The Imperial City

Heck of a Job, Bloomie

Speaking of presidential-scandal history—Watergate, Iran/contra, Monica Lewinsky; compare and contrast—the salient difference with this one is that it has not just obstruction of justice but a clear, specific, major national-policy debate at its core. That is, before the invasion of Iraq, how and why were we sold such a bill of goods? Imagine a federal criminal trial (or trials) during next year’s midterm election campaigns, with lovable Boy Scout Patrick Fitzgerald cross-examining Cheney and Rove and other unlovable administration officials about lies and exaggerations concerning WMDs.* Daily coverage will make people look back and feel hoodwinked into supporting the war, and maybe even into reelecting Bush. Fitzgerald said at his press conference that if Judy Miller had not protected Libby for a whole pointless year, “we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005.” That is, we would’ve had the indictment of the vice-president’s chief of staff back then—a real October surprise that might have turned a red state or two blue and thus swung the election. Would a Kerry administration have better managed the counterinsurgency and occupation these last nine months? Very probably, and they couldn’t have done any worse. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted before Libby was indicted, 55 percent of Americans would vote for a Democrat if the presidential election were held now, versus only 42 percent who would reelect Bush. During Watergate, even if the electorate had known all the facts as of November 1972, I bet they still wouldn’t have elected George McGovern president.

“ ‘What? I’m lying? Are you saying I’m lying?’ ” That’s a line from Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel, The Apprentice. Here’s another: “Or, the youth realized, might the story she had told him . . . be just a lie?” Also: “Surely, he thought, she would have seen that he had no choice but to lie about the box.” And finally: “ ‘Well, then,’ the thin man said, ‘someone’s lying. Or maybe more than one of us.’ ”

Like Watergate and Iran/contra, this scandal concerns lies told by the president’s men. Unlike with Watergate and blowjobgate, no specific deception by the president is alleged. (By the most powerful vice-president in history, though? We’ll see.) But even if only Libby is accused of breaking the law, this affair—lying to the FBI, lying to the grand jury—is a vivid example of the administration’s habitually reckless disregard for the truth.

The fundamental problem with any dogmatic ideology is that its premises lead believers to look at facts selectively, choosing to admit only the ones that reinforce their particular faith-based view of the world. Realists and pragmatists can certainly lie as well, but ideologues begin with a righteous antagonism to all inconvenient information. So even when they haven’t lied, the Bush administration has enthusiastically ignored difficult facts in favor of wishfulness and evasion and distortion.

Before the war, they talked darkly of mushroom clouds and blithely of a cakewalk and flowers-and-candy and a cheap oil-funded reconstruction. They resisted serious planning for occupation and counterinsurgency. They declared “Mission Accomplished” 1,800 U.S. lives ago and the insurgency in its last throes last spring. The refusal to admit mistakes or change strategy is a result of their fervent faith that reality must conform to their hopes and fantasies. The what-me-worry budget deficits; the support of intelligent design; even the tossed-off lie that Miers withdrew her nomination because of executive-privilege issues; so much this administration does and says is less than true. I have a hunch that the prosecution of U.S. v. Libby, in its slow, deep, relentless exposure of one episode of unambiguous chicanery, could be the small galvanizing episode that makes millions of fair-minded ordinary Americans see a disturbing pattern. Even if it won’t be enough to make most of them vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008.

In our 2005 mayoral campaign, it was the Democratic candidate who dissembled (about the Diallo shooting) and fibbed (about attending public school). Whereas Bloomberg seems fairly honest and straightforward, not even much of an embellisher for a politician. And in his second term, unlike Bush, he has a decent chance at pulling off a major and lasting accomplishment.

All he has to do is continue his stunning recent jag of impolitic truth-telling about ground zero, shove his pissed-off lame-duck Republican governor aside, and make good on the new vision. He has suddenly suggested that the atrocious Larry Silverstein, the developer who holds the World Trade Center lease, should be made to go away; that every rebuilding decision can no longer be subject to veto by the victims’ families; that the Port Authority, which owns the site, should trade it to the city for the land under La Guardia and JFK; and that we should put up apartment buildings instead of office towers. Dude! Suddenly, he gets it. And so, just as suddenly, I decided that in the election this week I wouldn’t default to the Democratic line, or abstain, that instead I’d forgive Bloomberg his Republicanism. Life changes fast.

*By the way, if they are such cunning, hardball-playing, ends-justify-the-means liars, why didn’t the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal arrange to plant WMD evidence in Iraq? When push came to shove, they played by the rules. Cold comfort now, maybe, but comfort nonetheless.

E-mail: emailandersen@aol.com.