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Taking aim at some political punching bags

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published February 19, 2006

Dick Cheney has his defenders, and I've heard from a few who believe the pundits and partisan headhunters in Washington should be charged with torture in their treatment of the vice president's quail-hunting accident. To hear them tell it, Washington has become the political equivalent of Abu Ghraib.

The dour Cheney has become a magnet for criticism, but I think he brings most of it on himself. The accident that left Cheney's 78-year-old hunting partner wounded probably would never have become the shot heard around the world had the vice president not waited almost five days to go public with an explanation. Most fair-minded people could see the vice president felt awful about his friend, Harry Whittington, taking the birdshot he intended for a quail. The issue was not the shooting accident; it was the way Cheney handled it with his usual bent for secrecy and his disdain for the Washington press corps.

If only the grim casualty counts coming out of Iraq could unleash as much political and journalistic outrage in Washington as Cheney's hunting accident did. So far, more than 2,200 Americans have died in Iraq, with thousands more suffering horrible wounds. The war in Iraq was no accident, in case anyone has forgotten. Sometimes Washington has trouble keeping things in perspective.

It's obvious that Cheney, who symbolizes much of what's wrong with this White House, and the news media, which can behave badly in the pursuit of a story, dislike each other. But Cheney is not the first Washington politician who feels he has become a punching bag for journalists (not including cable network gasbags and looney bloggers). And he won't be the last.

Bill Clinton was battered for most of his eight years in the White House by special prosecutors and merciless columnists on everything from Whitewater to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. And other Democrats, even years after they left office, are still targets of conservative ideologues and commentators who have their own hate lists.

While Cheney was hunkered down trying to ride out the hunting accident, former Vice President Al Gore was under fierce fire from the political right for remarks he made recently during a visit to Saudi Arabia. Fox News' Sean Hannity did not try to hide his loathing for Gore, accusing him of trashing his country in the heart of the Islamic world at a time when Muslims were rioting over Danish newspaper cartoons dissing the prophet Mohammed.

According to an Associated Press report, Gore said Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and confined in "unforgivable" conditions by the Bush-Cheney administration. He also said some Arabs had been swept up in the administration's antiterror net on "minor charges," such as overstaying their visas, and had suffered "terrible abuses" at the hands of their American captors.

"Which side is Gore on?" conservatives roared in print and on the airwaves. That's a cheap shot, but I am curious why Gore felt the need to attack the Bush administration's human rights record in Saudi Arabia of all places.

The Republican right also has Jimmy Carter to kick around, and sometimes he makes it easy. His political rap sheet includes such offenses as bad-mouthing his own country abroad, inviting Michael Moore to share his box at the last Democratic National Convention and, most recently, knocking President George W. Bush at the funeral service of Coretta Scott King.

In his eulogy, Carter noted how Mrs. King and her martyred husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had once been subjects of federal eavesdropping. It was Carter's way of letting Bush know he disapproves of the administration's controversial domestic surveillance program. But Carter forgot to mention that the wiretapping of the Kings' phones was authorized by the Kennedy administration.

I'm sure Carter's memory has grown hazy about his own lack of moral courage at the height of the civil rights movement in the South. This Georgia peanut farmer fancied himself as a moderate, which meant he kept his political head down and didn't answer Dr. King's call to conscience. White moderates were on Dr. King's mind when he wrote his powerful "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Dr. King suggested that the biggest obstacle to the equal rights movement was not the Ku Klux Klan but "the white moderate who is more devoted to "order' than to justice . . . who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action.' "

See how easy that was - I nicked Dick Cheney, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter in one column. It's possible to talk about their flaws and mistakes without demonizing them to the point of character assassination, which is how both Democrats and Republicans practice politics these days.

Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 17, 2006, 22:44:02]