Spoon,
Well thought out thesis.
Perhaps this article from the washington Post will put it in a little more perspective:
A Handle On Scandal
‘Uranium From Africa’ Doesn’t Have the Smell of ‘I Am Not a Crook,’ but It Has at Least a Whiff of Flap
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 24, 2003; Page C01
People in the nation’s capital don’t use the word “scandal” lightly. Here, a scandal is an almost sacred thing. It has formal structures. It has institutionalized traditions. Corruption at the highest levels – its ritualized exposure and punishment amid a media frenzy that humbles the mighty and turns obscure government employees into cult figures – is a cherished part of our community heritage.
If certain criteria aren’t met, the thing in question is not a scandal, but merely a controversy, or a furor, or something even more trivial than that: a flap.
At present there is abundant disputation in Washington over the president’s use of incorrect information about Iraq in his State of the Union address. Building his case for war against Iraq, President Bush said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
The White House has acknowledged that this was bad information and shouldn’t have been included in the January speech. Intelligence agencies had already dismissed the sketchy reports of Iraqi attempts to buy “yellowcake uranium ore” in Niger. The Central Intelligence Agency said this week that it had specifically warned White House staffers last October that the Niger allegation was unsupportable and should be removed from a presidential speech. Critics say the administration repeatedly abused intelligence data and exaggerated the Iraqi threat in the run-up to war.
A scandal?
Or just . . . flapdoodle?
Naturally there are partisan differences. William Kristol, editor of the conservative journal the Weekly Standard, has derided Democrats for scandalmongering, and ridiculed the news media for their “hyperbolic, rush-to-judgment, believe-the-worst” coverage of the issue. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has argued that the line in Bush’s speech was “technically correct.” National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the president’s mistake was “about a single sentence, a single data point,” and was just “16 words.”
The “16 words” defense sent up a red flag for those on the other side of the political spectrum.
“A lame attempt to diminish it is always a good sign of a scandal,” says Paul Begala, co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” and a former Clinton administration aide. The phrase “just 16 words” reminds him of a line about Watergate: “just a third-rate burglary.”
Begala says the climate is right for an authentic scandal.
“I see all of the storm clouds gathering. For one thing, it’s summer. Scandals do gather more in the summer. There’s nothing else to do.”
Liberal pundit Alan Colmes of Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” isn’t quite ready to use the S-word.
“To call it a scandal would be premature, but clearly a full and open investigation would be warranted. I don’t believe the president necessarily lied, but someone certainly made him look bad. And I don’t understand why he doesn’t loudly proclaim that he wants to get to the bottom of this,” Colmes says.
One person familiar with scandal, former White House counsel John Dean – instrumental in sinking the presidency of his boss, Richard Nixon – points out that a scandal by definition requires not only improper behavior but also public offense. Action and reaction are equally essential.
“Watergate initially was not a scandal,” says Dean, now a full-time writer, when reached at his office in Beverly Hills. “When the break-in occurred” in June 1972, “other than The Post, everyone in the media ignored it. Try as he would, George McGovern couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to the problem. It didn’t become a scandal until the spring of '73, when the cover-up falls apart of its own weight, then everyone jumps on it and it becomes a scandal. And then it’s a scandal right through Ford’s pardon.”
Asked if the current issue is a scandal, Dean says, “It’s close.” He also thinks it could lead to impeachment.
(edit).
Still, the administration has managed to keep the tempest going by changing its story about how the problem came about. The White House initially blamed the CIA for the blunder, before conceding that the CIA had bird-dogged the bad information. An excellent technique for initiating a Washington scandal is to get on the wrong side of the Agency.
In a real scandal, the scandalmongers ask, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” but that does not easily apply in this case, in part because the administration’s opponents cannot imagine the president as a mastermind of anything. Nor does the president hold himself out as a details person. On the finer points of who had what weapon when, the president doesn’t sweat the specifics, and his expression and body language conveys the message of Whatever . . .
The story does have one classically scandalous element: a dead body. British arms expert David Kelly, who had been a source for a BBC report that questioned the Blair government’s allegations about Iraqi weapons, was found dead last week, an apparent suicide – a tragedy that incited comparisons to the suicide of Vince Foster, the Clinton family friend and White House lawyer. Foster’s death, and the mysterious disappearance of files from his office, led to the appointment of a special prosecutor in the Whitewater case, and thenceforth scandal became institutionalized at the Clinton White House.
The critics of the administration would argue that the WMD case meets a crucial scandal requirement: the possibility of a pattern of abuse of power. They’d argue that the Sixteen Words were but a snippet of a vast catalogue of disinformation.
“If there’s an abuse of intelligence here, it’s certainly a scandal,” says Blumenthal, author of “The Clinton Wars.”
He sees signs of nefarious activity at multiple nodes of the government. The vice president is in the thick of it, behind the scenes, Blumenthal believes. Figures from the Iran-contra scandal have resurfaced with jobs in the Bush administration, he says.
“The character of this is more like Iran-contra than it’s like anything. It’s a serious question involving breaches of national security policy,” says Blumenthal.
Those who perceive a scandal will argue that the stakes are high, even if the details are sometimes a bit dry. William Rivers Pitt, managing editor of the online journal Truthout, says: “This doesn’t have sex, this doesn’t have the definition of ‘is,’ it doesn’t have stained dresses. What it’s got is an increasing number of dead American soldiers.”
The president’s defenders say there’s nothing here at all, except a desperate attempt to undermine the president and his war policy. One former Republican political appointee said yesterday, “It’s a nothingburger.”
Passions intensify as elections near.
“Some in the Democratic Party feel the need to discredit the president on the issue of the war in order to put him within reach politically in '04,” says Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.).
Scott McClellan, Bush’s new press secretary, charged last week that Democratic candidates are trying to exploit the situation, but added, “The bottom line is, America is safer, more secure and better prepared than we were on September 11, 2001.”
There are growing calls among Democrats for a full-blown bipartisan investigation, but the Republicans control Congress and have so far refused to hold hearings. What happens next may well depend on events in Iraq. Military success could push the story to the back pages, and then eventually exile it to a few redoubts on the Internet.
For an administration that has seen public support for its Iraq policy eroding, the deaths of Saddam Hussein’s sons this week offered an unexpected burst of good news. But the guerrilla war continues: Two more American soldiers died in separate attacks yesterday.
The worst-case scenario for the administration is that the story takes on a life of its own. Consider one scandal expert’s description of how that process works:
"The wildest accusations have been given banner headlines and ready credence as well. Rumor, gossip, innuendo, accounts from unnamed sources of what a prospective witness might testify to, have filled the morning newspapers and then are repeated on the evening newscasts day after day.
"Time and again, a familiar pattern repeated itself. A charge would be reported the first day as what it was – just an allegation. But it would then be referred back to the next day and thereafter as if it were true.
“The distinction between fact and speculation grew blurred. Eventually, all seeped into the public consciousness as a vague general impression of massive wrongdoing, implicating everybody, gaining credibility by its endless repetition.”
The expert was, naturally, Richard Nixon, speaking to America, and ready to put Watergate behind him once and for all.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37585-2003Jul23.html?nav=hptop_tb
