Oh wait, wasn’t that supposed to be the rap on Bill Clinton? George Stephanopoulos was supposed to be the true liberal believer, the progressive conscience of the administration, the last honest kid, or so he conjured himself in his book about his Clinton years.

The particular Sunday Gas Baggery which is emitted each week from ABC is almost worth imbibing to watch the spectacle of Lil’ George displaying his bad conscience. Oh, I know, he’s a journalist now. If only! Okay, maybe like Zelig, he is. Perhaps I’m being hard on the kid, but if anyone can supply me with evidence that George Stephanopoulos shows any sign of ever having believed deeply in anything beyond his own career advancement, about any aspect of politics, governance, or even journalism, I will be happy to reconsider.

Here’s the short version of this particular Sunday: Joe Biden was terrific, Richard Lugar, awful, pathetically so, Rep. Duncan Hunter was awful, but brilliantly so, no pathos there, thank-you, and don’t ever accuse ABC or George of not being receptive to the truest of rightwing believers, the Roundtable was awful in your basic every Sunday sense of being awful. And then there’s the truly awful Green Room, an on-line phenomenon I’ve ignored until this week’s This Week.

Joe Biden got off the best sound bite of the morning, when host George S challenged him to come up with a response to the administration’s claims, repeated by both General Petraeus and Sec. of Defense Gates, that resolutions like Biden’s, registering disagreement with the President’s newest P.R. policy, commonly referred to as “the surge,” even though non-binding, will undermine the morale of the troops in the field, and encourage, nay, embolden our enemies.

Without missing a beat, Joe shot back that what has emboldened our enemies is the failed policies of this President, with his administration’s unbroken history of incompetence abroad, going to war for dumb reasons, with no plan, no meaningful international support, no strategy to deal with the aftermath of success, inadequate equipment for troops in the field, and on and on. And now he wants to send more troops to Iraq, but still without any strategic plan for success, tactics yes, but no plans, no strategy.

Lugar surprised me; vapid to the point of suggesting physical illness, he tried to tread the narrow path between not actually expressing optimism re: “the surge,” and not actually claiming that someone like Joe Biden is trying to undermine the security of this country. Unfortunately, the policies of this administration are not conducive to such attempts at nuance. Remember, you are with them, or you are against them, and now we know that applies not only abroad, but here at home.

Lugar tried to undermine the importance of resolutions like Biden’s, or like Senator Warner’s kinder, gentler version of the same, by painting them as a self-indulgent opportunity to vent emotions. But “unhelpful” was as far as Lugar wished to go in criticizing Biden.
But, George, wondered, doesn’t the congress have a responsibility to register some awareness of the two-thirds majority of Americans who don’t support the administration’s policy, and what about this weekend’s demonstrations?

No, Lugar replied, polls are for that. The Senate needs to be about something more than “a show of hands.” Huh?

Oh, excuse me, that’s right, it’s unhelpful. Bush may have made many mistakes, but now he’s reaching out to the congress, and congress should reach out in response; we need to get on the same page, instead of going over past mistakes.

Things sure have changed since the Clinton administration, haven’t they? Remember Travelgate?

Here’s what Lugar meant about presidential reaching-out.

Did you know that Senator Lugar got a call from the President, last week, at five of eight in the morning; why, he’s never got a call at that hour from any president. Plus, Senator Lugar has been writing the President letters, and the President tells Lugar they are being read. Wow.

George asked Biden about Cheney’s assertion, last week, that all resolutions are DOA in the sense that they will make no difference; the troops will be sent, the surge will surge. Grinning, Biden asked George if he’d heard what Senator Lugar had just said? Yes, I know that Biden isn’t popular with some of us, but I’ll take all barbs aimed at Stephanopoulus. And Biden was making a good and important point, when he respectfully submitted that such a phone call from the President was unlikely to have come to Lugar without the pressure from the resistance of Democrats to the whole notion of a surge, registered by Biden in December and January.

A point well taken, and then Lugar gave Biden an opportunity to expand on it.

Look at all the recent signs of progress, Lugar pleaded - the Iraqi parliament met and really went at it, Secretary Rice is trying to do something with Sunni nations, sorry, didn’t catch what, yes, we knocked out the entire army and police structure of Iraq, and it will take a while to put it back together, but there is clear movement.

To which Biden pointed out that there had been no such movement during the entire year of 2006 when the situation on the ground went from horrible to more and more horrible. Does anyone think there would be this kind of movement, including Senator Warner’s resolution, or the purported benchmarks to be included in the McCain/Lieberman resolution, without the pressure people like Biden have been applying? The earth has moved under the President’s feet, Biden noted, and still, he came up with a plan that 95% of the experts he consulted recommended against, including the Iraqi Study Group.

Asked by George if Senator Lugar believed that the President was finally on the right path in Iraq, Lugar could only reply that he hopes so, and that we only have one President at a time. True, Senator Lugar, but go back and read what the constitution has to say about the role of congress in matters of war and peace.

Duncan Hunter is a congressman from California, a true believer in the rightwing vision of America, with a soupcon of populism in his desire for better trade agreements, and reduced immigration from the southern reaches of the continent. Except for the trade stuff, he’s the perfect candidate for the National Review crowd. And the focus of Hunter's trade reservations are focused on China, which he is trying to build up into a major international enemy of the US.

George followed Hunter around, as he met with the public, having declared himself in the running for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. He’s considered a long-shot. And he is. But his hard-right politics comes in a tough, smart package, and after George Bush, I’d say that the radical right will be looking for a tough-guy; no more compassionate conservatism, thank-you, even if it was neither compassionate nor particular conservative, and even though George Bush governed from as far right as you can get without actually embracing fascism. Hunter has elements of populism, too, although it generally appeals to the worst in the American ethos, the soft bigotry of racism, the hard reality of zenophobia; Hunter doesn’t just want a fence along our southern border, he wants two!

He supports every aspect of the President’s foreign policy, and his model for success is Reagan’s policies in Latin America, what we did in El Salvador being mentioned as an example of success.

As I say, he’ll go over big with the Townhall, National Review crowd; I wouldn’t cross him off the list of Republican contenders just yet. And if he were to get the nomination, even though I don’t think the country is ready for that kind of extremism, the entire political discussion could get pushed to the right, once again. Think I’m being an alarmist? Watch the online video of Georgie boy not challenging anything Hunter had to say, including the stuff about our great success in El Salvador. (Come back tomorrow for a fuller post on the idiocy of Hunter’s claim, and the way it’s become another rightwing revision of fairly recent history, which even the respectable conservatives, like David Brooks seem to believe.)

Those sitting at The Roundtable, besides George S, were George Will, Martha Radditz, E.J Dionne, and Torie Clarke, who you may remember was the DOD PR person during the first Bush term.

The panel engaged in a worthless discussion of the President’s so-called health care plan in which no one said “what health care plan?” Indeed, George Will thought the President had come up with something really nifty, although it became clear that he hasn’t mastered even the most basic facts about our broken health care system.

For instance, why does single payer mean that people will be dependent on the government for their health care. And even if that were so, why is that worse than depending on large corporate health suppliers who have shown themselves utterly unable to come to grips with the interlocking problems of ever rising costs and ever hshrinking coverage.

In fact, no one at the table, other than Dionne, seemed to know much about the subject. There was a nice moment when E.J. took friendly exception to Will’s attempt to show that statistically there isn’t really that much of a crises of uninsured Americans, and you could watch George Will in the very act of not hearing the critique. Torie Clarke thought that Democrats should just come clean and admit that what they think we need is socialized medicine. Gee, thanks for the suggestion Torie.

The second topic up for worthless discussion was, of course, Iraq and the 2008 presidential contest. Sigh. And Iraq’s role in that, I think. I’ll admit to some drifting off during this segment. George Will did present his thesis, once again, that Rudy Gulianni’s experience as major of New York is going to be a big selling point for his candidacy; who better to bring to heel the unruly mess that is Iraq than the man who made New York livable. Voters may be asking themselves, two years from now, who would I trust to make a decision about how to respond to an attack from someone, terrorists perhaps, our enemies, when the time span for hearing the problem and making a decision is only seven minutes, and if they do….isn’t Rudy the guy?

Of course, maybe if they are smart, voters will be asking who can engage this country with the rest of the world in a way which will make less and less likely that such an attack can be successfully planned and executed.

What was dazzling here was Martha Radditz’s stuttering attempts to say something coherent about the Democratic response to George Bush’s new non-strategy. Sorry, but I’m not sure enough of what she was trying to say to tell you about it. But there was a general sense, except from Dionne, that there was something troubling about Democratic opposition to Bush’s surge. As to the rest of the discussion, gee, don’t you think it’s too early to have anything sensible to say about the presidential race? Based on Sunday’s round table “yes” is the right answer.

On to the Green Room, which is where the week’s pundit stars retire in order to continue an informal discussion of their own previous on-camera discussion, except that this discussion is also being filmed, and indeed, prompted by an informal hostess, someone on the This Week staff, whose name and position I did not get.

What I did get is the string of media clichés that were used by the lady staff member to prompt the round-tablers into further discussion. It was as appalling as it was amazing. The hostess turned the discussion to Hillary’s candidacy for President with the question, isn’t she already over-exposed; don’t we know everything and more about her, resulting in Hillary fatigue?

Radditz, to her credit, tried to observe that Hillary’s first foray into Iowa appeared to have been successful and that she did manage to seem different from what we’ve seen of her before. That was too specific for this discussion, and too contrary to the established Hillary narrative. Doesn’t Hillary have a woman problem, asked the hostess. Oh yes, everyone agreed, she does. George Will thought there is a segment of women who would reject her because they saw her as being enabling of her husband. He didn’t have to say enabling of what, or even consider that some voters might associate her with the relative success of her husband’s eight years compared with George Bush’s. (BTW, speaking personally, I wish she’d decided not to run.)

What more is there to know about Hillary, after eight years of exposure to the most intimate details of Hillary and Bill’s marriage, the hostess insisted. The role of the press and of the Republican party in this was absent from the discussion.

Torie Clarke gave us inside dope on how a candidate like Hillary, with a huge staff, is essentially a created, crafted creature; those weren’t her words, but the cliché she was reviving is that Hillary is cunning, with mutable values, and no fixed identity, i.e., cold and calculating. American voters aren’t frivolous, chimed in Will, they can’t be bought with identity politics; look at Mondale’s selection of Geraldine Ferrar.

But is Hillary likeable, the way her husband was, is she someone you’d like to sit down and have a beer with, asked the hostess?

That does matter to those non-frivolous voters, presumably. In fact, ABC called the segment, The Beer Factor. Bill Clinton had it, of course, Obama might have it; McCain for sure….Gore didn’t have it, of course, and then there was all that not knowing who he was, yunno, wearing different clothes depending on the occasion, something unheard of in Washington apparently; our hostess even mentioned that non-happening, the Noami Wolfe memo about what colors to wear. (See Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler for the real story)

Aside from the disappointing phenomenon that half of us don’t vote, which no one thought to comment on, or the fact that we can no longer be sure that all of the votes of those who do choose to do so will be accurately counted, what makes our elections frivolous isn’t voters, it’s our awful Washington press corps, and what is corrupting our politics is money, both the money needed to run for office, and the cushy salaries that go to our handful of media stars, instead of going to the real work of a free press, to help create an informed electorate, and to offer a diversity of analysis and opinion.