I have been waiting impatiently for the "have you no sense of decency" moment in George W. Bush's six-year run. That being, of course, the retort counsel Joseph Welch threw in Senator Joseph McCarthy's face at McCarthy's slander of one of Welch's young associates during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Other voices had been raised by that time, principally Edward R. Murrow's, and the public was tiring of McCarthy's shtick--a traveling vaudeville act headlined by the alcoholic McCarthy and his sidekick, the
___ Roy Cohn (the perfect adjective escapes me). But it was Welch who exposed McCarthy for all to see, or perhaps simply spoke what others were thinking, which ended McCarthy's reign overnight. Welch had the benefit of a rapt national audience in the early days of television, unlike the fragmented audiences of today.
Nonetheless, Bill Clinton's smack down of Chris Wallace on FOX News seemed to have had the same effect over a period of days, as the remarks were replayed on cable and network television, posted on YouTube and replicated and rehashed by bloggers and pundits. Then a spate of bad news hit: the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate, Le Cage Aux Foley, Bob Woodward's revelations (and redemption), nuclear proliferation at Evil's very axis, and heightened violence in Iraq coupled with General Sir Richard Dannatt's assessment of the hopelessness of our role as referee. Except that it was not a spate of bad news, it was a spate of truth--it was the "truth eruption" that Bush's handlers had so feared.
This truth eruption is having a profound effect upon the public's mindset, but the first measurable change in attitude that I felt followed Clinton's pushback to Wallace's "nice little conservative hit job." It freed and emboldened others--both in the media and political spheres--to call propaganda propaganda and lies lies. (It is most satisfying that Disney's sponsorship of revisionist history in The Path to 9/11 provoked Clinton's response.) Neither legislators--one troika of Republican statesmen excepted--nor reporters can be cowed any longer by the bullying of Bush or Dick Cheney or Ken Mehlman or their legions.
One chapter was missing in Karl Rove's history/play book since Mark Hanna's client, William McKinley, was shot before Hanna could fully test his theorem of the enduring (persistent?) Republican majority. Rove should have looked at the last chapter of McCarthy's book instead, starting with the question Welch posed to McCarthy. The answer to that question today would be the same, and I trust the result will be as well.