After Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School
07 March 15
ears ago, when I was just starting in this business, I had the privilege to meet a well-known muckraker and columnist. I asked him the secret of his success.
"Two things," he said. "One: when you're hammered after a night out, drink an entire liter of water before you go to bed. An entire liter, do you understand? Otherwise the whole next work day is shot."
"An entire liter," I said. "Got it."
"Second, never write about Israel. It just pisses people off. No matter what you say, you lose half your Rolodex."
I frowned. How he could ignore such an important topic? Didn't he care?
"Son," he said, "we're prostitutes. We don't enjoy the sex."
Mainly by accident, I sort of ended up following that advice, but I did watch the Benjamin Netanyahu speech and its aftermath this week. A few thoughts on one of the more unseemly scenes Congress has cooked up in a while:
First of all, the applause from members of the House and Senate was so over the top, it recalled the famous passage in the Gulag Archipelago about the apparatchik approach to a Stalin speech: "Never be the first one to stop clapping."
Watching it, you'd almost have thought the members were experiencing a similar terror of being caught looking unenthusiastic. I say almost because in reality, it's a silly thought, in a democracy: nobody's getting taken out back and shot for showing boredom.
But then, no kidding at all, a gif apparently showing Rand Paul clapping with insufficient fervor rocketed around social media.
It got enough attention that the Washington Post wrote about it and Paul himself had to issue a statement on Fox and Friends denying he wasn't clapping really, really hard. "I gave the Prime Minister 50 standing ovations. I co-sponsored bringing him here," Paul pleaded. Is the Internet age beautiful or what?
But the telescreens weren't just watching the Republicans. Cameras also captured Nancy Pelosi looking somewhat south of enraptured during the speech.
Those photos only circulated more after she said she was "near tears" because she was saddened by Netanyahu's speech, which she termed an "insult to the intelligence of the United States."
This in turn led to more social media avalanching and a cartoonish response from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who told a donor at a fund-raiser: "Did you see Nancy Pelosi on the floor? Complete disgust. . .If you can get through all the surgeries, there's disgust!"
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the U.S. Senate! If Kathy Griffin ever bombs out on Fashion Police, Graham will have a job waiting for him.
After Bloomberg traitorously reported on Graham's locker-room joke about Pelosi's face, a storm of criticism from Democrat members raged and the Senator was forced to walk his comments back ("I made a poor attempt at humor," he said, in what is looking like the go-to lawyer-drafted apology line of our times).
All of this preening and adolescent defiance, all these bitchy homeroom-style barbs and insults: has the U.S. government ever seemed more like high school?
Indiana Republican Jackie Walorski apparently thinks school's still in. This is her reacting after Netanyahu's speech, according to Slate:
"Wooh, baby! That was awesome!"
Around the world, not everyone was so enthused. Several Israeli diplomats took to Twitter to voice their concerns over Netanyahu's appearance. (Everybody tweeted about this speech. There were more Iranian officials on Twitter Tuesday than there were sportswriters at the Super Bowl).
Yigal Caspi, Israel's ambassador to Switzerland, retweeted a line from an Israeli journalist: "Is it no longer possible to suffice in scaring us here in Hebrew? [Netanyahu] has to fly all the way to the US Congress and tell them in English how dangerous Iran's nuclear program is?"
Caspi and two other diplomats got the ax for their social media responses to the speech. Meanwhile, British journalist Jeremy Bowen got caught in the Twitter Punji-trap when he made a comment about Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor who sat in the Speaker's box with Netanyahu's wife, Sara.
A safe joke to make about Wiesel's presence probably would have been something along the lines of, "I guess that book Elie was planning on co-writing with Barack Obama is on hold." The BBC's Bowen went in a different direction, bluntly declaring that Netanyahu was "playing the Holocaust card" by bringing the Nobel laureate and camp survivor.
Instantly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, Bowen and the BBC insisted that he was just using "journalistic shorthand," and that the wording was appropriate because Netanyahu was raising the "specter of another Holocaust." As of this writing, Twitter warriors are still feasting on Bowen's head and should have him skeletonized by nightfall.
Nobody came out of this week looking good. Regardless of where you stood on a possible nuclear deal with Iran, the whole episode this week made the American government look like what some in the Iranian press apparently called it: a clown show.
Once upon a time, the opposition party pursuing a second line of foreign policy for domestic political purposes was considered unseemly.
Think candidate Dick Nixon submarining the 1968 Vietnam Peace talks behind LBJ's back, or the fabled October Surprise conspiracy theory. This was something one did in secret, preferably in trench coats instead of ties, with no press at all present, unless you count Sy Hersh's future sources.
But this was like the October Surprise as a pay-per-view MMA event. That this sleazy scheme was cooked up mainly for the political gain of both the hosts and the speaker (who faces an election in two weeks) was obvious in about a hundred different ways, beginning with the fact that the speech was apparently timed so that Israeli audiences could watch it over dinner.
But the gambit only sort of worked for Netanyahu, whose Likud Party has experienced only a modest bounce since the speech, if it got one at all. American news outlets humorously had different takes on the same polls showing Likud gaining one or two seats (HuffPo: "Netanyahu's Popularity Rises After Speech to U.S. Congress: Polls"; Washington Post: "Netanyahu's Speech to Congress Fails to Jolt Electoral Needle At Home").
Similarly, if the move had any benefit to the Republicans in congress, it was hard to perceive. Nobody in the media drew a link between Bibi's speech and the Republicans' surrender on the Homeland Security funding bill, but on some level there must have been one.
You can't invite a foreign leader into the House Gallery to accuse a sitting president of being soft on terrorism in an event covered by 10 million journalists, and then turn around the same week and defund the president's Homeland Security department over some loony immigration objective.
Even worse, the decision to try to conduct their own foreign policy in the shadow of the White House went over so badly with American voters, it actually gave Barack Obama a 5-point sympathy bumpin his approval rating.
Put it all together, and the Republicans' big rollout this week had to be the most self-defeating political pincer move since the Judean Peoples' Front sent their Crack Suicide Squad to the rescue in Life of Brian.
This was a week that made everyone look bad: congress, the media, Netanyahu, the Tweeting Supreme Leader in Iran, everyone. Obama only came out looking OK because he mostly stayed off camera and kept his mouth shut.
Mostly, however, it was just a depressing, circus-like demonstration of how schizoid and dysfunctional Washington politics have become. The logical next step after a caper like this is the opening of Republican and Democratic embassies abroad. Let's hope it's a long time before anyone tries this again.
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