Doolittle More Than A Crook, Rather A Bookend For The Conservative Era

Congressman John Doolittle's political career is pretty much over now that Federal investigators raided his and his wife's offices last month. Now that we know they skimmed campaign contributions and put approximately a quarter of a million dollars into their bank account, he's toast. Not only will the Republican party abandon him, but he'll most likely end up in jail for his illegal activities.

Doolittle is another Republican crook whom karma got around to, just as Duke Cunningham, jack Abramoff, Bob Ney and many other have found out for themselves. Yet there is more to it. The Sacramento News and Review took a good look at their local slimebag and saw a bigger picture.

...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.

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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.

In twenty-six years the conservative movement has had plenty of time to prove that their grand ideas would work for the country. Unfortunately for all of us the neo-con agenda has led to a tremendous downfall for our country that is left with the muck of Republican corruption. Doolittle is not just a bad duck, he exemplifies the entire G.O.P. movement.