footage of that statement, compared, especially, to the number of times you saw yet another story on the deep-seated problems facing Democrats?
And finally we come to Inspector Clinton, who "did not directly address the Basra situation on Saturday and instead kept the focus on economic issues." (No mention was made of her lecturing an organ-grinder, but again, this was print.) She did, however, concede that the deep-seated and now-resurfacing problems that Obama predicted are "a clear admission that the surge has failed to accomplish its goals." Well done.
But if the senator from New York would like to do even better, she could explain, once and for all, just why it was she voted to get us into this global mess in the first place. No more bluster about how she failed to comprehend the striking difference between a diplomatic green light and a military authorization. That line may provoke laughter, but offers little edification.
No, how was it that 133 U.S. representatives and 23 other U.S. senators recognized the Bush administration's war hysteria as a grotesque swindle and she did not? In the "What I'd like to see" department, it's a press conference in which all 133 plus 23 are queued up, one after another, explaining just what it was that tipped them off to the scam; then, one after another, asking how anyone with a detectable pulse could have missed it.
What intelligence data were they reading -- or not seeing -- that prompted them to deny the urgency of a military offense against a contained, unprovoking foe?
How was it that they were not only available but keenly attentive then those frantic 3 A.M. phone calls came in from the Middle East-attuned foreign policy community screaming, "They're out of their minds!"
And where was Hillary when that community was calculating the permanent human cost of temporary political advantage?
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, has noted the strenuously anti-intellectual thrust of Hillary's belittling remarks to voters about Obama's "one good speech" on Iraq. Many voters are attracted to assaults on intellectuality; Hillary knows this and exploits it. But many of the same voters also appreciate what John McCain advertises as "straight talk." Here, Hillary cheats them. And the enduring mystery is why more don't demand more.
I guess it's only because they're so amused and distracted by the inspector's unremitting lectures to others about political propriety, even as the savage consequences of her less than comical bumbling rage behind her.
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