Posted on 09/30/2003 3:51:13 PM PDT by NYC Republican
They begin, invariably, without much fanfare. The Paula Jones saga began with a story in a London newspaper about Bill Clinton’s “sexual peccadilloes” written off by the American media for weeks as typical Fleet Street scandal mongering. Iran-Contra, the tangled affair that bedeviled the last two years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, started with the otherwise unremarkable crash of a small plane over Nicaragua that turned out to be an illegal CIA gunrunning operation. For President Richard Nixon, of course, it all began with a “a two-bit burglary” at a hotel called The Watergate. FOR THREE YEARS now, the Bush administration has avoided the kind of roiling scandal that has hampered, to one degree or another, every president since Watergate forced Richard Nixon to resign in 1974. In spite of Herculean efforts by Bush’s enemies, the dirt so far has not stuck — at least not in a way that shows up as a significant factor in national opinion polls. The accusations began at the beginning — that the administration stole the 2000 election — and continued into every facet of its activities: that it is in bed with Enron and other energy companies; that it bungled evidence that might have forestalled the 9/11 attack; that it twisted and even invented evidence with regard to Iraq’s banned weapons program. Try as Democrats may, none of this has proven particularly good politics. As pollsters Republican or Democrat will tell you, the president’s current sagging job ratings have more to do with stubbornly high jobless figures and a poorly planned post-war situation in Iraq, than any widespread public impression that his administration is corrupt, deceptive or incompetent. “The character issue is what got Bush elected in the first place,” says Professor Clyde Wilcox, a Georgetown University professor and author of several books on the presidency and public opinion. “Character is one of those things people assume they can tell about some one, and so far, the sniping hasn’t hurt him.”
A TURNING POINT?
Should an independent counsel investigate allegations of White House involvement in leaking the name of a CIA agent?
Yes, the Justice Department can't be trusted to be impartial. No, the Justice Department can do an honest job. Can't decide
Vote to see results
The alleged use of a media leak to reveal the identity of an American intelligence agent whose husband had challenged U.S. policy on Iraq may be different, however. For one thing, unlike previous charges leveled at the White House by its opponents, this one is being formally investigated by the Justice Department after NBC News and MSNBC.com reported that CIA Director George Tenet requested one last Friday. Wilcox and other political analysts say that, if subsequent probes demonstrate that the Bush team or one of its leading players put the administration’s political agenda above national security, which is essential what the deliberate unmasking of a CIA agent does, it could cast a harsh new light on previous controversies in which the president got the benefit of the doubt. “If it becomes more widely believed that this administration has been dishonest, no matter if the evidence emerges from an investigation or from a newspaper or from one of the Democratic political candidates, then that is bad news,” says Wilcox. James Pfiffner, author of “Modern Presidency” and a professor at George Mason University, says the launch of a formal investigation could be “a turning point in terms of public perception.” He says the continuing post-war troubles in Iraq, combined with the $87 billion budget request and a sense that the economy is not improving quickly enough, “all of these things are coming together now and it may be a point of transition which eventually seeps down to public consciousness.”
There's a poll on this page - 26,000 respondants- 73% feel that an independent counsel should be used to investigate
As I see it, the risk is that the general populace finds what's going on to be extremely confusing, so all they hear is the lib media saying it's a scandal, it's Watergate, etc... If there's no counter-point, this has a good chance of sticking...
I, for one, am losing patience in Cheney/Frist/Hastert/Powell.
Thank God for DeLay and Talk Radio, and FOX, otherwise, this would doom the Pres.
James Woolsey
Woolsey served from 1993 to 1995 as President Clinton's first CIA director (when the CIA was reporting leaks about once a week to the Justice Department)
| Should an independent counsel investigate allegations of White House involvement in leaking the name of a CIA agent? * 26905 responses |
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Yes, the Justice Department can't be trusted to be impartial. 73% |
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| No, the Justice Department can do an honest job. 24% |
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| Can't decide 3% |
And I have a pretty high tolerance for things people may consider boring. Especially political things.
See, that's the risk here. People don't want to hear the details... They just hear the term Watergate being thrown around, and scandal, and it'll resonate with a lot of people...
I'm listening to Mark Levin, who's very abrasive/arrogant but also very good, he just had a lady call in saying they should get rid of Karl Rove, because he "has an agenda"... Sick.
Develop an equivalent of Reagan's "there he goes again". Or just challenge them head-on. Or ask the media to ask them how THEY would do things differently - how would THEY capture Osama, Saddam, etc...
Communism/Socialism 1919 - Communist Rules for Revolution These nine rules were seized in a raid in Dusseldorf Germany, in 1919. The files were marked, "Communist Rules for Revolution".
Corrupt the young: get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial; destroy their ruggedness.
Get control of all means of publicity. Get peoples' minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books, plays and other trivialities.
Divide people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.
Destroy the peoples' faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and . (speak against, condemnatory utterances)
Always preach ;true democracy; but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit; produce fear of inflation, rising prices and general discontent.
Foment strikes in vital industries; encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward these disorders.
By special argument cause a breakdown of the old moral virtues; honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.
Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext with a view of confiscation of them and leaving the population helpless.
These are the games the Democrats play and if we dont stop them we will be slaves gauranteed !
You said it. We should totally black out MSNBC and CNN --not even click on it for 5 minutes. They are barely holding their own against Fox as it is. If they lost whatever audience they have on the right, it could it could do some real damage to their ratings.
You need a reality check. It has been the policy of the Demoncratic party and the Clintoons to trash their opponents. They never argue issues, they just sling mud, turn the press attack dogs loose then let the sheep panic and do the work for them.
Support the president for a change.
And this hit piece won't stick either, Michale, no matter how passionate your wishful thinking. The reason--though President Bush's enemies cannot fathom it--is that he is an honest man, a man of character and integrity. This is beyond the comprehension of the leftist/"Liberal" Democrats, and, unfortunately for them, they tend to be stupid enough to believe their own propaganda.
Wrong. Robert Novak discussed the relevant article in this column. In Novak's words:
Unfortunately, I did not escape Suskind's article, which includes these sentences: "Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fund-raising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted." I was called by no fact-checker, who would have learned of multiple errors.
Suskind has confused former Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher Sr., Bush's 1992 chief fund-raiser, with his son Rob, who headed the Bush campaign in Texas (Victory '92). Criticism of the younger Mosbacher, a frequent unsuccessful candidate in Texas, was not "planted" with me by Rove but was passed to me by a Bush aide whom I interviewed. Rove was indeed fired by Mosbacher from Victory '92 but continued as a national Bush-for-president operative.
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