Bush in Decline

...It is a little early to ask whether President Bush would grant pardons to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr...

...But the Bush Administration continued to assert the existence of Iraqi weapons programs in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as well as a presentation to the United Nations by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that he now bitterly regrets...

...Responding to one, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said, "What the President did not do today again is acknowledge the fundamental reality of the insurgency...

...I was one of the CBS correspondents who covered McCarthy's Red-baiting hearings that destroyed the reputations of honorable men and women...

...The magazine answered, "Increasingly, it is this Administration's incompetence...

...Now You Can See It George Clooney's film Good Night, and Good Luck magnificently re-creates the struggle between Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R.-Wis...

...The report came to the CIA from a shady Italian businessman who produced a forged Nigerian document...

...That's probably an exaggeration...

...Doping the Next Election In a season of widespread disaster, natural and human, the nation's capital still finds time for its favorite pastime— doping the next national election...

...Actually, we do another...

...Paley told Murrow that his controversial documentaries gave him a stomachache and, indeed, after a devastating McCarthy film aired, Alcoa did not renew its sponsorship...

...Nixon forced the resignations of Chief of Staff H.R...

...Nor have Republicans in Congress offered much to assuage the suffering of poor victims of the hurricane...

...Democrats predictably found the President's speeches disappointing...

...Just as the revelation of abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad was bad news for the Bush Administration, the 1968 massacre of more than 350 South Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai was bad news for the Nixon Administration...

...So let's not get too bogged down in details of the leak's cover-up...

...Its sections, headed "Victory in Iraq Is a Vital U.S...

...In our own country, the anti-Communist President Richard M. Nixon created a sensation by flying to China for a friendly engagement with Mao Zedong...

...The Pentagon had one other equally questionable source on weapons of mass destruction...

...Criticized for speaking mainly to captive audiences in uniform, he delivered a speech in Philadelphia and another to the venerable Council on Foreign Relations...

...Laird claims to have invented the term "Vietnamization...

...Veteran political sage David S. Broder of the Washington Post wrote recently, "a path back to power for the Democrats lies in finding a way to connect with the political center...

...But, paradoxically, that did not translate into automatic Democratic gains...

...It was said this was something only a famous Tory could do...

...Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, the President refused any colloquy...

...Television then was still in its early stages and Murrow had to combat not only McCarthy but his own nervous boss, William Paley, who feared losing sponsors...

...That went against the tradition of the organization, but Council President Richard Haas, who had served in the Bush Administration, agreed to the stipulation, leaving many members (myself included) frustrated...

...The year was 1954...

...The whole exercise was a summons to doubters and a challenge to believers to meet the test of spreading freedom...

...In early 2006, the Democrats are expected to roll out an agenda featuring health care, energy independence, economic security, and governmental reform...

...In November, a Washington Posti ABC poll found the public was no longer sure of the President's personal integrity...

...The Real Cover-Up At this writing, the "CIA leak" investigation is still in progress...

...Bush offered no benchmarks or timetables...

...At stake here is what was being covered up: a sometimes frantic effort to justify a war that did not seem to have much justification...

...That was not to be the last time journalists, to fulfill their mission, would have to take on sponsors and, yes, even their own bosses...

...As was said of all the above, it takes a conservative to get away with doing a liberal thing...

...President Bush the elder, for example, granted pardons to former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others indicted for withholding information in the Iran-contra scandal...

...To bring this up to date, Laird has an article in the November/December Foreign Affairs magazine entitled, "Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam...

...Maybe the word today should be "Iraqization...

...Nixon said an image could be changed...

...He added that My Lai would provide "grist for the mill of antiwar activists" and could be "ruinous to our image...

...The CIA doubted the authenticity of that document...

...A Pew Research Center poll had the GOP leadership in Congress down to a 32 per cent approval rating...

...The question is how much caring alone can do...

...or anyone else found to have been involved in the CIA leak...

...history reminds us of how Presidents sometimes act when their aides get into trouble serving them...

...So you can understand how furious the White House Iraq Group must have been when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sent to Niger to gather proof for the story of Iraq's effort to buy uranium, reported instead that there was no evidence to back the supposition...

...For the Congressional contests in November 2006, the Republicans, after a series of setbacks from high gas prices to lagging hurricane response, displayed what looked like a losing hand...

...A report titled "The Politics of Polarization," by political scientists Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, who helped guide Clinton's successful campaign in 1996, says that to win the Democrats have to revise their stance on national security and on social and moral issues...

...The fascination with which official knew what about Valerie Plame, and when, should not distract us from contemplating the great con game the Administration played on the American people on the road to war in Iraq...

...wanted to establish in Vietnam "procedures for political choice that give each significant group a real opportunity to participate in the political life of a nation...

...In the days prior to the election, the White House released a 35-page document called "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq...

...The White House stipulated that there would be no questions or discussion...

...Let us go back to October 2002, when Vice President Dick Cheney received an Italian report about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in the African country of Niger...

...And then he had the temerity to go public with his conclusion...

...Paying the Price The...

...the White House seemed more willing to credit it...

...World War II was behind us...

...From early on, they bought and retailed a dubious bill of goods...

...No comprehensive legislative package has yet been submitted to Congress...

...Headlines reflected a sense of a Presidency in decline...

...I would say you had to be there but, in fact, you didn't...

...But Murrow did launch the attack on McCarthy long before it was the popular thing to do, and Murrow set the standard for integrity in the media...

...But it was only Murrow who had the stature and the sheer guts to take on McCarthy by playing back some of his ranting assaults on anyone who had read a liberal magazine...

...But what must have been most depressing for him was that, for the first time, 58 per cent doubted he was honest and straightforward...

...Jason DeParle, the New York Times' expert on poverty, noted that programs like Medicaid and food stamps are especially vulnerable...

...Bill Clinton's pardons to friends and friends of friends left an unpleasant mark on the last days of his Presidency...

...He could say that, to fulfill his promise to Katrina-stricken New Orleans, he will cancel tax cuts and ask for tax increases...

...troops...

...This black-and-white film skillfully captures the atmosphere of the period...

...But My Lai was treated by the White House as a public relations problem more than a moral one...

...That was not President Bush on Iraq, but President Nixon on Vietnam and Cambodia—one line in some 50,000 pages of newly declassified documents in the National Archive...

...He not only pulled out of the Gaza Strip, but resigned from the Likud to form a new, more moderate party called Kadima (Forward...

...In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 48 per cent said they wanted a Democratic Congress against 39 per cent who still prefer a Republican Congress...

...Nixon had let Vice President Ford know that a pardon might be the price of his resignation...

...Just for old times' sake, let me say, "Good night, and good luck...

...the Cold War was sending a shudder through the country, providing golden opportunities for cynical politicians who, as the saying of the time had it, saw a Red under every bed...

...He could take more definite action to withdraw from Iraq...

...Interest," "Failure Is Not an Option," and "Our Strategy for Victory Is Clear," made it seem more like a public relations handout than a military planning document...

...Political analysts said Democratic attacks on a culture of cronyism are not likely to prevail without a positive agenda like the Republican Contract with America that helped the GOP sweep to victory in 1994...

...In effect, I abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to somebody else...

...She wrote a series of stories about Iraqi weapons that her paper ultimately had to disown and apologize for...

...A Kind of Rubicon "Major speech" is a somewhat depreciated term in the White House lexicon, but Bush's four speeches leading up to the December 15 Iraq parliamentary election were about as major as they get...

...On the contrary, with reconstruction estimates running as high as $200 billion, the House Republicans were talking of more spending cuts in Medicaid and other social programs that would offset flood relief dollar for dollar...

...Eight times the President has visited the Gulf area to show the people that he cares...

...Even the space shuttle program was in trouble...

...And Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a founder of the Likud Party, dedicated to never yielding an inch of Israeli-held soil and supporting the proliferation of Jewish settlements, engaged his country in a historic turnaround...

...In those days, television shows had individual sponsors, and Murrow's See It Now was sponsored by Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America...

...In May 1969, a Nixon White House document said the US...

...The pro-Bush National Review's "How Bush Can Come Back" acknowledged that the President has a problem...

...But perhaps the most controversial pardon of all was the one that may have contributed to President Gerald R. Ford's losing the 1976 election—the pardon of Nixon shortly after he resigned from office to avoid impeachment...

...The cover of the Economist asked, "What's Gone Wrong With America's Right...

...Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird warned Nixon that My Lai could prove acutely embarrassing to the U. S. and could affect the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam...

...With each one the President dug himself more firmly into Iraq...

...Clearly the principals chose to believe, true or not, that only an invasion would save us from the imminent danger of Iraqi nuclear and/or biological weapons...

...They have shown little interest in emergency measures like the proposal of Charles E. Grassley (R.-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, to extend temporary Medicaid coverage to uninsured victims of Katrina...

...The 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a Conservative, introduced a series of liberal reforms in Parliament...

...Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan had to be shooed away from the road to the Bush ranch...

...Newsweek headlined, "The GOP: A Mounting Crisis of Competence and Cronyism...

...McCarthy ultimately was brought down by his own colleagues in the Senate, who thought the Red-baiting Senator was giving Republicans a bad name...

...But there was no reason to think Bush would be born again politically...

...He spoke as though recalling President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 line, "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny...

...To date, little has happened to fulfill that promise...

...On major legislation, there was a gridlock in Congress, and the government ground along on a stopgap spending bill called a continuing resolution...

...Actually, it was Bush in shirt-sleeves in New Orleans last September 15, promising to reconstruct the shattered city and to overcome the poverty and bigotry Hurricane Katrina had flushed out...

...That may sound like a standard Bush speech on Iraq...

...Essentially, their message is that the Democrats can halt what looked like a permanent Republican realignment, but they will need a lot more than bumper stickers announcing, "It's time for a change...

...We will stay as long as it takes...

...Echoes of Vietnam A secret memo from the President to his aides: "Publicly we say one thing...

...Bush seemed to have crossed some kind of Rubicon with no easy way back...

...But this may be the time to recall the words of Ehrlichman, who served 18 months for perjury: "I went and lied and I'm paying the price for that lack of willpower...

...He summed up the Republican attitude this way: "If the storm exposed great poverty, it also exposed the problems of the very policies that liberals have supported...

...As President, Ford denied there had been any deal...

...Arguing for "de-Americanizing" the Iraq War, he says our presence is what feeds the insurgency...

...and journalist Edward R. Murrow for the conscience of America...

...Secretary of State Henry Kissinger weighed in with the observation that the trial of Lieutenant William Calley, implicated in the My Lai massacre, would "alleviate press concerns about a cover-up...

...As with Watergate, the CIA leak investigation has in the end become a case of perjury and obstruction of justice...

...The Week Bush Got Whacked" proclaimed the limes of London over an article that described the President as growing touchy and lashing out at his junior staff...

...It can even be extended to someone before any legal action has been taken...

...Bush has a wide-open field...

...Is it already a half century...

...Haldeman and Adviser John D. Ehrlichman, then let them go to jail when he could have issued pardons...

...He could repeal a hopelessly confusing Medicare drug bill and call for a straight expansion of Medicare...

...The New Republic featured a piece entitled "The Conservative Crackup...

...These days, Murrow is widely credited with having brought down McCarthy...

...President Ronald Reagan, who coined the phrase "Evil Empire," flew to Moscow to make peace with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...That was the smoothtalking Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who offered a lot of inside information, including dubious word from dubious Iraqi scientists...

...Together they displayed their new friendship to a crowd in Red Square...

...Some of the discussions about the future of Vietnam read eerily like memos on Iraq...

...Empty Promises "We will do what it takes...

...Chalabi had not only a product, but a market—a friendly relationship with New York Times correspondent Judith Miller...

...At his Crawford, Texas ranch during the holiday season, President Bush may have been contemplating what I've dubbed the autumn of his discontent...

...Though not surprising, it is still a little unsettling to learn that a President, as a matter of policy, may not level with the people...

...Representative Mike Pence of Indiana said the way to fight poverty is by more tax cuts for the rich—"trickle-down," they used to call it...

...In Iraq, the killings went on and a hawkish, or once hawkish, Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, John Murtha, seized stage center by urging a pullout of U.S...

...A majority disapproved of his performance in Iraq and against terrorism...

...At such a time it may be well for a President to think of leaders in history who faced up to their problems—not by staying the course, but by reversing course...

...The Presidential pardon can be a powerful instrument, overriding conviction, overriding indictment...

...Efforts to get Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear programs lay dead in the water...