Rep. Terry Everett, 69, is as good a good ol’ boy that Alabama Republicans could send to Congress.

With his jowly drawl and courteous wit, I visualized him in a blue seersucker suit and straw hat while we talked on the telephone last Thursday.

Everett is so old-fashioned, he thought winning a seat in Congress was a step up from newspapers, where he started out as a reporter and ended up making a fortune as a publisher.

Everett arrived in Washington in 1993, when Newt Gingrich was giving new meaning to the word “partisan” in his hounding of Democratic Speaker Jim Wright.

That era seemed almost quaint last week, with the House’s armchair generals so busy playing at war that they lost sight of the big one, in which Baghdad is just one arena for a global movement of fundamentalist Muslims to wipe us out.

Everett said that the Intelligence Oversight Subcommittee he sits on is a model of bipartisanship, due to the harmonious leadership of “Mac and Bud” (that would be chairman William M. “Mac” Thornberry, of Texas, and fellow Alabama Democrat Robert E. “Bud” Cramer.

But the full committee is another world entirely, with ranking member Jane Harman, D-Calif., and Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., carrying on a running gun battle over the lack of NSA hearings and other intelligence issues.

“There’s no question that there have been questions raised in the Intelligence Committee that have been of a partisan nature,” Everett said, implying that Democrats were responsible.

That’s exactly what a distinguished group of intelligence professionals concluded last week.

“Congressional oversight of intelligence is broken,” said a report issued at a forum sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a think tank that has broken from the timid national security stances of its liberal forebearers.

Party warfare, the analysts concluded, has shattered a bipartisan consensus on intelligence that had been slowly nurtured during the previous 20 years.

In the 1990s, Republican members and staff of the House and Senate Intelligence committees began launching investigations against the Democratic administration that had little to do with oversight, the report said. That, in turn, left the spy agencies gun shy about being candid with Congress about their failings. Amid such partisan warfare, the professional staff had less time to concentrate on longer-term structural and performance issues.

“Beyond the numerous investigations, both Intelligence committees became increasingly caught up in the minutia of the annual Intelligence Authorization bill — to the detriment of effective oversight,” the report says.

“The reason: partisan focus on tiny aspects of the authorization process for political gain left the larger issues of oversight unaddressed, indicating the growing partisanship in both congressional committees.

“Several former staffers and analysts commented that, in the late 1990s and into this decade, the intelligence authorization process has been marked, in the words of one former staffer, by “an increasing trend toward micromanagement.”

The report cites a former House staffer for an example: “Rather than a review of all platforms in our overhead [satellite] intelligence, you have staffers up there looking at and legislating on one small gadget on one limited platform of one service’s overhead intelligence program.”

Another factor: Most members dragooned into serving on one of the Intelligence committees could care less about their duties. Why? Because there’s no bacon to bring home and brag about.

“Because Intelligence Committee members are unable to advertise the details of their service, they have less incentive to take the time to work through the complexity,” the report says.

That’s a fancy way of saying they don’t know jack about what the spy agencies are up to — or against.

Example: I asked Everett a question I often pose to people responsible for protecting Americans from Islamic terrorism. Do you know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites?

Sounds like a gotcha question, but it shouldn’t be for a member of a committee responsible for making sure U.S. intelligence gets what it needs — including criticism and guidance — in its war against people who are trying to wipe us out.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., handled the question with ease. Others, like Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., who is in charge of intelligence oversight, came up empty.

“Do I know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” Everett said with a low chuckle.

He thought for a moment.

“One’s in one location,” he finally joked, “another’s in another location.

“No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. . . . I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”

That was a sliver of it, I said. Like the good newspaperman he was, he asked me to explain the difference, so I just did the basics, how the Islamic world split into two camps in 640 A.D. over who would succeed Mohammed, how they’ve been at war with each other and the West — remember the Crusades? — for about 1,500 years. Iran has been the Shiite capital since the 1979 Islamic revolution, while Saudi Arabia is home to Mecca, home of the Sunnis’ most hallowed shrines. It was Osama bin Laden’s rage against the Saudi royal family for “defiling” Islam by allowing U.S. troops a base in the kingdom during the first Gulf War that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“I don’t understand why I didn’t know that,” Everett said.

Sounding somber, he added: “Now that you’ve explained it to me, what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

Indeed.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.