Rough Week

The Bush Administration has had a difficult week. In the space of just seven days, there have been no less than three embarrassing and/or potentially damaging revelations which call into serious question the Administration's veracity, judgment and just plain common sense:

1. The Department of Health and Human Services was caught distributing several phony news clips to local TV stations across the country, featuring fake journalists touting the benefits of the new Medicare prescription-drug law. Several dozen stations ran the clips before learning that it was a propaganda piece and not actual news. When the scam was discovered, HHS tried to get out of it by calling it a "video news release."

2. Richard Foster, Medicare's head cost analyst, revealed that before the Medicare bill was passed, he was ordered to hide the bill's true cost and ignore all Congressional requests for cost information. His supervisor also threatened to fire him should he ever disclose that the books were cooked. It was only after the bill became law that the real ten-year estimates, totaling $140 billion more than what Congress was told, were released. (Unlike other Administration figures who blew the whistle and were smeared for it, Foster was initially protected only because Republicans as well as Democrats are outraged by the White House's bait-and-switch move. That may be changing, however, as the White House attack machine shifts into gear.)

3. Richard Clarke, the Administration's former counter-terrorism chief, said in a 60 Minutes interview that the White House ignored the al Qaeda threat before 9/11 despite his increasingly frantic efforts to make them listen. After the terrorist attacks they sought to blame Iraq instead and thus make possible the pre-9/11 goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. (According to Clarke, Donald Rumsfeld even tried to justify it by claiming that "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.") After the interview, the White House hit squad went into high gear, attacking Clarke as a disgruntled former employee and pro-Democrat political hack, despite the fact that he had served administrations both Democratic and Republican since the 1980s.

One has to wonder what on Earth is going on in there. Does the Administration really not understand that this is the real world? In the real world, most people tend to look down on fake news, phony bookkeeping and using a terrorist attack to implement a separate agenda. If the White House keeps on blundering about like this, John Kerry won't have to do a thing to win the November election. He'll just have to sit back and let the Bush campaign do the job for him.