Harry Potter And The Political Class

National politics is like magic. It makes rules--and people--disappear. It can turn truth into lies and vice versa. But as any literate teen can tell us, magic has a dark side--one that turns deadly. Yet supposedly adult voters continue to venerate politicians. We anoint them Heroes or Everymen or Saviors and then project our hopes and fears upon them. Instead, they and their followers, by the very fact of seeking such enormous and potentially dangerous power, should be eyed like living wizards--as otherly and worthy of diligent suspicion.

Scott McClellan proves that yet again. As a matter of fact, he shows us--again--that individuals who seek to play in the international superpower sandbox easily become so entranced by the warm thighs of power and the powerful that they justify the lying and the cheating. They justify the acts that lead to killing. To maintain the embrace of those magic thighs, to serve the Dark Lord, the screams of the dying--yours, mine, your children's, and those of brownish foreigners who don't even deserve a passing mention their lives are so worthless--the screams become no more than gnats' buzzings. Barely worth a swat.

Colin Powell walked into the United Nations after what his deputy described as diligent removal of overt lies from the information they were charged with giving the world. Powell has expressed his regret. However, several in-depth critiques of Powell's statements against the information he held suggest that he played the "good soldier" too well. It suggests that, in deference to the power he served and with which he identified, he helped lie us into a war.

Mother Jones ran it down:

"On that February 5th in front of the UN Security Council, was Colin Powell certain what he was saying was accurate? He certainly was:

POWELL: My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

Later, regarding whether Iraq had reconstituted a nuclear weapons program, he said:

POWELL: [T]here is no doubt in my mind...

That's in public. What about in private? Larry Wilkerson, Powell's then-chief of staff, explained to CNN in 2005 what Powell had been thinking two years earlier:

WILKERSON: [Powell] had walked into my office musing and he said words to the effect of, I wonder how we'll all feel if we put half a million troops in Iraq and march from one end of the country to the other and find nothing."

Measure that against this, also from Mother Jones:

"Powell played an intercept of a conversation between Iraqi army officers about the UN inspections. However, when he translated what they were saying, he knowingly embellished it, turning it from evidence Iraq was complying with U.N. resolutions to evidence Iraq was violating them. This appears in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack: '[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to the rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light..."

One hand worries of needlessly sending men and women to their deaths, while the other dutifully embellishes the information with which to do so. He was just too weak to betray the powerful forces he served, no matter how base.

Had he been less deferent to great power he could have saved so many. No less an Insider than Maureen Dowd said, "If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security."

Powell's deputy, Lawrence Wilkerson, has openly broken with and attacked the Bush administration for its various sins, but according to his interview with Steven Weisman of the International Herald Tribune:

"It was in early 2004, the beginning of President George W. Bush's re-election campaign, that Lawrence Wilkerson first printed out a letter saying he wanted to quit as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"In essence it said, 'Dear Mr. President, I find myself at variance with a majority of your foreign policies and even your domestic policies and therefore I respectfully submit my resignation,"' Wilkerson recalled recently. But the letter remained in a desk drawer for the rest of Bush's first term."

He continued to luxuriate within the hallowed halls of almost limitless power. He has stated that he felt he was working for the only sane member of the administration. But that seems a reason to quit, not a justification for staying.

Now little Scottie McClellan emerges after years of telling Bush administration lies. According to press reports, his great disillusionment came after Karl Rove and Scooter Libby bitch-slapped him on the Valerie Plame affair. Had he not been so enamored of the power with which he'd managed to surround himself, he'd have known he'd been their bitch all along.

That textbook of wizardry--the Harry Potter books--warn us that power is most effective and seductive when it's wielded most ruthlessly. And Washington is all about power--getting it and keeping it. And that puts them all within kissing distance of what is fairly called evil. Any one of them could, with little effort reach out and slip the Dark Magic some tongue. So seductive...

McClellan reportedly paints Cheney as Voldemort, making plans, pulling strings, and leaving no fingerprints. He has his coterie of murderous Death Eaters--David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz. He even has his Bellatrix Lestrange in Mary Matalin. There are innumerable contemptuous Lucious Malfoys running around, from Charles Krauthammer and Tom Friedman to the right wing screamers. The mainstream press played the Ministry of Magic, lily-liveredly propping up, covering up, and turning a blind eye to this administrations lies and extra-constitutional activities.

Harry had no choice. He was born a wizard. But still he had the decency to acknowledge and fight the darkness within himself. But all of these men and women--they choose to be politicians, and manage to behave as if anointed by no less than God to do good. They have the delusionality or foolishness to act as if nothing else were possible. By now, it shouldn't take a Scott McClellan to teach us differently. Wizards, and the political class are dangerous things, blessed with power and cursed with the desire to wield it. We should be wary of them even in the best of times.