Freud is looking down on us, smiling at how the most powerful, the most-manly city on earth has learned to cope with the stress of war and peace and scandal.
Official Washington has never had a problem ripping the throats out of the misinformed and disloyal in its midst. But now, thanks to Vice President Cheney, we’ve grown beyond that. We feel good about speaking our minds. Indeed, we’re a helluva lot healthier this week.
Good riddance to absurdly pretentious senatorial niceties, mistaken far too long for political civility. Don’t like what your political opposite is doing or saying? Cut to the quick, get it off your chest: “Go **** yourself!”
You might be tempted to dismiss Cheney’s locker-room talk with Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.)-who once had the audacity to proclaim his state wouldn’t be “turned into a giant pincushion with 200-foot towers sticking out on every mountain and in every valley”-as your typical election-year message malfunction.
But perhaps there’s something bigger going on here-more profound than even the historic coming of democracy in the Middle East.
A revolution in political culture may be unfolding before our very eyes and ears.
Guilt-free, frank exchanges among the high and mighty have the potential not only to change political discourse, but to fundamentally alter the way all government, industry and society communicate their deepest feelings and fantasies.
Think for a moment about Verizon General Counsel William Barr’s admonition to disciples at the Federal Communications Commission of a plan to end 800 MHz public-safety interference in a way that allows Nextel Communications Inc.-the prime perpetrator-to walk away with valuable spectrum.
“It is no accident that Congress chose to employ the criminal law to police the fiscal accountability of public officials. Congress well understood that stewards of public resources could be exposed to relentless pressures to convert those resources to private gain. It therefore took stern measures, and aimed them directly at the officials themselves, to ensure that they would not succumb to these pressures and instead remain true to the public interest,” said Barr, attorney general under Bush 41. “The plan you are considering is a patent violation of these laws.”
Nextel was taken aback by Barr’s remarks, undoubtedly considering them a desperate, hysterical attempt to prevent the inevitable.
I disagree. Barr was holding back. If he were truly with the program, Barr would have dropped all the legal mumbo jumbo. He’d speak from the heart. He’d tell FCC Chairman Mike Powell and the others they are criminals-in-waiting, jailbirds-to-be, no better than common bank robbers.
Now there’s a thought for Independence Day: a bunch of FCC stars in stripes.
