The S.S. John Doolittle just got a little lighter today, as The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund becomes the latest rat to desert the sinking ship. The opening line is devastating:
It’s sad when someone you’ve known for decades gets in trouble and you’re not surprised.
It gets worse from there, and if you read closely, you can almost hear the tiny chorus of the world’s smallest violin section.
Over…
…political observers back in Mr. Doolittle’s hometown of Sacramento agree his congressional career is over. Last year, publicity about his ties to Mr. Abramoff caused his popularity to plummet. He won re-election by only 3% in a district President Bush carried by 24% in 2004. Now he is almost certain to face a primary challenge from a local GOP state legislator, as Republicans scramble to make sure the seat stays in their hands.
That’s new information there… even if he sticks around, he’ll be primaried? I’ll believe that when I see it.
This is the part where the Vasoline gets smeared on the lens and Fund takes you back to those halcyon days when Doolittle was just the Conservative Mack, man!
It will be a sad end to a political career that began with such promise. In 1980, when I met Mr. Doolittle, he was a 30-year-old lawyer and political upstart and I was a California college student. Mr. Doolittle had just defeated an incumbent Democratic state senator in Sacramento County, which had elected only one Republican to partisan office in the past generation (and she soon switched parties).
Mr. Doolittle, a confirmed Reaganite, inspired an entire generation of local Republicans to take advantage of demographic changes in the state’s capital. Today, Sacramento County often votes for Republican statewide candidates, and outside of the central city elects only Republicans to the Legislature and Congress. In the state Senate, Mr. Doolittle amassed a solid record as a fiscal conservative and championed ethics reform in the wake of an FBI sting operation that sent several legislators to jail. In 1990, he ran for and won a seat in Congress.
He was such a good man! He fought corruption and everything! Until some sort of Satanic bacteria got in his water (probably some liberal concoction out there in DC), John Doolittle was the finest public servant the world has ever known!
The rest of it is kind of hilarious, as Fund does what conservatives always do when faced with a corrupt or incompetent member of their own party – claim that they’re not a true conservative. See, he didn’t support term limits and he once talked to Maxine Waters:
When Mr. Doolittle went to Washington, he clearly didn’t intend to sacrifice much. True, he gained headlines as a member of the “Gang of Seven,” a group of reform-minded freshmen who tweaked Democratic leaders for their abuse of the House Bank and Post Office. But at the same time, just two months after taking office, the ostensible reformer teamed up with Democrat Maxine Waters, a left-liberal firebrand with whom he’d served in the Legislature and who went to Congress in the same election as he did. Together, the two proposed a wish list of new perks that would make even European Union bureaucrats blush.
Conservatism never failed, it’s just never been tried…
The truth is that John Doolittle did what every Republican in the 109th Prison Basketball Team Congress did; he got himself on a powerful committee and used it as leverage to personally benefit himself and his family. And he did it while being a rubber stamp for every conservative cause he’s ever voted on. Here’s another example of this neat little trick by Fund, where he claims essentially that no real conservative has ever written an earmark.
Fiscal conservatives will shed few tears over Mr. Doolittle’s likely departure from Congress. Ever since he joined the Appropriations Committee in 2001, he has been preoccupied with shoveling pork back to his district, telling one reporter he had adapted his small-government principles to the system Congress had created to spend money: “You work with what you’ve got.” In conversations with me, he would marvel at how well Democrats and Republicans got along on the Appropriations Committee because “we so often have the same priorities”–namely spending other people’s money.
Bullshit. The problem is that the GOP Congress sought to run a criminal enterprise out of the Capitol building because they have no interest in doing anything else. Doolittle was perfectly following the conservative script – fight any effort to make government work while making it work for his bank account. It’s true that there’s nothing conservative about it; but don’t give me this fiction that he’s not a “real conservative” because of it. Because if that’s true, then there are no real conservatives in the whole Congress.
We shouldn’t let anyone get away with this dodge. John Doolittle is as conservative now as he’s ever been. The movement is trying to jettison him because his days are numbered. But in truth the conservative movement only serves to destroy government and reward friends. Which is all John Doolittle has ever done.
P.S. Oh yeah, come to our blograiser for Charlie Brown.
