|
Where's the Outrage? During
the eight seemingly interminable years of the Clinton
administration, Bill Clinton perfected a method of damage control for
those ever-so-frequent times when he was caught, or about to be caught,
in yet another lie. There
were three basic components to this method, each used when appropriate
to the problem at hand:
1.
Release the
damaging information, often only in part, before the accuser does so
that when the accuser releases it, you can claim it’s “old news”
and that we should all “move on.”
2.
Attack the
character of the accuser so as to cast doubt on his veracity.
For example, if you know it’s about to be revealed that
you’ve been carrying on with an intern, put out the story that said
intern was a “stalker.”
3.
Change the
subject to the seeming successes of your policies, such as a booming
economy. George
W. Bush apparently borrowed Clinton’s white horse, which
Clinton
rode into Washington
promising “the most ethical
administration in history,” as Bush promised to return honor and
integrity to the White House after eight years of corruption and
scandal. It also appears
that, like Clinton, he changed horses in
mid-Potomac and opted instead for the black horse of smears and evasions
when caught in a lie. We
need look no further than this past week to see a perfect set of
examples of this warmed-over Clinton
m.
o., as Bush’s already fraying case for war on Iraq
started coming apart at the
seams. First,
there’s the early release of damaging information.
On Thursday, Secretary of State Colin
Powell acknowledged that he had seen no “smoking gun, concrete
evidence” of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, despite his
presentation before the United Nations last year in which he alleged
such links existed and despite repeated administration attempts to
imply, if not actually to allege, such links.
The next day National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice admitted that the administration doesn’t “have any
indications that I would consider credible and firm that” Saddam
Hussein shipped his alleged stockpiles of WMDs to As
it happens, the same day that the New York Times published the story about the recall of the weapons
hunters, the Washington Post ran
a lengthy piece entitled “Iraq’s
Arsenal Was Only on Paper.” In
this well-sourced article, the Post’s
Barton Gellman, via recent interviews with Iraqi scientists and others
in the know, demolishes practically every administration claim about Iraq’s weapons programs.
Gellman shows that almost all of Iraq’s weapons programs were
destroyed after the Gulf War and that those that remained intact were
destroyed by 1995. All
Saddam had left were a few scientists with some relatively sketchy notes
on the prior programs and no way, given existing prohibitions on
importing equipment and technology, to obtain the materials and know-how
to reconstitute the programs. It
would have taken years for the weapons programs to return to their
pre-1991 condition, which even then wouldn’t have been much of a
threat. This story doesn’t
seem to have made too many waves throughout the rest of the media,
perhaps due in part to the administration’s having largely given up
trying to prove its bogus claims, including by recalling weapons
searchers, in favor of pretending that the ouster of Saddam is enough to
justify the war, regardless of what they contended beforehand. Parts
(2) and (3) of the Clinton-Bush damage control m.
o. were in full flower following former Secretary of the Treasury Paul
O’Neill’s bombshell revelation that the administration began
planning for an attack on Iraq almost from day one, over seven months
before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
If O’Neill’s allegations are true—and he appears to have
the documentation to back them up—then every single thing the
administration has told us about taking on Iraq turns out to have been
based on the big lie that it was a response to 9/11. Has
the administration denied O’Neill’s charges?
No, and how could they? He
has the documents to prove them. Instead,
they first tried the character assassination approach.
One “senior administration official” told CBS News:
“O’Neill had enough problems in his
area of expertise. Why
should anyone believe he has a credible understanding of foreign
policy?” In other words,
the guy was a failure as Treasury Secretary (because he didn’t always
go along with the president), so you can’t trust him when it comes to
foreign policy, either. This
conveniently ignores the fact that, as Treasury Secretary, O’Neill was
a permanent member of the National Security Council and thus was in
attendance at the meetings where ousting Saddam was discussed and,
furthermore, has transcripts of those meetings. Having
exhausted the character assassination route, the administration then
decided to change the subject. When
asked about O’Neill’s allegations, White House spokesman Scott
McClellan (who must have sent his conscience to With
all of the lies that have been exposed just this past week, not to
mention all the others that have been exposed in the months since Dubya
declared the mission accomplished, one can only wonder, as Bob Dole did
repeatedly in his 1996 presidential campaign:
Where’s the outrage? Dole,
of course, was referring to the public’s complacency over Clinton’s repeated lies and his
underhanded damage control methods.
While Clinton certainly told his share of whoppers as regards
truly significant issues—accepting campaign contributions from foreign
sources, providing dangerous technological know-how to the Chinese
communists, lobbing missiles into medicine factories—just as often, it
seems, he was telling them to cover up for stupid personal scandals like
Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, and various other women.
It is, therefore, understandable that the public thought that all
he did to bring impeachment on himself was to lie about sex with an
intern. There were, however,
a whole host of good reasons that Clinton
deserved impeachment, the
Lewinsky affair probably being the least among them.
Nevertheless, most, if not all, of Clinton’s lies did not cost
thousands of foreigners and hundreds of Americans their lives. Now that Bush has established himself as not only a liar but also a damage controller on par with Clinton, it is about time someone asked, “Where’s the outrage?” Bush’s lies have cost the lives of thousands of foreigners and hundreds of Americans, destroyed the infrastructure of an entire country, upended the lives of thousands more within that country and among the U. S. military, and bogged our country down in an occupation that threatens to last for decades and cost many more lives and many more billions of dollars. If Clinton’s lies, which were far less detrimental and harmed far fewer people than Bush’s, were cause for impeachment—and I believe they were—then how much more does Bush deserve not only to be impeached but also to be the first president in history to be convicted and thrown out of office by the Senate? Unfortunately, given the sorry state of our ruling class and the fact that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, we’re more likely to see Britney Spears reconcile with her two-minute husband than we are to see justice done in Washington, D.C. What’s even sadder is that more Americans would tune in to CNN to see the former than would tune in to see the latter.
Michael
Tennant is a software developer in
|
