Here’s a provocative post by Byron Williams at Huffpo.
For instance, Williams asks what if the “Democratic president’s secretary of defense were Ted Kennedy and our military committed Abu Ghraib-like torture? At that point, would conservatives still be content with their “a few bad apples alibi”?
Williams asks a good question: whether this country’s self-proclaimed conservatives really approve of the actions taken by the Bush Administration. His hypothetical strongly suggests that the answer is “no.” What’s really going on is that Republicans are simply sticking up for Republicans.
My own favorite example of the rampant hypocrisy is the constant Republican claim that the decision to invade Iraq is now water under the bridge. It’s already happened, they claim. No use fretting about that any more.
Gee. That’s not what the conservative bellowed when it appeared that President Clinton had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinski. Back then, the past was critical to evaluating the present character of the President. Back then, it was important to follow the evidence where it led to determine whether the president was fit to continue holding office.
I'll go one step further and say that Republican efforts to impeach Clinton was NOT a situation where they were following the evidence where it led. If they cared at all about following the evidence, the impeachment was a non-starter, because a federal judge had already declared that Clinton's false testimony had NOT risen to the level of perjury, and without perjury the Republicans had no legitimate grounds for impeachment — and they knew it. Although Clinton had lied under oath, he had not committed perjury, because he had not lied about anything that was *material* to his testimony. It's like testifying about seeing a bank robbery and falsely declaring that you were, say, shopping for apples at the time instead of going on a job interview. Maybe you don't want your current employer to know you were scouting a new job, so you lie under oath, but it has no bearing on what you saw at the bank. It was the same with Clinton's testimony. However, Republicans used every opportunity to trump up Clinton's "lying under oath" charge, when they knew it would never sustain an impeachment.
Indeed, it is somewhat frightening to speculate about what our Republican-controlled Congress (run by sleazeballs like Tom DeLay) might have done to a Democrat who proved to be as utterly incompetent as Bush has been. Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Katrina, FEMA…heck, they would have blamed 9/11 on the Democrats, too, as indeed, many tried to do by blaming Clinton for poor pre-9/11 security. Fortunately, it's hard to imagine Democtrats creating the sort of disasters-of-Biblical-proportion that Bush has fostered.
Why such a big difference in leadership between Clinton and Bush? I think it's because Clinton tried to hire the best people for his staff, even of they disagreed with him on ideology. Bush, by contrast, is all about ideology and apparently very unconcerned about competence. He has a Secretary of Defense who never served in the military; he tried to appoint Harriet Miers to the highest court in America even though she had no judicial experience AT ALL; his FEMA director had no emergency management experience AT ALL; the list goes on and on. Arguably, Bush's biggest problem isn't that he's a bumbling idiot; it's that he surrounds himself with other bumbling idiots. Even worse: he then tolerates no meaningful dissent, so even the competent voices (Colin Powell, Admiral Shinseki) get silenced, marginalized and, eventually, fired. It's a textbook example of bad management and bad government.