Hillary Clinton yearns for the return of the politics of personal destruction, posits Rich.
An Easier Fight
by Frank Rich
IF you had to put a date on when the Iraq war did in the Bush administration, it would be late summer 2005. That’s when the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina re-enacted the White House bungling of the war, this time with Americans as the principal victims. The stuff happening on Brownie’s watch in New Orleans was recognizably the same stuff that had happened on Donald Rumsfeld’s watch in Baghdad. Television viewers connected the dots and the president’s poll numbers fell into the 30s. There they have largely remained — at least until Friday, when the latest New York Times-CBS News Poll put him at 29.
Now this pattern is repeating itself: a searing re-enactment of the Iraq war’s lethal mismanagement is playing out on the home front, again with potentially grave political consequences. The Washington Post’s exposé of the squalor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center — where some of our most grievously wounded troops were treated less like patients than detainees — has kicked off the same spiral of high-level lying and blame-shifting that followed FEMA’s Katrina disasters.
Just as the debacle on the gulf was a call to arms for NBC’s Brian Williams and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, so the former ABC anchor Bob Woodruff has returned from his own near-death experience in Iraq to champion wounded troops let down by their government. And not just at Walter Reed. His powerful ABC News special last week unearthed both a systemic national breakdown in veterans’ medical care and a cover-up. The Veterans Affairs Department keeps “two sets of books” — one telling the public that the official count of nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at 23,000, the other showing an actual patient count of 205,000. Why the discrepancy? A new Brownie — Jim Nicholson, the former Republican National Committee hack whom President Bush installed as veterans affairs secretary — tells Mr. Woodruff “a lot of them come in for dental problems.”
Yet 2007 is not 2005, and little more damage can be inflicted on the lame-duck Bush White House. The long-running Iraq catastrophe is now poised to mow down a second generation of political prey: presidential hopefuls who might have strongly challenged Bush war policy when it counted and didn’t. That list starts with the candidates long regarded as their parties’ 2008 favorites, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.
Read more . . .
Frank Rich News Politics 2008 Hillary Clinton McCain Iraq Walter Reed Bush
