Wow — read this amazing statement from Senator Daschle. He rips into the Bush administration on just about every front that we’re concerned about, from the politics of personal destruction to evading investigations.
Bravo for Tom. And now, we wait for him to be the next high profile target of the right-wing attack machinery.
I’m posting big chunks of it, so it’s in the extended entry.
The retaliation from those around the President has been fierce. Mr. Clarke’s personal motives have been questioned and his honesty challenged. He has even been accused, right here on the Senate floor, of perjury. Not one shred of proof was given, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to have the perjury accusation on television and in the newspapers. The point was to damage Mr. Clarke in any way possible.
This is wrong?and it’s not the first time it’s happened.
When Senator McCain ran for President, the Bush campaign smeared him and his family with vicious, false attacks. When Max Cleland ran for reelection to this Senate, his patriotism was attacked. He was accused of not caring about protecting our nation — a man who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, accused of being indifferent to America’s national security. That was such an ugly lie, it’s still hard to fathom almost two years later.
There are some things that simply ought not be done ? even in politics. Too many people around the President seem not to understand that, and that line has been crossed. When Ambassador Joe Wilson told the truth about the Administration’s misleading claims about Iraq, Niger, and uranium, the people around the President didn’t respond with facts. Instead, they publicly disclosed that Ambassador Wilson’s wife was a deep-cover CIA agent. In doing so, they undermined America’s national security and put politics first. They also may well have put the lives of Ambassador Wilson’s wife, and her sources, in danger.
When former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed that the White House was thinking about an Iraq War in its first weeks in office, his former colleagues in the Bush Administration ridiculed him from morning to night, and even subjected him to a fruitless federal investigation.
When Larry Lindsay, one of President Bush’s former top economic advisors, and General Eric Shinseki, the former Army Chief of Staff, spoke honestly about the amount of money and the number of troops the war would demand, they learned the hard way that the White House doesn’t tolerate candor.
This is not “politics as usual.” In nearly all of these cases, it’s not Democrats who are being attacked.
Senator McCain and Secretary O’Neill are prominent Republicans, and Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay, Joe Wilson, and Eric Shinseki all worked for Republican Administrations.
The common denominator is that these government officials said things the White House didn’t want said.
The response from those around the President was retribution and character assassination — a 21st Century twist to the strategy of “shooting the messenger.”
If it takes intimidation to keep inconvenient facts from the American people, the people around the President don’t hesitate. Richard Foster, the chief actuary for Medicare, found that out. He was told he’d be fired if he told the truth about the cost of the Administration’s prescription drug plan.
This is no way to run a government.
He goes on to describe the ways the White House is using the power of government to intimidate dissenters; the way the White House will declassify information that bolsters its case; and the way the White House calls for investigations:
In recent days leading congressional Republicans are now calling for an investigation into Mr. Clarke. As I mentioned earlier, Secretary O’Neill was also subjected to an investigation. Clarke and O’Neill sought legal and classification review of any information in their books before they were published.
Nonetheless, our colleagues tell us these two should be investigated, at the same time there has been no Senate investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity as a deep cover CIA agent; no thorough investigation into whether leading Administration officials misrepresented the intelligence regarding threats posed by Iraq; no Senate hearings into the threat the chief Medicare Actuary faced for trying to do his job; and no Senate investigation into the reports of continued overcharging by Halliburton for its work in Iraq.
