Gonzales' evasion can't hide blame
The Virginian-Pilot
© March 16, 2007



President Clinton did it!

With those four words, America has seen the utter bankruptcy of the current White House strategy of defending the botched firings of federal prosecutors by blaming it on Bubba.

In one desperate sentence, the talking point attempts to camouflage the current calumny in hazily remembered politics of 14 years ago, holds up President Clinton as the shiny arbiter of presidential rectitude and provides a steaming pile of red meat to Bush stalwarts anemic after so many cuts and scandals.



The goal of the confusion is to distract us from a basic fact: Nobody disputes President Bush's right to fire federal prosecutors. Plenty are worried that these particular U.S. attorneys were fired for being insufficiently obedient to the White House. And everyone should be alarmed that the administration, when asked by Congress about it, didn't tell the truth.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now finds himself in an impossible position. His chief of staff has resigned, and Gonzales has admitted he wasn't sufficiently informed about what was going on.

Which leads to two possibilities: Either the attorney general doesn't know about White House meddling at the Justice Department (which is scary) or he did, which makes the nation's top prosecutor first and foremost a political tool.

Couple that with a new inspector general's report that the FBI was abusing its powers to violate the privacy of Americans, and it is no wonder that it has become ex-presidents week in the nation's capital. Scandals, like no other D.C. social occasion, have the ability to focus political attention on the past.

Indeed, the Clinton excuse flowered on the same day that Gonzales found himself channeling another ex-president.

"I acknowledge that mistakes were made here," Gonzales said to the utter astonishment of every living Washingtonian.

Sound familiar? The grammar might've been a little different, but the aura of Richard Nixon - "Mistakes have been made" - at the end of Watergate was very much in the springtime air. Gonzales wasn't the only one.

"Mistakes were made. And I'm frankly not happy about them," President Bush said.

Every politician in Washington knows to avoid any echo of Nixon's non-admission admission of 30-some years ago, the ultimate attempt to avoid responsibility that the 36th president so richly deserved. Yet politicians - from Carter to Clinton to Reagan - often just can't help themselves.

"Mistakes were made here by people who either did it deliberately or inadvertently," President Clinton said in 1997, about a gathering fundraising storm.

Sometimes, the passive locution - "mistakes were made" - is just bad wordsmithing. Sometimes, it's an attempt to hide a culprit. Sometimes, though, such language is merely a desperate attempt to shift the blame you know has finally hit the mark.




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