Truth - Al Franken [120]
But the All-Girl Orchestra was perhaps the most minor part of the emerging progressive infrastructure. Along with Air America, there was David Brock’s progressive media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, which drove conservatives crazy by paying attention to what they said. Very, very, very, very carefully. It turned out that a lot of what they said wasn’t true. And when your Uncle David called them on it, they squealed like pigs.
And there were the new liberal think tanks, like the Center for American Progress, which, true to its name, almost immediately became a genuine center for American progress. One of the differences between the liberal think tanks and conservative think tanks is that liberal think tanks were much less frequently funded by huge corporations that stood to benefit financially from the foregone conclusions of their research. That gave our think tanks the advantage of accuracy, which became invaluable when the reality-based community came back into power.
This new infrastructure helped us prevent the 2004 election from being an unmitigated disaster. But it became even more important afterward. Following the election, Bush and the Republican Congress proceeded to completely blow it by flashing, if only for a moment, their true colors. When they alienated the public by ignoring the nation’s priorities and screwing up on Schiavo, Social Security, and Iraq, Air America was right there, poised to use statistics provided by our think tanks and audio clips pulled by unpaid interns at Media Matters to heap scorn and ridicule upon the hapless Republicans. That was our mission, and we did it well.
By the 2006 election, the Republican dam was beginning to crack.
That year, voters expressed their disgust with a Republican Congress that had completely betrayed the promises they had made in order to win power in 1994. Back then, Republicans had vowed in their Contract with America to “end the cycle of scandal and disgrace” and to “restore accountability to Congress.” When Americans were reminded of those quotes and of the fact that 226 of the 231 Republicans in the House had received campaign cash from Tom “Forced Abortions” DeLay (as he had come to be known), they scoffed.
The unfathomable corruption and moral bankruptcy of Tom DeLay and his dearest friend, a man named Jack Abramoff, were just the beginning. The public was also enraged by the way Congress circled the wagons around the White House even as its betrayals of the public trust were becoming clear. For the second time in thirty-two years, a cancer had begun to grow on the presidency. This time, the tumor was Karl Rove–shaped, and though the President could have caught it in its early stages, when it was first revealed that Rove had outed an undercover CIA agent, he failed to do so. And Congress, instead of performing emergency surgery on national television by holding hearings on BlowCIAAgent’s-CoverGate, held more and more hearings on the postal service and diploma mills. Congress even failed to address those two issues, which, as you kids will one day learn, remain extremely minor problems to this day.
Most of all, people were angry about Iraq. The politically motivated premature withdrawal was a disaster. The militarily necessary reinvasion was even worse.
It was a miracle that the Republicans managed to cling to fifty seats in the Senate in 2006. Vice President Cheney had to cast tie-breaking vote after tie-breaking vote, cursing all the while. (When you’re all a little older, I’ll tell you what Cheney said, and why C-SPAN had to become a pay channel.) But it was no surprise that we Democrats regained control of the People’s House, the House of Representatives.
Republicans had spent the previous six years saying that Democrats were just a party of obstructionism, and that if we ever gained power, we’d just pass resolutions attacking Republican proposals without offering any new