It's been increasingly clear the past few years, and particularly so the last few months, that the DC beltway gasbags don't care about anything outside of DC and their own cocktail party circuit. It's not that they willingly despise the rest of the country, it's that they don't even realize it exists. It's all about them, and their needs and wants, and their notions of what is good for the country their little ecosystem.

The reception of the ISG report was a startling window into that mentality.The death of war critic and Bush-bashing former president Gerald Ford has provided even more evidence.

This well-known speech highlights a key aspect of Gerald Ford's legacy: His performance at the end of the Vietnam War. Yet if you read all the pieces lauding Ford, you'll find that this aspect of his Presidency -- his handling of the war's aftermath -- is not very high at all on the list of things that are praised by Washington's wisest commentators.

This speech, for instance, was not mentioned in David Broder's column deifying Ford today. There was no mention of it in George Will's column on Ford, no mention in Robert Novak's column on him, and no mention in the Washington Post's grand and sweeping farewell editorial. In fact, neither Broder's nor Will's column even contained the words "Vietnam" or "Indochina." Nor did Novak or the Post editorial make any mention of Ford's declaration that the Vietnam war was over.

Instead, those worthies spent most of their ink praising Ford for his "civility" or "decency" -- that is, mostly towards themselves and others in Washington, D.C.

This strikes me as exceedingly strange -- and very revealing. Whatever the verdict on Ford's performance in the aftermath of Vietnam, Ford's handling of the end of the war would seem to be one of the aspects of his Presidency that has direct relevance to our current situation.  It clearly bears most directly on the thing that matters to the American people more than any other issue right now -- that is, the Iraq war. After all, at this moment we're all awaiting a speech from another President about another seemingly hopeless quagmire that continues to claim the lives of Americans with no end in sight. While the historical parallels are far from perfect, many of Ford's phrases then have profound resonance in the current debate.

So why do we hear so little praise or discussion of this aspect of Ford's legacy? None of these commentators could spare a single word on it. None of these commentators thought to ask whether that speech on Vietnam, or his handling of the end of the war in general -- rather than his "civility" -- might contain guidelines or lessons that D.C.'s current leadership might learn something from, or even might usefully contemplate in the context of the current quagmire. Instead, they were mainly preoccupied with drawing lessons for the present from how nicely behaved Ford was to them and their class of D.C. insiders.

It's a funny place, DC, inhabited by funny, silly people. It's a place where people who are consistently wrong are held in high esteem, and those who are right are held in contempt. It's a place where the cocktail party pecking order is so important, that Lieberman is creating a new organization in the Senate strictly devoted to having more cocktail parties. It's a place where "popular opinion" is deternined by the spinners at the RNC, rather than by, you know, people.

Update: As often as we've heard about "healing the nation" the past few days, it's obvious that the nation was doing just fine after Nixon's impeachment and resignation. It was the DC elite that needed "healing". It's hard to have a successful cocktail party (literally and metaphorically) if pundits, politicians, lobbyists and the rest of the beltway crowd are mad at each other.