Watching the current administration in action is similar to sitting at an intersection watching an impending car crash. You see it coming, you know it's going to happen but there is nothing you can do but watch.
Occasionally someone raises up and says "can't we stop this thing" or "this person should lose their license." Unfortunately it doesn't happen much. In politics that event happened the other day when New York Sen. Hillary Clinton pointed out that the Bush administration will go down as "one of the worst" in U.S. history.
One only has to look at Bush's accomplishments: turning a surplus into a deficit, turning the world against the U.S. (no easy task when after September 11 even the French said we are all Americans), and helped game the electoral system.
However what most people will hear about the speech is that Sen. Clinton said Republican leaders have run the House "like a plantation. " Of course those on the Right were appalled and immediately criticized Clinton, conveniently forgetting that in 1994 former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, shortly before Republicans won a majority in the House, said Democrats "think it's their job to run the plantation" and that "it shocks them that I'm actually willing to lead the slave rebellion."
But hypocrisy is nothing new for those on the right. On Tuesday, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan called Al Gore (winner of the 2000 Presidential election) a hypocrite because Gore said that Bush broke the law by letting the National Security Agency monitor e-mails and phone calls to and from the United States without approval from a special federal court.
McClellan claimed the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, but what he didn't say was that at the searches in 1993 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.
See if McClellan had told the truth, he couldn't have called Gore a hypocrite. And knowing that the press would most likely bury the technical aspects (i.e. facts) of the story, this left him free to lie with little reaction.
All in a day's work for staff of the Worst American President.
1 comment:
I still lie awake at night wondering how Florida 2000 happened. I mean, I know technically how it happened, but still it's amazing that a glitch or two and a cynical Supreme Court ruling installed one of our worst presidents ever, even though he lost.
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