Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report

It's worth reflecting a bit on what's going on in Washington, D.C., this week. It's somewhat amazing to witness the powerlessness of elected officials, from Congress to the Mayor of the City and including the all-mighty Washington Post, in the face of a White House decision to virtually lock the place down.

With justification from three-year-old pre-Sept. 11, 2001 intelligence, the last reluctant balloon had barely detached from the roof of the Fleet Center in Boston following the Democratic National Convention before the Bush White House leapt to its feet and whistled a state of emergency, stealing the national headlines and turning the nation's capitol into a city under siege.

Now, the more Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams, Congress woman Eleanor Holmes Norton and the Post editorial page complain about the overly robust administration response to its new "Code Orange" declaration, the more Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security officials announce plans to clamp down even further and close down even more streets.

The Post editorial yesterday was entitled, "Fortresses of Fear," and quotes Mayor Williams. "Walling off the Capitol is a capitulation to terrorism." the Post continued, "To imprison the shrines of freedom — the House and Senate, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court — behind blocked streets and gates makes a mockery of our claim to be a free and open society that can provide for the nation's security."

But the stronger the words from local elected officials or an institution as powerful as the Post serve only to underscore their unsettling helplessness, and that of anyone and everyone in our democracy to reign in the police powers of the White House.

Truly an interesting and scary development. The fear is not so much focused on the danger implied in three-year-old intelligence reports as on the extent to which this White House and its sponsors are and may be willing to go unchecked in the exercise of their perceived self-interest.

Democrats can criticize this administration for playing the "politics of fear" as much as they want. It doesn't mean this administration intends to stop it. But it's not just psychological fear, it's craven police power exercised against the domestic population, including against the wishes of its democratically elected public officials, that really raises the shackles.

In her comments at the Falls Church News-Press last week, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who turned 84 yesterday, underscored how unlike previous administrations she's covered since 1960 this current Bush administration is. "It's the most conservative in decades," she said, and that goes back beyond the Reagan years perhaps to Nixon or the excesses of the McCarthy era in the early Eisenhower years.

Thomas should know. She's one of the few journalists with a career-long record of exercising the kind of independent thought and courage that marks a true journalist, and doing so while covering U.S. presidents up close and personal for over 44 years.

No wonder the highly reputable Editor and Publisher magazine reported on Thomas' remarks at the News-Press in its own pages this week with a rewrite of the News-Press coverage.

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has opined twice in the last week, the media in the U.S., apart from Thomas and her rare ilk, are doing a gross disservice to the public, focusing only on the "front burner" issues in the campaigns and avoiding a careful examination of the issues, including the current administration's performance.

Environmentalist lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., interviewed on CNN last night, made the same point, as documented in his new book, Crimes Against Nature. The administration has stopped enforcement of environmental laws in the worst assault on environmental legislation in 30 years, he said, and the media is ignoring it.

This brings us back to the scene in our nation's capitol this week and its dubious, or questionable, at best, three-year-old pretext.

Somehow, when it comes to national security matters, everyone's supposed to just shut up and do what they're told. The problem is where that could lead if some administration were ever to consider its own seamless continuation in power a national security matter.

Just a thought. And, oh by the way, I strongly recommend the great old Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas thriller from 1964, screenplay by Rod Serling, called Seven Days in May. If you're frustrated by your inability to get around in D.C., rent it, take it home, and check it out.