This week has proved the old adage that a controversy can be made of anything. This is not to say that there hasn’t been significant “real news” out there to report. The FBI Director sold out the Attorney General, the War in Iraq continues, the President emphasized vigilance in the war possibly setting the stage for further escalation, and there has been more evidence linking the deaths of American soldiers to Iranian mercenaries.

Not to mention Lindsay Lohan!

The political news that dominated our cycle though was over the YouTube Obama/Clinton spat over foreign policy. Each one called the other naïve. The pundits are analyzing what each camp did right and wrong and are mostly calling the match for Hillary.

Only in the stupid world of position politics could so much be made of so little. Obama let his idealism get the best of him and Clinton showed that she is perfectly willing to assassinate that idealism (not to mention vision and his meaning) to score some cheap points. He showed he is still new to the cutthroat world of political debate where you can’t say anything of substance for fear of reprisal, and she proved that she is just as vindictive of an opportunist as we all thought. As for me, I will take a Lincoln any day over a Stephen Douglass. I’ll let you figure out who’s who.

I don’t want to feed into this debate any more than to register my official disdain for its very existence. The priority story this week should have been Bush renewing the Al Qaeda in Iraq rhetoric in the past few days, linking again the fight in Iraq to the global war against this fascist organization. There is a signal here – this White House doesn’t change their rhetoric often so when they do (even subtly) it usually is followed by a major policy announcement.

That announcement will be for a prolonged reauthorization of the surge policy. Congress, impotent and adrift, will fail to stop the war and we will go on with the same measured level of frustration until the next president is elected. It would be irresponsible to leave Iraq now and there isn’t a single anti-war Congressman who wants to be labeled as a facilitator to genocide in Iraq.

Meanwhile, while we are distracted by “what comes next”, we are missing what is going on before our very eyes. Congress is so Iraq crazed, so caught up in subpoenas and in finding new levels of corruption that they are confusing their role of oversight with their duty to legislate. We have seen preciously little in terms of substance from this Congress other than a lot of press conferences and spats with the White House.

Surely, oversight is important, especially with imperial presidents, but we have staggering domestic problems that need to be addressed now, rather, than by the next president. Or should we wait until fall of 2009 to deal with health care?