It's amazing when you look at everything that's happened to the Bushies in the past couple of weeks:
- Iraq never had WMDs.
- Bush's entire assertion that he ever performed his National Guard service in 1972-1973 rests on a torn piece of paper with no name or social security number, apparently because a Bush aide "cleaned up" the public records.
- The Valerie Plame FBI investigation might hand down indictments of two top-level Cheney aides for exposing the identity of a CIA agent in retribution for ambassador Joe Wilson's questioning of the admin's Iraq policy.
- A Republican Senate staffer is being forced to resign this week due to a Senate Sergeant-at-Arms investigation that Republicans hacked into Democratic Senators' computers in order to spy on their strategy for blocking Republican judicial nominees.
- A media firm working for the Bush re-election campaign (the same firm that flashed the word "RATS" in an attack ad on Gore) is being paid millions by taxpayers to run misleading ads in support of Bush's Medicare bill. (The same Medicare bill, by the way, that retiring Congressman Nick Smith was essentially bribed to vote for in exchange for party support of his son's candidacy--though he did not vote for the bill).
- Bush's deficit projections, too, were clearly misleading.
Now, with all this, Bush is scheduled to go on Russert's "Meet the Press" this weekend. Given Russert's history of being only selectively hard-hitting, especially when it comes to Republican presidents, what do you think the odds are that Bush will have to squirm about any of these issues? The problem here is, if Russert rolls over, the rest of the press will take it as a sign that they should continue to treat Bush with kid gloves. But if Bush is presented with any of these questions in a stark way and then flubs the answer, whoo boy.
You know what the scary part is? Clinton lied about trivial things, but the kinds of things (like gay marriage or Janet Jackson's boob) that the media loves to obsess over. Bush lies about really serious things, and the problem is that these things are a) so easily cloaked in "executive privilege" or "reasons of national security" or b) important but so esoteric that the public can't wrap its mind around it, or c) so truly frightening that exposing the lies might actually rock the boat.
Sad.
But, I don't know--maybe my perspective would be different if I was old enough to have witnessed the Watergate scandals?