Testing the Winds

1) Ambassador Wilson's Lament?
Someone’s got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press.
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick; when they will I can only guess.

…People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act.
Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts.

From “Idiot Wind”, Bob Dylan (1974)

On the face of it, "Idiot Wind" was about Dylan's difficulties in dealing with the public and the media, and with some particular individual (ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, perhaps). I think there's something more, though: the man who coined "blowin' in the wind" and said "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing" was testing the winds at the time, and he found something stultifying out there. Mind you, this was the time when America was stirred by the corruption of the Nixon-Agnew administration and was about to move to decisively oust the Nixonites and go for a breath of fresh air, which was what Jimmy Carter promised. I think Dylan saw beyond it all to the stink of the political climate that was to follow. It would be nice to know what his finger in the air tells him now, but my sense is that he's not interested anymore in that scene.

2) The Scent of Alito-sis
That's the flavor of the stagnant air in Bushite Washington these days. Old thinking, old ideas, but very practical tactics. Let's be sure we lock in these gains now, because this doesn't look like it will last.

That's what the Establishment decided, rejecting Bush's adventurous nomination of Miers. Last month's aroma was unsettling, improvised: frankly, the smell of the uncertainty of the future, rather than the familiar stench of the past.

Although the Miers fiasco presented the Democrats with a great pretext for filibuster: I thought you guys were the ones who insisted on a "fair up-or-down-vote of the full Senate"! I don't see this fight as one they will take up seriously. For one thing, it's the one their opponents wish for, so it's letting them pick the terrain. The credentialists are totally cowed, so it's down to those with the political freedom to fight the right-wing agenda. As with the Roberts nomination, only 30 or so.

I'm only slightly worried. The fulcrum of "what 5 Supreme Court justices say the law is" will move from O'Connor to Justice Kennedy, who is a vain weakling and may cave to pressures from the Right. Perhaps in some ways Alito would be better than Miers, in the sense that a principled conservative may hold back federal prerogatives more consistently than a political cronyism-based one, who'd give the Bushite GWOT anything it asked for. We shall see (and smell). If any institution was made to be conservative, it's the Supreme Court.

3) A Shift in the Jetstream?
Certainly the weather is playing a larger role than usual in the affairs of our country. On the one hand, a timely reminder of the limitations of our power; even more, of policy failures (in disaster planning, in infrastructure); most tellingly, though, the exposure of our governing elite's negligent attitude toward those who are not the winners in American society. This winter the weather promises more political embarrassment due to supply/demand imbalances for gas and oil products in the colder regions.

Or is it the climate, not just the weather? I'm one who finds it very plausible that the storms of 2005 are more than just an accident, even more than just a cyclical variation. Instead, consider them a means of the terrestrial system self-regulating: the greater energy in the seas and lower atmosphere being expended through storms of greater intensity.

Will these be reflected in the political climate? Well, I don't believe that the political storms will be more intense, but I do find that the "idiot wind" has shifted. The Bushites are on the defensive, their party colleagues are rushing to separate themselves, the discipline of the zealots is loose. Democrats seem to be making more of the right moves, and I believe some policy consensus has emerged around some key issues for them. It is way too much to expect a reversal in power in Congress in 2006--the system is gamed against any dramatic changes--but the winds are blowing over the warm waters in a new direction: they may pick up speed.