The modern White House has become an ivory tower from which presidents descend only to appear before handpicked audiences of uncritical supporters. In North Carolina Thursday, the script went wrong when a man in the room got up and told George Bush he should be ashamed of himself for leaving “compassion and common sense far behind” during his administration.
To Bush’s credit, he stopped supporters booing when the man first started speaking and insisted he be heard out. As a result Bush was also criticized for wiretapping without warrants, for his environmental policy and for his views on abortion. As any politician would in response to such wide-ranging criticism, he cherry-picked what to answer and focused on his old mantra - the war on terrorism. So would he apologize for wiretapping that was constitutional and authorized? He boomed: Absolutely not.
The awkward moment passed and Bush, now suffering from his lowest-ever popularity ratings, got on with fielding questions from the mass of Republican loyalists at the meeting. Nevertheless, wider criticism of the president almost certainly will not be dismissed so easily, if ultimately it can be dismissed at all. Most important, this week the whispers became louder that the White House was directly involved in the outing of a CIA spy, a serious criminal offense in the US.
Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney is facing trial for revealing the name of Valerie Plame, the wife of US diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had publicly debunked administration claims that Saddam Hussein had been sourcing uranium from Niger for his nuclear program. As part of Libby’s defense, he has now claimed that the vice-president authorized him to leak a range of classified information, which would help bolster the administration’s WMD case for the attack on Iraq. Most significantly, Libby claims that Cheney told him that the instruction to leak came from the president himself.
There is not yet any assertion that Bush specifically approved the unmasking of CIA agent Palme. But even if the finger of suspicion has not actually moved into the Oval Office, the shadow is already on the door. No doubt the president’s men will try to claim, if Libby is found guilty of outing Plame, that he was acting on his own initiative and exceeded any brief that he may have received from the vice president.
The problem for Bush is that the US public’s confidence in their commander in chief is ebbing fast along with US fortunes in Iraq. It has taken three years but the realization is finally dawning that far from dealing a shattering blow to international terror, the Iraq invasion and incompetent occupation thereafter have stirred up a new hornet’s nest. The neo-conservative agenda, which once seemed such a clear-cut and simple way to reassert US values in the world, has proven blundering and ignorant. Disillusioned US voters will make up the jury in the Libby trial next January and any further cases that may follow as a result.
