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I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Pete Domenici played politics.

Yes, that Pete Domenici - the moderate conservative statesman and benefactor of poor New Mexico - was caught urging the White House to fire U.S. Attorney David Iglesias.

Just kidding, of course. It's no surprise that the senator plays rough. Color me perplexed, though. Why is the senior senator taking heat for this relatively minor use of political muscle, while nobody challenges him on life-and-death issues?

As the president and his men drag our nation down to their level, Domenici, an Albuquerque Republican, is AWOL, and nobody holds him accountable, often not even the local news media.

There's a deeper problem. It's easier to cover politics than government, particularly when the governing transpires back east. Without regular, contextual updates on our federal representatives, we're susceptible to images. Maybe that's why the senator's Iglesias gaffe surprised a friend of mine, a liberal. He thought the senator was above that. Wrong!

Mind you, there's lots to say for Domenici, starting with his yeoman service in bringing home the bacon from that huge wholesale butcher shop called Congress. He's our Robert Byrd of West Virginia, our Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Domenici gets credit for this, but not enough. Federal dollars that subsidize our military-industrial-university complex - Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, the University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech, Holloman Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range - and our health businesses, eventually aerate the economy, crucial in a state that came late to modern capitalism.

Credit Domenici, too, for helping the Russians safeguard their nuclear arms when the Soviet Union disintegrated. In 35 years in office, he's also directed dollars to anti-poverty and arts organizations, and he's currently pressuring the insurance industry to cover mental health.

Simultaneously, however, Domenici dedicates himself to the health and welfare of corporate America and sides with the establishment in the class war. Witness his vote two weeks ago to sustain Big Pharma's price controls on prescriptions for seniors.

Years ago, I figured these brush strokes painted a portrait of a principled, pro-business conservative who deserved respect, if not agreement.

But the portrait has morphed. The fiscal conservative who once bucked Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics" now acquiesces to President Bush's wild spending and wilder borrowing from abroad and from generations unborn.

He's mute as the president conducts a foreign policy as delusional as it is deadly. And when the White House, in pursuit of empire, attacks democracy itself, our senator plays politics as usual. Not so all Republicans.

Look at his Justice Department priorities: No opposition to illegal wiretaps. None to torture. Not even the subversion of habeas corpus has awakened his ire - only Iglesias' failure to indict Democrats before the last election. That's not shocking, it's sad.

Unable to read the senator's mind, I can only surmise he puts loyalty to president and party first. Partisanship, as that's called, is no crime, but I wouldn't confuse it with statesmanship or patriotism.