When you want to clean up the neighborhood, there's generally very little you can accomplish until you get the actual criminals off the streets. Once that's done, you can knock down the abandoned buildings, reseed the park, refound the neighborhood watch organization, whatever.
But the true, immediate and overriding problem with a crime-infested neighborhood is the criminals.
Congress, and thus the country, faces a similar predicament.
The talk of the day now in DC is 'lobbying reform', which Mark Schmitt aptly pillories over at TPMCafe. We may need new laws to curb the power moneyed interests now have over policy-making. In fact, I think we do.
But that's not the problem in Washington.
If you want to see what Josh thinks is the problem in Washington, read Talking Points Memo.
Original post: You know how bloggers like Digby, Bob Geiger, Julia and me, to say nothing of our man Howard Dean, have been hitting the fact that the Abramoff mess is not bipartisan, but a scandal owned by the Republicans lock, stock, etc?
Turns out somebody agrees with us. Somebody named Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review.
The Abramoff Scandal (R., Beltway)
It’s the Republicans, stupid.
...The GOP now craves such bipartisan cover in the Jack Abramoff scandal. Republicans trumpet every Democratic connection to Abramoff in the hope that something resonates. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), took more than $60,000 from Abramoff clients! North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan used Abramoff's skybox! It is true that any Washington influence peddler is going to spread cash and favors as widely as possible, and 210 members of Congress have received Abramoff-connected dollars. But this is, in its essence, a Republican scandal, and any attempt to portray it otherwise is a misdirection.
Abramoff is a Republican who worked closely with two of the country's most prominent conservative activists, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Top aides to the most important Republican in Congress, Tom DeLay (R., Tex.) were party to his sleazy schemes. The only people referred to directly in Abramoff's recent plea agreement are a Republican congressmen and two former Republican congressional aides. The GOP members can make a case that the scandal reflects more the way Washington works than the unique perfidy of their party, but even this is self-defeating, since Republicans run Washington.
Republicans must take the scandal seriously and work to clean up in its wake.
Of course, he had to throw in a paragraph reassuring his audience that the right is behaving well and self-correctingly in this matter. As opposed to "the left's lickspittle loyalty to Bill Clinton, whose maintenance in power many liberals put above any of their principles."
Or maybe it was just that among our principles is the idea that a President should not be impeached for something that should have been a private matter between him and his family. But putting that aside, this is a mostly-honest editorial-and one that works nicely into the continuing theme that I've been working on here.
Hey, Democrats! If you don't start making moves to show that you "take the scandal seriously and work to clean up in its wake"...the Republicans are going to do it for you, get all the credit, and claim a just reward in November.
Now will you stop listening to the Joe Liebermans?
ETA: Digby posts about the same editorial, and expands on some of the points I made above, at greater length and with arguably greater words. He's less convinced than I (or maybe I should say not so afraid) that the Republicans will be able to come out of this clean as a whistle.
This Republican party is crooked. And despite what George Will says, it's not because of big government. Government spending has exploded under the allegedly "small government" Republicans while delivering less and less to average Americans. They have proven that they are completely full of shit on that issue and anyone who votes for them on that basis is an idiot. Judging by their performance the only things they actually care about are padding their own pockets and protecting their own power. If there are a hoard of "reform" Republicans out there who have been objecting to this pillaging of the treasury, they haven't exactly been speaking up. All I've heard is "praise God and pass the contributions."
In addition, he responds to the 'graph about Clinton thus:
...both the Republican president and the invertebrate Republican congress have engaged in or silently acquiesced to blatant graft and corruption for years while the Democrats impotently screamed into the void. The party was keeping the seat warm for months while the majority leader remained under indictment. They changed the rules so that an indicted leader could keep his seat until the public outcry forced them to retreat, for crying out loud, and then they launched a grassroots campaign to defend him.
So...who put "maintenance in power...above any of their principles?"
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