White House Report

In the fashion of the most out-of-control frat house lost weekend binge, this president and his cronies have wreaked wanton destruction on the national fabric, starting with stealing the 2000 election, and progressing to the lightning-fast liquidation of the national surplus, the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the launch of one of the worst cases of imperialistic, "Manifest Destiny"-style roughshod invasions of a foreign land in the nation's history.

In the context of all this, Bush and his henchmen, in the fashion of blocking the access by worried parents to the trashed frat house, have mastered the habit of shrugging their shoulders and lying vigorously about what's really inside.

Who really cares about indiscretions in the Vietnam days? They matter little more to the national interest than consensual extra-marital relationships in the Oval Office.

Lying, on the other hand, lying to the American people and the leaders of the United Nations, really matters, especially on matters as important as war and peace.

The only thing that has buoyed the president's popularity and performance ratings, even as fast as they are now sinking, has been the stubborn unwillingness of millions of honorable and law abiding American citizens to believe, on principle, that their president would look them straight in the eye and deliberately lie, in particular about something like war, something that puts thousands of our own sons and daughters in harm's way and inflicts such pain, misery and death upon countless innocents.

It's only as the evidence becomes overwhelming and irrefutable does that innate, and meritorious, resolve to believe the nation's leaders erode and melt away. The trend line of the president's popularity ratings suggests this is now beginning to happen.

On its editorial page Tuesday, the News York Times unleashed a scathing attack on the president entitled, "Distorting the Intelligence."

It began, "The Senate Intelligence Committee made the right call last week when it decided to examine whether top administration officials had exaggerated or misused the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs."

After delineating discrepancies between intelligence assessments and administration pronouncements in the areas of nuclear and biological weapons, the threat of aerial attacks and Iraqi links to terrorists, the editorial ended by asserting, "The Bush administration took unlikely worst-case scenarios and inflated them drastically to justify an immediate invasion (of Iraq) without international support. The Senate committee will need to find out not just why the intelligence was so wrong, but also the extent to which the administration misused it to stampede the nation."

Misused intelligence to stampede the nation!

This is the gravest of charges. It continues to puzzle me why this plausible explanation for what was happening just a year ago has not already resulted in a persistent drum beat for accountability, if not censure or impeachment.

The evidence is there. Is it because too many leading Democrats voted in support of the president's war resolution in the fall of 2002? Now that Sen. John Kerry appears the shoe-in for the Democratic president nomination, is it in order to avoid exposing him to embarrassment on that vote? Is this why some Democratic honchos are trying to redirect the nation's focus onto the irrelevant issue of Bush's military record during Vietnam?

They might think this makes their man look better, contrasting his Vietnam War fighting record to Bush's.

But it also makes Bush look better, if only because it redirects the media's and the nation's all-to-brief attention spans away from the Senate Intelligence investigation and its contents to something of negligible ultimate import.

I never trusted those Republicans who said six months ago that they'd prefer Howard Dean win the Democratic nomination because he'd be the easiest to beat. Never trust what one party says about its rival.

For whatever else about his qualifications, Howard Dean has and would stay focused to go relentlessly for the jugular against the worst crimes of the Bush administration. He forced the entire Democratic presidential field to follow his lead in just this way through the early primaries.

Maybe Kerry will keep the heat on. We wonder how much he would have had Dean not been around up to now, and if he won't rather run on comparative Vietnam records.