Peegy Noonan missed something

I have grown almost as tired of hear about Deep Throat as I have about the latest updates from the Machael Jackson trial. The former is 30 years gone and the latter is great giant waste of the media’s collective time. Nevertheless, I did read one thing about Deep Throat that I thought needed a bit of light shed on it. WSJ editorial page columnist Peggy Noonan, who is rather conservative, published a piece in which she attributes Pol Pott’s genocide in Cambodia and the collapse of American efforts in Vietnam as well as growing Soviet threats to the United States all to Mark Felt’s revelations about President Nixon. She also manages to fully implicate most media outlets, especially the Washington Post.

What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon’s ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events—the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions—millions—killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

Essentially Noonan is indicting Felt and the media for speaking out and being honest about an American presidency “out-of-control.” Nixon was too distracted by being investigated and impeached to see to his duties as president. If that is true then let’s see what follows in a more recent public trauma.

Bill Clinton spent the better part of three years being investigated and impeached by (mainly) republicans in Congress for an affair and a lack of moral values, essentially. In that time he

• failed magnificently to stop genocide in Rwanda (read Pol Pott 30 years ago).
• watched while al’Queda grew into a huge threat to the entire world yet did little to stop it (read Soviet Union 30 years ago).
• didn’t stop the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorists in the Sudan (because when he tried to bomb terrorist training camps it was attributed to his desire to draw attention away form the Lewinsky scandal not a need to quell terrorist threats).

Do we now call everyone who participated in or supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton essentially un-American? Is it fair to blame every misstep during a period of trauma for the president on those who revealed it? Of course not, it’s absurd logic. Any president cannot be let off that easily and those who do the right thing (at the risk of implying Clinton’s impeachment was right) by the country cannot be blamed for everything that happens afterward. I mean, I learned about post hoc fallacies in 10th grade, Peggy.

It is all too easy to blame the media or the other side of the political isle for a president’s failures and mistakes, but at some point we just have to hold politicians accountable for what happens on their watch, unless we have legitimate and well-reasoned arguments to excuse them. In the case of Nixon and Clinton I can see no such evidence.