Why now?

Mark Shields on the NewsHour this Friday: (emphasis added)

And I think what's at stake here, Margaret, is the credibility of the White House, the credibility of President Bush. President Bush has not relied upon fancy rhetoric and prose, he's been a straight talking, plain spoken guy. And what this does is it goes right to, once the weapons of mass destruction argument was gone, once obviously a mistake was incredibly that the military quite frankly, that they were complicit and not objecting to the inadequate number of troops that the troops would be overburdened and overstretched and strained, that we didn't have enough troops, everything about it, the war has been costly, deadly and increasingly unpopular.

Now to find out that what had been a stated implicit argument by the administration that now we're talking about connection versus collaboration but that to have them say that there was none, that this was not a relationship, that ten years ago Osama bin Laden met in Sudan with an intelligence official from Iraq requesting training facilities in Baghdad, never heard back, and that to have this come out I think really raises the question of credibility in the election and no president wants to run for reelection, especially one who is based on his integrity and outspoken candidness on the basis of did he mislead us into this war and knowingly deceived the American people.

What credibility is Shields talking about? We have heard this refrain over and over. It's always, "This time the president has to come clean with the American people." But after a couple of weeks, especially in the face of sustained lobbying by the White House, people forget the mendacity or deception or incompetence. When a subsequent exposure of White House obfuscation surfaces, our tired ears hear, yet again, "This time the president has to come clean with the American people."

posted by Quiddity at 6/19/2004 04:26:00 AM