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« For Those of You Who Want a Piece of Michael Moore's Ass... | Main | Name That Decade »
December 28, 2004

Scandalblogging

One of the raps conservatives got a lot of during the nineties was that we were inordinately fixated on scandal. Why, we were spending all of our time fussing about Whitewater and Loral and, yeahp, perjury and obstruction of justice regarding a "purely private sexual matter."

We weren't engaging on questions of policy; we didn't enter the public dialogue with Bill Clinton and offer solutions which would build bridges to the twenty-first century.

Perhaps some of that rap was well-deserved. I don't know. Clinton did (and still does) seem to me to have been a fairly corrupt guy, economical with the truth, as they say, but perhaps there was a point at which mere scandal-mongering became a proxy for substantive political discussion.

For me, at least, and people like me. Maybe for some people like you, too.

What a difference a change of the President's party makes though, huh?

Let's start with left-wing bloggers. Josh Marshall is supposed to be the cream of the lefty crop. But browse through his past year of blogging. Is there anything but scandal-mongering on his site? How frequently, exactly, does Josh Marshall weigh in on policy question?

Now, I don't trust any politicians, including Republican ones, and I think that it can't hurt to have sharp-eyed critics, ever-eager to pounce, on the left. I confess my enthusiasm for pursuing Republican scandals isn't as high as it probably ought to be, and so, to some extent, people like Marshall are doing some necessary work that I am constitutionally incapable of.

But.

I do seem to remember a time during which a fixation on scandal -- both real and wholly imagined -- was denigrated by those on the left as whining and griping and refusing to simply come to terms with the fact that a popular President was in office, and that policy fights ought to be on actual policy, rather than proxy fights over the scandal-of-the-week.

Josh has weighed in on the emerging Social Security debate in a predictable fashion. His take? The President's coming initiative to convince the American people that Social Security must be changed is rank dishonesty of a scandalous nature.

Where are the Belmont Clubs of the left, I wonder? Where are the considered policy arguments? Not among the best-known lefty blogs, apparently. I'm sure there are a few policy-oriented lefty blogs out there, but they don't seem to get an awful lot of attention.

The Democratic Party seems nearly as fixated on scandal as a proxy for policy disputes. True enough, there will occasionally be a policy position offered, but let's face it, the Democratic Party is primarily interested in attacking Bush. When a leader like Hillary Clinton treads down the same path as certified-moonbat Cynthia McKinney and brandishes an infamous NY Post bearing the slammer "BUSH KNEW," one knows immediately the mindset one is dealing with.

And the media? Well, they seem to follow the Democratic Party's lead, strangely enough. They're currently attempting to bring down Donald Rumsfeld, and, while policy questions do weigh into the mix, they're currently all in a fuss about an "insensitive" truism he uttered and the scandal that condolence letters to soldiers are signed by an Auto-Pen.

Is this serious debate?

A case can be made that this is what out-parties do with their time-- not having much actual political power, they are forced to resort to often-petty sniping from the sidelines.

Trouble is, I don't remember the Republicans getting much of a pass on that basis when Bill Clinton was cleaning our clocks. (And man, did he ever!)

And I'm not quite sure why the media-- previously rather reluctant to follow up on important stories like Clinton's claim he'd never been previously informed about Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, when in fact he proveably had been (and Tim Russert embarassed former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson badly on this point) -- now spends most of its time cracking important stories about "plastic turkeys" and letters signed by Auto-Pen.



posted by Ace at 03:44 AM
Comments



Ace, the left doesn't have to engage in debate about policy. They care, and really isn't that enough?

Posted by: Rocketeer67 on December 28, 2004 09:37 AM

If you were to sit down a write a timeline of the Clinton scandals, you would be astounded as the length of the list.

You would have to read old WSJ editorial pages to make up the list because MSM suppressed most of the scandals.There is no doubt that Clinton turned the US into a Banana Republic during his years in office.

It is obvious that the MSM is bored out of their minds with the Bush Administration. Thus they are acting like spoiled 11 year-olds in their petty stories.

Posted by: on December 28, 2004 11:09 AM

Yo ACE! Bill Clinton was the lowest scumbag ever to occupy the White House, and that has nothing to with Monica. First of all, he was a coward. His lack of action re terrorism suggests that despite his parsing, legalistic excuses (which kept changing over time) for not killing or capturing Bin Laden (when he could have three times) his real motive was simple fear: he was afraid for his own ass if he actually took real action against terrorists. He knew that Saddam had tried to kill Bush Sr. and he feared him, and Osama even more. But he was a real tough guy when it came to intimidating reporters he didn't like throught the IRS, or women who told of his forcible rape upon them. Bribed by the Chinese Communist military, he sold an entire Boeing plant to China that could be used to make nuclear missles for less than the union members of the plant here in the US were willing pay for it! And there is strong evidence that he was responsible for giving nuclear warhead technology to the Chicoms too. And to muzzle TIME about this, he held up the TIME AOL merger till he was out of office. When the press finally began to pick up this trail, he started a stupid little war in Bosnia and made sure he "accidentially" targeted the Chinese embassy. But the worst thing about the Bosnian farce is that after centuries of internecine warfare, the Christians there had removed 90% of the trouble making Moslems when Bill finally decided to act. He put them all back again, and now the Christians are the persecuted group under a figleaf truce that will blow up again any minute! He opposed welfare reform until he couldn't stop it, he tried to disarm the American public (all Liberals fear and loathe the public) until he was stopped by the NRA. His race and gender baiting set race relations back twenty years. His photo-op fraud at brokering a deal between Arafat and Isreal only encouraged the Palestinians intransegance and his official public apologies all over the world merely encouraged our enemies to continue to critisize us as they were now vindicted by our own leader! As Bill Bennet wrote: "Bill is a reproach" and he amply disgraced us all through his own actions so many times that we became desensitized to his crimes and can't even seem to remember them, they are so numerous.

Posted by: 72VIRGINS on December 28, 2004 11:40 AM

Most Clinton scandals had serious policy implications.

For example: Filegate, where the Clintons hired as law enforcement liaisons two men whose only relevant background was in opposition-research. They requested the FBI files of practically every Republican in Washington. Accidentally, of course.

For example: Chinagate, where campaign contributions from Chinese military intel were funneled through Trie, Chung, and Huang. Meanwhile, Loral was given the go-ahead to transfer crucial targeting technology to the Chinese military; and the vaults containing US military secrets were left wide open despite repeated alarms.

The list goes on for eight years, up to and including Marc Rich. The MSM struggled mightily not to connect the dots, and to dismiss crimes as mere scandals. For the rest of our lives, we will pay a price because the watch dogs were sleeping.

Posted by: lyle on December 28, 2004 11:40 AM

It's because they lose the argument when they argue issues Ace. Pure and simple.

When the facts are against you, pound the law. When the law is against you, pound the facts.

When the facts and the law are against you, call your opponent a liar.

Posted by: Dave in Texas on December 28, 2004 09:14 PM
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