WaPo:
Bush: Democrats Should Drop Partisan Politics
Translation: Bush: Partisan Political Organizations Should Drop Partisan Political Activities.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Post, E.J. Dionne gets it precisely right:
So many principles that Republicans held dear when they were trying to take Clinton down are no longer operative. This certainly applies to a 1998 column now whizzing around the Internet that ran under the headline "Executive Privilege Is a Dodge." It was written by Tony Snow, who is now President Bush's press secretary.
To investigate Clinton -- even his Christmas card list -- was God's work. To investigate Bush is "to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials," as the president put it this week....Bush knows something else: The Washington conventional wisdom machine always defines "fairness" as a carefully calibrated point exactly between the positions of the two parties, no matter how outrageous one of the positions might be. By making ludicrous demands on Congress -- that it accept interviews with White House advisers Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and others in secret, not under oath and without transcripts -- Bush will encourage supposedly moderate voices to call for "compromises" that are really administration victories.
Bush's demands are absurd, because without a transcript, there is no efficient way to check versions against each other or to hold officials to account for what they say. Without putting them under oath, there is no way to ensure they tell the truth.
Had the administration been candid from the beginning, it might be possible to trust its officials in informal sessions. But even Bush conceded that the information given to Congress was "confusing and in some cases incomplete," his sanitized way of acknowledging that Congress was misled. The administration has repeatedly changed its story, retracting earlier statements as it put out documents -- we don't even know how complete they are -- that flatly contradicted some of its previous claims.
You don't have to be paranoid or partisan to wonder whether the administration's stumbling is the result of something more than incompetence. Is the U.S. attorney scandal actually a small part of a larger story about how politicized the Justice Department has become over the past six years? That is the more important question.
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