Everyone's talking about...

...George Packer's piece in the New Yorker this week, "The Empty Chamber," about the dysfunctional United States Senate. Packer (above) points to incessant fund-raising demands, ideologues on both sides of the aisle and the modern media circus as three of the villains responsible for the current atmosphere.

But what I would like to know is, what happened to all the grown-ups in the Republican Party? They are all either strangely silent, like Richard Lugar, Pat Roberts, George Voinovich, Lamar Alexander and Bob Bennett, or they've caved in to the extreme right, like John McCain, Chuck Grassley, Kit Bond, Judd Gregg and Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Hutchison and McCain felt they had no other choice but to tack right this year in order to win their respective primaries. Hutchison lost anyway, to tea partier Rick Perry, in the Texas gubernatorial race. And while McCain enjoys a 20-point lead in the polls over his tea party challenger, J. D. Hayworth, the 2008 GOP standard-bearer has pretty much sold his soul in the process. It's hard to imagine taking McCain seriously in what will surely be his last six years in the Senate. Was it really worth it, you two?

As for Voinovich, Bennett, Bond and Gregg, they are all retiring at the end of this year. (Bennett was defeated by no fewer than two tea party candidates in his primary.) So what are they waiting for? Why don't they speak out? Isn't there one statesman in the bunch?

As Paul Simon once sang about a hero from an earlier generation, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns it's lonely eyes to you..."