Will Giuliani Need Plumbers?

It is amazing to me how many times in the course of our history, serious issues have taken a back seat to trivial and often foolish diversions that were politics-driven. Does anyone remember Quemoy and Matsu – nondescript islands off the coast of China whose status probably enabled John Kennedy to defeat Richard Nixon in 1960? Does anyone remember the “brainwashing” of George Romney or the pubic hair in the Coke can? How about the videos that someone in Judge Bork’s family viewed – videos that were gleaned from receipts fished out of the Bork family garbage by people who want to kill babies in the ninth month, regardless?

I raise this point because of two diversions that are ongoing right now – diversions that Congressional Democrats have tried their best to manufacture into scandals. In the first instance we have two holdover, liberal Democrats, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, who decided that they knew better than the elected President of the United States what the policy of the country should be – and then set out to undermine that policy through lies and deceptions. In almost any other country they would have been executed after a summary trial, but in this country, they are heroes to those liberals who also disagree with our policy and for whom the end justifies any means. They don’t seem to realize that the actions of the Wilsons undermine our Constitution.

Instead of confronting their disloyal, fifth-column activities, we have found ourselves bound up in arguments over who might have outed Plame when outing her was meaningless, and who said what to whom, and in what order, when there was no underlying crime. Even with a well-documented appointments book, I sometimes can’t remember what I did last Monday.

At the same time thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars are being expended over the firing of a few federal prosecutors, ignoring completely that the President has complete and unassailable authority to hire and fire said prosecutors for any reason he wishes – for political or any other reason, and also ignoring completely that Democrat President Clinton abruptly fired 92 of the 93 federal prosecutors in the first week of his first term in office. It was widely thought at the time that he did so to shut down the Whitewater investigation and to reward Democrat activists. Although there was an outcry because of the Whitewater connection, it was short-lived, and I don’t recall that there was any investigation of his actions.

It may well turn out that Attorney General Gonsalves mishandled and underestimated the intensity of the political smearing operation being assembled against every aspect of the Bush Administration, but in the end, the firings will stand.

I have written before of the thousands of liberal appointees and government employees who try every day to undermine and undercut whatever policy of President Bush’s that they disagree with. Many problems we face are almost beyond solution. These problems become even harder to solve when almost everything you try to do is undermined by the very people who are sworn to carry out the policies of whatever president they are currently serving.

Our next Republican President needs to have much more of a mean streak than does President Bush – first to defend himself quickly and vigorously when smeared – and second to put in place people and procedures who will make sure his policies are given a fair chance to succeed. Maybe Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ weren’t such a bad idea. We had no idea then what was really going on.