See No Evil

I’ve been trying to avoid writing about explicitly political topics here, but I can’t pass this one up.

Here’s Washington Post columnist David Broder talking about Al Gore’s recent barn-burner of a speech:

His overall charge is that Bush has systematically broken the laws and bent the Constitution by his actions in the areas of national security and domestic anti-terrorism. He is not the first to make that complaint. My e-mail has included many messages from people who have leaped far ahead of the evidence and concluded that Bush should be impeached and removed from office for actions they deem illegal.

Gore stops well short of that point and contents himself with citing the cases that cause many others concern. The first — and to my mind weakest — instance is the claim that Bush took the nation to war on the basis of false intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But there is no clear evidence as yet that Bush willfully concocted or knowingly distorted the intelligence he received about Saddam Hussein’s military programs. Interpretations of that intelligence varied within the government, but the Clinton administration, of which Gore was an important part, came to the same conclusions that Bush did — and so did other governments in the Western alliance.

It is a reach to attempt to make a crime of a policy misjudgment.

Let’s assume that Broder isn’t blind, stupid, or drunk. Let’s assume he knows as well as everyone in the world that Bush was going to attack Iraq no matter what the evidence showed. Let’s assume he knows that Bush didn’t make what he calls “a policy misjudgment.”

What he should have written was this: Misjudgment was the policy.

To say that Clinton and Gore “came to the same conclusions” about Iraq is beyond stupid. They didn’t launch a war based on their mistaken conclusions. And if they had, Broder and his gang of nabobs would’ve accused Clinton of “wagging the dog” to make the public forget about his personal indiscretions.

Week after week, we learn more about how far the Bush White House and the Republican Congress have gone to break, rewrite, or manipulate the laws of our country and the traditions of our system of governance.

And every time we learn more, the chucklehead editorialists and commentators pretend that this is all some kind of momentary aberration.

Abramoff wasn’t a flaw in the Republicans’ strategy. Abramoff was the strategy.

Republican policies haven’t been undermined by badly written laws. Writing bad laws was the policy.

And Bush didn’t launch a disastrous war in Iraq because he believed the evidence supported the idea that a drained, contained, and restrained country led by a nutjob writing romance novels was a threat to us or anyone else outside its own borders.

They knew he wasn’t.

But they went to war anyway.

It doesn’t matter if that’s an impeachable offense. No one in Washington, in either party, has the balls to impeach him. Republicans will never break ranks, and Democrats know the next one of their kind in the White House will be walking on eggshells anyway. The articles of impeachment will be written before he or she takes the oath of office. It won’t take a blowjob; a run in a stocking or an ill-timed fart will be enough.

The question is this: How do we guarantee that a future president won’t be able to launch another vanity war? How do we guarantee Bush or one of his successors won’t launch nukes if a little voice in his head tells him to do it?

People like David Broder operate under the assumption that this president is honest and sincere and conducting business as usual, willfully ignoring all the evidence that he isn’t, and that our nation is in new, dangerous, and uncharted waters here.

If he wants to do something useful, he can explain to his readers how we got to this point, how we can pull back from it, and how we can ensure we never get here again.

Tags: Tags: Politics