Rotting from the Head Down: The Bush Administration’s Moral Decay

One of the two people who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame was recently revealed. The agent's exposure was a form of retaliation for factual criticisms of Bush administration claims regarding Iraq made by her husband Joe Wilson. The person who exposed the undercover operative was not a careless intern. It wasn’t a double-agent spy. It was President Bush’s deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. Rove is well-known for his political maneuverings (or dirty tricks, depending on where your politics lie or how flexible your ethics are). To many, this was only the latest—though perhaps among the most egregious—exercises of Rove’s stock-in-trade.

The truly sad and bizarre thing is that, instead of being horrified that Rove may have damaged America’s security and committed a crime, the Republican party has begun to circle the wagons. They have issued defenses of Rove’s conduct and tried to deflect attention from his actions. Republicans are acting as if this was business as usual.

Does “business as usual” in the Bush Administration include the exposure of undercover CIA operatives as a form of political retaliation? It is true that all the facts have yet to come out, and judgment should be withheld until then. But the White House seems less interested in finding the facts than finding legal wiggle room for Karl Rove. Bush has clarified that he will only fire Rove if he is found to have committed a crime.

But what Bush seems to miss—and what Americans must realize—is that even if Rove isn’t found to have broken any laws, two things are clear: 1) Rove’s action was an unethical and unjustified smear job that is (or should be) beneath the Bush administration; and 2) that the Bush White house lied when it denied that there was any attempt to discredit Mr. Wilson or other Bush critics. In a democracy, in the United States I want to live in, shaky facts should be refuted by accurate facts, not by personal attacks on the source, nor by damaging national security in exposing the source’s wife as a CIA agent. If Wilson’s findings were true (as they substantially turned out to be), a moral and honest administration would admit its error and seek to correct its information; an immoral and dishonest administration would deny, defend, and discredit; it would do what Karl Rove did. (The case also shows that Bush has no idea what is going on in his own administration; “The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved,” Bush’s spokesman had said.)

Rove has offered a variety of intellectually and morally feeble defenses, including that he didn’t actually say Plame’s name, though it was clear to all involved who it was. This is almost as embarrassing and shameless as Bill Clinton’s infamous “it depends on what ‘is’ is” justifications in the Monica Lewinsky fiasco.

Has the Bush administration grown so corrupt that nearly any act can be justified? After the evidence-free lead-up to the Iraq attack, there came the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Bush expressed his moral outrage and vowed to punish those responsible. Almost two years later, four low-ranking military personnel have been convicted, and Bush then appointed Alberto Gonzales—a lawyer who worked to legally justify American torture—as his Attorney General.

As they say, you can’t fool all the people all the time, and many Americans don’t believe that Bush is being honest, nor is the White House doing all it can to fully investigate Rove’s role in the affair. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll reported by CNN on August 5 found that only 38 percent of Americans approve of Bush's handling of Iraq, and exactly half of Americans believe that their president is honest.

Bush may end up firing Rove; it’s possible that this time the stench of Rove’s rotting ethics and his dirty tricks smell too bad even for the current president. But if the firing comes to pass, I’ll have to wonder whether it’s out of a sense of betrayal and revulsion that his deputy chief of staff knowingly and needlessly helped expose an agent who was gathering intelligence to protect America, or whether it’s because the media exposure has caused Rove to become a political liability. Call me a cynic, but I think I know the answer.

In today’s over-politicized climate, even legitimate criticisms are immediately dismissed as partisan attacks. This sort of cursory dismissal is logically fallacious, intellectually dishonest, and subverts the free exchange of ideas. Let me be clear: I am not a Bush-basher. I have criticized both Bush and Clinton in talks and in print. I have called Clinton a coward for firing Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders and blamed him for his unwillingness to take the 1994 Rwandan genocide seriously. I am more Democrat than Republican on many issues, but I am far more independent than Democrat. I detest and condemn liars on all sides of the political debate. I target deceivers, bullshitters, and smooth-suited con men of all political stripes. All presidents are liars, but some lies are more damaging than others.

While the war in Iraq wages on, and the number of dead American troops increases literally every day--over 1,800 as of August 6--bombings and terrorist attacks continue. Innocent Iraqis continue to die and the Muslim world increasingly views America as an enemy. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, remains free four years later. Yet bin Laden is rarely mentioned by Bush or the news media these days, the real architect of America's devastation conveniently forgotten in a bit of "out of sight, out of mind" deception. Bin Laden is an embarrassing reminder to Americans of Bush's failure to bring those responsible for the attacks to justice.

Bush’s blithe disregard for the truth was driven home to me recently. In his June 28 speech, Bush repeatedly cited the September 11 terrorist attacks as a reason why the United States must remain fighting in Iraq. Whether American troops should stay in Iraq is a legitimate and debatable question; whether there is a link between Iraq and the terrorist attacks is not. Anyone who has been following the news knows (except, as studies have shown, for Fox viewers) that there has been no proven link between the September 11 attacks and Iraq. None. Period. Bush himself acknowledged in 2003 that “[w]e’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the [sic] September 11th,” a conclusion supported by the independent September 11 commission in its findings.

When Bush invoked the September 11 attack over and over, he wasn’t making a mistake. Bush wasn’t misinformed. President George Bush was intentionally and repeatedly misleading Americans. As Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation recently, the Bush administration is one for which verifiable truth holds no particular priority over politically-driven agenda. He simply doesn’t care if what he is saying is true; it’s irrelevant to his purpose. It was stark, clear as day, and sad for America. Even many Bush supporters were surprised that he would revive a link as thoroughly discredited as that one. This was pointed out in the days following Bush’s speech, but—as usual—the factual and legitimate criticisms were brushed off as partisan attacks.

Bush’s indifference to truth is tragic, not only for its consequences in Iraq but for its influence on American democracy and our moral standing in the world. And that’s not a partisan attack, that’s the truth.