This really sounds like $200,000 in vandalism to me. Especially read the fourth paragraph and the last paragraph of this story. I think what happened here is that a lot of people took as "fact" something a rumor-monger posted on his Web site. Combine that with Fox news and you've got a real lethal mixture of bullcrap.
Headline: Bush aides mum on reports of White House vandalism
By Anne E. Kornblut, Boston Globe Staff, 1/26/2001
WASHINGTON - First they noticed some letter W keys were missing from White House computers. Then Bush officials said they began finding other peculiarities around the West Wing: a mirror hidden inside a bookshelf, a jacket vanished from where it was supposed to be.
By yesterday, the condition in which the Bush team found the administration buildings had blossomed into the sort of miniature scandale that Washington loves to hate, complete with racy headlines splashed across the Drudge Report and piercing questions at the daily White House briefing.
Was it true that pornographic material had been left on fax machines in the Old Executive Office Building? Was there graffiti scribbled in the halls? Had Tipper Gore really called Lynne Cheney to apologize?
No public evidence exists that Clinton and Gore staff members vandalized the White House or Old Executive Office Building.
In another administration, the queries might have been met with a wink and a pun or encouraged as evidence of a vast conspiracy in the opposite camp.
But in the new Bush administration, the reports are giving aides the perfect chance to advance the president's cause: appearing to ''change the tone'' by saying nothing at all.
Bush aides are not denying the accounts, circulated by anonymous sources and conservative pundits, of pornography, graffiti, and cut telephone wires. Instead, the administration is maintaining a proud silence, part of its ''no complaining, no whining'' approach to governance, said Cheney spokeswoman Juleanna Glover-Weiss.
''We are declining to elaborate,'' she said, when asked about an alleged phone call from the former vice president's wife to the current one, in which Tipper Gore reportedly apologized to Lynne Cheney for acts of vandalism that may or may not have occurred.
''I choose not to describe what acts were done that we found upon arrival, because I think that's part of changing the tone in Washington,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Fleischer continued: ''The question is: Do you have to blame somebody in this town? And bear with us. President Bush is not going to come to Washington for the purpose of blaming somebody in this town. And it's a different way of governing. It's a different way of leading.''
Bush has long presented himself as ''a uniter, not a divider,'' a politician skilled at bringing together political opponents and softening the rhetoric of partisan debate. And he pledged throughout the campaign to restore dignity to the Oval Office, a task he embarked on last week when he instructed staff members to wear appropriate attire - in other words, no blue jeans - into the presidential work space.
In the midst of the honeymoon Bush has enjoyed since his inauguration Saturday, the reports of unusual discoveries, starting with the missing ''W'' keys, at first seemed innocent, even humorous. White House aides readily admitted to their disappearance, and Fleischer voluntarily informed reporters that a flak jacket passed down to him from the previous press secretary, Clinton spokesman Jake Siewert, had disappeared.
The jacket has since been found, and administration officials have downplayed the seriousness of the ''W'' offenses. But the other reports - especially those trumpeted on the Drudge Report, the Web site maintained by Matt Drudge - have created a dilemma for the administration. Aware that any accusations about the past administration might appear to contradict the effort to ''change the tone,'' Bush officials have not even admitted conducting an investigation.
Yet they have created a certain amount of confusion - within the press corps, at least - by declining to offer details. At the same time, the administration is facing questions about its accountability to the public, especially where the cost to taxpayers is concerned. Fleischer refused to estimate how much the damage cost.
Fleischer instead offered a sort of blanket reprieve to his predecessors. ''The president understands that transitions can be times of difficulty and strong emotion,'' he said. ''He's going to approach it in that vein.''
Bush should know. When the victorious President Clinton and his troops seized the White House in 1993, they found the telephones a wreck, computers missing hard drives, and a departing staff that gave them the cold shoulder during the transition. |
