Secret Senate Circus As Metaphor

CBS' Meyer: What The Senate Stunt Hides, Seeks And Reveals

(CBS)  The closed session that Harry Reid and The Opposition Party tricked Bill Frist and The Governing Party into this week was a self-admitted stunt. Child psychologists would call it "acting out" and we know that these behaviors offer parents "teaching moments" and opportunities for analysis.

So putting the Stunt of '05 on the couch of political and social deconstruction, here's what it means, I think:

Governing is now a quaint euphemism for campaigning; campaigning is easy, governing is hard.

This was, all admit, a "stunt" — a campaign-like ploy to influence the news cycle and score ephemeral public relations point. The narrow goal was to get the Samuel Alito nomination out of the lead story box and put I. Lewis Libby back there. "Alito had his day, we're going back to our story," an unnamed Democratic leadership aide told The Washington Post. The overt Democratic rationale (read propaganda) for the stunt was that the Libby case raises legitimate new questions about the use and misuse of prewar intelligence by the administration, questions the Senate Intelligence committee has been ducking for years despite being tasked with that assignment. But the Libby case is only trivially related to all that. This was spin.

Acting out often works in the short term.

Many children get candy to stop public tantrums only to be denied dessert when they get back home. However ignoble the Democrats' motives were, their trick worked in one legitimate way. The Senate Intelligence committee promised to have a bipartisan report on the status of its foot dragging in two weeks. That's a minor coup — it's the candy — but at what cost? Majority Leader Frist says his relations with Minority Leader Reid are forever poisoned and the Democrats may never get the dessert of a full investigation or a real voice on other legislative matters in the next 18 months. I believe Frist.

Acting out occurs when more acceptable behaviors failed.

The congressional branch of the Democratic Party has abjectly failed to conduct effective oversight of Iraq-issues since 9/11. They voted for war and then wanted to be let off the hook. They did not use their clout and the expertise that came from controlling the American intelligence apparatus during the Clinton era to marshal effective investigations of the Bush administration's case for war as it was being made. They have barely been unable to force potent, effective post-mortems after the fact.

Acting out gets results most often from lily-livered parents or guilty ones.

Senate Republicans have indeed stonewalled important investigations and blew assessing the administration's case for war as much as the Democrats and free press did (absolutely including me; I believed the intelligence and was a firm agnostic on whether or not to invade).

If — big IF — the Senate tantrum spasms this week do indeed lead to a more adult accounting of the case for war, there remains a huge, ongoing area of potentially delinquent behavior that impotent Democrats and water-carrying Republicans have been avoiding: the covert international mechanism that is serving as criminal processing system in the war on terror.

Some 520 prisoners (detainees is the euphemism) remain in darkness at Guantanamo Bay. The Washington Post reported today that the CIA has been holding al Qaeda suspects in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, part of network of underground facilities that may include ones in Thailand and Afghanistan.

What goes on there? Who knows?

But The New York Times reports that the administration is now finally having a real, intense debate on how these prisoners can be treated and whether protections similar to the Geneva convention should apply.

Is this system effective in processing bad guys? Has it made the world safer? Is it humane, something that will not bring the U.S. shame? Is it a scandal waiting to happen?

Will it take a legislative hissy fit to get some answers? Or can the Democrats, partners in sanctioning the war, be controlled by some cookies and maybe a time out?

That and so much more on the next "Dr. Phil Does DC."

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Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, is the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.

E-mail questions, comments, complaints, arguments and ideas to
Against the Grain. We will publish some of the interesting (and civil) ones, sometimes in edited form.


By Dick Meyer
©MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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