I believe were in

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I believe we’re in need of a new word. I’ve been wondering today how and why numerous scandals just seem to roll off the backs of the president and his many flunkies.

Some have gotten a bit of attention. There’s Karl Rove’s sharing his expertise on antitrust doctrine with executives at Intel, the late news that Vice President Cheney’s former company Halliburton was doing business with Iraq during the 1990s, using $23 million in government money to send out a smiley face postcard from George W. about the tax cut, John Ashcroft’s decision to settle the Tobacco suit in an obvious payback to the Tobacco industry, firing the Senate Parliamentarian when he refuses to shine Trent Lott’s shoes on command, the White House vandalism story that I talked about so much before I got obsessed with Gary Condit.

Hell, there’s even stuff like the Pentagon’s hiring a Russian cargo firm with close ties to the Russian military to bring back our mangled spy plane from China.

But this last instance especially spotlights the need for the new word. If President Clinton hired the Russians to bring back our plane people would be going nuts. If one of Clinton’s guys pulled a Karl Rove we’d be hearing very serious calls for his resignation. They’d both get added to the list of the dreaded ‘Clinton’ scandals and be treated accordingly. You know the drill: Dan Burton announces hearings; Andrea Mitchell gives it some establishment cred with a few blurbs on the nightly news, Chris Matthews pops a vein, and then the whole thing slithers off into a bizarre and languid quasi-life at NewsMax, FreeRepublic.com, and Regnery Publishing.

Of course the problem here is that most of these ‘Clinton scandals’ were just puffed up exaggerations for imbeciles and oafs. They never should have been scandals in the first place. Just as the Russian plane thing is not, and should not, be one today. And the same is true for a lot of these things with the Bushies.

So why talk about them? It’s not really that some of these lapses should be scandals. It’s just too galling for Clinton supporters to see the Bush folks skate free for the kind of stuff they got endless crap for.

One of the things this shows is that scandals don’t just require a bad or ambiguous act. They also require lots of folks who just can’t seem to get a life to huff and puff over them. And for better or worse there’s just a whole lot more of those folks on the right then on the left. If you don’t believe me just drop by the next annual Conservative Political Action Conference and you’ll see what I mean.

Anyway, if you’re a Dem with a brain this puts you in a tough spot because you want to give the Republicans as good as they gave. But you don’t want to end up seeming like a pitiful doofus like Dan Burton. You know a lot of these ‘scandals’ by any sane standard should never have been scandals but you still don’t want to give the Republicans a pass. Maybe the ‘scandal’ is just the double-standard. Who knows?

So you need a word, a literary shorthand, for these non-scandal scandals like the Karl Rove thing, the Senate parliamentarian firing, and so forth.

Let’s call them woulda-shoulda scandals (or maybe just ‘wouldashouldas’ for short). That would mean: if this were under Clinton, such-and-such woulda been a scandal and if there were any justice such-and-such shoulda been a scandal under Bush. But we’re just not as whacked as you guys. So we’re going to note it and move along and wait until we catch you actually doing something really bad.

This allows you to make your well-merited point, let off a little Clintonian rage, and get on with life.

It may not help us politically but at least we’ll have our self-respect.

P.S. Up next week, two potential scandals that aren’t wouldashouldas and do deserve some real looking into. (One clue: it’s tied to the oil industry.) Talking Points also defines “clintonian rage.” Now Talking Points leaves for 24 hours of much needed R-n-R outta town. So no more posts till the end of the weekend. Or until Gary Condit hires Johnnie
Cochran
. Whichever comes first.

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