Texas Blue Mailbag: Week of 9/2/2007

Another Friday, another Mailbag. I have the funny feeling that Josh's verbosity in his answers is starting to rub off...

NYJoe asks:

Why hasn't more of a ruckus been raised regarding the fact that the the firing of the federal investigators earlier this year was such an obvious and ridiculous conflict of interest?

Josh answers:

I think the issue requires some intellectual commitment to understanding what the extant ruckus, no matter how small, is about. That makes it largely inaccessible to the majority of people because they don't dedicate the mental bandwidth to figuring things like that out. It doesn't take much, but it is more than people are used to being asked for. I think that as more investigating occurs and the White House continues to avoid subpoenas, the concept that some Bad People are in Trouble for Doing Bad Things will get much more obvious, especially if charges are ever filed against anybody for anything. Which isn't totally unlikely. Somebody, whether it be Rove or Alberto Gonzales or Cheney or Bush himself, is going to to take some heat, and it will be heat that might only cover an issue or two but will be representative of many years of malfeasance.

Time might prove me wrong, but the Democrats have invested in this fight over subpoenas and executive privilege and whether the Executive is allowed to do what it has done. Something will shake out, and when it does, the distillation will bring in more eyes and ears than either you or I might reasonably expect.

SB writes:

Hi!
No less than Tom Ridge-former director of Homeland Security- introduced me to the Patriot Act, and it sounded like a good way for the Administration to declare Martial Law, at will, even way back then.
Since then, this current crop of elected scoundrels has invoked the Patriot Act to enable them to wiretap private citizens and to generally make life harder for those of Middle Eastern descent without provocation.
Let's hope it is rescinded soon.

George replies:

Harder for people, for example, named George Nassar? Hm.

Our ex-congressional candidate for 2006, Tim Barnwell, once made a pretty funny one-liner out of the fact that I'm an American of Hispanic heritage and with a Middle Eastern last name. I won't go into the details here (this is, after all, a family publication), but you can guess where it was going.

I am curious to hear how you met Tom Ridge, but that's another story, I imagine. Word on the street is that Congress has a number of restorations of our civil liberties on its plate between now and the end of the year. Here's to hoping.

Everyone writes:

Josh, the Mayor of Houston's name is Bill White, not Bob White, like you said this morning.

Josh owns up:

Let me take this opportunity to poke fun at myself. Have you ever typed something and sworn it was fine because spellcheck didn't catch anything wrong with it and you read it 7 times and it looked fine and you just knew it was ready to go, only to be embarrassed later by something your eye just happened to slide over each and every time you read it? This is happens to me without fail when, at the odd time, I am my own copy editor, which is never ever a good idea for anyone. Apologies to Mayor Bill White, whose name I swear is well known to me; and to Bob White, whomever he happens to be.

And George follows up:

Really, I try to make those times when he's his own copy editor as rare as humanly possible. Really. I just need one or two more clones of myself. Workin' on it.

AG wonders:

What kind of a chance does a rough and rowdy ground-breaker like Mike Gravel have in modern politics? Will we ever see another underdog, a people's champion, or a totally insane-but-honest person in the White House?

George answers:

Boyoboy. I think Josh just likes to leave me with the one-liner questions. Mike Gravel's chances? Same as Ron Paul's, asked about a couple of weeks about: none.

But at least you ask about "modern politics," which gives me something else to talk about. You ask about whether we'll ever see another underdog. I ask you: who was the first? Even the "black sheep" presidents throughout history have had substantial party support to get the nod. This is not a case of some malady in modern politics, glitzy ad campaigns and a TV-addicted electorate. This is simply politics. There can be comparative underdogs in presidential races who are not as high-profile as other candidates but end up doing well regardless, but these are not "underdogs" in the sense you use. They typically still have experience in their party and represent the basic platform planks pretty well.

Part of this is due to the nature of the party: Democrat and Republican are just clever names unless they're assigned some meaning, and that meaning is in large part explained to the American people by way of consistent, controlled message from the most influential members the party. And at the same time, candidates — often some of the most influential members of the party — are effectively encouraged to align with the message of the party in that doing so helps them get out more of their base voters and get elected. There's a certain symbiosis there. And outliers that choose not to go with the party's message (or, ironically similarly, that don't have the political sway to help shape the party's message) end up being just attention-getting sidelines players.

If there's one positive I can leave you with, it is that "issues candidates" like Mike Gravel that are there more to have their point of view heard than to win a primary tend to stick it out until the very end of the race. So the chance that you'll get to see Mike Gravel actually take a swing at one of the candidates will remain for a while.