House of Eratosthenes

I’m wondering if CNN has engaged in the rewording of articles after bloggers and other interested folks have already linked to said articles. There’s nothing wrong with that, we do it here all the time. It’s just that this is kind of interesting…

Congressman William Jefferson, D-LA, has been removed from the powerful House Ways and Means committee. The decision was made by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA. House rules say a committee member must be removed upon conviction of a crime, which has not happened to Congressman Jefferson just yet. At a press conference, the Congressman took responsibility and apologized for…er, well, actually I’m not reading that last part anywhere.

To be fair to Congressman Jefferson, he only gets to decide what he says, he doesn’t get to decide what CNN is going to write about. But I have to draw conclusions from what I know, and what I see here is a whole bunch of kibitzing. Pissing and moaning. Oh poor me. An approaching-the-edge-of, and a dancing-on-the-brink-of, saying he’s a victim of racial discrimination without coming out and saying it.

(Photoshop by David Lunde.)

Asked if he thought race was a factor in Pelosi’s decision, Jefferson replied before the vote, “It’s not happened before. The first time it’s happening, it’s happening to an African-American.”

The assertion that race is a factor has already been floated by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including [Rep. Mel] Watt, who question why Rep. Alan Mollohan of West Virginia, a white Democrat who also is under investigation, was allowed to keep his seat on the equally powerful Appropriations Committee.

Mollohan, whose personal finances are being investigated after a complaint filed by a conservative group, stepped down voluntarily from his post on the Ethics Committee, pending resolution of the inquiry.

Watt warned last week that singling out Jefferson would not be received well by black voters.

Thursday, he said, “Our constituents will import their own interpretation into this, and a number of them will import that there’s a different standard in our caucus based on race.”

Jefferson also raised race in his letter to Pelosi.

“When an African American member of an exclusive committee is asked to resign his committee because of news reports or allegations of wrongdoing, it gives the appearance of unfairness and even racial discrimination if another member continues serving on an exclusive committee under Justice Department investigation as well, particularly if the other member is white, and is not subject to the same treatment,” he wrote.

You know, stereotypes about black people are ugly things. Since Congressman Jefferson isn’t coming out and saying what he wants people to think, and is so carefully limiting himself to giving people a good shove in the direction of thinking what he wants them ot think, I see no reason to look into the black stereotypes.

Let’s look instead at stereotypes about congressmen. Both Republicans and Democrats. Sleezy, slimy, filthy politicians. What are some of our ugly stereotypes about those people?

They do a lot of talking.

They tell a lot of lies, in ways they can’t be nailed on the lies later.

They take bribes and kickbacks.

When they get nailed on things, they don’t take responsibility.

They’re experts at changing the subject. They cry on cue. After a good corruption scandal, on the way to the paddy wagon they’ll start droning on and on about what their mothers taught them, or the last words of their dying sisters, or some other damn thing completely unrelated to the subject at hand — like race — while ordinary Americans wonder why someone doesn’t interrupt them and request that they answer the damn question.

And what is it we see happening here?

Anyway, speaking of returning to the subject at hand, Michelle Malkin finishes off with the one-liner, “they’ll all find a way to blame Bush somehow.” It would appear that they did, in the version I’m reading. This must have been inserted after Malkin lifted her version — you know, this stuff never seems to take too long.

The move was led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who already had asked Jefferson to step down voluntarily, a request her embattled counterpart rebuffed.

“This isn’t about proof in a court of law. This is about an ethical standard,” Pelosi said in a brief statement after the vote. “I wish that the White House would take our lead on this.” [emphasis mine]

Malkin has issued a challenge to Democrats in our House of Representatives: Conquer the final frontier of Bush-blaming. Screw up yourselves, and blame it on the President. Show us that nothing, nothing whatsoever, is too sufficiently removed from the President, and too sufficiently attached to something else — like yourselves — to be blamed on George Bush. Set the standard, so that all subsequent Bush-blaming, no matter how reckless and detached from reality, will be old territory.

Democrats have answered the call. Democrats can take bribes, stick it in the freezer to hide it, build the case against them through a wiretap, and when they get in trouble it’s Bush’s fault.

From here on out, if a weather phenomenon happens and Democrats blame it on Bush, there will be nothing new about it. If the Democrats break the law, get hauled before a judge, and blame it on Bush, that will be old territory too. It’s simply not possible to blaze a new trail from here on out, everything possible has been done. You might as well blaze a brand new trail in…in the middle of a sports stadium parking lot.

It’s interesting that Pelosi talks about an ethical standard. Taking responsibility is what that’s supposed to be about. You’re supposed to be able to sail into the midterms saying “Our guy screwed up too, but we have a higher ethical standard than Republicans so we took responsibility.” You know, if that part is absent from the sum of what Pelosi said, it really says something and it’s going to cost the Democrats dearly, or at least should. When you find a scapegoat like President Bush, and stick to it like glue, blaming everything that comes down the pike on that scapegoat and people start to get concerned about it — taking responsibility has a lot to do with that, too. The issue that arises, is, do you have a mindset going where the results of what you do don’t matter, because if said results are negative you’ll just blame the scapegoat and go back to doing what you did before?

Heady question. Democrats have been unworthy of our trust in leadership matters for six years now, and we have a lot of people thinking of putting them back in charge. How are they held accountable for their screw-ups, if they don’t hold themselves accountable? Even when they dismiss one of their own and start calling each other racists, presumably to earn back this trust, they can’t bring themselves to mention the two words “take responsibility.” They can’t comment on it. I may form my own opinion about the mistakes the Democratic leadership made, and the mistakes Congressman Jefferson made, to make things happen the way they happened. But I do not know how much of that opinion is shared by those in power. I don’t know what Pelosi’s take on it is. I don’t know what Jefferson, or any of his friends, think about it. They talk of this whole event as if it’s just something that happened; nobody actually did anything unwise, something they would do differently now that the lesson was learned. The blame lies with no one, except you-know-who down the street at 1600 Pennsylvania.

So because any discussion along these lines was carelessly left out — or, perhaps, expurgated from the statement with surgical precision — this concern is left unresolved. No responsibility taken. I do not know why it is, exactly, that I’m supposed to believe putting Democrats in charge of things, would clean up Washington. All I know is that I’m supposed to think it. As far as why things happened the way they did, it’s just another round of Bush-blaming, after Malkin predicted it was coming.

To have confidence in someone cleaning up Washington, you have to see that someone take ownership of the problem. It doesn’t seem like so much to ask, since this particular problem occurred under their roof. I wonder how many among the Democratic core constituents would have been offended by such a concept.

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Taking ResponsibilityFriday, June 16th, 2006

Taking Responsibility
Friday, June 16th, 2006