New President, New Lie
by Paul Vitello
January 31, 2004, 7:17 PM EST
Who can forget the virtual earthquake in Washington -- the culture war, the shaking of our civil foundations, the End Time raptures of Pat Robertson and Tom DeLay -- over the Monica Lewinsky lie?
Even from way out here on the edge of the republic, you could feel official Washington tremble and sway as it learned that President Bill C*****n had had an affair with that woman -- and that he had lied about it.
The capital fell into chaos, you remember. Through 1998 and most of 1999 (two years during which Osama bin Laden was laying plans for us, as it turned out) the work of the Congress and the president stopped dead while a Republican posse demanded C*****n's job.
They did so, they said, not just because he had committed adultery but because he had lied about it to the people and because presidential lying represented a kind of cancer that threatened the moral health of the nation. The idea was that if a president lied, everything might start to unravel in concentric circles of Evil. They invoked Biblical absolutes and near-absolutes such as the sanctity of truth, the rule of law, the responsibilities of power.
DeLay, then-House Republican whip, said that unless President C*****n was impeached for lying, somewhere someday a mother would "lose custody of her baby in court because a father lies," and professors would sell good grades for cash, and brave men would die due to lies in the military, and businesses would collapse from "a cancer" of lying throughout the land. You can look this up in the congressional record. DeLay may even have had a point.
But I bring this up not to remind you of that sad episode in the country's moral life, and in the marriage of the C*****ns. I mention it only to ask -- honestly, because I am as curious as any other increasingly anti-war American with grave doubts about the truthfulness of my government in its pursuit of foreign (and domestic) policies -- why there was no earthquake in Washington this week when it emerged that President George W. Bush may have launched an entire war on the basis of a lie?
There was no earthquake, no Bible thumping, no Pat Robertson or Tom DeLay. There were some high-end campaign speeches by the Democrats. The president went to New Hampshire not to campaign for president. (That's what he said.) And that is the up-to-the-minute report on the state of the national moral umbrage.
But if a Lewinsky lie was big enough to paralyze the government for two years, what is the proper response to a possible lie that costs more than 500 American soldiers and untold thousands of Iraqis their lives?
This week, the chief U.S. weapons inspector resigned his commission and said that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq; and that if there ever were, they were probably long gone by the time Bush launched the invasion last year to make the world safe from Saddam Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction.
David Kay was very diplomatic with his words. He lay blame at the door of U.S. intelligence agencies, who he said owed President George W. Bush an apology and not the other way around.
But I am not a former government employee. I don't expect ever to be sent on a mission by this president (unless to be "questioned" by authorities in torture-loving Syria). So here is the scoop on who owes whom an apology, according to the dozens of news stories I have seen while Kay was in the desert.
The Washington Post, Newsday and other newspapers have described how pressured some intelligence agencies felt to supply the White House with evidence to support its case for a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein. They reported on numerous visits to CIA headquarters, during the months before the war, by Vice President Dick Cheney. They have described tensions between the State Department and the Defense Department over the meaning of ambiguous intelligence information about Iraq's weapons programs.
They describe the "politicization" of intelligence. They have described one harrowing case of apparent retribution against a high-ranking intelligence official who failed to toe the line.
If the president and vice president maintain that they were not sexing up the case against Iraq to justify a war that most Americans never wanted, so be it. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says launching the war was a top priority for them from the beginning of the Bush presidency in early 2001.
What to make of this, then, in the context of the culture war, which was the subtext of the 1999 impeachment and of Bush's 2000 promise to "restore integrity" to the White House?
Maybe you remember the almost bizarre bill of particulars brought against C*****n in the House articles of impeachment. One article charged him with perjury because he had said he had "occasional" conversations with Lewinsky when, according to phone records, he'd had exactly 17 such conversations.
If that was perjury -- and maybe it was -- what do you call it when the president stands before his nation, holding ambiguous and unproven information, and warns the people that "final proof" of the existence of these disputed weapons possessed by Hussein "could come in the form of a mushroom cloud?"
Is that perjury, too? Or is that just someone used to getting his way, regardless of the facts?
In either case, DeLay was right. Let there be one lying president, and before you know it like cancer, there is another, worser.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
Jestah
posted 02-01-2004 19:43
