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WORD COUNT
672
SEPTEMBER 7, 2005
THE WHEELS ARE COMING
OFF – by Donald Kaul
It begins to look as
though the wheels are coming off of President Bush’s little red wagon.
Forget the fact that his approval ratings are lower than Michael
Jackson’s; he’s got real problems:
---His nominee for
the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, crashed and burned on take-off. Her
nomination was withdrawn in the face of criticism bordering on scorn.
It was a curious fate for a woman who once took an aptitude test to see
what job best suited her and the answer came back, “best friend.” It
wasn’t so much that she had enemies as it was that her friends didn’t
like her, not as a Supreme anyway. The only people really enthusiastic
about the nomination were late-night comedians.
---Lewis (Scooter)
Libby, Presidential assistant and chief of staff for Vice-president,
Dick (Sneaky) Cheney, resigned after being indicted on charges of
perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that involved the unmasking
of a covert CIA agent. The President’s chief political adviser, Karl
(Skipper) Rove, stands trembling on the brink of indictment in the same
case.
---Bush ally Tom
(Snapper) DeLay, has been indicted on charges of campaign law violations
and has stepped down as House Majority Leader.
---The leader of the
President’s party in the Senate, Bill (Snoopy) Frist, is being
investigated by the Security and Exchange Commission for possible
violation of the terms of his “blind trust,” in other words, insider
trading.
---The war in Iraq
continues to be the war in Iraq: Two thousand American dead and
counting. Things are so bad that the Pentagon has started to emphasize
“body counts” of the people we kill, a sure sign a war is on the skids
(see Vietnam).
---Gasoline prices
continue to hover near the $3-a-gallon mark, forcing the President to
utter the dreaded word ?conservation.?
How appalling it must
be for Mr. Bush. How disquieting.
How delightful.
Don’t misunderstand
me, I’m a patriotic American and I wish the President every success
(with the possible exception of political). I even have sympathy for
him. How much sympathy?
Just as much as the
Vituperative Right had for Bill Clinton when they impeached him for
lying about an egregious sexual indiscretion. That much.
I think it
marvelously ironic that administration apologists are now complaining
that Special Prosecutor Ernest Fitzgerald is being overzealous in his
pursuit of Rove and Libby. They say he’s trying to convict them of
lying about something that was no big deal.
Really? Where they
were all those months when Special Prosecutor Ken Starr was playing
Inspector Javert to Bill Clinton’s Jean Valjean or when Martha Stewart
got sent up for lying to an FBI agent about a stock deal that didn’t
amount to much? And how about Henry Cisneros the Clinton cabinet member
who’s now in his tenth year of being investigated for a relatively
trivial lie?
I argued against all
those prosecutions but the Holy Right said the foundation of our legal
system depends on the absolute truthfulness of witnesses.
Well, they convinced
me. If Scooter or Skipper or even Sneaky lied or fibbed or misled
federal officials about their roles in outing a CIA agent, I think they
should go to the slammer.
Ms. Miers, it turned
out, was not done in by Democrats fighting for a less conservative
nominee; she was torpedoed by the Hard-core Right because it was afraid
she wouldn’t be conservative enough.
This presents
President Bush with a real dilemma. Does he nominate a saber-toothed
conservative to placate his conservative base and risk a Democratic
filibuster in the Senate that will leave blood all over the floor? Or
does he try and find a compromise candidate mildly acceptable to both
sides?
The Right has
exhibited little talent for compromise and the Democratic leadership,
what there is of it, has promised to bring Senate business to a halt if
it is steamrolled on a nomination.
By the time you read
this, he may already have made his unhappy choice.
Couldn’t happen to a
nicer bunch of guys.
--
Don Kaul is a
two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own
account, is right more than he's wrong. Email:
donald.kaul2@verizon.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul is available
CLICK HERE
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