A ‘free ride’ for
Bush-Cheney?
Commentary by Pat Murphy
Republicans are frantically brandishing
their long knives and checkbooks in hopes of booting California Gov. Gray Davis,
a Democrat, out of office. The GOP charges? California’s $38 billion deficit.
What’s going on here? Republicans who’re
willing to oust Gov. Davis for a deficit are also the same Republicans who’re
ecstatic about the debt-and-deficit economics of President Bush, who has drained
the Treasury of the $256 billion surplus he inherited, in addition to spending
the nation into a $455 billion-plus deficit this year and a long term deficit of
trillions of dollars for our great-grandchildren.
Is there something wrong with that
picture?
There’s also the matter of the 16-words in
the State of the Union speech that asserted the Iraqi regime was trying to buy
bomb-rich uranium ore in Nigeria, which now is being disavowed and the faulty
information is being blamed on the CIA.
It shouldn’t have gotten into the speech,
the White House now admits—although, the line was technically correct, Bush
apologists add, because the Brits also made the same assertion. Huh?
Bush White House funny business with words
is the equivalent of the daffy rhetoric of President Clinton when caught lying
about his peccadillo with Monica Lewinsky: "It depends on what the meaning of
the word ‘is’ is," he said to wiggle out of telling the truth.
In Clinton’s case, Republicans in Congress
spent $70 million to investigate Clinton’s pipsqueak Whitewater real estate deal
and then impeach him for lying about Monica.
But there seems to be no rush by
Republicans—or Democrats, for that matter—to hold Bush accountable for driving
the nation deep in debt and taking the nation into war with knowingly false
information. (Shades of President Lyndon Johnson fabricating a 1964 attack on
the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin to hurl the United States full
bore into the Vietnam War.)
It’s probably true what was said by the
GOP’s self-contrived moralist Newt Gingrich, the disgraced former Speaker of the
House and much married repeat adulterer. Bush will get a "free pass" in the
present controversy because, Gingrich believes, Bush is too popular to be called
to explain his deceit.
At stake here is not just the 16 words
that boomeranged. The issue is whether someone—Vice President Dick Cheney,
perhaps—has misused and manipulated U.S. intelligence for political purposes.
Richard Nixon’s use of the FBI and the CIA
in the Watergate burglary and cover-up is precisely what led to his impeachment.
Will Republicans blindly stick with Bush
and Cheney and will most Democrats check with their pollsters to see if it’s
okay to criticize Bush and Cheney and check to see if they have any spine?
There was a time when Republicans rose
above party.
On Aug. 7, 1974, House minority leader
John Rhodes, R-Ariz., along with Sens. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and Hugh Scott,
R-Pa., went to the Oval Office to tell President Nixon that he was finished.
Nixon resigned and was gone two days
later.