Date: 2004-05-04
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. there is a new section in libraries and in bookstores all across America. It is called the "credibility gap and the leadership problems of President George W. Bush." There are so many books being published now that maybe the Dewey decimal system will have to be revised for Americas libraries. I recommend this new section to my colleagues and to the general public. Last week. the latest edition to this collection was published. raising again serious questions about the President. I predict that rather than directly confront the substance of Ambassador Joe Wilsons criticism in his book. "The Politics of Truth." the White House will instead. as they have in the past. attack his motives. his character. as they have done with the critics before him. Recent history is littered with the Bush White House smear campaigns against good and brave people. all of whom share one simple characteristic. loyalty to the truth. Let us start with John DiLulio. the White Houses director of faithbased programs in 2001. He said that the Bush administration was more focused on politics than on good policy. and he is gone. If that sounds familiar. it is because it is the same thing the former Treasury Secretary. Paul ONeill. said in his book. "The Price of Loyalty." ONeill rightly warned that the massive Bush tax cut would wreak havoc with our fiscal system. and remember what the White House did after Paul ONeills book came out. They launched an investigation and tried to smear his credibility and his reputation. Of course. that investigation went nowhere and the book stands for what it says. How about Richard Clarke. a trusted. lifelong bipartisan public servant who was devoted to protecting Americans against terrorism? He wrote this book. "Against All Enemies." which says the war in Iraq has diverted needed resources from the war on terror. He felt this Nation had a right to know. Do my colleagues know how the White House responded? With a shock and awe media campaign to try and discredit Clarke. They said Clarke was just angry because he wanted a more prominent position. that he was essentially a Democrat or that he was out of the loop. Out of the loop? He was the administrations top antiterrorist official on September 11. If we cannot trust Richard Clarke. why not General Anthony Zinni? Zinni served in Vietnam. commanded the troops in Somalia. directed strikes against Iraq and al Qaeda. and served as the Bush administrations Mideast peace envoy. He had the audacity to agree with Clarke that the war in Iraq undermined the war on terror. He has not been asked to serve on any more diplomatic missions. Then there was Larry Lindsey. former economic advisor to the President. who was fired when he correctly said that the war in Iraq would cost as much as 100 or $200 billion. but the President did not want to hear it. The administration did not want to hear it. and they certainly did not want Congress to hear it. Today. we are fast approaching $200 billion. all of it borrowed. all of it borrowed. for the war in Iraq. Too bad for his career. because the facts were important to him. Larry Lindsey is gone. General Eric Shinseki apparently had the same problem. He said that we might need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq to secure the peace. to secure the peace and provide for the force protection of our soldiers. The White House did not like that. Soon enough. Shinseki had stepped aside. but now we have 150.000 troops and asking for more to try and secure a peace that has been so badly compromised because of the lack of preparation by this White House. Too bad that General Shinseki decided that he had to tell the truth and was compelled to let the American people know. But there is more. The White House threatened to fire the Health and Human Services actuary. Richard Foster. if he revealed his higher estimates of what the Medicare prescription drug bill would really cost. Instead of having an honest debate in the Congress on the real cost of the prescription drug benefit. they said. no. keep the figures from Congress. Of course. Congress voted for the bill. and now we find out it is going to cost $140 billion more than we had anticipated. It is too bad. It is the law of the land. but it was done because of the intimidation by somebody in the administration who wanted to tell the truth. Are you starting to see a pattern here. Mr. Speaker? Others have weighed in. too. Historian and political analyst Kevin Phillips says that Bushs selfinterest trumps the national interest in his book "American Dynasty." Kevin Phillips is not a liberal. or a Democrat. he simply wanted to explain what was going on inside of the administration in terms of the selfdealing special interests. which brings us back to Joe Wilson. As Members will recall. in the Presidents State of the Union address in 2003. President Bush said that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain nuclear material from Africa. even though he was told it was not true. but he came to the halls of Congress to tell the American people that is what happened. Wilson heard the speech and blew the whistle. Unfortunately for Wilson. his allegiance to the truth did not just result in the character assassination of Joe Wilson. In a particularly insidious and dangerous move. someone in the White house publicly revealed that Wilsons wife was a CIA agent. putting her life at risk. ending her career. and the people she worked with. That is what happens when you try to tell the truth in the Bush administration.