Politics

Led by Democrats since the start of this year, the U.S. Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973, and five points lower than what the Republican-controlled Congress scored last year.

            The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted money for the surge in Iraq and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement has been to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wire tapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush.

Put together Murdoch's Fox News, a mid-May debate between Republican presidential candidates and the state of South Carolina, and you have a hotbed of stupidity. But to the fury of the Republican organizers, there was an intrusion of rational thought in the person of Ron Paul, a U.S. congressman from Texas, classed as a rank outsider in the nomination race.

            Texas used to send true individualists to Washington, D.C. One of the brightest moments of my early years, visiting the nation's capital, was watching Rep. Wright Patman, head of the House Banking Committee, tell the red-faced chairman of the Federal Reserve he deserved to be locked up in the penitentiary.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians are becoming uncomfortably aware that they may have seriously miscalculated just how unpopular the war in Iraq is with a very large number of American voters. Fence-straddling on the war, let alone calls to "stay the course" are being seen as increasingly dangerous or fatal options.

            Take John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, former POW in Vietnam and, until recently, deemed a sound bet to win his party's nomination as presidential candidate. McCain saw his task as the simple one of banging the war drum more loudly than his rival, Rudy Giuliani, and deriding the Democrats as wimps and traitors to the flag.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Mayor Giuliani seemed as sure a bet as you could hope for as the Republican candidate destined to seek the White House in 2008. He rallied his city amid the rubble of the Twin Towers. His, not Bush's, was the firm voice of resolve.

            Since that apex in popular esteem, Giuliani's course has been unsteady. His business enterprises and associates have come under unsparing scrutiny, prime among them his former New York City police chief, Bernie Kerik, a former prison warder plucked from obscurity by Giuliani. Last week, prosecutors informed Kerik he will be indicted for serious offenses including tax evasion and misleading federal investigators (Martha Stewart's ticket to conviction).

Our children are being sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed in Iraq. As the purported rationale for the war has metamorphosed from protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction and the specter of a ''mushroom shaped cloud,'' to regime change, to fighting terrorists, to spreading democracy at the point of a gun, two constants remain. The children of the poor, the working class, and the lower half of what is left of the shrinking middle class return to us in coffins, or limbless, or brain damaged, and emotionally scarred. The children of the power elite, for whom they fight the war, secure in their corporate boardrooms or on their yachts, reap unconscionable profits as the nation''s treasure and blood is being stuffed down the rat-hole that is the Iraq war.

Someday, historians will wonder why the highest officials in the Bush Justice Department believed they could inflict heavy-handed political abuse on federal prosecutors -- and get away with it. The punishment of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys betrays a strong sense of impunity in the White House, as if the president and his aides assumed nobody would complain about these outrages or attempt to hold them accountable. The precedent for their misconduct was set long ago.

            There was once another Republican prosecutor who insisted on behaving professionally instead of obeying partisan hints from the White House. His name was Charles A. Banks, and his story begins in the summer of 1992, as the presidential contest entered its final months, with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton leading incumbent President George H.W. Bush.

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insists that his firing of several United States attorneys last December wasn't a political purge but merely a normal bureaucratic decision, many thousands of lawyers, judges, officers and officials surely wish to believe him. Anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the law and the Constitution in good faith -- indeed, anyone who cares about the rule of law -- can only contemplate the vandalism inflicted on our law-enforcement system by Gonzales and his deputies with foreboding.

            Unfortunately, the credibility of Gonzales -- which was never very great -- is diminishing further as the facts behind the controversial round of firings continue to emerge. While his excuses and explanations for those dismissals evaporate under scrutiny, what can be seen instead is a familiar pattern of partisan misconduct.

The Makkah agreement, signed between rival Palestinian groups, Hamas and Fatah on February 8, under the auspices of the Saudi leadership, was welcomed by thousands of cheering Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, and seen as the closing of a chapter of a bloody and tumultuous period of their history.

Officially, although more subtly, there is an equal eagerness to bring a halt to an oppressive command of economic and diplomatic sanctions that have rendered most Palestinians unemployed and living well below the poverty line.

In fact, almost all Palestinians want to remember, if they must, the bloody clashes that claimed the lives of over 90 people since December as a distant memory, a bitter deviation from a norm of unity and national cohesion, according to which they want their struggle to be remembered.

President Nixon, a very good poker player, once defined the art of brinkmanship as persuading your opponent that you are insane and, unless appeased by pledges of surrender, quite capable of blowing up the planet.

            By these robust standards George Bush is doing a moderately competent job in suggesting that if balked by Iran on the matter of halting its nuclear program, he'll dump a couple of nukes on that country's relevant research sites, or tell Israel to do the job for him. In Washington, there are plenty of rational people in Congress, think tanks and the Pentagon who think he's capable of it.

Prior to this I just sat through a hearing which Pelosi scheduled 12 votes in the middle of, exactly as the Republicans used to do. Conyers subpoenaed no documents or people and put noone under oath. The media left in the middle because of all the votes. And the media was less than it had been when Conyers' hearings were unofficial minority affairs. The only difference was the presence of rightwing nuts at the witness table lying out from under oath. So, it is with some frustration and foreboding that I begin listening to this event. Blogging follows.

4:25 pm John Nichols introduces Chuck Collins and Congress Members Barbara Lee, Steve Cohen, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Bob Filner, and Maurice Hinchey.

Collins spoke first. The Institute for Policy Studies ("Defining the Issues") is sending this out live to radio stations.

Collins suggests holding hearings off the Hill around the country, and tying them to activism. Fine. But how about using them to demand truth out of a criminal White House?

B. Lee spoke next, then Conyers. Conyers described signing statements as Bush placing himself above the law.