It’s Saturday, and you know what that means — it’s time to marvel at the latest column from Fred Barnes, the executive editor of The Weekly Standard. Of all of the Bush shills in the conservative media, no one enjoys being an unpaid public relations rep for the White House more than Barnes. It’s enough to make Sean Hannity blush.
This week, Barnes defends the Bush gang against the prosecutor purge scandal.
When President Bush, at the tail end of his Latin American trip last week, got around to commenting on the controversy over eight fired U.S. attorneys, he was calm, reasonable, and even a bit apologetic. Little good it did him. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Bush administration was guilty of “immoral” and “illegal” behavior. The next day, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York responded with some of his usual hyperbole. “This is the worst crisis of confidence at the Department of Justice that I have seen in my time in the Senate. It is a crisis of confidence, a crisis of credibility, and a crisis of management.”
Schumer may be a partisan hack, but as the Democratic point-man on the firings, he is carrying the day. He guided Democrats as they transformed the perfectly legal and quite normal removal of federal prosecutors into a raging scandal. They’ve done this for raw political reasons: to mortify and cripple the president. And Bush, with his timidity in the face of Democratic accusations, has let them. He hasn’t fought back. He’s become an enabler.
Let’s pause for a moment to fully appreciate the notion of Fred Barnes referring to anyone as a “partisan hack.”
It’s hard not to read Barnes’ columns without smiling. I go in expecting a certain level of Bush-flattery and sycophancy, but he always manages to exceed my imagination. The purge was “quite normal,” he says, despite it never having happened before. Bush was “apologetic” in a press conference in which he showed no remorse and trotted out a demonstrably false defense.
Indeed, as far as Barnes is concerned, the reason that the purge has become a major scandal has nothing to do with the facts and everything to do with the president being too darned “nice.”
Bush needs to fight back, rhetorically and otherwise, without hesitation and without fear that his critics will end up even more opposed to his policies. The way Washington works in 2007, with Democrats in control of Congress, makes this necessary. Being nice and conciliatory, as Bush has been, is counterproductive. It’s never reciprocated. Rather, it encourages his Democratic foes to be even more belligerent and discourages his Republican allies.
From the earliest days of the Bush presidency, his advisers have debated whether he should be nice or tough. On one side are what an aide calls “the communicators.” They want the president to speak kindly to Congress, the aide says, and try to mollify not only Democrats but also “the New York Times and [ABC anchor] George Stephanopoulos.” The tough guys believe Bush should be as hard-hitting on Congress as he is when discussing the war on terror. As best I can tell, counselor Dan Bartlett favors the gentler approach, Rove and Vice President Cheney the harder line. The communicators are winning. […]
What should Bush have said when Democrats first took after the firings? Something like this: “It’s an outrage that Democrats would attack, solely for political gain, a president’s constitutional authority to name U.S. attorneys and remove them from office. President Clinton removed all 93 federal prosecutors in 1993, as was his right. I have removed 8, none of them for political reasons. That Democrats are now willing to play political games with our criminal justice system is a shame, and I will vigorously oppose their efforts.”
Let me get this straight. There are White House aides, who have the president’s ear, who want to mollify Democrats, the New York Times, and George Stephanopoulos? Since when? Who are these bleeding hearts and when was the last time they got their way?
And Barnes couldn’t seriously be dumb enough to believe a bogus “Clinton did it” argument, which has been debunked enough times that even right-wing bloggers have given up on it, is the key to getting out of this mess, could he?
I used to wonder if the White House communications office wrote Barnes’ columns for him. Now I’m practically convinced his words are his own — even the Bush’s flacks wouldn’t write such tripe.