Guilty (22 page)

For a Democratic president, however, anything short of a Hallelujah Chorus is a shocking comeuppance. Judging by the reaction to
All Too Human,
you would think Stephanopoulos had written a scandalous book, maybe accused the president of some grave misconduct, such as attacking Iraq on false pretenses. (Of course, Clinton had a very good reason for bombing Iraq on the day of his scheduled impeachment and, in fact, appeared on the White House lawn a few days later, after his eventual impeachment, to declare, “Mission accomplished.”)
³⁹
NBC quoted one former Clinton adviser saying of Stephanopoulos, “Where does he come off ratting on the President?”
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Stephanopoulos himself wrote in the epilogue that former colleagues had told him that “as far as Clinton was concerned, I was now a non-person—my name was not to be mentioned in his presence.”
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Democrats are so accustomed to rave reviews for everything they do that the most meager criticism provokes tantrums.

The third book by a Clinton insider was not really an insider book at all but rather a policy book. It was Secretary of Labor Robert Reich's
Locked in the Cabinet,
containing his policy prescriptions on issues like the minimum wage. As it was described by
Library Journal
on Amazon, “His diary brims with stories about successful programs for the poor, the rage of displaced workers, and the futility of trying to pass legislation on behalf of the most vulnerable members of society. Reich tried to use his office as ‘secretary of little people,' fighting against corporate greed and the growing chasm between rich and poor by advocating retraining and education programs that would let workers remain productive in a global society.”

Top that, Deep Throat!

It would take employees of the George W Bush administration to remind the world what disloyalty to a boss looks like. The resurgence of
kiss-and-tell books under Bush was especially impressive when you consider that Bush is a Christian, doesn't drink, and is asleep by 10 P.M. every night. His administration had the fewest scandals of any modern president's, including Reagan's. In fact, the only scandal was that his former employees kept writing books deriding him. While no one can be sure if this is a complete list, there were at least a dozen books written by Bush “insiders” while he was still in office, most of them attack books:

1. DAVID FRUM, former Bush speechwriter:
The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
(January 2003)

Frum's book was positive toward Bush—one reporter called it a “love poem”—and disputed many of the nonsense caricatures of Bush. Still, it must be disconcerting for a president to read a self-described “minor player” in the White House giving a comprehensive account of the president's IQ and temperament. Frum wrote, for example, that Bush was a “good man who is not a weak man. He has many faults. He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be. But outweighing the faults are his virtues: Decency, honesty, rectitude, courage and tenacity.”

That's not an unkind description, but David, c'mon, I've spent more time talking to my gardener than a White House speechwriter spends talking to the president and I don't expect my gardener— Wait. He wouldn't, would he? I'D better check on that….

2. RICHARD PERLE, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and David Frum, former speechwriter:
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror
(December 2003)

This book was far from a kiss-and-tell book—it was more of a policy book, rather like Robert Reich's
Locked Inside the Cabinet.
Except instead of analyzing the fascinating world of minimum-wage laws, it dealt with international Islamofascism. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between liberals and conservatives.

3. RON SUSKIND, writing with the cooperation of Paul O'Neill, Bush treasury secretary:
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill
(January 2004)

In the first of the insider hit jobs, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill criticized not only Bush's economic policy but his foreign policy as well, claiming that Bush and his advisers wanted to invade Iraq as of January 2001. This widely publicized claim posed no obstacle to liberals' simultaneous claim that Bush thought Saddam hit us on 9/11.

4. RICHARD CLARKE, former counterterrorism adviser to both Clinton and Bush:
Against All Enemies: Inside Americas War on Terror
(March 2004)

Clarke was the chief counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council under Bill Clinton, was demoted by George W. Bush, and soon wrote a book saying the 9/11 attack was Bush's fault. As he explained during his sappy grandstanding before the 9/11 Commission, Clarke had warned the White House about everything: “I continued to say it was an urgent problem, … I wanted a covert action program to aid Afghan factions to fight the Taliban, … I suggested that we bomb all of the Taliban and al Qaeda infrastructure … I thought cybersecurity was and I still think cybersecurity is an extraordinary important issue for which this country is very underprepared….”

Clarke was nearly moved to tears by his own compassion.

On Clarke's watch, the World Trade Center was bombed by Muslim terrorists (1993), a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia was bombed by Muslim terrorists (1996), U.S. embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania were bombed by Muslim terrorists (1998), and our warship the USS
Cole
was bombed by Muslim terrorists (2000).

In Bush's first few months in office he asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to draft a strategy for going after al Qaeda and killing Osama bin Laden, famously remarking that he was tired of “swatting flies.” There has been only one major terrorist attack on U.S. sovereign territory on Bush's watch, eight months into his administration on 9/11. Maybe Bush should have gotten rid of Clarke sooner.

5. JOSEPH WILSON, International Man of Mystery:
The Politics of Truth: A Diplomats Memoir: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Be trayed My Wife's CIA Identity
(April 2004)

As we all now know—thanks to a massive, bipartisan Senate investigation instigated by Wilson's charges—Wilson was not an “insider” of the Bush White House, he was not an employee of the Bush White House, and, indeed, he was not an employee of any sort to anyone, apart from unpaid, make-work jobs dreamed up by his wife. But since Wilson claimed to be an insider and the media believed it, I am including his book on the list.

The main impression left by Wilson's book is the image of Wilson furtively locking his bedroom door every night, closing the shades, lying in bed, and fantasizing about the glorious biographies that would be written about him someday. Joe Wilson: the conscience of his age.

6. JOHN BRADY KIESLING, former Foreign Service officer:
Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower
(August 2006)

Joe Wilson's brief celebrity status must have been galling to other Foreign Service chair-warmers, toiling away in jobs that have been obsolete since the invention of the telephone. One of their own had broken out! He was even being treated like some sort of expert.

So a couple of years after Wilson's book, a low-level functionary from our embassy in Greece, John Brady Kiesling, released his book, announcing that he too was against the war in Iraq! Kiesling's jacket flap boasts that in February 2003, he “publicly resigned his position as political counselor of the US Embassy in Athens to protest the Bush
administration's impending invasion of Iraq.” Isn't that the guy who prepares name tags for embassy cocktail parties?

By sheer coincidence, also in February 2003, I publicly resigned my position as a Ben & Jerry's “Chunk Spelunker” to protest the ice cream manufacturer's opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq.

If Kiesling's gripping tale of courage doesn't grab you, the jacket flap also advises that his book discusses “what is possible and affordable in a world Americans share with more than six billion other people.” Kiesling only made this list because his name turned up by complete accident in a search for a different Bush-bashing book. One can only imagine how many random idiots with petty bureaucratic government jobs have tried to resign in protest to get in on the anti-Bush loot.

7. CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN, former head of the Bush Environmental Protection Agency:
It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America
(January 2005)

In this book, Whitman's main point is that the Republican Party should dump the Christians and return to the halcyon days when the Republican Party was composed of silly, elitist Rockefeller Republicans. A perennial demand of liberal women who find the Democratic Party too déclassé to join, Whitman's plan is known as Throwing Out the Baby and Keeping the Bathwater.

8. L. PAUL BREMER, former U.S. civilian protector in Baghdad:
My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope
(January 2006)

Bremer claims that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored his requests for more U.S. troops. A mistake, but historically perhaps not as big a mistake as Bremer's decision to formally dissolve the Iraqi army and exclude the Iraqis from being involved in governing their own country.

9. DAVID KUO, former deputy assistant director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives:
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
(October 2006)

Another book by another minor player, claiming to know the heart
and soul of George Bush. Kuo's book tour featured photos of him sitting with George W. Bush on Air Force One, but Jim Towey, Kuo's former boss at the White House, explained that he had given his seat to Kuo that one time as a favor to Kuo before he left his job.
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The main point of Kuo's book was to tell Christians to get out of politics. (It's a wonder he didn't work out at the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.) Kuo derisively called Bush the “pastor in chief and “George W. Jesus,” and complained that at the Bush White House “Christians are viewed as simply only another constituency group. They are the most important constituency group in the Republican Party right now, but that's it.”
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The most important constituency in the Republican Party? Sounds good to me! Why do we have to get out of politics? Why don't liberals get out of politics?

10. GEORGE “SLAM DUNK” TENET, former CIA director:
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
(April 2007)

Tenet's book weirdly confirms that the CIA had boatloads of intelligence indicating that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and might well have nuclear weapons, but complains that Bush was too eager to go to war with Iraq.

According to Tenet, the intelligence showed that:

The head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was operating a chemical and poison lab in northern Iraq from May 2002 to 2003.

Al Qaeda planned a cyanide terrorist attack against the New York City subway system for the fall of 2003, but Ayman al-Zawahiri called it off because he wanted “something better.”

“Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons,” the CIA had concluded by the fall of 2002.