It was Groucho Marx who uttered one of my all-time favorite quotes: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing—and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Now, I should explain for the benefit of our younger readers and those who may have grown up in humorless households, that Groucho Marx was a comedian, and when he said things like that, he didn’t really mean them. Lines like that were what is known as “jokes,” and were uttered not to educate or inform the listener, but to make him or her laugh.
The reason I’m telling you this is that one of the Great Secrets of Life has just been revealed to me, and it explains an awful lot of what’s been confusing and troubling to me these past few years. The secret is this: The White House and the Congress have been taking Groucho seriously!
This revelation instantly clears up my incomprehension, and ends my double-takes and sleepless nights trying to arrange their words and actions into some logical fit. Now, it’s revealed: The pieces don’t fit and, at least in Washington, there is no connection between words and actions.
When the Abramoff scandal hit the news, and revelations continued day after day with more bribes being detailed, do you remember the reaction among members of Congress? First, those identified as having taken money from Abramoff instantly found religion. Deciding that the money was evil and contaminated (now that everybody knew about it), they hastily wrote Abramoff-sized checks to charities, who were happy to receive the tainted money and blessed them. (How giving the money away only after they were outed could possibly erase their guilt is beyond me.)
The second thing virtually every member of Congress did was call a press conference and shout to the world that these lobbying abuses, these blatant attempts at bribery, these vile tricks that lobbyists foisted on innocent politicians would come to a screeching halt. No more free dinners, no more free luxury vacations, no more lavish gifts, and no more free private jets, replete with corporate executives and lobbyists, to take them wherever they wanted to travel. Hardly a day went by when some senator or congressperson didn’t try to outpromise another regarding how they would clean things up.
Well, it never happened. Taking a lesson from Groucho, they were faking it, because by the time a bill finally emerged, it was so watered down and there were so many exclusions that it was what Groucho intended in the first place: a joke.
When the press spilled the beans that our trusted government was tapping the phone lines of large numbers of American citizens without bothering to get an easily obtained court order, senators and congresspersons, including a lot of Republicans, screamed and hollered. They vowed to end that unlawful practice (a practice that, just a few months before, Mr. Bush said didn’t exist, because all wiretaps had an authorizing court order!). After a few weeks, when things quieted down, they decided to let the White House continue the tapping, provided it didn’t do too much of it! Like maybe any isn’t too much?
Lately, senators and representatives have ranted and raved about oil addiction and foreign oil dependency. But when it came to modifying automobile mileage standards, the improvements they mandated were laughable. They all talk big, and they all wait until it’s quiet and then do next to nothing.
President Bush said he’d fire anybody who leaked information to the press in the Valerie Plame case. He was outraged. Weeks later, he modified his position, saying he’d fire anybody who was convicted of leaking information. Weeks after that, Scooter Libby’s testimony suggested that maybe it was Mr. Bush who, via Dick Cheney, authorized the leak. Then, presidential minions began issuing a stream of gibberish, the essence being that when the president leaks information, it automatically becomes declassified, so no law is broken.
And somewhere up above, a man with a black, painted mustache and a big cigar is shaking his head and laughing—or crying.
