The WaPo’s Eugene Robinson has one of those columns today that I wish I’d written. (via Norwegianity)
Today’s topic is credibility — specifically, recent claims by certain high-ranking present, former and perhaps soon-to-be-former Bush administration officials. The aim is to answer a simple question: Should we believe these three Bush loyalists if they tell us that rain falls down instead of up, or should we look out the window to make sure?
Robinson has quite a bit to work with here. For example, Karl Rove’s excuse last week for losing all of those emails that were supposed to have been archived was that he didn’t know they were being deleted. “The present official is political czar Karl Rove, long regarded by friend and foe alike as some kind of cutting-edge genius, who seems to have the darnedest time figuring out this newfangled e-mail stuff. Robinson said.
“Apparently he thought he had it figured out.”
Then there’s Paul Wolfowitz, the current head of the World Bank, who helped arrange for a cushy job at a great salary for his girlfriend, after vowing to take on corruption and connecting World Bank aid to transparency and accountability. “We’re supposed to believe that for a central bank official in, say, Nigeria to arrange a sweetheart employment deal for his girlfriend would be corrupt, but for Wolfowitz to do so is perfectly legitimate,” Robinson said.
But the real fun is with Alberto Gonzales.
The question at the heart of the affair is whether the eight federal prosecutors were fired for reasons of politics rather than of justice. Gonzales maintains that politics had nothing to do with the firings. But if you take his version of events at face value, Gonzales doesn’t actually seem to know just why the prosecutors were canned.
At first, he said he had nothing to do with the whole thing. Then he acknowledged that he did — after it was disclosed that he attended a meeting on the firings, held in his own office. Now he says that, yes, he was given updates on the situation, and, yes, he did approve the “final recommendations” of his aides to fire the U.S. attorneys. But somehow, in his mind, this doesn’t add up to material participation.
Gonzales had an op-ed Sunday in The Post that included this positively breathtaking claim: The attorney general of the United States writes that “to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.”
To his knowledge? What on earth does that mean? Is Gonzales in the habit of making decisions without his own knowledge? Does he have multiple-personality issues?
Robinson ponders the credibility of these three, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, these guys don’t think highly of the truth.
That’s clearly true, but I’d add just one other point: they don’t think highly of their audience, either. Rove, Wolfowitz, and Gonzales don’t appear to concern themselves too deeply with accuracy, but part of this is because they think we’re idiots, who’ll believe whatever they shovel in our direction.
Given their deteriorating standing, I’d say the Bush gang misunderestimated us.