Bush II: Tragedy or farce? L. Jean Lewis Revisited

History repeats itself, Karl Marx famously observed, first as
tragedy, then as farce. Like most Marxist dogma, it won't stand much
skeptical scrutiny. Take the Bush administration, for example,
tragedy or farce?

Judging by the president's wary expression during his recent
speech calling for $87
billion to rebuild Iraq--enough to fund Medicare for two years, or
pay the salaries of 1,740,000 teachers, cops or firefighters at
$50,000 per annum--Bush himself clearly has no clue. Except that
submitting the bill wasn't as cool as swaggering across an aircraft
carrier flight deck to pronounce "mission accomplished" in a
tailored aviator costume.

Polls show that with budget deficits approaching a record $500
billion, Americans are reeling from sticker shock. Indeed, Bush did
such a bad job that Vice-president Dick Cheney emerged from his lair
to make what a Los Angeles Times editorial called "sweeping,
unproven claims about Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorism"
on "Meet the Press." In another sign opinion is turning, the
Washington Post gave front page space to an article demonstrating
that much of what Cheney said was either factually false or sheer
speculation.

But what really appeared to irk Cheney were suggestions that
multibillion dollar, no-bid contracts in Iraq awarded by the
Pentagon to his old company, Halliburton, may have had something to
do with political influence. After cashing in $30 million worth of
Halliburton stock options upon assuming the vice-presidency, Cheney
says he has taken no further interest in the corporation's fortunes.
He described as "political cheap shots," any suggestions to the
contrary. "Nobody has produced one single shred of evidence that
there's anything wrong or inappropriate here," he said.

What's more, and this is where the story diverges into sheer
slapstick, there's not much chance that Pentagon investigators ever
will. Newsweek reports that none other than L. Jean Lewis, the
preposterous GOP heroine of congressional Whitewater hearings, has
been named chief-of-staff of the Defense Department's inspector
general--an agency with 1240 employees and $160 million budget whose
task is auditing Pentagon contracts for waste and fraud. It's a
$118,000 a year job for a woman who once peddled "Presidential
BITCH" t-shirts and coffee mugs mocking Hillary Clinton out of her
government office at the now-defunct Resolution Trust Corporation.

Having prosecuted Jim McDougal's handling of Madison Guaranty
Savings & Loan, Banks knew perfectly well what Kenneth Starr
eventually spent six years and $70 million dollars proving: the
Clintons were, if anything, the pigeons in McDougal's flim-flams. He
added prophetically that media coverage of the kind investigation L.
Jean Lewis was frantically pushing tended to "'legitimize what can't
be proven,'" adding that "I cannot be a party to such actions."

Both Banks' letter and Lewis's nationally-televised comic opera
swoon, it will be recalled, went unreported in the New York Times
and Washington Post, the two newspapers most deeply committed to the
bogus scandal she helped them conjure out of thin air. It says a lot
about today's Republicans that Banks' principled action in the face
of the first Bush White House's covert efforts to convene
an "October Surprise" probe of the Democratic nominee probably
doomed his chances for a federal judgeship.

Documents showed that Lewis and like-minded RTC colleagues spent
thousands of man-hours probing Madison Guaranty, ignoring Arkansas S
& L collapses ten and twenty times larger in their futile quest. But
if getting Whitewater upside-down disqualified a person from
employment, half of official Washington and most of the city's name-
brand journalists would be out of work.

Of much greater concern was Lewis's bizarre testimony. Under
oath, she swore the "Presidential BITCH" T-shirts signified no
political bias, and that she personally didn't mind being called a
bitch. Before both House and Senate comittees she denied pressuring
Justice Department officials to act before the 1992 election. But
FBI agents and prosecutors testified that she'd hounded them
repeatedly and made melodramatic statements about "altering
history." Contemporaneous documents proved it.

Lewis also secretly recorded conversations with colleagues,
misrepresented their contents, then swore that a defective tape-
recorder had magically turned itself on. Senate investigators proved
she'd actually used a brand new machine, and turned the matter over
to Kenneth Starr for investigation. But you know what happened to
that.

So rest easy, taxpayers, L. Jean Lewis is on the job.