Suddenly we find pundits huddling over the troublesome proposition that George W. Bush is beginning to look a bit shifty. Because of his recent redefinition of what it takes to fire a duplicitous, security-breaching aide, the possibility now looms, warns this insightful crowd, that Bush may not, after all, be the straight-talkin’ Texan who lays it on the line -- no fudging, no parsing, no changing political lanes for expediency’s sake.
Pardon me, but where have the folks at Pundit Central been for the last five years?
Have White House watchers really forgotten how Bush shifted his 2001 rationale for massive tax cuts? First he said they were needed because the economy was doing so well, and then they were needed because, well, it wasn’t. Now there’s some straight-talkin’ for ya.
Have they forgotten the lane changing from campaign trail to Oval Office on environmental policy? On tariffs? On nation building? On education spending? And the careful parsing involved in all of it?
And how could the pundits have forgotten that Bush opposed a department of homeland security and then conned the public into thinking it was all his idea? That was a good trick. The same happened with respect to the 9/11 Commission: Bush was both for and against. And, the same with campaign finance reform.
These weren’t secrets, ladies and gentlemen of PunditLand. They were all supreme acts of shiftiness for you to take note of.
There have been Bush’s unconscionably contradictory positions on the hunting of Osama bin Laden. When it was politically expedient for Bush to say, “The most important thing is for us to find [him],” he said it; and when it was more expedient to say, “I don’t know where he is. I have no idea and I really don’t care,” he said that too.
And have the pundits actually forgotten the constantly changing rationales for the Iraq war? In a stunning disarray of shiftiness we heard WMD, regime change, humanitarianism, threats to national security, Saddam was one bad dude, Iraqi democracy, fuzzy 9/11 links, Middle East democracy, the U.N.’s weakness, Iraq’s centrality in the front against terrorism….
Undoubtedly I left some out. It’s just that George shifted lanes so often, who could keep up?
Yet now, all this fuss over the president’s shifting standard for the level of malfeasance he’ll tolerate. Just being involved in unethical practices was once the publicly avowed standard, but anyone capable of drawing breath knew that was an impossibly high one for this White House. There’d soon be no one left to mind the store.
So by and by came the “committed a crime” standard. Next will come the “has been indicted” standard, then “has been convicted” standard, followed by the “anyone presently serving time” standard, then “anyone denied parole” standard, possibly ending with the “anyone who would have failed to pass an FBI background check on the fourth day of the fifth week prior to my father’s administration” standard -- George’s personal standard.
Meanwhile, in the “Was that really news?” department, administration officials announced Monday and again yesterday that the president’s Supreme Court nomination process was “moving far faster than they expected.” No kidding. Bush would have named the White House doorman to shove the broadening Rove story off the front page.
But here’s a final thought I’d like to leave with pundits and their press corps colleagues before they move on to Bush’s “mainstream” judicial pick of John Roberts, something else he’ll parse. Rather than asking the president what his ever forward-shifting standard for pink-slipping hooligans is, why not ask what he knew about the security breach and Rove’s strategy to cover up the White House’s involvement and subsequent perjurious acts and when did he know it?
Then we can start tracking the differing takes from straight-talkin’ George on those, too.
Recent Comments