We’ve said repeatedly in our posts that a key problem with the Bush administration is its nonstop, growing credibility crisis. It’s a huge underlying factor in the current uproar over the collection of phone call data by NSA — a controversy that actually swirls on several other, more evident fronts.
One is the privacy issue. One is the legality issue. Those are and will be debated further in many forums in coming weeks.
But the larger issue is the one that poses the most danger to this administration — particularly if White House guru Karl Rove winds up being indicted in Plamegate.
It’s the fact that Americans have learned you cannot trust the assertions or assurances of members of this administration because it’ll turn out later that reality is a different matter.
The key here is the word “later.” Officials will issue a statement or a seeming assurance. It later turns out to be incorrect. They either deny they said the original statement or just ignore what was said or implied before. And when former statements are researched (or old videos of them shown) they show that a) statements were not accurate b) there were instances of omission where an inaccurate statement was not made but the implication was left out there that a situation was a certain way, which it wasn’t.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A VIDEO SHOWING that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on this same point. Does Gingrich read TMV? Here’s an excerpt (read and watch the rest yourself):
I’m not going to defend the indefensible. The Bush administration has an obligation to level with the American people. And I’m prepared to defend a very aggressive anti-terrorist campaign, and I’m prepared to defend the idea that the government ought to know who’s making the calls, as long as that information is only used against terrorists, and as long as the Congress knows that it’s underway.
But I don’t think the way they’ve handled this can be defended by reasonable people. It is sloppy. It is contradictory, and frankly for normal Americans, it makes no sense to listen to these three totally different explanations.
Lock-step Bush defenders, talk radio hosts and in some weblogs will immediately fall in line and echo the latest official explanation. We even got emails from some folks trying to compare the NSA phone data mining operation to the way one political group collects information and to the Clinton administration.
It’s apples and oranges, plus every time the government or an official seemingly steps out of line saying “Clinton did it” doesn’t impress since if we recall correctly the GOP campaigned in 2000 and 2004 as offering the American people a higher ethical and efficiency standard than the Clinton administration.
It’s the credibility issue that will sink this administration even if in November the GOP holds onto both houses of Congress: the GOP could still cling to power and the U.S. could be left with a government that only is believed by a narrow, partisan portion of the electorate.
AND THEN THERE’S THIS IMPLICATION:
Will it kill investigative reporting?
A reader emails us:
One point no one has mentioned — and it may be the reason the issue of the phone surveillance issue must not die — is that the media cannot live with the program and continue their investigative role.
With that program in operation the government can check on every caller to a writer or commentator. The government can also document every call to a source that the writer or commentator makes.
This program will totally dry up whistle-blowing. The government can now “reverse engineer” the calls to and from the writers of the article and pinpoint who is talking to whom. If they are government employees with access to classified information you put them on a lie box (just routine, m’am) with a half a dozen other people and then you fire them for a) lying or b) telling the truth.
Doesn’t it make you wonder if that wasn’t the recent scenario in the CIA? The victim talked to media, and admitted that, but claimed she didn’t spill any beans.
He notes that “terrorists killed 3,000; Americans will have killed 230 years of freedom and the rights of hundreds of millions of people. Now THAT is a weapon of mass destruction!”
Putting aside the actual issue of privacy and other controversies raised by the NSA program, what’s interesting is how this is being done, – by default and by the support of folks who would normally have vehemently battled these kinds of government operations without strict Congressional or civilian oversight. Government officials can say one thing that later turns out to be untrue. Or leave an implication hanging that later turns out to be untrue. And all it seemingly takes is for a leader some folks voted for to make a new statement ignoring what was said or implied before and these folks will accept the new explanation and immediately say they favor it on their own too (and favored it all along now that the subject has come up).
But not Newt. Not GOPer Joe Scarborough (VIDEO HERE).
And if you hear a sound tonight, it’s probably Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater turning over in their graves.
Are they all RINOS?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.