Evolution on the Hudson?

Maybe...or perhaps it's just another example of how, if I remember right, Gore Vidal once described the paper of record--paraphrasing here, it was something like never standing on the front lines, but, once the battle ends, always willing to go out and shoot the wounded.

The wounded, in this case, being Shrub...so it's not like I have any sympathy. I just wish American Pravda would've taken their stand BEFORE Operation Head-Meet-Wall...Rinse, Repeat--Over and Over commenced. Then, it might actually have meant something. Instead, it was all Miss Run Amok, all the time.

After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.

I suppose hindsight is better than no sight (i.e., Faux News), and their startling ("I'm shocked, shocked, to find gambling going on here") discovery that the corpse is rotting from the top (Big Time AND Little Shrubleroy) might well be of some significance...the journalistic equivalent of a primitive lungfish flopping about on dry land, and inhaling atmospheric oxygen (instead of consuming the mounds of garbage tossed overboard by the Bushistas)...hell, one can hope. But I've also learned to be realistic and not expect TOO much. After all, lungfish didn't evolve in a day.

Besides, it could be instead that we're merely seeing, to use another cliche, yet another dinosaur trying to play catch up--in this case, with a public already sick and tired of a government hijacked by a pack of hyenas--hyenas lacking even basic competence:

THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's ''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall...

Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age. Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war against Panama...

The first Gulf War, remembered by Americans as justified, was in fact an unnecessary affirmation of military might as the ground of international order, just as an historic alternative was opening up. US responses in that period, mainly shaped by Cheney, stand in stark contrast to Gorbachev's, who, refusing to call on military might even to save the Soviet Union, was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks. The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda.

With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as vice president) showed itself for a moment.

The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.

At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.

Moving back to evolution (no pun intended), Congressional Democrats as well are attempting to reclaim their collective spines and perhaps might one day recognize the benefits both of STANDING for something AND proffering a good, swift kick to the GOP hindquarters now and again--as they say, politics ain't beanbag. It's just a goddamned shame that it takes thousands getting killed on the basis of flat out lies before someone notices a small problem: unaccountable government might as well be government minus consent of the governed. We supposedly took care of THAT problem a while back.

But forgetting the past, as they say, is tantamount to repeating it--or something like that. Or maybe it's another lesson in evolution: linear progress isn't a given...it takes work...hard work.