Kevin Drum summarized the White House’s principal political problem with the purge scandal extremely well today.
They’ve now had nearly two months to come up with a simple, clear, understandable explanation for why they chose those eight to fire but not the others. So what is it? And why has it taken such an interminable amount of internal chaos to come up with something?
People aren’t stupid. If there were a simple, innocent explanation we would have heard it in January. The fact that the president of the United States held a press conference eight weeks after this issue first hit the media and still didn’t have a plausible story to tell suggests pretty strongly that there is no plausible story to tell.
It’s an important point about this scandal, which is probably helping drive the media’s interest. The White House, and its vaunted communications office, has had eight weeks to come up with a plausible explanation. What have we heard? The Bush gang said a purge like this is normal and routine. It wasn’t. They said Clinton did the same thing. He didn’t. They said the U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, which is true, but doesn’t offer any substantive explanation why these specific U.S. Attorneys had to go.
They couldn’t decide whether (and which) prosecutors were actually bad at their jobs. They can’t explain why Justice Department officials lied to Congress. They can’t explain why White House officials can’t testify under oath. They can’t explain what role the president had in the firings. They can’t explain what role the Attorney General had in the firings. They can’t explain the meaning of the phrase “loyal Bushies.” They can’t explain the 18-day document gap. They can’t explain why they can’t explain.
Someone recently emailed me, asking why the traditional media seems to have sunk its teeth into this scandal, but was reluctant to in previous scandals. I’m sure the fact that there’s a Democratic Congress, which is actually interested in accountability and oversight, has something to do with it, but I also suspect the White House’s utter incoherence in explaining its behavior tells journalists there’s a genuine problem here. Even the most tepid, enabling political reporter looks at contradictory answers from a White House the way a shark looks at chum.
As Kevin explained, if there was a reasonable explanation for this, we would have heard it by now. The fact that we haven’t says a great deal.
Way back on Mar. 4, just as the scandal was reaching the crisis mode, Josh Marshall said:
If someone tells you one reason they’re doing something, you may believe me. If someone tells you twenty reasons they’re doing something, and some of the reasons contradict each other, it’s very hard not to get suspicious. That was the story of the lead up to the Iraq War — it was about al Qaeda, or WMD, or democratizing the Middle East or stabilizing the Middle East, or about human rights or defending Israel or maybe Saudi Arabia. There were so many good reasons to invade Iraq that only a fool could pass on the opportunity. But for those watching closely the very multiplicity of rationales suggested we were being scammed and weren’t hearing the real story.
Here too, perhaps these folks were fired for incompetence, or maybe over policy disagreements, or maybe because the FBI didn’t think they were moving quickly enough on corruption cases, or maybe they were being shoved out to open up slots for deserving GOP lawyers. Any of these explanations might be true. But when we hear them all, in succession, in little more than a week, you begin to suspect that none of them are true. And that it’s all so much flimflam trying to obscure the real explanation.
That was almost three weeks ago. The answers have gotten no better in the interim.
If the White House wants this scandal to go away, all it has to do is explain what happened and why. Any time they’re ready….