Avedon Carol: Eddie Haskell's enablers

Dick Meyer has a piece in The Washington Post this morning about The Wreck of the U.S. Senate that makes the usual RNC error of placing all the blame on the Democrats for "starting it":

If I had to etch a date on the tombstone of The Senate Club it would be March 9, 1989, the day the Senate rejected, with a 53-47 vote, former four-term Texas senator John Tower to be secretary of defense under the first President Bush. This was only the ninth time in history that a Cabinet-level nominee had been rejected.

The Senate's clubby comity had already been strained by the bitter battle over Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court and by the Iran-contra affair. But the long debate over Tower's misadventures with women and defense contractors and, most of all, his drinking was, if you will, a tippling point. Camaraderie became cat-fighting. That they did it to one of their own only made it worse.

Senate relations were "strained" by the Iran-Contra affair. That would be a situation in which the top echelon of government was involved in criminal activities so egregious that virtually all of them, including the President, should have ended up in jail. Instead George H.W. Bush pardoned everyone who could have testified against him, thus circumventing any possibility that Congress or any other aspect of the criminal law system could mete out justice. But the fault lies with those who lost patience with deferring to an administration that had all the marks of a criminal enterprise, rather than the criminals who created the problem in the first place.