We ve learned President Bush is a hypocrite, so what?

WE’VE RECENTLY LEARNED that President Bush took a loan from a company on whose board of directors he served, even though he now wants to ban such practices. The New York Times headlined the story “Bush Calls for End to Loans of a Type He Once Received.” White House spinners and spokesmen are working furiously to explain why Bush isn’t being hypocritical. “They are an entirely different set of circumstances,” administration spokesman Scott McClellan insisted with a faint whiff of panic.

Meanwhile, Democrats are Christmas-pony happy over Bush’s troubles. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, in his usual razor-sharp monotone, serenely observed: “It puts him (Bush) in a difficult position to criticize others.”

In a town where looking for hypocrisy is easier than looking for sand on a beach, I am consistently amazed how everyone is willing to accept that hypocrisy is always wrong, even though what we admire most in our politicians is hypocrisy. It’s just that when we like the hypocrisy, we call it courage.

Take campaign finance reform. Sen. John McCain is considered one of the bravest politicians in America, at least by elite journalists who often define their jobs as the search for hypocrisy. Why is he a paladin of political courage? Because he dedicated himself to the cause of campaign finance reform. And why did he commit his eternal honor to slaying the dragon of Big Money? Because he took some himself.

McCain was part of the once-infamous Keating Five campaign finance scandal. He didn’t enjoy having his integrity questioned. So, he decided to attack the system. And yet, we don’t fret over McCain’s “hypocrisy” for waging a battle against a system he benefited from.

But McCain’s experience is different, you might say, since he felt his integrity was unfairly besmirched in the Keating scandal. Fair enough. But do I really need to call the roll of Democrats who took — and continue to take — precisely the sort of huge donations from corporations and PACs they want to outlaw?

I must have missed the condemnatory New York Times headline declaring “Democrats Call for End of Contributions of a Type they Once Received.”

As often as not, our political heroes (and villains, depending on where you’re coming from) are hypocrites. As attorney general, Robert Kennedy was more of a threat to civil rights than critics imagine John Ashcroft to be. It was RFK, remember, who bugged Martin Luther King. And yet, when Kennedy became a born-again liberal he became a secular messiah to many liberals.

Choose your poison. Bill Clinton was a huge supporter of feminist causes. Ronald Reagan was a former union boss. Woodrow Wilson was an unreconstructed bigot who championed human rights and democracy. Teddy Roosevelt was a flaming hypocrite who was regularly denounced by the wealthy as a “traitor to his class” for his attacks on the Trusts and other so-called “malefactors of great wealth.” Richard Nixon was supposedly a bigoted and anti-Semitic conservative who hired and relied on Jews, supported Israel and pretty much made affirmative action into the quota system liberals consider sacrosanct.

When you sit back and think about it, we largely define political courage as the willingness to contradict yourself. Richard Nixon’s trip to China, Bill Clinton’s denunciation of Sister Soulja, President Bush’s sop to the steel industry: These overtures were all hailed as bold and brave by those who agreed with them and hypocritical by those who didn’t.

When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, the liberal establishment exploded with charges of hypocrisy. “This blundering intervention,” The New York Times thundered, “is a body blow to the President’s own credibility.”

Calling the pardon “a betrayal of the public trust,” Ted Kennedy asked, “Is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?” This from the man who finagled his way out of a homicide charge. Talk about hypocrisy.

A quarter century later, Ford received the Profiles in Courage award for his pardon decision. The award is supposed to go to politicians who make brave but unpopular decisions. Yet when Ted Kennedy gave him the award, The New York Times applauded, hypocritically.

Indeed, if you wade through the list of award recipients, you’ll find many hypocrites. Among them, former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker received the award in 1992 for forcing an income tax on voters after swearing he wouldn’t. If conservatives gave out the award instead of unreconstructed liberals, we’d have to call it the Profiles in Hypocrisy Award.

Now, I don’t think hypocrisy is good, but it’s not nearly as terrible as we’re taught to believe. If hypocrisy were the most terrible thing in the world, we would demand that overeaters endorse gluttony. So is Bush a hypocrite for wanting to ban a legal and accepted practice he — and thousands of others — benefited from? Of course. But you still need to explain why that’s bad.

As an "issue", Harken is Still Dead

Democrats are leap-in-the-dark desperate -- far more than I'd previously imagined. There they were, swarming the Sunday public affairs shows harping on Harken, a buy-a-pig-in-a-poke, going over the same old ground, hoping to breath this corpse new life.
From the hue-and-cry, the raging frenzy and ferment on CNN, you'd never know this matter's been probed, sifted, panned, winnowed, mined, parsed, analyzed, scrutinized and dissected ad nauseam -- by SEC huntsmen, no less. Every Harken 'scent' had been followed, every Harken 'clue' had been sought, every Harken hole and corner pried into; in the chase for dirt on George W., no stone had been left unturned.
Conclusion? Much to the chagrin of inquisitors, there's no there, there. In fact, Bush's clean as a whistle. Yet no-one's been more closely or rigorously examined..
Then again, the Harken brouhaha has nothing to do with facts, nothing to do with ethics, propriety or minding one's P's and Q's, and everything to do with tearing to pieces/trampling to dust a man whose sterling reputation has defied every filthy attempt to besmirch it by political terrorists unconstrained by decency nor truth.
Bush is a man of honor, honest to a fault, virtuous -- always a cut above the rest, a pillar of the community. No one has produced a shred of evidence suggesting otherwise.
His moral bona fides with the public has Democrats fearing and trembling, his skyhigh polls strike terror in their hearts. Couple this with looming elections and small wonder Democrat blood runs cold these days.
While the media trollops say Democrats have seized a winning issue, portraying them as on the offensive, a tour of the political landscape, post-9/11, tells another story.
Democrats have struggled tooth-and-nail to morph Enron, WorldCom, Tyco et al from business to White House scandals, from shame and disgrace on Wall Street to skullduggery in the Oval Office. Crooked executives like Ken Lay and Bernard Ebbers, operatives like Skilling, Fastow and Kopper became, in a sense, All the President's Men.
Who's responsible for fraud at WorldCom?
Bush!
Who caused Enron's careen into bankruptcy?
Bush!
Who cooked the books at Tyco?
Bush!
Who shredded documents at Arthur Andersen?
Bush!
Who inflated profits at Xerox?
Bush!
Who inflated cable subscriptions at Adelphia?
Bush!
Has it worked?
Judging from the polls, the effort to make Bush the poster child of corporate greed has not only failed, it's backfired..
Accusing the President of being a white collar criminal, no better than Ken Lay or Bernard Ebbers, Democrats foolishly over-played their hand, and firmly positioned their party as being anti-business. This cedes the middle ground to Bush.
It's why, on the economy, Bush is still preferred over Democrats in Congress, who are seen as more interested in scoring partisan points and fixing blame than fixing the problem.
Question: Why hasn't it 'worked'?
Bush's stubbornly impervious popularity has Democrats and the media elite utterly flummoxed.
That his ratings have withstood the brunt of the most uninterrupted, unremitting raking fire his enemies could muster signals some unusual dynamic at work.
Actually, the phenomena is nothing more than the typical 'rallying 'round the flag' effect.
The colossal political capital and credibility Bush amassed for a formidable performance in the 9/11 aftermath essentially insulates him from such partisan attacks. His steady hand, even-temper and unflappable poise amid circumstances which would easily tax the skills of the most experienced leader won him the hearts and minds of many who, pre-9/11, were more or less on the fence. By so personally attacking the President as a drooling halfwit, pre-9/11, Bush's adversaries basically sealed their own fate.
In the eyes of most Americans, Bush's chorus of critics, having lied about him pre-9/11, don't have much credibility today.
In short, the more fire the President draws from his partisan enemies, the more the American people rally behind him, particularly if the attacks are generally perceived as unfair and/or politically motivated.
The principle is doubly true during times of war.
Anyway, that's...
My two cents...
"JohnHuang2"

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As an "issue", Harken is Still Dead

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