This never happened: A President, a Democrat, whose daughter has been kidnapped, possibly by Arab terrorists, decided to step aside temporarily so that government policy was not directed by a distraught father. Since there was no Vice President at the time, this meant that a Republican, the temporary Acting President. When the issue of how such a move could be a windfall for the Republican Party, and Democratic Party leaders complain, the White House chief of staff, in words written by Aaron Sorkin, tells them

"I'm not prepared to think about politics when we're under terrorist attack. The Republic comes first."

Those were the days.
When the planes hit the Trade Center that day, the idea that a government in perpetual campaign, which views everything it does in terms of how it bears on the incumbent president's ability to get re-elected, or assist those in his or her party in their elections, was ill equipped to protect us in our workplace, or in our homes. Katrina confirmed it. Yet, for all the change that those two events, and so many others, were said to inspire, we have seen over and over that we remain in the era of campaign before governing remains.

It is curious that we get that message as much from Jon Stewart and the "West Wing" of Aaron Sorkin and John Wells, as much as anywhere else, though both Paul Krugman and Frank Rich have made this point well in books as well as columns. But more importantly, it is time---way past time (especially since the 9/11 of which we speak was over seven years ago)---that it stop. There is something about doing right for the "good of the country" that was lost, I think, when the reality of the minority presidency on which West Wing was partially based, led, in January, 1995, to a House of Representatives whose Speaker, Newt Gingrich, saw himself as constitutionally virtually equal in authority to the President of the United States.

Nobody with the country's best interests at heart would have tried to close the government when the president would not agree to congressional demands about the budget they would agree to pass, or to impeach the president over his personal indiscretions, or to permit the Supreme Court to decide the outcome of an election in Florida that determined who would become President of the United States.

Yet, during that crisis, when former Secretary of State James Baker III denounced the ruling by the Florida Supreme Court interpreting the election laws of Florida with which he did not agree, he all but advocated the overthrow of the sovereign authority of that state:

All of this is unfair and unacceptable. It is not fair to change the election laws of Florida by judicial fiat after the election has been held.

Unacceptable. A court has ruled. The highest court of the state on an issue on state law concerning how it counts votes. It is "unacceptable." A bare majority of the United States Supreme Court, bullied by this threat to the country, decided to exercise power it did not have to dictate a contrary decision to Florida and claimed, contrary to the very basis of the common law, that its decision was "limited to the present circumstances" and not relevant to any other issue which might come up in the future.

That was the end of the concept of doing what is best for the country. Party comes first. Senator Vandenberg's dictum about a politics that "stops at the water's edge" is surely no longer so, and the financial crisis we are in is seen in Washington as nothing more than backdrop for political arguments about whether we are a socialist country or not. (At this rate we will soon we will be debating what position to take in the Spanish Civil War.)

Yes, I felt bad, for the first time ever, to see Jim Cramer have to accept Jon Stewart's beating on behalf of the cheerleader media. Cramer faced his accusers, seemed genuinely chastened (we shall see) and eager to right what he knew to have been a wrong (again, we shall see.) Judith Miller has not done the same thing and NBC has blacked out any coverage of the whole issue on any of his networks placing their commercial embarrassment over their professed obligation to inform and to report the news. (The New York Times and Washington Post, by contrast, covered their own failures to report on the entry into the war in Iraq.)

A slight detour is required here so I can repeat something posted elsewhere. The reason Stewart's week long take down of CNBC, the source of the Santelli rant, was important is exactly the same reason why the Post and the Times had to admit their failures in the run up to the war. Credibility is the only currency journalists have and in these dire times for newspapers, all that distinguishes them from the other garbage posted everywhere is that the newspapers have a past and a degree of trust that comes from what they have done before:

Thus for Keith Olbermann to deny NBC pressure to ignore the story, to say that you do not think it was much of a news story ("let's play Odd Ball!") demeans you and your program. I can no longer trust you to deliver the news.

Rachel, to be fair, struggled on air with the NBC solidarity edict, referring to the "financial press" pr "financial media" as code while speaking to Frank Rich on Thursday and his chuckle, and the point she made showed what was going on.

Not worth resigning over (Murrow did not resign when CBS News first tried to distance itself from See It Now and then figured out how to cancel it---and instead forced "Harvest of Shame" on them years later) but MSNBC is not much of a news organization if it can do two hours of "news" and fail to mention this story.

An Air America needs to return Rachel to the 6 to 8pm slot so we can get "regular" Rachel somewhere when people are able to listen.

More significantly, perhaps, what Washington accepts as interesting controversy increasingly appears to the rest of us to be breathtakingly out of touch. We are in dire straits. During the past eight years the executive branch was led to idiots and hopelessly political ideologues more interested in their philosophy of "smaller government" (meaning repeal of any vestige of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier or Great Society) than in the welfare of their country (speaking of the public relations benefits of when to "roll out" a war, for heaven's sakes). For the eight years before that, they derailed the executive by forcing him to pay attention to their trivia and his own personal faults than our security (though, to his credit, the President took time out from politics long enough to engage the government to try to deter planned attacks on us set for the faux millenium of January 1, 2000.

This week's attack on our recovery comes from the "the President is trying to do too much" crowd who complains that the dumb American public is "confused." The dumb part is not something worth debating right now because, for once, we are not confused, we are united. As the "expert" on SNL says, the time has come to "fix it" and their is almost universal agreement about this, except, of course, among politicians.

Last year, when it was considered to tempting of fate to talk about what might happen were President Obama elected, we risked fate here to write about how important it would be to try to everything and to try to do it quickly. June 8 was before many acknowledged the crisis, but the imperative was there.

And, just for the record, Mr. Morning Joe, Rahm Emanuel ("Josh Lyman" for the West Wingers) did not make up the concept of using a crisis to reform government: Franklin D. Roosevelt did, and in doing so, protected countless millions until Reagan and his acolytes (you, Joe, included) took it apart, making the rerun today necessary.

I am glad, Joe, that you aren't allowed to discuss CNBC anymore. Maybe you can stop talking about anything. If not, try talking about right and wrong first.