July 2, 2007

Language of Scandal Abounds, But There’s No Scandal to Be Found

Savor the words and phrases. Subpoena. Witness. Constitutional showdown. Stonewall. Investigation. Nixonian.

This is the language of scandal. The more you hear it, the more scandalous the atmosphere seems. The more you get that feeling that something is rotten in the air.

Even if nothing is.

News reports late last week talked of a constitutional showdown between the Bush administration and Congress over subpoenas seeking internal White House documents. Congressional “investigators” want information about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys and about wiretapping by the National Security Agency designed to prevent terrorist attacks.

President Bush will not give Congress the documents they want, because they intentionally asked for documents they knew he would not give them. Why? To create a “constitutional showdown,” which is one of the phrases you need to toss around when you’re playing scandal.

And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid knows that you get mega-double points if you can find a way to get “Nixonian” into the news reports, so he declared Bush’s “stonewalling” to be Nixonian in nature, and the press lapped it up.

No one was surprised that, when the Democrats took control of the committee chairmanships on Capitol Hill, their first order of business was to launch as many investigations as possible. Investigations create many opportunities to talk like there’s scandal in the air.

First, you ask for documents that you know are covered by executive privilege. Say, for example, you want to demand to know who met with Vice President Cheney on energy policy. Granted, when it was Hillary Clinton meeting with a secret 500-member health care reform commission, the secrecy was perfectly OK. But Dick Cheney is evil, so he gets subpoenas. The same goes for the Justice Department when you want to make a mountain out of the molehill that is eight ineffectual U.S. attorneys getting sacked. The same thing goes for a wiretapping program that was “revealed” by the New York Times years after the president told you all about it.

Will you get the information you want? No. Will you find evidence that anyone did anything wrong? No. Did anyone do anything wrong? No. It doesn’t matter. Your purpose is not to discover the truth. You already know the truth. Your purpose is to make it look like you’re pursuing something sinister, and that the other guy is hiding something sinister.

That’s why you have investigations.

As long as the news reports are peppered with the language of scandal, you’re achieving your goals. Your goals, by the way, are to keep the president’s approval ratings in the toilet and make it as difficult as possible for him to do his job. This provides Democratic presidential candidates with talking points about “honesty” and “openness,” even though none of them would give up the documents in question if they were in the White House.

Most consumers of news have no idea what the real facts are. Many believe that Scooter Libby outed a covert CIA agent and is going to jail for it. Many believe that Dick Cheney was spying on innocent Americans and hiding it from the public. Many believe that eight fired U.S. attorneys are the second comings of Archibald Cox.

News reports never actually say that any of this is true. They can’t, because it isn’t. But the tone and language of the reports makes it seem as though it is all true, and when people hear Democrats decrying secrecy and stonewalling, this is what people figure they are talking about.

I suppose that you can always succeed when your sole purpose in life is to make another human being look bad, especially when said human being doesn’t seem all that interested in responding to you. The skillful use of loaded words and phrases often gets the job done.

But a political movement that wins power by creating an illusion usually ends up being exposed for the fraud it is. That can make it difficult to govern if and when you get the chance. Then again, right now they’re making it nearly impossible for Bush to govern, so maybe the American people will see difficult as an improvement.

Assuming the language of scandal continues to fool them.