The Adventures of Scooter, Sneaky, Skipper, Snapper, Snoopy and Ernest

by Donald Kaul

Donald Kaul recently retired as Washington columnist for the Des Moines Register. He has covered the foolishness in our Nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards along the way.  Mr. Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.

It is beginning to look as though the wheels are coming off of George W. Bush’s little red wagon. Forget the fact that his approval ratings are lower than Michael Jackson’s; he’s got real problems:

 - His nominee for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, crashed and burned on take-off. Her nomination was withdrawn in the face of criticism bordering on scorn. It was a curious fate for a woman who once took an aptitude test to see what job best suited her and the answer came back, “best friend.” It wasn’t so much that she had enemies as it was that her friends didn’t like her, not as a Supreme anyway. The only people really enthusiastic about the nomination were late-night comedians.

 - Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Presidential assistant and chief of staff for Vice-president, Dick (Sneaky) Cheney, resigned after being indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that involved the unmasking of a covert CIA agent. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl (Skipper) Rove, stands trembling on the brink of indictment in the same case.

 - Bush ally Tom (Snapper) DeLay, has been indicted on charges of campaign law violations and has stepped down as House Majority Leader.

 - The leader of the [so-called] President’s party in the Senate, Bill (Snoopy) Frist, is being investigated by the Security and Exchange Commission for possible violation of the terms of his “blind trust,” in other words, insider trading.

 - The war in Iraq continues to be the war in Iraq: Two thousand American dead and counting. Things are so bad that the Pentagon has started to emphasize “body counts” of the people we kill, a sure sign a war is on the skids (see Vietnam).

 - Gasoline prices continue to hover near the $3-a-gallon mark, forcing [Bush] to utter the dreaded word “conservation.”

How appalling it must be for Mr. Bush. How disquieting.
How delightful.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m a patriotic American and I wish [Bush] every success (with the possible exception of political). I even have sympathy for him. How much sympathy?

Just as much as the Vituperative Right had for Bill Clinton when they impeached him for lying about an egregious sexual indiscretion. That much.

I think it marvelously ironic that administration apologists are now complaining that Special Prosecutor Ernest Fitzgerald is being overzealous in his pursuit of Rove and Libby. They say he’s trying to convict them of lying about something that was no big deal.

Really? Where were they all those months when Special Prosecutor Ken Starr was playing Inspector Javert to Bill Clinton’s Jean Valjean or when Martha Stewart got sent up for lying to an FBI agent about a stock deal that didn’t amount to much? And how about Henry Cisneros, the Clinton cabinet member, who’s now in his tenth year of being investigated for a relatively trivial lie?

I argued against all those prosecutions but the Holy Right said the foundation of our legal system depends on the absolute truthfulness of witnesses.

Well, they convinced me. If Scooter or Skipper or even Sneaky lied or fibbed or misled federal officials about their roles in outing a CIA agent, I think they should go to the slammer.

Ms. Miers, it turned out, was not done in by Democrats fighting for a less conservative nominee; she was torpedoed by the hard-core Right because it was afraid she wouldn’t be conservative enough.

This presents Bush with a real dilemma. Does he nominate a saber-toothed conservative to placate his conservative base and risk a Democratic filibuster in the Senate that will leave blood all over the floor? [Yes.]  Or does he try and find a compromise candidate mildly acceptable to both sides? [No.]

The Right has exhibited little talent for compromise and the Democratic leadership, what there is of it, has promised to bring Senate business to a halt if it is steamrolled on a nomination.

By the time you read this, he may already have made his unhappy choice.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

(source)