Lieberman Limbo Dance

In his two-step with the former Democrat turned Independent (by his own party's outraged voters) and, most recently, inseparable McCain sidekick and Obama basher, Harry Reid is showing all the resolution and skill that have marked his tenure as Senate Majority Leader.

"Joe Lieberman is not some right-wing nutcase," Reid said today. "Joe Lieberman is one of the most progressive people ever to come from the state of Connecticut."

He is also playing Reid like a cheap violin in the moves over stripping him of chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, as Democrats in and out of the Senate have been calling for the Majority Leader to do.

Apparently Lieberman is refusing to accept a less critical assignment and making eyes at Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a threat to switch allegiances once again.

Reid, who used to be a boxer, seems unable to recognize a feint when he sees one and call the bluff. Back here in Connecticut, voters have revised an old folk saying, "When you have Joe Lieberman for a friend, you don't need an enemy."

Bedford Falls in D.C.

In the era of Bush, Cheney and broken government, just in time for reruns of "It's a Wonderful Life," we get a Capraesque moment. After three decades in the Senate, Chris Dodd doesn't look much like Jimmy Stewart, but for the time being, he has saved the savings and loan or, in view of his filibuster threat, is it the boy's camp from "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?"

Until after the holidays, at least, the Senate won't be giving telecoms retroactive immunity for illegal spying on Americans. The Majority leader (if you use the word loosely) was ready to Christmas-wrap that gift for the Bush Administration until a few Bill of Rights Scrooges started talking about traditional American values.

“Today," Sen. Dodd said of Harry Reid's decision to put off the vote on the FISA bill, "we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy.”

Before we get all misty-eyed, start re-reading "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus" and sending checks to Dodd for President, it might help to ponder how far we have come from the innocence and hope of those old Capra movies.

But it's good to be reminded that the spirit of Jimmy Stewart still lives in Washington, even if embodied in a white-haired Presidential candidate who is polling in the single digits.

The Senate's Tower of Jello

Harry Reid is once again showing the leadership that gave us a year of bickering and frustration over getting out of Iraq with nothing to show for it.

Today, as Chris Dodd fights retroactive immunity for telecoms on illegal wiretapping and threatens a filibuster, the Senate Majority leader is taking the bold step of offering versions of a bill with and without it.

“I have determined that in this situation," it would be wrong of me to simply choose one committee’s bill over the other," Reid said, referring to the conflicting versions presented by the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.

To accomplish this, Reid took the unusual step of overriding Dodd's "hold" on the bill with immunity to keep it from coming to a vote.

"Providing retroactive immunity to companies that may have violated the law will set a dangerous precedent,” said Dodd. “Companies who violated the trust of thousands of their customers will be immune to prosecution and the details of their actions will stay hidden.

"The President, and his Administration, has consistently used scare tactics in an attempt to force Congress to pass FISA legislation that provides retroactive immunity."

The Democratic Senate leader is acting as his helper on the issue.

Phony Soldiers With Real Bullets

As Washington debates the humongous issue of Rush Limbaugh’s outburst about unpatriotic “phony soldiers,” there is news today about murderous drive-by shootings in Iraq by quasi-soldiers.

The New York Times cites a report by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: “Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded.”

In what is now becoming familiar asymmetry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid yesterday was asking Limbaugh’s bosses for an apology as the House Committee was preparing to grill State Department and Blackwater officials about the behavior of bodyguards whose mission is supposed to be defensive--195 shootings from 2005 until early September, a rate of 1.4 a week, incidents in which 163 times they fired first.

Blackwater is emerging as one more piece of the disheartening picture of Wild West chaos in Iraq, with millions of American dollars disappearing and civilian profiteers free to treat locals as targets in a turkey shoot.

Among those testifying today will be Blackwater’s owner and founder Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and intern in Bush I's White House, who has contributed $200,000 to the Republican National Committee since 1998.

According to the House report, his company has dismissed 122 employees in the past three years for misuse of weapons, drug or alcohol abuse, lewd conduct or violent behavior, insubordination and failure to report incidents or lying about them.

Congressman will be asking about what they have been doing in our name while the Senate keeps America safe by trying to get Rush Limbaugh fired.

Democrats' Back-to-School Test

Like American children, Congress is returning to a familiar place this week with the challenge of a new curriculum.

The subjects will be the same but on an advanced level, and many of the familiar Washington faces are gone or on the way out the door.

Even the dynamic of Topic A, the war, has changed. Senior Republicans are ripe for change, and the President, under cover of optimistic rhetoric in Anbar yesterday, opened the door slightly to a drawndown of American forces.

How to adapt and create a new climate will be Job One for the Democratic leadership. They can keep railing against Bush’s failed policies at home and abroad or, confident they will take back the White House and extend their control of Congress next year, start to give the American people samples of how they intend to govern in 2009 and beyond.

On Iraq, continuing to press for the end of a lost war against Bush’s veto power can be converted into a more bipartisan effort to agree that the U.S. has done what it can, tamp down recriminations and concentrate on how we get out.

On the U.S. Attorney scandals and other abuses of power, both houses are duty-bound to carry on their investigations, but the emphasis can shift to safeguards for the future.

None of this will be easy to do, in the face of the rage in the Democratic base that has been built up by Bush’s high-handedness, as seen in the concessions last month on the wiretapping bill. But Senate Leader Harry Reid has made a start by reaching out to anti-war Republicans.

Politicians being as they are, this may sound unrealistic, but if the Democrats need incentive, they may want to look again at Congress’ abysmal approval ratings and revisit the history of Pyrrhic victories.

Harry Reid, the Un-Lyndon Johnson

Before he became President and lost a war, Lyndon Johnson was the most effective Senate majority leader in history. Today’s Democrats, trying to stop another war, could use his skills.

To put it kindly, Harry Reid is no LBJ. In six months as majority leader, he has consistently misspoken and mismanaged Democratic efforts to win over enough Republicans to change policy in Iraq, culminating in this week’s disastrous all-nighter.

It takes a unique set of mismanagement skills to help propel the Democratic-controlled Congress to lower approval ratings than Bush. To be fair, Reid has had to navigate differences about how to end the war in his own party and the ambivalence of Republicans who want to stay loyal to their President but fear for their electoral skins next November. Even so, his performance has been dismal.

In April, David Broder in the Washington Post called Reid “the Democrats’ Gonzales” for his gaffes, and liberal bloggers gang-tackled the venerable columnist. Three months later, Reid, looking more like Bush’s Brownie of FEMA fame, is turning out to be the polar opposite of Lyndon Johnson.

In 1966, Robert Novak of Valerie Plame fame was co-author of a book that described Johnson’s ways as a majority leader who worked with a Republican President, Eisenhower, to pass the first civil rights bill of the century. LBJ, knowing where every Senator stood on every issue and what it would take to win him over, would then go into action:

“The Treatment could last ten minutes or four hours...Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of threat...Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

No one expects Reid to be another LBJ, but some semblance of parliamentary and negotiating skills would go a long way toward building some real legislative pressure to end this miserable war. Then, if Democrats win next year, they will need effective leadership to start undoing the damage Bush has done. They can do better than Harry Reid.

Senate Sleepover

After so much squabbling in the sandbox, it’s nice to see our Senators planning to spend the night together on a play date. There will be games, of course, including blogging and making videos, and someone will undoubtedly bring hot chocolate and cookies.

They may not be any more grownup in the morning, but picturing Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid in Dr. Dentons is worth it all.