From the GOP heartland.......do I hear cracks in the GOP facade? I think I do.
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Bush flips, Cheney flops and both tell whoppers
O. Ricardo Pimentel
Republic
columnist
Mar. 28, 2004 12:00 AM
The Bush administration is in too deep. Richard Clarke must be destroyed.
Clarke is a 30-year-civil servant, a former counterterrorism honcho in both the Clinton and Bush administrations and a registered Republican in the 2000 election.
He testified on Wednesday before the commission investigating Sept. 11 and has written an insider book that credibly scores the president as soft on terrorism pre-Sept. 11, 2001, and ineffectual in the conduct of the war on terror afterward.
So, Clarke must be smeared. This is because central to Bush's re-election hopes is convincing America that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for Osama bin Laden.
Clarke ties that argument in knots.
"A vote for Kerry is a vote for terrorism" is the Bush re-election slogan. They just don't say it quite that way.
They bring out Dick Cheney to say, "The question that you have to ask a would-be president is what kind of decisions he would make in that capacity about national security. I would say based on 19 years in the U.S. Senate, Senator Kerry's record is one that I think many Americans would have trouble supporting."
Many have now reminded the vice president that he also voted against weapons systems as a House member and that he did some paring as secretary of defense. This puts him in the faint-hearted camp too, right?
Senate votes are fair game but when you lie about what they mean, that's generally called . . . well, lying. Or we can call it rhetoric, as John McCain did recently.
But it is, in any case, negative campaigning, particularly since there are certainly other Kerry votes on broader defense authorization and appropriation bills that could, taken in isolation, be made to paint him as a hawk.
And that's the point McCain was trying to make when he said that, though he disagrees with many Kerry votes, that the Massachusetts senator isn't really weak on defense, i.e., soft on Osama.
Republican presidents and vice presidents, of course, don't indulge in rhetoric and certainly don't lie. They don't even exaggerate. If they err at all, they are merely mistaken.
Let us imagine, however, that we were now in the midst of Bill Clinton's second term and that Sept. 11 happened on his watch. Suppose that Clinton did all that Bush has done, from WMD arguments and Iraq to tax cuts and Medicare "reform," including a prescription drug benefit that, it turns out, will hasten the bankruptcy of Medicare, perhaps by 2019.
We, yours truly included, would unashamedly be calling both Clinton and his VP, Al Gore, liars - or worse.
A Republican would be winning the White House in 2004. That's because Clinton would be going through his second impeachment ordeal.
Yes, Clinton shares much of the blame for Sept. 11. But he's out of office and can't be unelected or otherwise held accountable. Bush can.
First there was Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary. He said Bush focused on invading Iraq soon after taking office and before Sept. 11. Bush, he said, also ignored advice about looming budget deficits.
Then came Clarke, who slammed the president for taking the terrorist threat too lightly, anathema to the argument that Osama wins if Kerry wins.
There was also the case of Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, who was threatened with dismissal if he revealed the true cost of Medicare reform to Congress.
There was Bush asserting, falsely, that his tax cuts heavily benefited the working class.
There was Bush saying our budget surplus proved we needed tax cuts and then that we still needed them despite burgeoning budget deficits. Oh, right. For job creation, though those jobs don't seem to be anywhere in sight.
And Kerry wants to raise taxes by nearly $1 trillion. It seems to matter little that he doesn't and hasn't said he does.
Let's not forget WMDs. They don't exist? OK, whatever argument works for legitimizing, after the fact, a war that had nothing credible to do with fighting terrorism.
This is funny. We have Bush and Cheney lecturing Kerry on flip-flopping and being weak on national security.
Yet together they've flipped and flopped like crickets on a hot skillet, have arguably not made us any safer and told whoppers befitting Baron von Munchausen.
This is the epitome of irony deficiency.
Reach Pimentel at ricardo.pimentel@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8210. His column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.
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