If at first they don’t succeed, they try, try, try again.
Remember how the Democrats and their media chorus went ballistic
over some scrap of evidence that Bush might have seen the name of
Osama bin Laden in print some time before last September 11?
Because of Bush’s popularity on security matters, that campaign
went nowhere, not even to the point where Bush would have been
forced to appoint an independent commission to examine pre-9/11
intelligence failures. When congressional committees threatened to
show the administration up on that score, Bush neutralized them by
calling for the creation of a Department of Homeland Security.
That’s about the last we’ve heard of any serious exchanges on that
front.
Instead the anti-Bush war returned to a previous battleground,
the one where Enron’s collapse was to have bloodied Bush into
submission. New corporations, new collapses and new information
about bogus profits — most recently involving WordCom to the tune
of several billion dollars — were enough reason to revive interest
in a once much reported business situation involving pre-political
Bush when the stakes were no more than ten or twenty
million and his own stock deal worth no more than $850,000
in shares.
Most wars of aggression center on efforts to acquire new ground.
Those against Bush keep going back in time. Recall that 9/11 only
led to a cease-fire in the war that had existed ever since Bush
emerged the victor in Florida. Questions about his legitimacy
resurfaced after the new year, and the Democrats’ more fevered
outposts continue to be obsessed by them. But the latest attacks on
Bush give combatants the thrill of returning not only to the year
2000, but to 1998, 1994, and the first Bush presidency as well, if
not earlier. There’s nothing new about any of the current anti-Bush
fever. Back in June 1999, the well-known anti-Republican attack rag
The American Spectator ran a cover story examining the
crony capitalist career of Texas Gov. George W. Bush. It found
nothing in that career that wasn’t legal.
The author of the 1999 story, National Review’s Byron
York, has done some follow up work in the wake of the latest effort
to use Harken and the SEC against Bush. In a definitive report
posted yesterday, he notes that contrary to what such disinterested
figures as Tom Daschle and Terry McAuliffe may claim, there is
plenty of documentation from Bush’s business career already in the
public domain. Nor has any Bush basher bothered to note that, as
York reports, Bush sold his Harken stock for a simple business
reason: he needed the money to invest in the Texas Rangers, which
were then up for sale. (Wait a few weeks and Bush will be roasted
anew for making a huge, not quite McAuliffe-like profit on that
investment.) Late filings with the SEC? Not in the case of a key
document no one else cares to discuss. It’s all in York.
Even Joe Conason, an anti-Bush obsessive if there ever was one,
is impressed, not for the first time, by York’s piece. He calls
it “competently” presented. Then he proceeds to lay out the latest
charge: the SEC investigation of Bush’s sale “was conducted while
that agency was under the control of Bush family friends and
appointees.” That begs the question why there was an investigation
in the first place. (Or, ultimately, why a president so apparently
ruthless was powerless to guarantee his re-election.)
Where Conason used to team with the imaginative Gene Lyons maybe
he now should hook up with Maureen Dowd, assuming she can take time
off from her glitzy life with Michael Douglas or whoever else she
paints New York with. Her anti-Bush animus goes back furthest of
all — to the very fact of his birth. “Can a Bush — born on third
base but thinking he hit a triple — ever really understand the
problems of the guys in the bleachers?” she asks in
yesterday’s New York Times. (The only real problem the
guys in the bleachers have is girlfriends who remind them of
Maureen Dowd.) Just to confirm that her analysis is nothing more
than unabashed bigotry, she also singles out “the rich white guys
running the first Bush administration … in a fog of privilege.”
Ignoring all requirements of full disclosure, she tells us not a
word about the rich white guys who run the Times and
envelop her in a fog of privilege.
Finally, there’s the old standby explanation that’s
automatically used against anyone who happens to be a rich white
guy: Bush is simply stupid. The New Republic, in another
clever fit, accepts Bush probably did nothing illegal, but
concludes that doesn’t mean he wasn’t and isn’t incompetent, “dim”
and if not an Ivan Boesky, then at least Mr. Magoo.
Remind us to laugh, as the Washington Post’s Reliable
Source tried to yesterday,
comparing Bush with ultimate dumb-dumb Dan Quayle, all because
he once allegedly “confided” to Tony Blair about the troubled
French economy, “The problem with the French is that they don’t
have a word for entrepreneur.” Huh? If that’s indeed what Bush said
it was sheer brilliance, the best proof yet that wit is the best
defense against witless snobs and the many wars they launch.
