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Copyright © 2002 Express Publishing Inc.
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For the week of January 8 - 14, 2003

Opinion Columns

Political hors d’oeuvres for the year

Commentary by PAT MURPHY


Words from the past that haunt the present.

During last Thursday’s "All Things Considered" program on National Public Radio, Washington reporter Linda Wertheimer aired a 1987 congressional tape from the Iran-Contra hearings into White House secrecy and lying. The tape should humiliate the speaker, but probably won’t.

A young congressman was excoriating President Reagan’s national security adviser for lying and misleading Congress.

"The reason for not misleading the Congress is very practical," he said. "It’s stupid, it’s self-defeating. Because while in fact it allows you to prevail in the problem at the moment, eventually you destroy the president’s credibility."

The target of the dressing down? Navy Adm. John Poindexter, who was convicted of perjury (later reversed on appeal) but now works for President Bush managing the Big Brother "Information Awareness" program to siphon private information from Americans’ Internet messages, bank accounts, credit cards and telephone records, allegedly to fight the war on terrorism.

The congressman who was so exercised by Poindexter’s deceit? Dick Cheney, then a Wyoming congressman, now vice president of the United States and a principal architect of the Bush administration’s sweeping secrecy to keep Congress and the public in the dark and mislead them with undocumented claims.

Cheney obviously is indifferent to whether he’s destroying President Bush’s credibility, and surely indifferent to his flip-flop on the ethics of White House openness.

If North Carolina’s photogenic first term U.S. Sen. John Edwards accomplishes his long-odds quixotic goal of running for president against George W. Bush, count on this:

Bush’s Republican strategists will try to discredit and demonize Edwards because of his career as a trial lawyer.

So, voters would have to decide this: is a trial lawyer in the White House worse than, say, a lifelong oilman like George W. Bush?

If the Republicans have a reputation for being grim, Democrats are capable of fielding buffoons.

Take the Rev. Al Sharpton, who’s announced he, too, will run for president because, he says, the party needs him.

"I'm qualified, probably more qualified than any other person who is expected to be on the Democratic ticket for 2004, because I actually have a following and I speak for the people."

The "following" Sharpton claims is pretty meager. For his momentous announcement, 75 people showed up.

Republicans who remember days of civil discourse in Washington bristle at the use of "liberal" as a political epithet and put-down. Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, of Wyoming, calls it a "crutch" for Republicans who have no other argument.

So, when will Republicans abandon using the American Civil Liberties Union as a convenient whipping boy when trying to belittle liberal politics and politicians?

The tactic could now backfire. Some of the most politically conservative Republicans in the U.S. Senate, including the No. 2 man, Sen. Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, have recruited the ACLU to join in the lawsuit to have the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law ruled unconstitutional.

Goodbye Reagnomics that Republicans have long hailed as their Holy Grail, hello Autonomics.

In his first inaugural address as president in 1981, Ronald Reagan said, "You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?"

According to the Dec. 17 Wall Street Journal, "Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, derides the ‘current fixation’ with budget deficits and labels (them) as ‘nonsense’ … "

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The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.