Barack Obama wins. Mitch McConnell is talking nice about the president-elect. And Henry Waxman bounces John Dingell from the chairmanship of the all-powerful House energy and commerce committee.

It's a good time to be a liberal in Washington.

Sure, Clintonites are scoring well in the Obama administration sweepstakes, and the Clinton years are remembered by liberals for the exasperating triangulations of Bill, Hill and their crew. But the combo of Obama's triumph and the far-from-over economic meltdown has provided liberals with their best opening since the days of the Great Society, or even the New Deal. Forget--for the moment, only for the moment, I promise--Hillary Clinton's possible appointment as secretary of state. There's something larger going on and it's truly a fundamental change: the market is dead. It cannot even take care of itself. So how can anyone rely on--or call for--market-driven solutions for the challenges that face the nation: the economy, the health care crisis, and global warming?

I am traveling, so posting will suffer. (Don't ask how I came to be asked to leave a super-swanky Hollywood party celebrating the filming of the 300th episode of ER.) But let me give a quick tip of the hat to Representative Henry Waxman, the hardworking and feisty Democratic chairman of the House oversight and government reform committee.

Regular readers know that I have recently broken news about the extensive corruption that plagues the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. (See here, here, and here.) The issue is an important one. The former Iraqi anticorruption chief Radhi al-Radhi--who was forced out of his job by Maliki--told me that the Maliki government is so corrupt it is functioning at about a 2 to 5 percent level and ought to be scrapped entirely. If Radhi is correct--and a report drafted by officials in the U.S. embassy in Iraq (and classified by the State Department after I wrote about it) backed up this pessimistic view--that would suggest the Bush administration's Iraq policy is fatally flawed. After all, what's the point of sacrificing thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars to create "breathing space"--as George W. Bush put it--for a corrupt and inept government that cannot achieve political reconciliation or provide essential services to its citizens?

Waxman understands that. On October 4, he held a hearing so Radhi could testify. And yesterday, he published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times under the sum-it-up headline: "Is Maliki's corruption worth American lives?" He writes:

Two truths have emerged from Iraq in recent months. First, corruption is so pervasive in Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government that political progress in Iraq may be impossible. Second, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and our embassy in Baghdad are inexplicably neglecting this corrosive threat.

Confronting these facts is difficult. Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have been killed and another 28,000 wounded in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. No one wants to believe that these sacrifices were made to establish and support a regime riddled with fraud and graft. But as President Bush asks for an additional $153 billion for the war, we can't shrink from this reality.

Well, it seems, we are shrinking from this reality. Waxman's hearing sparked some media coverage, but not a lot. And since then, the matter has not received much attention--neither from the press nor Waxman's colleagues on Capitol Hill. He ends his article:

The Maliki government is our ally in Iraq, so I understand why [Rice] and President Bush find the mounting evidence of fraud and graft inconvenient. But the moral, political and practical implications of this corruption cannot responsibly be ignored.

Military success in Iraq isn't an end unto itself: It is a bridge to the ultimate goal of a lasting peace. If the Maliki government is too corrupt to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq -- and political reconciliation is an illusion -- can we in good conscience continue to ask our troops to risk their lives and our taxpayers to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in this war?

That is a question the Bush White House has no interest in answering.