Rove "Scoop" Remains Exclusive

The New Republic sounds off on my favorite issue of late, what the Dems should do if they take back the House:

"The truth is, it is not impeachment Republicans fear; it's simply oversight. Since 2001, Congress has sat idle as the executive branch gradually proclaimed new powers for itself, and it has aided and abetted Bush's every failure by refusing to operate as a check on his administration. So, while Democrats are wise to distance themselves from the I-word, they shouldn't be bullied into abandoning promises to aggressively investigate the Bush administration. In fact, they should be running on the issue, not away from it.

"GOP control of Congress deserves to end this year, not least because Republicans have abused--and then abandoned--government oversight. Six years of chasing every wild accusation leveled against the Clinton administration have been followed by almost six years of near-total deference to the executive branch. In the Clinton years, a single House committee, Government Reform, issued over 1,000 subpoenas and spent millions of dollars investigating the White House and the Democratic Party. More than two million pages of documents were handed over. In one inquiry alone--the grave matter of the politicization of the White House Christmas list--Republicans took 140 hours of testimony.

"Nobody wants to return to those days--except perhaps to experience the sheer delight of watching a congressman solve the Vince Foster 'murder' by shooting a pumpkin. But, in terms of congressional oversight, what has followed in the Bush years is even worse than the abuses of the Clinton years: nothing. Congress has brushed off the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. In the rubberstamp House of Representatives, the abuses at Abu Ghraib have merited a total of a dozen hours of sworn testimony. The use of propaganda by government agencies? A collective yawn from the GOP. The housing and urban development secretary's boast of denying federal grants to contractors who dislike Bush? Silence."

CNN commentator and ex-Clintonite Paul Begala backtracks a bit on his criticism of Howard Dean, but still thinks the party's strategy is wrong:

"I should never, ever have denigrated young men and women who are working in the political trenches in places like Mississippi and Utah. I was being arrogant and flippant when I said they're just picking their noses. Mea culpa. You live by the smart-ass quip, you die by the smart-ass quip.

"What prompted that comment was a report that the Democratic National Committee had raised $74 million, but only had $10 million cash on hand. This in contrast to a Republican National Committee with $43 million cash on hand. That disparity is a crisis . . .

"I am deeply frustrated with a party establishment that does everything except tell people what we stand for. They spend millions on voter files, field work, phone banks, staff, consultants, etc. . . . and yet people don't know what we stand for. I am not opposed to hiring organizers. I'm opposed to pretending that hiring organizers is in any way a substitute for having a message."

That front-page NYT piece on how Airbus was considering selling standing-room-only seats was not just wrong--nobody had asked the company whether the idea was still alive--but went uncorrected for a week. Public Editor Byron Calame spanks the paper:

"A major gaffe was that editors at various levels got caught with their skepticism down, fascinated by the story's Wow! factor. The seat was an idea that they apparently found bizarre yet believable in light of the airlines' continual efforts to jam more passengers into planes."

Are books very 20th century...or even 15th? Jeff Jarvis has moved on, so to speak:

"I have nothing against books.

"But the book is an outmoded means of communicating information. And efforts to update it are hampered because, culturally, we give undue reverence to the form for the form's sake. Publish or perish, that's the highest call of our intellectual elite. But any medium that defines itself as a medium is in trouble: newspapers, broadcast TV, broadcast radio, and books. They are all faced with new and better means of doing what they do without regard to the limitations of any one medium.

"The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don't teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books."

On the other hand, they can't flourish unless people buy them--the ultimate market test.