29
Oct
We got the government Lanny Davis deserves
If you’re looking for an argument in favor of overthrowing the Democratic party old guard, you won’t do better than the one Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis advances in his bizarre New York Times op-ed piece today.
Assuming it’s not a parody, the stomach-churning essence of the argument is that crime is now indistinguishable from politics. While Davis admonishes Republicans for their “criminalizing politics” mantra, he likewise chastises Democrats for finding an indifference to national security in the Plame leak.
Similarly, the Democrats are playing up the idea that White House officials may have endangered national security in playing hardball politics. Well, I can remember all the times I picked up the phone and talked “on background” to reporters, “pushing back” against rumors damaging to President Clinton and citing information that I thought was “out there.” I don’t remember ever worrying about whether the facts that I felt were public knowledge might have been classified. But even if I had, I would probably have rationalized that anything I had heard on the grapevine couldn’t possibly be a state secret. If every political aide was prosecuted for those kinds of conversations with the press corps, I’m afraid there wouldn’t be enough jails to hold us.
Maybe Davis didn’t have time to read the Libby indictment before he submitted his article; given what he says about his own carelessness as White House counsel, that’s not out of the question. Whether he did or not, the cynicism and dishonesty he packs into that single paragraph is breathtaking (and the rest of the piece is worse).
The information about Plame wasn’t “out there:” it was about as far “in there” as one can get without resorting to a proctologist to get it out. It was in the vice president’s office, the state department’s intelligence branch and the CIA. Libby wasn’t “pushing back” against rumors: he was “screwing” an administration critic for so publicly “discrediting” an already rickety core administration “claim” about Iraq that the White House felt compelled to “renounce” it. And if every senior White House official — calling Cheney’s chief of staff and national security advisor a “political aide” is pretty cute — who learned the identity of a covert CIA agent from the vice president of the United States and promptly leaked it to the press was prosecuted, I suspect our jails could handle the traffic with room to spare for Davis if he did anything even remotely as sinister as that. With a bit of luck, we’ll find out.
Davis plays the equivalency game: for every Republican sin, he has to offer up a counterweight Democratic one. But Republicans have owned the government for five years now; there is no equivalency. There are no powerhouse Democratic lobbyists under indictment, if only because Tom DeLay has been so successful in purging Democratic lobbyists from K Street. There are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders under indictment, if only because there are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders. Democrats didn’t out a covert CIA agent; Democrats didn’t drag the nation into an illegal war based on bogus intelligence (although more than a few are complicit in the effort); Democrats didn’t institutionalize torture or strip US citizens of basic constitutional protections.
There is a national security issue here. Republicans are demonstrably more corrupt than Democrats. Hell, this isn’t even the only occasion on which the administration have blown the cover of a secret intelligence asset from purely political motives: in August of last year, the administration infuriated British and Pakistani intelligence services by leaking the name of a highly placed al Qaeda informant in order to justify an increase in the terror alert level, and in the process ruining counterterrorism operations in Britain and Pakistan.
For going on 40 years now, Democrats have gotten their asses kicked when it comes to hardball politics. Lanny Davis and Libby/Rove are emblematic of why. If Davis wants to wish a pox on both parties’ houses, he should probably wait until Democrats get a house.
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“Davis plays the equivalency game”
Has a Republican ever played the equivalency game?
October 29th, 2005 at 3:19 amThe republicans are always playing the equivalency game. The difference is that when they do it, they say “but the democrats did the same thing” in order to make what they did seem normal. They do this even when what the democrats did wasn’t the same thing at all. They main difference between democrats and republicans in this case is that when republicans use equivalency, it is to make themselves look good by making democrats look bad. Actually, there isn’t a difference… when democrats use the game, it is to make republicans look good and themselves look bad. The question is why democrats seem to want to do this so often?
October 29th, 2005 at 3:47 amWho is this Lanny Davis anyway and why should we give a s**t?
October 29th, 2005 at 4:18 amMy question is, can’t the NYT find more interesting commentary than, “gosh, Mom, all the kids are doing it”?
October 29th, 2005 at 5:17 amClinton himself seems not to desire to act like he has some special duty to deal with the opposition of his party. His dealings with the President Dad is telling as is his desire to make his wife look centrist. And, then, after supporting the Democratic candidate for mayor of NY, he allows himself to be photographed smiling and shaking the hand of the guy’s Republican opponent, Mayor Bloomberg, who has done his part in promoting the Republican cause.
Also, Davis is mirroring the voice of various members of the press. For instance, Michael Iskhoff was on NOW last night suggesting that everyone leaks and plays dirty politics … you know, Karl Rove is no one special in that department.
The BS continues to flow.
October 29th, 2005 at 6:03 am[…] Weldon Burger over at Betty the Crow News rips into former Clinton official Lanny Davis for a moronic op-ed at the NYT: The information about Plame wasn’t “out there:” it was about as far “in there” as one can get without resorting to a proctologist to get it out. It was in the vice president’s office, the state department’s intelligence branch and the CIA. Libby wasn’t “pushing back” against rumors: he was “screwing” an administration critic for so publicly “discrediting” an already rickety core administration “claim” about Iraq that the White House felt compelled to “renounce” it. And if every senior White House official — calling Cheney’s chief of staff and national security advisor a “political aide” is pretty cute — who learned the identity of a covert CIA agent from the vice president of the United States and promptly leaked it to the press was prosecuted, I suspect our jails could handle the traffic with room to spare for Davis if he did anything even remotely as sinister as that. With a bit of luck, we’ll find out. […]
October 29th, 2005 at 6:11 amWow. This is pretty emblamatic of the problem. But if he’d been honest (as opposed to “fair”) he probably wouldn’t have made it to the Times’ Op Ed page in the first place.
October 29th, 2005 at 7:16 amdamn, what can you say about a former Clinton employee who still has yet to bother himself to look up the fact that whitewater turned out to be tens of millions of dollars worth of bullshit which resulted in charging the president with lying about some sex. this is part if this guy’s own kife and legacy, and he can’t even be bothered to knw that much about it! i just stopped reading after he even mentioned it…
October 29th, 2005 at 8:29 amThank you for covering the Lanny Davis wing of the corrupt Democratic looser camp.
I noticed that while the NYT admits there are no WMD’s in their Sat Editorial, they loaded up the op ed page with pro-bush spin.
It’s still the same game. Strong minded Bush supporters, with some ‘equivalent’ or mild progressive commentary. Is Maureen Dowd supposed to balance Tierney? Of course not.
One other note, nobody in MSM is reporting that Bush is implicated. They are labeling Libby as ‘Cheney’s former aide’. In fact he is a Bush aide, and a ‘national security’ adviser.
“Libby holds three titles: chief of staff and national security adviser to Cheney, and assistant to Bush.
Like few other advisers, he attends the highest level of White House meetings. He attends the weekly gathering of Bush’s top economic advisers and — according to Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack,” about the Bush administration’s run-up to the Iraq war — was one of two non-principals who attended National Security Council meetings with the president after Sept. 11, 2001 (the other was Condoleezza Rice’s then-deputy, Stephen Hadley).”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp…2201439_pf.html
October 29th, 2005 at 8:37 amcorrected url…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp…2201439_pf.html
October 29th, 2005 at 8:39 amone more time for url on Libby role in wh
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102201439_pf.html
October 29th, 2005 at 8:40 amIt’s an old story. The Republicans keep falling into the holes they dig to trap others. The Democrats keep throwing them a rope to help them out.
Sigh.
October 29th, 2005 at 11:21 amLanny Davis is desparate for business. I would be willing to bet a lot he has pitched potential targets in this and still hopes to get hired. Read his emails in the Scrushy matter to see how he operates when looking for a client he can milk for fees.
October 29th, 2005 at 7:27 pmI heard similar sentiments from Richard Clark recently on NPR; basically, Washington insiders find it appalling that they might be treated in the same manner as common folk when they break the law.
Davis doesn’t claim that revealing classified info for partisan gain is *legal*, or even *right*- just that he’s done it, so either 1)he’s a felon and a threat to national security or 2)it’s ok.
He assumes that #1 is a reductio ad absurdum (ie a ridiculous conclusion), and that therefore we must conclude that it’s really ok.
But I think I’ve just concluded that Davis is, in fact, a danger to national security and a partisan hack.
October 29th, 2005 at 10:51 pmNot wishing to go to the trouble of getting a copy of the NY Times, but wanting to read Lanny Davis’s piece, I found same on your web page. So you’ve saved an evil conservative republican (a triple redundancy, I realize, in your view) some time. Any objective reader would have to note that Mr. Davis’s piece, while very temperate, was more critical of republicans than of democrats, which is fine with me; temperance counts for a lot in my book. But the ad hominem attacks on Mr. Davis say a LOT more about y’all than they do about Davis. Here’s a bit of avuncular advice for each of you: if you’re an unhappy soul, confronted by the inevitable personal failures and setbacks of life, look to yourself to address your problems. Big Oil, George Bush, and (now) Lanny Davis, won’t have much shelf life as scapegoats.
October 31st, 2005 at 12:35 pmNice ad hominem, Casiday. So, everyone who’s outraged at crime in high places is just compensating for their own personal failures? If that makes you feel better about your part in putting criminals into high office, and the mess they’ve made of our country, I guess that’s what it takes.
November 1st, 2005 at 3:28 pm[…] Via This Modern World, from BTC News: […]
December 27th, 2005 at 2:56 am