GOP's Double Standard On Presidential Lies
by Derrick Z. Jackson
Published on Friday, July 18, 2003 by the Boston Globe
AMERICAN SOLDIERS continue to die in Iraq, and the Republicans do not want us to know why. In a 51-45 vote, the Republican-led Senate this week rejected a proposal for an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the claims Bush used to justify his invasion of Iraq. The senator who made the proposal, Democrat Jon Corzine of New Jersey, said, ''Each day, we have failed to have an accounting ... of what really happened.''
In the latest Pentagon count, 224 US soldiers have died in combat or accidents in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Soldiers are dying at a rate of one a day 77 days after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations. The number of soldiers who died in noncombat accidents after the invasion has surpassed the number prior to it.
As the dying goes on, Bush has yet to prove the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He now admits to using bad intelligence in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.
Yet Ted Stevens of Alaska, the Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: ''I'm tired of making a mountain out of a molehill. This is not Watergate. It's not even truthgate.... This is an attempt to smear the president of the United States.''
His complaint was but another in a round of Republican efforts to resist a full inquiry and keep the stench rising from Bush's empty claims behind the closed doors of congressional intelligence and armed services committees. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in June, ''I found, at least in the information that I have as chairman, no evidence of manipulation.'' He blasted a formal investigation as being ''a pejorative that there's something dreadfully wrong.''
Five years ago the Republicans found President Clinton's lying about sex to be so dreadfully wrong that they voted to impeach him in the House. Clinton survived, but not before the Republicans hurled all kinds of pejoratives at Clinton's perjuries.
Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida said: ''Lying under oath is an ancient crime of great weight because it shields other offenses, because it blocks the light of truth in human affairs. It is a dagger in the heart of our legal system and indeed in our democracy. It cannot, it should not, it must not be tolerated.... All that stands between any of us and tyranny is law.''
Representative Sam Johnson of Texas said Clinton's actions ''have made a mockery of the people who fought for this country and are fighting for this nation today.'' Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said: ''If the president calculatedly and repeatedly violates his oath, if the president breaks the covenant of trust he has made with the American people, he can no longer be trusted. And because the executive plays so large a role in representing the country to the world, America can no longer be trusted.''
Now it is a Republican president who increasingly appears to have lied to the American people to justify a war. There is hardly a peep out of Republicans over whether Bush has broken the covenant of trust he made with Americans and made a mockery out of the men and women who are dying in Iraq. Troops and even some officers in the field are openly grumbling that they no longer know why they are there.
Meanwhile Bush's claims continue to crumble. A Washington Post story this week reported that United Nations weapons inspectors found nothing to back up Bush's claims last October that Saddam Hussein had a revamped nuclear arms program. Yet on March 16, just three days before the war, Vice President Dick Cheney declared about Saddam, ''We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.''
To be clear, Clinton indeed did a lot of bad things in his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. I wrote before the impeachment that he should resign. The Democrats were wrong to downplay Clinton's sins in the Lewinsky scandal. Any other CEO in the country would have been canned had he or she been found to have used their office to have sex with a decisively powerless intern.
But it is a far more grave matter if we discover that a president's claims in effect claimed the lives of 224 American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians. Five years ago Henry Hyde said, ''The president is the trustee of the nation's conscience.'' It is time to lay bare the conscience of the White House with full public hearings. The way his claims are crumbling, hearings may be the only thing that will stop Bush from plunging his dagger of deceit right through the heart of our democracy and the hearts of our soldiers.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
commondreams.org |
