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’ … "