Smells Like Dead Elephants

by Matt Taibbi

  I looked around. “Man,” I thought. “This place sure looks better on television.” On TV, the whole package—the deep-blue curtains, the solemn great seal—suggests majesty, power, drama. For years I’d dreamed of coming here, the Graceland of politics.

  In real life, however, the White House briefing room is a grimy little closet that’s peeling and cracking in every corner and looks like it hasn’t seen a bottle of Windex in ten years. The first chair in the fifth row is broken; the fold-up seat doesn’t fold up and in fact dangles on its hinge, so that you’d slide off if you tried to sit on it. No science exists that could determine the original color of these hideous carpets. Reporters throw their coats and coffee cups wherever. The place is a fucking sty.

  It’s a raggedy-ass old stage, and the act that plays on it isn’t getting any fresher, either. All partisan sniping aside, this latest counteroffensive from the White House says just about everything you need to know about George Bush and the men who work for him.

  Up until now this president’s solution to everything has been to stare into the cameras, lie, and keep on lying until such time as the political problem disappears. And now, unable to comprehend that while political crises may wilt in the face of such tactics real crises do not, he and his team are responding to this first serious feet-to-the-fire Iraq emergency in the same way they always have—with a fusillade of silly, easily disprovable bullshit. Bush and his mouthpieces continue to try to obfuscate and cloud the issue of why we’re in Iraq, and they do so not only selectively but constantly, compulsively, like mental patients who can’t stop jacking off in public. They don’t know the difference between a real problem and a political problem, because to them there is no difference. What could possibly be worse than bad poll numbers?

  On this particular day in the briefing room, it’s just more of the same disease. McClellan, a cringing yes-man type who tries to soften the effect of his nonanswers by projecting an air of being just as out of the loop as you are, starts pimping lies and crap the moment he enters the room. He’s the cheapest kind of political hack, a greedy little bum making a living by throwing his hat on the ground and juggling lemons for pennies.

  Putting his hat out for the Strategy for Victory, he says nothing new—there is no real strategy, remember, just words—and it quickly becomes clear that the whole purpose of this campaign is not to offer new information but to reinforce the adminis­tration’s most shameless and irresponsible myths about the war: that we invaded to liberate Iraq, that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and so on. McClellan does this even in the context of responding to angry denunciations of this very tactic.

  For instance, when a reporter asked why the administration still insists on giving the impression that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, McClellan answered, “I don’t think that [it] does. But I think what you have to understand about September eleventh is that September eleventh taught us some important lessons: one, that we need to take the fight to the ­enemy and engage them abroad . . .”

  Implying, in other words, that the enemy who attacked us was in Iraq. Same old shit.

  After hearing McClellan talk for what seemed like the thirtieth time about our continuing efforts to spread democracy, I finally felt insulted. Giving in to the same basic instinct that leads people to buy lottery tickets I raised my hand. I figured I’d ask nicely, just give him a chance to come clean. C’mon, man, we know you’re lying, why not just leave it alone? I asked him if he couldn’t just admit, once and for all, that we didn’t go to Iraq to spread democracy, that maybe it was time to retire that line, at least.

  “Well,” he said, “we set out the reasons we went to Iraq, and I would encourage you to go back and look at that. We have liberated twenty-five million people in Iraq and twenty-five million people in Afghanistan . . .”

  “But that wasn’t the reason we went—”

  “Spreading freedom and democracy,” he said, ignoring me. “Well, we’re not going to relitigate why we went into Iraq. We’ve made very clear what the reasons were. And no, I don’t think you define them accurately by being so selective in the question . . . that’s important for spreading hope and opportunity in the broader Middle East . . .”

  “Just to be clear,” I said, exasperated, “that’s a different argument than was made to the American people before the war.”

  “Our arguments are very public,” he said. “You can go look at what the arguments are. That’s not what I was talking about.”

  He smiled at me. There’s your strategy for victory in Iraq: Fuck all of you—we’re sticking to our story.

  The Harder They Fall

  Republicans are scrambling to clean their House—but the dirt

  won’t wash off

  February 9, 2006

  “The Republicans are now and always have been the party of reform,” said a grinning David Dreier, surveying the crowd of journalists in the congressional radio and TV gallery.

  The nattily dressed House Rules Committee chairman then paused, as if to give someone in the crowd a chance to chuck a bottle at his head. No one did. So he went on. “I see this,” he said, “as a wonderful new opportunity for us . . .”

  Again, he paused. No bottles, no rotten tomatoes, no clouds of flying dog shit landing with a slap! on his receding forehead. Given what the Republican leadership might have expected, at a press conference unveiling a “lobby reform” package in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal (what Dreier meant by “this”), the event was a smashing success.

  Standing next to Dreier, nodding with mild approval but also scanning the crowd cautiously, was the boarlike House speaker, Dennis Hastert. Hastert had kicked off this presser with similarly inspired oratory—the highlight of which, according to my notes, was this line: “It’s not acceptable to, uh, break the rules or the law.”

  Now he was standing there next to Dreier, motionless and mute, with the nervous, half-bored look of a man with a commuter train to catch. It was a lonely picture: an exhausted fat man playing his last political card and an effete Californian in a too-orange tie, standing alone behind a plywood podium in a dank congressional closet, putting a brave face on The End. In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, they were all that was left of the once-vaunted Republican leadership. It was like a Star Trek script gone hopelessly wrong, with Kirk and Spock beheaded in the first two minutes, and no one left to man the bridge but Scotty and maybe that blond nurse of McCoy’s, the one in the blue minidress.

  The Dreier-Hastert press conference felt in every way like the very last act in the desperate black comedy known as the Tom DeLay era of Republican rule in Washington. What will follow is a new play, a gruesome tragedy in all likelihood, whose main characters will be Abramoff, an enraged public, and a succession of grandstanding criminal prosecutors. But lonely and desperate as it was, this last event had all the wit and spirit of an inspired farce—the chutzpah, the arrogance, the spit-in-your-eye rhetoric, the maddening cloud of impunity hanging over it all.

  Just consider: At this critical moment in the party’s history, when survival required some kind of dramatic public gesture toward self-policing, the GOP needed an innocent, someone with clean hands, to lead the “anti-corruption” drive. The Democrats, who a day later would announce their own reform bill, would do just that—elevating relative political virgins Representative Louise Slaughter and Senator Barack Obama to starring roles in their own “Clean House” movement.

  But the Republicans who ran this town like a dictatorship for most of the past five years apparently looked around and could not find a single plausible virgin for the part of their Mr. Clean.

  Of the two leading candidates for the recently vacated House majority leader seat, one (acting leader Roy Blunt) had attempted to slip tobacco-friendly language into a Homeland Security authorization bill while having an extramarital affair with a Philip Morris lobbyist, and the other (John Boehn
er) had once been caught handing out checks from tobacco interests to members of Congress on the floor of the House.

  Elsewhere, the Commerce Committee chairman (Joe Barton) had inserted a provision into an energy bill on behalf of a company that had paid $56,000 to a PAC to “get a seat at the table,” and the names of the House deputy whip (Eric Cantor), the House conference secretary (John Doolittle), and the House Appropriations chair (Jerry Lewis) were all floating around in various sordid Abramoff tales involving golf junkets, Indian tribes, and floating casinos. The only Republican names not burning putrid holes in the front pages of the Washington Post were the ones who at that very minute were busy forming alliances and gearing up for a factional challenge to the DeLay/Hastert/Bush–backed congressional leadership.

  So in the end to whom did the Republicans turn to be their white knight? David Dreier, a man whose very first act in last year’s Congress was to write a Rules package that not only sought to rewrite the congressional rules to allow the majority leader to continue service while under indictment for a felony but also castrated the Ethics Committee, changing its structure in such a way that the Republicans could unilaterally quash any further investigations of DeLay.

  As chair of the Rules Committee—a murky body whose chairman has the power to rewrite bills entirely before they are voted on—Dreier moreover was presumably the gatekeeper to much of the midnight shenanigans involving earmarks and last-minute insertions of paid-for corporate goodies in big pieces of legislation. Perhaps more than any other Republican, Dreier was a symbol of the institutional corruption that allowed DeLay to almost single-handedly manipulate Congress like a marionette for the Abramoffs of the world. As one Democratic staffer said to me, “Putting Dreier in charge of this is the biggest fucking joke you can possibly imagine.”

  Which made it all the more beautiful that when Dreier ­brazen performance worthy of the best and most confident days of the in-your-­face DeLay regime. Grinning and fingering his tangerine-colored tie (Dreier’s inappropriately cheery Crayola tie collection is a source of many dark jokes in Congress), Dreier explained that when he’d called to wish Hastert a Happy New Year, the latter had surprised him by asking him to take up lobby reform.

  “And I thought,” said Dreier, raising his hands to his chest, “‘My gosh, is this something more that I want to take on?’”

  The “my gosh” inspired a muffled groan on my side of the room. Dreier smiled and went on. “Yesterday, we marked the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King . . .”

  Reporters shot each other looks, all thinking the same thing: In this dire situation, with Jack Abramoff babbling strings of names and account numbers into an inquisitor’s mike somewhere, would even a Tom DeLay Republican have the balls to defile the corpse of Martin Luther King? The answer came quickly, as Dreier quoted MLK to explain his attitude toward lobbyist reform:

  “I thought about one of his letters,” he began. “‘We should always be careful about the tranquilizing drug of gradualism . . .’”

  He smiled and surveyed the crowd, a hand still pressed to his breast. Gradualism! It was a breathtaking show of balls—a cynical display of Mozartian virtuosity. Well, I thought, they’re not dead yet. Or if they are, what a way to go out!

  Washington is a different place since January 3, a date that will go down in infamy for this Republican regime. It was on that quiet day at the tail end of the New Year hangover that the superlobbyist Abramoff announced his intention to cop a plea—an announcement that sent half of Washington in search of good criminal representation.

  Since that day, the Republicans in this town can often be seen staggering down the halls of Congress, faces caked with debris and still deaf from the impact of the Abramoff nuclear shit-bomb. Complicating matters is the fact that the party has been forced to return to congressional business very early in the winter recess to conduct elections for the House majority leadership seat, which of course was recently vacated by Tom DeLay, himself now headed for Texas to meet with the Hand of Fate.

  There are three candidates for the leadership spot, who represent three distinct strategies for dealing with the current crisis. The front-runner is the acting leader, Blunt, who pointedly represents a strategy of doing nothing at all. Blunt’s biography is brimming with the kind of pornographic devotion to money and corporate privilege that was a prerequisite for political success in the good old days.

  The Missouri congressman three years ago ditched his wife for a Philip Morris lobbyist named Abigail Perlman, whom he subsequently married; it’s been a profitable marriage, as Philip Morris (now called Altria) has donated more than $270,000 to committees tied to Blunt. Meanwhile, Blunt’s son Andrew is also an Altria lobbyist, and Blunt’s other son, Matt, is governor of his home state—elected, conveniently, with the help of funds from Altria. One gets the impression that the whole family spends its holidays sitting in a circle, two-fistedly smoking Chesterfields while handing each other wads of hundred-dollar bills.

  Blunt’s hands are also wet with the blood of the Abramoff scandal; as party whip he cosigned (with DeLay) letters on behalf of a Louisiana Indian tribe represented by Abramoff. Meanwhile, Abramoff is one of the first names on the list of 2004 individual donors to Blunt’s PAC, the sickeningly named Rely on Your Beliefs fund.

  Blunt appears to be the choice for majority leader in the event that the party concludes that it still has a chance to get away with absolutely everything, Abramoff trial be damned. But the next choice, Ohio long-timer John Boehner, appears to be the cosmetic fallback position should the party conclude that business can go back to operating as usual only after a few carefully chosen heads are rendered unto Caesar—whomever Abramoff decides to give up.

  On the surface, Boehner would seem a brilliant choice; he has game-show-host looks, no shame, and has never been indicted for anything. Although his own sugary-titled PAC, the Freedom Project, has accepted some $31,000 from Abramoff clients over the years, there are as yet no allegations that Boehner has ever traded favors with the Evil One.

  Still, folks around the House describe the long-serving Boehner—who was kicked out of party leadership once before (he was House Republican Conference chairman in the 104th and 105th Congresses but lost his seat when his­mentor, Newt Gingrich, was ousted)—as having an off-putting, semi-delusional, almost Kerry-esque sense of entitlement about the leadership post.

  Boehner’s zeal for the leadership post is such that he issued a thirty-seven-page PowerPoint presentation to campaign for the job. The document is a towering monument to political cliché, wrapping quotations of Reagan, Churchill, and John Paul II around paeans to the virtues of change, light, hope, “big goals,” and hitting the accelerator while others stay stuck in neutral.

  For all his sterling qualifications, though, Boehner can hardly be described as someone who lived outside the K Street/DeLay universe. If anyone in this race can claim that distinction, it could only be the third and last candidate, John Shadegg of Arizona, another Gingrich protégé, who kicked off his campaign by bragging on national television that his “level of taint” was, if not entirely absent, at least “decidedly lower” than that of his opponents. A late entry into the race, Shadegg menacingly represents the prayer-and-belt-tightening future of the Republican Party, should Abramoff sink the Rove-DeLay-Hastert-Norquist rampaging corporate-money machine that took over the party in 1999.

  While those Republicans spent the years since treating Washington like their own personal Girls Gone Wild video—drinking champagne out of bra cups at lavish corporate fund-raisers and turning Congress into one big turnstile, passing any and every law that anyone with a dollar felt like paying for—there were other Republicans with actual ideological convictions who just went along with it all in a codependent fashion.

  These were the true believers, the deficit hawks, and the Bible thumpers, who bit their lips and voted the party line even as the government exploded i
n size in the first five years of the Bush presidency. They had blind faith, but now they’re organizing to take the party back. This process began last fall with the ascendancy of the uber-conservative Republican Study Group, which mounted a brazen factional challenge to new acting leader Blunt over emergency spending for Hurricane Katrina. It continues now with the leadership candidacy of the humorless Shadegg, whose conservative bona fides include a father who managed the 1952 Senate campaign of Barry Goldwater.

  Shadegg’s run coincides unpleasantly—almost audibly, like fingernails on a blackboard—with the unsolicited reappearance on the public scene of his mentor Gingrich. The latter keeps showing up in newspapers with the description “presidential hopeful” violently attached to his person, shaking his head in anguish over this whole Abramoff business and acting as though someone asked for his advice.

  That Gingrich has somehow managed to position himself as a pre-Abramoff Republican champion shows how dangerous a moment this is not only for the Republicans but for the country in general. All but forgotten now is the fact that Gingrich more or less invented the K Street Project—a Republican scheme to freeze out Democratic lobbyists—and that Abramoff was a bridge between K Street and Gingrich as long as a dozen years ago.

  The raging shit-fire that is the Abramoff scandal exposed Washington as a veritable inferno of crushed values and boundless activist cynicism. It eloquently revealed an America whose system of government had finally mutated to fit the vapidity and anything-for-money morality of the culture as a whole. In a country where people eat bugs for money on national television, how surprising is a congressman who sells his vote or a Congress run like a Wal-Mart?

  Barring a sudden and unforeseen flowering of affirmative values in the depraved whorehouse that is our nation’s capital, money is still going to remain a hell of an effective substitute for political principle in this town, meaning all manner of frauds—from Gingrich on down—will be moving in not to do anything different but to take over the old dealer’s territory. The Democrats, whose innocence in the crimes of the past five years to date corresponds exactly to their lack of opportunities for corruption, may now get a chance at the helm. But it won’t take much exposure to cheap stunts like a beaming Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi signing a “Declaration of Honest Leadership” before people begin to remember how much the other guys can suck, too.