Dirty Tricks

Here come the dirty bombs.

I'm not referring to the most recent terror alert, which just so happened to coincide with the conclusion of the Democrats' successful convention. (Isn't it awful that the public – quite justifiably – cannot approach the Bush administration's terror announcements without a healthy dose of cynicism?) No, the dirty bombs being launched these days are coming from GOP HQ.

No sooner had Commander Kerry accomplished his mission in Boston – by presenting himself as a serious, smart, firm and sensible alternative to George W. Bush – the Bush campaign declared its intention to rip the former war-hero-turned-war-foe into small pieces. It's not as if the Bush crew hadn't already tried to blast Kerry to smithereens. In the first half of this year, it spent tens of millions of dollar on ads that claimed Kerry was a flip-flopping, equivocating, say-anything pol (who voted for the liberal position 97 percent of the time). Those negative ads took a toll; polls showed that some folks absorbed the GOP's anti-Kerry message. But they did not produce as big a bang as many GOPers expected for all those bucks.

And in the wake of a convention that highlighted Kerry's resolve as a soldier (who actually killed the enemy) and his commitment to certain bedrock principles (such as being honest when assessing threats to the national interest) it might be tough for the campaign of a missing-in-nonaction Guardsman who misled the nation into war to portray Kerry as a weak, vacillating and untrustworthy fellow. So Bush's first post-convention line of attack was to assail Kerry for having achieved little in his 19 years as a senator.

Desperate times call for desperate negative ads. Bush is doing okay in some polls against Kerry, not-so-okay in others. But his approval rating has been on a steady decline for months. A majority of Americans tell pollsters they believe the Iraq war was a mistake; more than 60 percent say the war was not worth it, and in the past two months, Bush's credibility has fallen dramatically, according to the polls.  Republicans ought to be worried. And when they fret, they tend to lash out.

Two recent examples show how reckless and vicious GOPers can get. When the news broke weeks ago that former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger had removed classified documents related to terrorism and notes from a secured viewing room at the National Archives, leading Republicans and conservative commentators – including House Speaker Denny Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay – went berserk.  With little information available about what Berger had done – he claimed he had taken papers out with him by accident and returned most of them later – they accused Berger of stuffing documents down his pants and suggested he had swiped documents to cover up misdeeds or mistakes committed by the Clinton administration and to prevent the 9/11 Commission from finding out truths that would trouble or embarrass the Clinton gang. 

But days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported, "Officials looking into the removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger say no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.... The conclusion by archives officials and others would seem to lay to rest the issue of whether any information was permanently destroyed or withheld from the commission." This, of course, doesn't explain what actually happened, but it does take the fizz out of attacks initiated by Republicans before the facts were in.

Before Berger became the target of the GOP hit squad, former ambassador Joseph Wilson – whose wife was outed by unnamed Bush officials as an undercover CIA officer after Wilson challenged Bush's claim that Iraq had been uranium shopping in Africa – was in their crosshairs. The fuss began when the Senate intelligence committee released its report on the prewar intelligence on Iraq. The GOP-led committee declared that the intelligence community had "overstated" and "mischaracterized" the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It noted that prewar claims about Iraq's WMDs "were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." The committee also concluded that the CIA had "reasonably assessed" there was no working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq.  This meant that Bush's primary rationale for the war – Iraq posed an "immediate" threat to the United States because Saddam Hussein was loaded with WMDs he could share with his pals in Al Qaeda – was bullshit. But how did leading voices of the right – The National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Times columnist William Safire – respond to the damning report, which was bad news for Bush? They pounced on Wilson and claimed that he, not Bush, was the liar.