October
2, 2005
The GOP's Broken Hammer
By Pat
Buchanan
The photo
on page 3 of The Washington Times was a metaphor for the
Bush administration and the Republican Party.
It is a
shot of the most powerful vice president in history, hunched over,
gazing down, as he slowly mounts the steps of the White House,
with the aid of a cane. But where Dick Cheney is recuperating
smoothly from knee surgery, the administration appears in need
of resuscitation.
The words
of Claudius again come to mind: "When sorrows come, they come
not single spies, but in battalions."
The charge
by District Attorney Ronnie Earle of Travis County, Texas, that
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay engaged in a "criminal conspiracy"
may be a shot in the back from a partisan prosecutor. But that
does not alter history.
Article
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Tom DeLay,
the most powerful Republican in Congress, is the first House leader
in a century to be indicted. And given The Hammer's previous problems
-- three citations from the House ethics committee and reports
of miles of first-class travel courtesy of indicted lobbyist Jack
Abramoff -- it is hard to see how DeLay recovers his luster or
his power.
This same
week, the ranking Senate Republican, Majority Leader Bill Frist,
came under SEC investigation for his fortuitous sale, out of his
blind trust, of his block of stock in Hospital Corporation of
America, days before the shares sank on news of a bad earnings
report. Frist claims he sold the stock to clear his portfolio
of any potential conflict of interest, should he declare for president.
But other Frist family members, who are presumably not declaring
for higher office, also appear to have dumped HCA shares.
The Frist
case is a simple but deadly serious one. Did he and his family,
as insiders, use privileged information to unload their HCA shares
on an unsuspecting public that took a bath when the HCA stock
tanked?
Frist denies
it. Thus, his integrity, credibility and career are all on the
line. He will need a clean bill of health from U.S. investigators
to remain viable as a presidential candidate. And even a clean
bill of health will not stop cynical snickers that, by divine
intervention, Frist's blind trust miraculously recovered its sight
-- just in time to save him a small fortune.
A bedeviled
Bush did not need this grief. His own White House already has
ethics clouds swirling above: the investigation into the outing
of Valerie Plame as a CIA covert asset; the procurement chief
at the White House, David Safavian, having just been collared
in a land deal involving Abramoff; and charges of cronyism in
naming "Brownie" and the boys to run FEMA.
Now, we
learn that Ms. Julie Myers, 36, niece of Gen. Myers and currently
betrothed to the chief of staff to Homeland Security's Michael
Chertoff, is to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which
is housed inside Homeland Security. All in the family.
Ethics clouds,
cronyism, nepotism aside, Bush's approval is at 40 percent. Social
Security reform seems dead. Disapproval of Bush as a war leader
is now two-to-one, and half the nation believes Iraq to have been
a mistake and we ought to get out.
Pile on
top of this the daily beating the president gets for Katrina,
gas prices at $3.00 a gallon, Americans about to get the first
bills for home heating oil, consumer confidence plunging to a
two-year low, Bush's refusal to deal with the border crisis and
a GOP rebellion over spending, and you have the ingredients of
a party uprising and a political tsunami in 2006.
All the
news is not bad. The nomination of John Roberts as chief justice
could, if supported by one or two more conservative jurists, be
a crown jewel in the Bush legacy. And though Rita and Katrina
hammered the Gulf Coast, threw the budget back into deep deficit
and may knock a point off of GDP, tax revenues have been soaring
at record rates.
Nor is Bush
alone in encountering second-term turbulence. Nixon had Watergate.
Carter did not get a second term. Reagan was knocked off stride
by Iran-Contra. Bush I did not get a second term. Clinton got
impeached. Yet, no taint of personal scandal has directly touched
this president.
Moreover,
if the Republican Party looks like the New York Yankees in disarray,
the Democrats look like they have a mortal lock on the league
cellar. On the war, the economy, the Supreme Court, they have
nothing to offer but negativity.
The left
seems to be as unhappy with its leaders as the right is becoming,
and there is no third party out there, and no primaries in which
to pick new leaders for two-and-a-half years.
Houston,
we have a problem.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
