A good article about the rise and looming fall of my congresscritter, and the peak and decline of the Repug criminal machine in general, in the Sacramento News & Review.
Does the downfall of a local congressman mean something more than the latest corruption of a politician?
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the U.S. Department of Justice's ongoing investigation into Congressman John T. Doolittle and his wife, Julie - and it's been going on for three years now - clearly his political career is over. Even if he and his wife unexpectedly locate some loophole to avoid indictment or imprisonment for the two corruption cases in which their fund-raising activities are inextricably entangled, the Doolittles' unsavory skimming of campaign contributions and personally pocketing more than a quarter-million dollars have forever finished off their reputations among their own conservative kith and kin. From Sacramento to Washington, the only discussion of the Doolittle case by political insiders from both parties regards strategy over when and how and by whom he should be replaced.
Easy answers: When and How? If he's still hangin' on by his toenails next November, at the ballot box. Preferably, indictment, prosecution, conviction, jail sooner. By whom? Doolittle or some hapless Repug interim chump will be beaten by Charle Brown.
But Doolittle's devious machinations may not have amounted to all that much if it also had not been for larger forces at work. In hindsight, one can identify the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 and the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 as the beginnings of a conservative ideological ascendance, one that more or less continued-and perhaps crested in the 2006 election. Whatever its sources and whatever accounts for its relative longevity, Doolittle's rise and fall serve as the bookends of the era.
Whether it's their aggressive overreach abroad or their negligent under-reach at home, the neoconservative Republican agenda with its ersatz Christian halo exhausted itself in failure. Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and climate change are among the key indicators of their collapse.
To whatever extent Doolittle's decline signals a shift in the larger forces that are reshaping the state's and the nation's political dialogue, there still seems something exquisitely inevitable about him personally facing the prospect of criminal prosecution. His successful unbroken ride to power, while regularly violating the most basic ethical standards, must have had the effect of deluding him to believe there need not be any boundaries to his behavior.
In a remark suggestive of both his ambition and his underlying amorality, when he first arrived in Congress in 1991 Doolittle told a reporter, "You can do what you need to do here, and the only thing holding a person back is the person himself." There is a growing likelihood that, in the near future, Doolittle will have some significant time on his hands to contemplate this insight.
Whether or not you're interested in the goings-on in one California district, the story of Doolittle's rise and fall is a microcosm of the whole Repug scam of the last quarter century.
It is coming to an end despite its desperate 'last throes' and kicking and screaming. Go down it must and go down it will. We will be able to breathe again soon.
Update, kicking & screaming dept.:
Raw Story
Writing in his hometown newspaper, Doolittle said the search was "an attempt to intimidate us and garner media attention," noting that news of the search emerged in a Capitol Hill newspaper just before Gonzales was to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"I do not believe it was a coincidence that the leak came the day before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before Congress on charges that his office was overly partisan in its firing of eight U.S. Attorneys," Doolittle wrote in the Auburn Journal, "especially considering Gonzales specifically cited his recent prosecution of Republican members of Congress as evidence to the contrary."
Nice try, Johnny boy.
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