Column: Is President Bush Asking to Be Treated Differently than Others?
No doubt the plea was heartfelt. If I had to explain why my presidential boss hadn't insisted on greater superspook-agency cooperation in the midst of credible piecemeal warnings about a rabidly hostile and lunatic squad; or why my boss had instructed intelligence agencies to"back off" investigating the bin Laden clan; or why he dismissed Israeli intelligence warnings in August about bin Laden's planning of a"major assault on the United States" involving a"large-scale target," my plea would be heartfelt, too. Very heartfelt.
The immediate problem, Mr. Fleischer, is which standard of fairness should we use? The traditional one that calls for self-honesty and somber impartiality? Or the more innovative standard established around, oh, 1993, that calls for impartiality regarding one's internal doings, but laying waste to a presidency with an utter lack of fair-mindedness or damning evidence of wrongdoing? As we all struggle to live up to that other now-trite standard--that of"leveling the playing field"--let us opt for the conservative version. That is, after all, only fair, so I'm sure Ari and W. and their like-minded Congressional compadres won't mind.
The conservative version was an easy one to satisfy in the 1990s. Through a phalanx of investigative congressional committees, it dug into questions not only about what President Clinton did know, but what he should have known.
For example, you may recall that when Clinton's former national security advisor, Anthony Lake, was up for Senate confirmation to the top CIA post, there were lots of questions floating around about why he was never told by the FBI that China was randy to influence U.S. congressional elections. Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Lake freely admitted that"on a matter of extraordinary importance such as that, I should have been informed and the president should have been informed." Yet the committee's chairman, the slooow-taaalkin' Alabama conservative, Richard Shelby, sat indignantly perplexed:"Wouldn't that have been something that the president [and] you should have known?"
When asked on NBC's Today show about the current presidential predicament, the senator speculated that had information"been acted upon properly we may have had a different situation on Sept. 11." But just to be fair he added,"We don't know that." We have all been quite impressed by Shelby's penetrating mind and vigorous efforts to secure freedom throughout the land, but to date, his only act of authentic public service remains in leaving the Democratic Party. Well done, Dick.
Before that there was Republican Representative Bill Zeliff. More than two years after the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, he and fellow House conservative Bill McCollum of Florida staged yet another investigation into the affair. Zeliff wanted to know which executive-branch high-muckety-mucks knew what and when--and he wasn't buying Janet Reno's story that hers was the ultimate say in the decisions made. Flashing a bit of epistemological elan, he said,"I would think the president would have known what was going on while it was going on." That he really meant to say,"should" have known what was going on while it was going on, became nakedly evident in his following statement:"My guess is that if I were president, it would be on my to-do list." What likely will never be known is whether the Republican presidential habit of napping on the job would interfere with President Zeliff's execution of his"to-do list."
For eight grueling years, our preceding president never caught a fair-minded break; not on Whitewater, not on the travel office"scandal," not on campaign fundraising tactics; and heaven knows, not on the whole sorry mess that was Monica. Conservative suspicions were always acted on, each baseless allegation was always followed by another baseless allegation, and the party-wide idea of fairness always seemed to comport with what Tom DeLay's staffers once gleefully celebrated in an e-mail exchange:"This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS....You kick him until he passes out--then beat him over the head with a baseball bat." Yeomanly Christian love and understanding.
It so happens that some of us non-Christians don't feel hypocritical compunctions (which I doubt DeLay's Christian lackeys do either) about squaring professed brotherly love with beating someone over the head with a figurative baseball bat. Yea, verily, we say swing away. Only, that is, because they have swung unto us--relentlessly and without a shred of decency, even for politics.
Present questions aren't merely about what W. should have known, as was Clinton's repeated crime, but what he did know and did virtually nothing about. Some might conclude that evidence of what was coming was too scanty and disjointed for W. to have done much of anything. Yet in accord with recent habits of conservative politics, that simply doesn't wash.
One can imagine the blistering conservative outrage, the foaming right-wing oral cavities, the high Falwellian cynicism and sarcasm to erupt were Bill Clinton or Al Gore in the White House possessing identical intelligence information in the summer before 9/11. Impeachment demands for the misdemeanor of phantasmal stupidity would flourish. Presidential initiatives would be halted cold in their tracks--and permanently. For the remainder of his term, a Clinton or Gore would experience imposed paralyzation, plagued eight days a week by ever-mounting Republican investigations. Conservatives would bust a gut in the comfortable knowledge that this wasn't about some vague"shoulda known," but what the president indeed knew and sat on.
Turnabout is but fair. Grab a Louisville Slugger.