All is proceeding according to the master plan at the White House – cut off the criticism of the President quickly by sending out a sacrificial lamb. I think that most of us expected that it would happen. What will be the next step in the plan? I’m not sure. I doubt that we will see the President ask CIA director Tenet to step down – as media pundit Joe Conason said,
I have my doubts as to whether Tenet is really to blame. But he has played the good soldier and done little to defend himself or his agency on this issue. Yet somehow I doubt he will be fired — and kicked out into the cold where he might tell the whole truth.
Howard Kurtz, in his Media Notes column, brings up the Bush double standard that I’ve been constantly complaining about for some time:
How, critics wonder, can the commander-in-chief be so cavalier about this bogus bit of intelligence (which the press already knew about but which the White House had previously greeted with silence)? What if Clinton had done this? Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage?
He then quotes Al Hunt in the Wall Street Journal:
If Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying about sex, or Al Gore discredited for exaggerating his relationship with James Lee Witt, then lying about the reasons for going to war — whether it was the president or one of his subordinates — ought to command an inquiry from the people’s representatives.
Following that, a somewhat amusing metaphor from Richard Cohen, equating the Bush backtracking with the rash of corporate “restatements”:
The president recently restated some of the reasons for invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program, which Bush told the world was being ‘reconstituted,’ may in fact not exist. The White House the other day restated its earlier insistence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. It turned out that the supporting documents had been forged. The White House admitted that in a press release left behind after Bush had departed for Africa.
Similarly, the accusation that Iraq was buying high-strength aluminum tubes, which Bush said were ‘used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons,’ has to be restated. The tubes appear to have been bought for another purpose entirely and may not be high-strength after all.
As for the charge that Iraq was bristling with other weapons of mass destruction, none have yet been found, raising the distinct possibility that — in an upcoming quarter — this too will be restated and the Bush administration will take a one-time charge against future credibility. . . .
Almost everything has been restated. During the campaign, Bush said he would not go in for peacekeeping operations abroad. He appears ready to do so in Liberia. He also said he would not get engaged, as did the previous CEO, Bill Clinton, in the nitty-gritty of Middle East peace negotiation. The administration is now choosing intersections in Gaza for traffic lights.
