March 19, 2007

When You’ve Just Got to Have a Scandal

It’s become an odd American tradition that every second-term presidency has a so-called scandal, and try as they might, Democrats and the media just can’t get many people interested in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. This might have something to do with the fact that “outing” this CIA desk jockey was not illegal, and the “investigation” into who did it went on for several years while the “investigator” knew all along that State Department official Richard Armitage did it.

Drat. You can’t have a second term without a scandal, and this one just isn’t working!

But if you’re willing to define “scandal” broadly enough, just about anything will do, and that leads us to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys – a news story that truly fits the times, insofar as it has lots of intrigue but no point whatsoever.

The Bush administration fired eight of the 93 U.S. attorneys, apparently because they were not moving quickly enough on cases involving voter fraud. Here’s your new scandal – the firings, silly, not the voter fraud.

Who suggested this? Why was it not explained better to Congress? Wait! Karl Rove may have been involved!

Day after day, the headlines have continued. The fired U.S. attorneys allege they came under political influence to investigate Democrats. One even received a phone call from a Republican U.S. senator asking about a case! What a complete shock! That never happens!

Well. Last I checked, U.S. attorneys are supposed to investigate illegal activity, even if it is committed by Democrats. And most voter fraud is committed by Democrats in big cities, where chaos typically rules the administration of elections and it’s relatively easy to skirt the rules. In many cities, they are even accepting “provisional ballots” from people who may or may not even be registered in the precincts where they are trying to vote.

The situation begs corruption, and corruption obliges.

Democrats don’t like it when you talk about it, and the media don’t report it much, but the fact of the matter is that Democrats count on big-city chaos on election nights to artificially bloat their vote totals. They’ve become increasingly shameless about it, too. In 2004, they actually tried to say Democrats weren’t voting in Ohio because lines were too long. I heard that one in the restaurant where no one goes because it’s too crowded.

Voter fraud should be investigated. That is the real story here. If these eight U.S. attorneys were dragging their feet on cases that were important to the president, well guess what? They serve at the pleasure of the president, and he had the right to fire them. Apparently the administration weighed the option of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys and starting fresh, but decided against it.

That, of course, would be unprecedented, except that it wouldn’t, because it’s exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1993. Sen. Hillary Clinton, who now issues predictable calls of what-did-Bush-know-and-when-did-he-know-it, was right in the middle of the U.S. attorney bloodbath of ’93, and was one of the most public defenders of the move.

Today’s “scandal” is one of the weirdest in memory. Even the Democrats acknowledge that no one did anything illegal and that Bush can fire U.S. attorneys whenever he wants. But as usually happens when nothing was actually done wrong, people start obsessing about “the way it was handled.”

Pressure is now coming down on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for supposedly botching the process, and the way it was explained to Congress. Even the administration is tripping over its own feet trying to explain itself. One day they say White House counsel Harriet Miers suggested the firings, then they come back the next day and say maybe she didn’t, and they’re not sure whose idea it was.

Meanwhile, a smoking gun emerges! That’s right – the dark lord Karl Rove may have had a role! Rove, whose official title in the media is “controversial political advisor,” actually holds the title of deputy chief of staff, so if he wasn’t involved on some level, he wasn’t doing his job.

We hear a lot these days about the Bush administration’s supposed incompetence, and the evidence is all the situations that get out of hand. But this “situation” is a perfect example of where the only thing out of hand is the wailing and gnashing of teeth over a decision that was perfectly legitimate.

This administration is very good at making tough decisions, and very bad at preventing typical Washington idiocy from resulting – perhaps because their weakness is an inability to think like the kinds of idiots who populate Washington.

That is not such a bad weakness for an administration to have.