A Swift-Moving Story

"House Republican leaders laid out a proposal Tuesday to rewrite Congressional rules governing lobbying as they tried to limit the political damage from an election-year scandal over undue influence and access afforded to lobbyists," says the New York Times.

"In the first of a series of competing initiatives, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert called for a ban on Congressional travel underwritten by outside groups, tougher restrictions on gifts and favors, and the elimination of privileges for lawmakers-turned-lobbyists in response to three bribery and corruption convictions that have reached into the House of Representatives. Inquiries related to those criminal acts are continuing.

"Congressional Democrats plan to issue their own overhaul plan on Wednesday and Senate Republicans are preparing one as well in what one longtime watchdog described as a bidding war touched off by guilty pleas to corruption charges by the high-powered lobbyist Jack Abramoff and an associate and a House Republican's admission to taking bribes."

Bill Kristol, who provided some of the intellectual underpinning for the invasion of Iraq, is eyeing a new target:

"An unrepentant rogue state with a history of sponsoring terrorists seeks to develop weapons of mass destruction. The United States tries to work with European allies to deal with the problem peacefully, depending on International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and United Nations sanctions. The Europeans are generally hesitant and wishful. Russia and China are difficult and obstructive. Eventually the reality of the threat, the obduracy of the rogue state regime in power, becomes too obvious to be ignored.

"This is not a history lesson about Iraq. These are today's headlines about Iran, where the regime is openly pursuing its ambition to become a nuclear power. 'But this time diplomacy has to be given a chance to work,' the doves coo. 'Maybe this time Israel will take care of the problem,' some hawks whisper. Both are being escapist.

"Doves profess concern about Iran's nuclear program and endorse various diplomatic responses to it. But they don't want even to contemplate the threat of military action. Perhaps military action won't ultimately be necessary. But the only way diplomatic, political, and economic pressure has a chance to work over the next months is if the military option -- or various military options -- are kept on the table.

"Meanwhile, some hawks, defenders of the Iraq war, would prefer to deal with one challenge at a time. They hope we can kick the can down the road a while longer, or that a deus ex machine -- a Jewish one! -- will appear to do our job for us. But great powers don't get to avoid their urgent responsibilities because they'd prefer to deal with only one problem at a time, or to slough those responsibilities off onto others."

This strikes me as just the opening salvo in a very important debate -- one in which critics may point out that the Iraq thing didn't turn out too well.

Josh Marshall's new investigative site, Daily Muck, is already into the mud.

At Beltway Blogroll, Daniel Glover has words for the right's Alito bloggers:

"I recoiled at much of the content written by the GOP-approved bloggers last week. Why? Because the content they wrote from Washington, while being feted by the Republican Party, did not pack the same punch as their normal fare. Too often, they sounded more like unofficial stenographers for the GOP than the passionate, independent watchdogs that they normally are.