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For the week of July 16 - 22, 2003

Opinion Columns

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.

 

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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.