Things to Thank the Bush Administration For

Good Faith Matters.
Perhaps.

If there’s anything that may come of the various GOP attempts to destroy government at the Federal level, perhaps one of the most salient will be a recognition that institutions are more than just a collection of people operating under political authority. The Bush administration has operated government as if it is politics all the way down. A corollary of this kind of thinking is treating the unwritten norms of a government institution—EPA, DOJ, FEMA, for example—as if they had no effect or weight. This includes the apparently quaint notion that one holding a position of authority should act in good faith. The end result has been obvious but what I want to point out is not the obvious damage such as the raw incompetence, chicanery, fraud, self-dealing and theft this approach has brought about, but rather the insidious but more long-lasting harm to the mores of the institutions the Administration has assaulted. In other words, as Mr. Rove has repeatedly demonstrated, it’s possible to destroy an institution by refusing to accept good faith as a constraint on the exercise of power. Comey’s testimony this week demonstrates this doctrine in action: when you don’t get the answer you want, just try to game the system to achieve a different outcome. In this particular instance, apparently the gambit did not work but that was probably due to the threat of wholesale resignations. It is a sad but revealing comment on the decay of official Washington that it took a dramatic scene out of the Godfather movies to make at least a few official voices recognize that at least a few people in positions of power still believed that the government had some meaning independently of the individuals holding power at the moment. What the defenders of the status quo (e.g., what was called in an earlier day the Establishment) appear to have, finally, realized is that at the end of the day if the people in power simply refuse to act in good faith, no governmental body will be anything other than a Party apparatus. Time will tell whether it is possible to recover from this poisonous self-dealing.

I am of the opinion that if we as a country continue to exalt cleverness without compunction ("Yes, you're clever. Now sit down.") whatever democracy in the US is left will be destroyed. The remnant will be a shell—a nice marble façade, but a false front. Eventually the gap between pretense (accountable, democratic government) and reality (political power exercised without accountability) will be so great as to resemble the gap between the Soviet constitution and the Soviet state. I don't care to speculate on what kind of havoc that situation would


Here, and here are two of the most thoughtful posts I've seen on the Comey testimony and its implications.