Earlier this year, I wrote a series of syndicated newspaper columns (here and here) about how General Stanley McChrystal was permitted to effectively give orders to his commander-in-chief about what the Afghanistan war policy should and should not be. As I argued, this was a major affront to the spirit - if not the letter - of the constitution and the military's chain of command. And yet, at the time, few - if any - political voices called for McChrystal to be fired or to resign.
Of course, after McChrystal was this week quoted in Rolling Stone personally disparaging various Obama administration officials, those calls for firing/resignation are everywhere (including from unnamed Obama administration sources) as they should be. However, it is the disparity in reactions to McChrystal's statements from a year ago and from this week that gives us a deeper insight into what the Obama administration and the larger political/media class considers - and does not consider - a fireable offense.
What we now know is that generals are now fully permitted to publicly challenge the constitutional authority of the president and the elected civilian leadership of the United States. Based on the lack of anti-McChrystal sentiment seven months ago, we know that is not a fireable offense. At the same time, based on the anti-McChrystal sentiment this week, we also know that what is a fireable offense is a general using petty or mean language in describing the elected civilian leadership whose power he is unconstitutionally usurping.
How can we explain this disparity? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't it be an automatic fireable offense to defy the constitution, but a relatively minor offense to use mean language?
Sure, it should. But it's not because Washington - as it is often accurately described - is truly one big high school, with each major political battle really a gossipy scuffle between cliques of Kool Kids. In that high school, the worst offenses aren't violations of the ironclad rules, but violations of interpersonal social etiquette. Indeed, you can freely violate the rules as long as you do it in a way that honors the etiquette.
That is the real lesson of McChrsytal - according to the political class, his career mistake wasn't trampling democracy and destroying 200 years of constitutional tradition, it was simply being not very nice. In our corrupt political culture, that's unfortunately the only transgression that's not allowed.
NOTE: I've been on a very long hiatus from blogging in general, and from the Kos world in specific. Between a book I've been working on, a new drive-time daily radio show and my newspaper column, my blogging time had been severely squeezed. Now that the book's first draft is done, I'm gradually easing my way back into a new schedule, and figured I'd try posting this piece here. I have no idea how much I'll be posting, but I figured after a year away from DailyKos community, it couldn't hurt to make a trial effort to come back.