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Jewish World Review July 21, 2003 / 21 Tamuz, 5763
James Lileks
No winners in this game of gotcha
Or not, perhaps. We'll see. The entire nation may swing left with such force and fury that everyone in the Midwest not wearing a seatbelt will be pitched into the Atlantic. In the next year public fury may build and boil until we hear people literally punching the ballot for the Democrats, shouting, "That's for the yellowcake lie, you lying liars!" After all, look what happened to Bill Clinton -- he bombed an aspirin factory on faulty intelligence, and less than two years later he was out of office.
Granted, he wasn't running for the job, but still. You remember the fury over the aspirin factory? No? Right, there wasn't much of a fuss at all. The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant was bombed right in the middle of the Monica Lewinksy mess, but that was coincidence. Apparently the CIA got information that the aspirin factory was going to escape in the middle of the night, so it had to be bombed RIGHT AWAY.
Some wags questioned the timing, but no one thought the president made up the target's importance. No doubt the intelligence service presented its information with a certain amount of confidence, and the Sudanese target was added to the list for that two-front panache, the impression that the United States was really, really serious about its ineffectual responses. Did Clinton choose a target based on shaky info? Looks like it now. But we do know one thing: Not everything we know is always right. Even that sentence.
This doesn't mean the president gets to lie, of course. So it's a good thing President Bush didn't.
From all the hurly-burly in the press you'd think Bush had spent six months stumping the country shouting about how he personally saw Saddam Hussein slap down his Amex Platinum for a brick of Niger Yellowcake. You'd think the entire case for war depended on this detail. You'd think Bush dropped the lie on the table like a fresh-caught flounder, well aware it would start to stink after a while.
Who knows? Perhaps it's all part of a master plan. "Don't worry, boys, by the time they figure out the whole weapons-of-mass-destruction thing was a hoax, I'll distract them with a big trip to Africa, the very continent mentioned in my prominent, naked lie. They'll never catch on!"
Now we have caught on, and there's nothing they can do but suspend the next election and start shipping key members of the Democratic National Committee down to Guantanamo. Flights leaving daily by week's end, no doubt.
There's no profit in this for the Dems. None. It's tasty meat for the base, but to everyone else it looks like the same sort of perpetual hissy fit that overtook many conservatives in the '90s: "If the public didn't turn on Clinton during the bloody nightmare of Travelgate, they'll surely turn on him for the lost billing records! Finally they'll see his cloven hooves! Finally!"
Each time, the Republicans were disappointed, either because the electorate wasn't paying attention, or wasn't inclined to care or believe the charges. But the reasons for disinterest have changed, perhaps; back then the charges seemed lightweight to those who don't breathe the heavy, humid Beltway air. Back then things were good; the boat was moving again. Why rock it?
Now it's different. Now we are at war. Granted, it doesn't feel like a hot war right now, unless you have a relative in the service. But it's war nonetheless. In the most recent campaign a very bad man went down, face first, and no one's digging mass graves for children anymore in Iraq. The torturers are out of work. And Saddam or his sons are in no position to buy a nuke from North Korea.
Yes, North Korea. Remember? The country that says it's making nukes hot and fresh as we speak?
But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about 16 words. In fact let's go over every speech since 9-11 and look for split infinitives. Let's tear ourselves up playing pointless gotcha. Give the people some political theater instead of leadership and substance. Let them eat yellowcake.
07/14/03: Doing the right thing in Liberia may not be the right thing to do
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