A Question of Competence

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 10:44 AM

There they go again: another liberal magazine attacking George Bush.

We have the caricature of W. in a baseball uniform, with the old Casey Stengel line about the '62 Mets: "Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?"

We have pieces on "How the White House Messed Things Up" on "Scootergate," and one on the Gonzales uproar, "Fiasco at Justice."

And then, the coup de grace, "the incompetence charge" against the Bush administration: "He has made a few key bad decisions about policy and personnel, compounded them by not reacting quickly enough when things go wrong, and failed to create a sense of accountability in his government. . . . The upshot is that even Republican primary voters will be looking in 2008 for someone who doesn't run the government like George W. Bush. . . . Once inside the charmed Bush circle, people tend to stay there and rise to the level of their incompetence."

Wait a second--d'oh!--this isn't the Nation or American Prospect. It's National Review! And the editor, Rich Lowry, is the author of the piece questioning the president's competence. So much for liberal media bias.

That, in a nutshell, explains why Gonzo is in deep trouble. It's not just that conservatives consider him too moderate and are not lining up to defend him (nor are Republican lawmakers rushing to the AG's side). It's the feeling that DOJ is the new FEMA, that Alberto Gonzales is the latest example of a "loyal Bushie" (to use the phrase that appeared in one e-mail to describe which U.S. attorneys should be retained) who is in over his head.

It's also interesting that Harriet Miers, who Bush thought was Supreme Court material until a conservative revolt torpedoed her chances, was deeply involved in the Purgegate planning.

I wonder if these "Republicans close to the White House" who keep getting quoted as saying Gonzales is toast and the search is on for his successor are freelancing or putting out the administration's message. After days of tepid Tony Snow endorsements, the president called his attorney general yesterday, which suggests to me he's not ready to cut his old Texas pal loose.

Some anchors and commentators described Bush at his brief news conference yesterday as "angry," but I thought he was trying to sound reasonable. Of course, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers will be happy to chat with Democratic investigators, but no troublesome details like transcripts (so the rest of us can find out what was said) or being under oath (to avoid any Scooter Libby problems). And no "partisan fishing expeditions" (unlike the high-minded approach that congressional Republicans took with Bill Clinton, when Dan Burton fired shots at a pumpkin to test his Vince Foster-was-murdered theory.) And please, no Stalinesque "show trials."

In invoking executive privilege, Bush is taking a stand embraced by every past president from Nixon to Clinton, although exceptions have been made on a number of occasions for White House aides to testify.

The Democrats--who are trying to milk this for all it's worth, which doesn't mean it's not a bona fide scandal--will huff and puff and probably issue subpoenas, and in the end a compromise will be worked out.

Reporters, meanwhile, get to trot out one of their favorite phrases:

"President Bush and Congress clashed Tuesday over an inquiry into the firing of federal prosecutors and appeared headed toward a constitutional showdown over demands from Capitol Hill for internal White House documents and testimony from top advisers to the president," says the New York Times.

The Dems rejected the offer on Rove and Miers:

"Tuesday's confrontation was the sharpest yet between the Bush White House and the new Democratic majority in Congress on a matter of oversight, and it set the stage for a legal showdown over executive privilege. Democrats threatened to subpoena Mr. Rove and the others unless they testified publicly and under oath, while the White House vowed to fight subpoenas in court."

The Boston Globe: "The president's press conference was held hours after the Senate delivered a bipartisan slap at Bush, voting 94 to 2 to strip Gonzales's authority to appoint interim US attorneys without Senate confirmation -- authority granted to him in a revision of the USA Patriot Act. The law, passed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, delivered sweeping new powers to the Department of Justice, based on the need to investigate and thwart terrorism.

"With Democrats promptly blasting Bush's refusal to allow Rove's testimony, Bush took the unusual step of delivering a nationally televised statement late yesterday in support of the attorney general.

"Bush offered no apologies for the way the firings were handled. Nor did he say, as Gonzales has, that mistakes were made."

A "high-ranking Republican congressman" tells Ana Marie Cox (and other reporters who agreed to chat on background):

"On Gonzales stepping down: 'You guys have been in Washington longer than I have -- a leaked list of replacements? A phone call from the President? He's not going to make it through this.' "

This week's sport for liberals seems to be replaying the '03 comments of war supporters, as in this post by HuffPost's Jackson Williams:

"The following comes from The Weekly Standard, the well known conservative magazine that Fox News contributor William Kristol edits. Back on April 21, 2003, they published 'The Cassandra Files' to crow about the wonderful success of their Iraq war. The subhead of the piece was 'The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.' I looked up the date of this piece, and just to refresh your memory, it ran a mere nine days before President Bush landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1 and gave a speech under a banner reading 'Mission Accomplished.'

"In other words, the whole neocon Bush gang was in a very serious and well coordinated 'strutting' mode at the time, classically counting their chickens before they'd hatched. The Standard took what it saw as the most off-the-wall and egregious anti-war predictions and then made pithy fun of them. My favorite example is this one:

" 'They don't call it "conventional wisdom" for nothing. Mere days before the fall of Baghdad, one of America's newsweeklies, the "hip" one, makes a fatuous blunder for the ages: 'Cheney [down arrow] tells Meet the Press just before war, "We will be greeted as liberators." An arrogant blunder for the ages.' --Newsweek, April 7, 2003, edition.

"You gotta love that! The Weekly Standard is saying that calling Cheney's 'greeted as liberators' comment a blunder was, in fact, itself a blunder for the ages! Here's some other examples the Standard cited as inane in early 2003:

" 'This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense--and transparent--political stupidity.' --Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002.

" 'Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America's intentions than Saddam's. . . . [I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself.' --New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002."

Bill Kristol, who edits the Standard, remains a true believer:

"The world will surely note our success or failure in Iraq. It will not long remember the gang that couldn't shoot straight at the Justice Department--or, for that matter, the antics of congressional Democrats--unless either so weakens the administration as to undercut our mission in Iraq.

"Obviously, it's too early to say anything more definitive than that there are real signs of progress in Baghdad. The cocksure defeatism of war critics of two months ago, when the surge was announced, does seem to have been misplaced."

Do we obsess too much on politicians changing their positions? The New Republic's Jonathan Chait thinks so:

"On the scoreboard of major flip-flops, Giuliani (partial-birth abortion and gun control) and Romney (abortion and gay rights) both lead with two. McCain trails with one (the Bush tax cuts, which he voted against but now vows to keep). I suppose if you count as a flip-flop McCain's embrace of onetime agent of intolerance Jerry Falwell, that would tie him up on the leader board. (Though, in McCain's defense, it's not literally a flip-flop, as he never specifically said he wouldn't hug Falwell.)

"The Talmudic exercise of counting flip-flops, though, tells you little about a politician's ideological malleability. Anybody who spends enough time in elected politics will rack up a flip-flop or two. George W. Bush started out pro-choice and Dennis Kucinich pro-life. Both switched sides eventually, but nobody would accuse either of being an ideological weathervane. This is problem number one with the flip-flop obsession: Things that count as flip-flops often have no broader significance.

"Problem number two is that changes that do have deep ideological significance often don't count as flip-flops. In 1992, Romney voted for Paul Tsongas in the Democratic primary. Two years later, Giuliani publicly endorsed Mario Cuomo. Romney isn't running on an anti-Tsongas platform today, but he's clearly running as the sort of man who would never vote for Tsongas, or any Democrat. Likewise Giuliani, whose conservative tribal appeal is based primarily on how much he hates liberals.

"In McCain's case, his one or two flip-flops don't even begin to convey the enormity of his ideological metamorphosis."

Ankle Biting Pundits focuses on Mitt's bilingual blunder:

"We interrupt this McCain-fest in order to bring to you Mitt Romney's latest fumble in public, this time down in Miami where he'd have been better served sticking with addressing the crowd in English:

" People chuckled when presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Mormon raised in Michigan and elected in Massachusetts, bungled the names of Cuban-American politicians during a recent speech in Miami.

"But when he mistakenly associated Fidel Castro's trademark speech-ending slogan -- Patria o muerte, venceremos! -- with a free Cuba, listeners didn't laugh. They winced . . .

"As someone who grew up in an area of Texas that was majority Hispanic, trust me, you do not want to be the white guy trying to speak Spanish when you have no clue what you're saying. In my neighborhood it would get you jumped. For Mitt, it may cost him a nice-sized voting block in South Florida.

"Way to go, gringo."

Is Arnold conservative enough? The LAT reports on a new spat:

"After repeatedly being asked about his conservative critics, including talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped his diplomatic veneer Tuesday and declared their views irrelevant to his work in California.

" 'All irrelevant. Rush Limbaugh is irrelevant. I am not his servant,' the governor said on NBC's 'Today' show. Limbaugh then declared on his radio program that Schwarzenegger, lacking the communication skills to convince Californians of his Republican values, had sold them out. " 'If he had the leadership skills to articulate conservative principles and win over the public as (former President) Reagan did, then he would have stayed conservative,' said Limbaugh, who is seen by some as the embodiment of all conservative viewpoints."

Speaking of governors, one just had her career washed out:

"Beset by complaints about the state's slow recovery from the 2005 hurricanes, languishing in the polls and facing pressure from her own party, Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced Tuesday that she will not seek reelection this year," says the New Orleans Times Picayune.

American Prospect's Greg Sargent responds to Joe Klein talking about Republican presidential contenders as "moderate candidates who live like liberals:"

"So Klein thinks getting a divorce is living like a 'liberal'?

"Okay, he obviously intends 'live like liberals' to mean that this is how the 'Republican faithful,' not he himself, see this behavior (I think, anyway). So, not really objectionable. But, hey, I had to get your attention somehow, and besides, this suggests a useful question:

"How many divorces have there been among the men -- and women -- in the Democratic field? Let's run through them real quick, just for the fun of it. None of the following liberal Dem candidates has gotten divorced:

"(1) Hillary: You know the story. No need to repeat it

"(2) Obama: Married to Michelle, whom he met when she was just out of law school, for 15 years.

"(3) Edwards: Married to Elizabeth since 1977; they've had four children, one of whom was killed in a car crash. . . .

"(4) Richardson: Married to his high-school sweetheart for 33 years.

"(5) Biden: First wife killed in car accident in 1972; married to his current wife for almost 30 years.

"Yeah, you have to really scrape your way to the bottom of the Democratic field to find divorces. The only Dem Presidential candidate with any kind of credible shot who has gotten divorced is . . . Chris Dodd, who divorced in 1982.

"In fact, if you think about it, the entire field of Dems deemed credible boasts fewer divorces than Rudy Giuliani alone!"

But Dennis Kucinich, he notes, has been divorced twice.

Joe Klein responds: "Do I really have to explain my jokes in each column?"