International Politics

	Vol. 226 No. 11
JOHN MCCAUGHEY, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, WASHINGTON

The appearance of solidity. Washington loves a disaster. Hurricane Katrina (and, to a lesser degree, her sister, Rita) already promises to provide a feast of hearings and legislation for at least a year to come. Gasoline prices help, too. Oil is among the most political of commodities, as most global reserves are owned by governments. So, politicians react with panic. Politicians everywhere are good at that – witness the colossal errors of creating the Department of Homeland Security and the dismal record of many agencies, most notably the Department of Energy.

Environmentalists are also waving panicked arms. A League of Conservation Voters press release was typical. “The new energy bills being considered today in the House Resources and Energy & Commerce Committees,” it fumed excitedly, “are nothing short of a national disgrace. Both bills are shameful examples of the radical right-wing using the recent tragedies on the Gulf Coast as an opportunity to gut our environmental protections, and open up more of our coasts to drilling, while lining the pockets of an already-profitable oil and gas industry.”

Anxious to “display leadership” and lead the way in the post-hurricane process is President George W. Bush, who has fervently been claiming credit for recovery efforts. He has promised an open-ended commitment to Katrina-related spending. Figures as high as $200 billion have been mentioned, enough to give a $400,000 check to each of the 500,000 evacuated families.

Dubya thus becomes the biggest-spending president for many decades. Washington wags have already taken to referring to Franklin Delano Bush or to Lyndon W. Johnson. The Republican Party is now, indisputably, the party of profligacy and Big Government, flirting with national insolvency. Behind the Gulf Coast refining, pipeline and production knife-edge, all one needs is another hurricane, or any other crisis, to trigger triple-digit oil prices and, maybe, a depression.

This panic, of course, is just Washington nonsense-as-usual, a little bit like the exit polls that, as late as 6 p.m. on Election Day 2004, had declared John Kerry the winner in the last presidential contest. Or it’s like the recent fashion for apologies – the Vatican to the Jews, the Japanese to the Chinese, Americans to black people and the Germans to practically everyone. Yet, the whole Katrina affair raises interesting points about politicians, the public and the press.

Politicians. Washington is a cynical insiders’ town. The briefest acquaintanceship with it teaches one that its main industry is to generate pork for buying votes. The politicians provide the pork. The lobbyists bicker (behind closed doors) over who gets the pork. The taxpayer pays, essentially to bribe himself. And, as English writer Auberon Waugh tellingly pointed out, politicians are often “very stupid people gripped by the terrible urge to exert power and to interfere in the lives of their fellow citizens....with a readiness to lie, twist and bluff, which, in anybody but a party politician, would be considered truly breathtaking.”

Politicians mostly have little knowledge of the issues on which they legislate, and even less concern for the consequences of the laws that they pass. Few of them have a real point of view on any issue: “I voted for it, but that was before I voted against it.”

The Public. For all the talking heads and chattering classes in print and on television, the relationship between the public and politicians remains little analyzed. The truth is probably that (aside from a political ‘I’m With the Band’ groupie class) almost every regular citizen is apolitical and indifferent to, or actively dislikes, politicians. Polls show that an appreciable majority would prefer smaller government, with fewer services and lower taxes. The more thoughtful ones must see that they rarely get their wish. Some mechanisms exist in the states to curb spending, but there are none at the federal level, as George W.’s massive deficit expansion has made abundantly clear in recent months.

In the end, however, politicians capitalize on ordinary peoples’ opinions about political issues of the day being either fatuous, ill-informed or irrelevant. This general ignorance is unfortunate. Every few years, voters are afforded a similitude of replacing their political masters, but generally the replacement masters are just the same type as the old crowd.

The Press. It is also probably true that the public dislikes journalists and politicians about equally. Hurricane Katrina was hardly the media’s finest moment. One CBS News Sunday Morning contributor said that if the hardest-hit victims had been white, they would not have gone for days without food and water. They would have been “rescued and relocated a hell of a lot faster than this. Period.” This was quite silly even by network TV standards. Most other media were equally silly, politically correct or partisan in playing the Hurricane Blame Game.

The unfortunate truth is that most reporters are stupid, lazy and ignorant, and they very rarely ask the obvious questions. As upstart bloggers have demonstrated (and as media types readily admit in surveys), most reporters and editors have a strong liberal bias that can often be seen in their stories. Many of them are earnest, self-serving and self-important to the point of the ridiculous. Some are moral cowards.

All of this makes Washington a grim, driven, exceedingly ugly, partisan and unpleasant place – more so today than anyone remembers it ever being. Republican and Democratic staffers no longer have friendly luncheons together, as was once common. George Orwell had it right in his 1946 essay, when he wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Thus, you need a certain bleak sense of humor to survive in Washington. The latest noir quip here – What is George W. Bush’s position on Roe vs. Wade? Answer: He really doesn’t care how people get out of New Orleans. 

John McCaughey edits and publishes Energy Perspective, a Washington-based, fortnightly publication featuring in-depth coverage of major energy topics. Mr. McCaughey has written and edited for Irish newspapers, an international news agency, the London-based Financial Times and the U.S.-based Energy Daily newsletter, and contributed to many other newspapers. He regularly contributes to this column.