Turnabout is fair play

Is the "liberal" media unfairly burying the Bush administration? That’s pretty much the way conservatives see the criticism of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the president’s tax cut. Where Hillary saw a right-wing conspiracy to undermine her husband’s presidency, conservatives see a political conspiracy on the left that wants to distort the record of George W. Bush.

When is criticism legitimate and when is it ideological venom? In my never-ending quest to support truth, justice and the American way, I have come up with the turnabout test. The turnabout test simply consists of taking the criticism being leveled at President Bush and pretending the same set of facts applied while Clinton was in office. If conservatives would have attacked Clinton for the same set of circumstances under which liberals are now attacking Bush, then the criticism is fair.

To better understand the validity of the turnabout test, all you have to do is recall how liberals scorned Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson for injecting their religious ministries into politics and compare that with liberal silence when the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson did the same thing in the fight for civil rights. Conclusion: Religion and politics are not necessarily a bad thing if you agree with the political convictions of the particular reverend.

Conservatives love to bash Hollywood celebs and their liberal politics. When Sean Penn took out a full-page ad to oppose the invasion of Iraq, conservatives scorned him as a "high-school drop-out." It wasn’t so long ago that liberals bashed Ronald Reagan for being an actor, implying he didn’t have enough brains for the White House. The fact that Reagan came to the White House as a two-term governor of California was conveniently forgotten. Whatever liberals might think of Reagan as president, he proved he wasn’t in over his head.

Now the conservatives’ criticism of Hollywood will be put to the turnabout test if Arnold Schwarzenegger runs for governor. My bet is conservatives will forget all about those brainless Hollywood types and support Arnold while liberals will revive their criticism of actors running for office. Conclusion: It’s OK if you’re from Hollywood as long as your politics agree with mine.

It’s time to use the turnabout test on the current criticism leveled against the Bush administration. First, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction — is the criticism all a liberal plot? Is it, as columnist Charles Krauthamer claims, a way for liberals " … to change the subject and relieve themselves of the shame of having opposed the liberation of 25 million people?"

What if President Clinton had invaded Iraq under similar circumstances and three months or so later we had failed to find WMD? How would conservatives such as Krauthamer reacted? Consider that Bush came into office ridiculing the idea of nation-building while conservative pundits decried the fact that American troops had been spread too thin. It was not enough to liberate people; America must have geopolitical interests. Many conservatives were against America intervening in Kosovo to oust Milosevic and stop the ongoing genocide.

Conclusion: If the Clinton administration had made the same claims of imminent danger that Bush made and then failed to find WMD, conservatives likely would have seen some Clintonian plot to get himself reelected. In fact, when Clinton ordered a military strike during the Lewinsky affair, they made that very charge.

Let’s look at the criticism of Bush’s economic record. Since time began, Republicans have equated Democrats with the phrase "tax and spend." Republicans prided themselves on their record of fiscal responsibility. During the Clinton presidency, Republicans were foursquare behind a balanced budget amendment.

Whether you give Clinton the credit or not, his record after eight years as president is that he left the treasury with a huge surplus. Remember when the big argument between Gore and Bush during the last presidential campaign was how to spend the surplus? Gore and the Democrats wanted to pay down the national debt while Bush and the Republicans wanted to cut taxes. That debate seems as if it happened a hundred years ago.

Today, the same Republicans who argued for a balanced budget amendment are now telling us that deficits are not such a bad thing. In fact, the president and a Republican Congress passed another big tax cut, which even with phony sunset provisions will plunge us deeper into debt.

Time to apply the turnabout test. If President Clinton had ended his two-term presidency with the treasury bathed in red ink, what would have been the Republican reaction? Do you think Tom DeLay would have been on Meet the Press telling us that the deficits are only a small percentage of our gross national product?

Conclusion: Deficits are not so bad when you can reward your big contributors with a hefty tax cut and the nation is focused on the threat of terrorism.

In this case, turnabout is fair play.