Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The War on Tobacco

(Reprinted from the issue of September 30, 2004)

President Bush’s conservative defenders are trying to find significant differences between the most profligate spender ever to occupy the White House and his liberal opponent. Some, like National Review, are citing his theme of an “ownership society” in which private property, not centralized government, is the decisive force. But is this anything more than empty lip service to conservative principles — the hallmark of the Bush administration?

The Justice Department, following through on an initiative from the Clinton era, is using anti-racketeering laws to pursue a $280 billion suit against major tobacco companies. Its strategy is to destroy the entire tobacco industry by treating it as a criminal conspiracy. Industry lawyers say the government will have a hard time proving its case in court. Maybe so; but still, how did it get so far?

Here is a breathtaking assault against private property and personal freedom by anti-smoking zealots. Their goal is to wipe out a small but traditional liberty, not by legislation, but by imposing financial ruin on a large sector of the American economy. As with Prohibition, it would inevitably result in massive lawbreaking, corruption, and contempt for law.

But at least the anti-liquor zealots who imposed Prohibition on the country in 1918 had the scruples to amend the Constitution (meeting the tough standard of ratification by state legislatures) in order to extend federal power over what were formerly areas of liberty; today that’s no longer necessary. Federal bureaucrats whose names we don’t know can take the initiative by themselves, with no opposition by their nominal boss, who is sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Why doesn’t Bush quash this outrage? Probably for the same reason he hasn’t vetoed a single act of Congress in his entire term of office: He simply has no serious desire to arrest the growth of the government. He and his partisans prefer to pretend that he is directing its growth in a “conservative” direction.

John Kerry is right to charge that Bush is leading us in the “wrong direction.” The trouble is that Kerry would continue leading us in the same direction, with only minor modifications. Operationally, the two men and their parties agree in principle. Our entire political system, including the news media, tries to disguise this basic truth of American public life. And so the very propositions we ought to be vigorously debating are almost entirely ignored.
 
Rathergate

Dan Rather and CBS News have finally admitted that their sources for the “exposé” of Bush’s National Guard days were dubious indeed. Their chief source was a disgruntled Texan ex-Guardsman named Bill Burkett, who has been gunning for Bush for years. But the red-hot story quickly turned into an exposé of the major news media themselves.

These media, it transpires, have lost their authority with the public. The fraudulence of Burkett’s documents was almost instantly detected and revealed on the Internet by numerous independent bloggers; Rather’s “scoop” backfired terribly, and he was unable, as in the past, to dismiss criticism as partisan. Some of his critics weren’t even pro-Bush.

“Alternative media” have decentralized the news business. The public no longer regards the big networks as virtually official sources of information; or rather, it distrusts even official sources in a way it never used to. Rather and his colleagues are used to having the last word, but that was yesteryear.

The shock of this episode has made the whole news business shudder. Traditional journalism is being shoved aside by amateurs; a free market in information, which everyone professes to want, is changing the rules. Journalists pride themselves on being skeptical of the government; but they aren’t nearly skeptical enough, and now they themselves are in the unaccustomed position of facing intense and intelligent skepticism.

Rather became famous during the Watergate scandal, when he bedeviled Richard Nixon. He no doubt thought he was merely repeating his triumph by presenting a story that might destroy the Bush presidency. Instead, he himself wound up being compared to Nixon, with phrases like “stonewalling,” “modified limited hangout,” and (worst of all!) “Rathergate” being used to describe his obdurate refusal to come clean.

Far from seeing the media as “adversaries” of the government, many people have come to see the relation between the big media and big government as essentially a partnership. The “liberal” bias of the big media is really a deep and pervasive bias in favor of big government. The media’s occasional hostility to politicians is usually directed against those they suspect of being insufficiently liberal: Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes, for example, as well as prominent Republicans in Congress.

If there is one thing about the current President Bush it’s tempting to applaud, it’s his occasional defiance of the major media. He seems to understand that they no longer speak for public opinion.
 
Quagmire in the Desert

Robert Novak reports that a consensus is growing within the administration that U.S. forces must be withdrawn from Iraq sometime next year. Whether or not the scheduled elections come off in January, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the occupation is failing. American casualties keep rising, guerrillas control much of the country, and the news is insistently grim, with kidnapings and beheadings reported almost daily.

Bush continues to speak optimistically about the march of freedom in Iraq, as he did at the United Nations recently, but nobody takes such talk seriously. Bush himself is the only one now talking it, against the contradicting background of bloody headlines. And it hardly seems to describe the realities of life in “democratic” Baghdad.

Plans to make the occupation a success sound increasingly like barely disguised exit strategies. The puppet government itself is far too insecure to provide security for Iraqis once American troops leave. It’s all too reminiscent of the “Vietnamization” efforts that were once expected to allow a decorous U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

It’s less and less clear who the enemy is. Communism was at least a more palpable enemy than “terrorism.” When Bush can only call the foe “thugs and terrorists,” the point of this war is pretty elusive. The other side isn’t about to surrender; what satisfactory conclusion is possible? How can progress even be measured?

Toppling Saddam Hussein was the easy part; when he fell and fled, supporters of the war scoffed at the pessimists’ warnings of a “quagmire.” They insisted there was no parallel with Vietnam. And in fact the dry deserts of Iraq, devoid of Vietnam’s forests, marshes, and rice paddies, made “quagmire” seem the wrong metaphor.

But today the Vietnam analogy seems apt, even irresistible. The war looks more futile every day. And Bush seems to be trying to put a brave face on it until election day. After that, we may see a change of course.


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Joseph Sobran