On the ropes

I assume, if you follow the news at all you've heard about the scandal involving the White House's decision to fire eight US Attorneys. I think the biggest lesson we can take from this story is that the Bush White House is really on the ropes, or at least that's what I take from it. You might wonder why I say that, well the Clintons fired all 93, and yet no one seems to remember that, or mention it in reference to this current scandal. In fact if I hadn't heard about it briefly when I was watching Fox News Sunday I wouldn't have known. But it was just a brief aside during the letters part of the program, since then I've heard lots of coverage, but the Clinton parallel is never mentioned.

Yesterday I came across This editorial in the WSJ and they not only mention it, but they go into the details of why it was just as smelly, if not more so, than the current firings. Which brings me to my point. How is is that Clinton was able to deflect criticism so easily and effectively, so effectively in fact that people aren't even talking about it now? And how is it that Bush is so... clumsy?

Perhaps clumsy isn't the right word. Early I said he was up against the ropes. Certainly the black eye he got from Walter Reed, and the cancerous grown that is Iraq haven't helped matters. But even when Clinton was being impeached he was pretty bullet proof. Another possibility is that it's because of the liberal bias in the media. Certainly that's the answer most of the conservative news sources have offered up. I hesitate to offer up so pat an answer, though I was interested to see that Camille Paglia offered a similar and in fact much more brutal assessment:

It's as if Democrats, pampered and spoiled by so many decades of the mainstream media trumpeting the liberal agenda, are so shaky in their convictions that they cannot risk an encounter with opposing views. Democrats have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and 98 percent of American humanities professors to do their bidding. But no, that's not enough -- every spark of dissent has to be extinguished with buckets of bile.

She was talking about the recently canceled Nevada Democratic Primary debates which had been cancelled because they were going to be hosted by Fox News. About which she further went on to say:

Yet for Democratic presidential candidates, who will be assessed by voters for their ability to stand up to China, North Korea or al-Qaida, to run squealing from a Fox moderator as if he or she were a boogeyman with blood-dripping fangs makes the whole pack of them look like simpering wusses. Dennis Kucinich was quite right to express his scorn and offer to debate anyone anywhere and under any sponsorship. Nice job of skewering the sacred cow!

I any case I don't quite know why people aren't mentioned Clinton firing all of the US Attorneys when they talk about the scandal of Bush/Gonzalez firing 8. But I'm glad to see that I'm not the only libertarian (Paglia describes herself in an earlier article as a "pro-choice libertarian Democrat") that thinks the media might tilt a little left.

I tilt a little right, but that's just because one leg is shorter than the other