President Bush Now Knows How Clinton Felt

Glenn Greenwald has a great summary.

Apparently members of President Bush's White House staff are going to be subpoenaed to testify before Congress to answer questions regarding the firing of U.S. Attorneys... very similar to when President Clinton's White House staff were subpoenaed to testify before Congress during the Lewinsky affair.

President Bush has vowed that he can resist the subpoenas of his staff because of the power of "executive privilege"... much like President Clinton vowed he would do when he was going through his Lewinsky affair. (President Clinton didn't succeed using executive privilege then, and President Bush likely won't succeed using it this time either. Nixon tried the same ploy in Watergate and failed too.)

What was the Republican reaction when President Clinton threatened to use executive privilege to prevent his White House staff from testifying? Quotes like "No one is above the law," and "hiding behind executive privilege," and "being held accountable," went flying around.

How does that compare to Republican reaction when President Bush threatens to use executive privilege? Mmm.... Not quite so harsh this time.


Tony Snow is caught between
the rock of his opinion and the
hard place of President Bush's
plans to use "executive priv-
ilege" to block subpoenas.(An amusing fact that Glenn Greenwald points out is that the biggest critic of President Clinton's use of "executive privilege" to shield White House staff from Congressional subpoena in 1998 was Tony Snow, then a conservative columnist and Fox News commentator, and who is now President Bush's press secretary. Tony Snow is going to have to come out at a White House press conference soon and put a positive spin on the exact same thing he criticized President Clinton for doing a decade earlier. Good luck getting the press to buy that one.)

It's funny: I always thought about how it was a very bad idea for Republicans to support some of the things that President Bush did, because at some point in the future, a Democratic President may decide to go ahead and do the same things that President Bush did, and then the Republicans wouldn't really have the ability to condemn that future Democratic President when they supported President Bush before for doing the same thing.

It's funny: I always thought about how it was a very bad idea for Republicans to condemn some of the things that President Clinton did, because at some point in the future, a Republican President may decide to go ahead and do the same things that President Clinton did, and then the Republicans wouldn't really have the ability to support that future Republican president when they condemned President Clinton before for doing the same thing.

Shows you how little I know about Republicans. An elephantThe elephant is the symbol of the Republican party in America. never forgets? Sheah right.

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UPDATE:

A good point from one of my favorite writers, the king of snarkSnark refers to a pejorative style of speech or writing. It could loosely be described as irritable or "snidely derisive"; hence, 'snarkish', 'snarky', 'to snark at somebody'. (The Urban Dictionary refers to it as a contraction of "snide remark".) It could less politely be described as 'bitchy'. (Source: Wikipedia), James Wolcott:

When Dick Cheney famously told Pat LeahyDemocratic Senator from Vermont, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the guy responsible for all of the subpoenas the White House is complaining about. to go fuck himself, he and the rest of the administration clearly never anticipated the day when Leahy would return to the powerful chairmanship; I think they internalized Karl Rove's visionary scheme of a permanent Republican majority and thought the future was in the bag. Now they're holding the bag and it's leaking all over their laps.