A Few Questions for Ms. Hughes
I see that Karen Hughes has been nominated by the President to the position of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, with the rank of ambassador. A position, I should note, that requires confirmation by the Senate.
One of the first questions I would think should be asked is what in Hughes' background makes her qualified for a diplomatic position such as this. Her years as a television reporter in Houston? Her tenure at the White House was certainly not in the diplomatic realm. Indeed, it would be the equivalent of President Clinton nominating Sidney Blumenthal for a State Department position.
And while we're asking questions of Ms. Hughes, I'd love to see her answer a few about her role in a) fabricating Bush's 1999 campaign autobiography (specifically, his National Guard service) and b) covering up the fact that Bush had lied about his DWI arrest. Here's a great Jake Tapper article about the subject from November 2000. It begins this way:
Panic on the plane! Fire in the hole! We know Gov. George W. Bush was
arrested for drinking and driving at the age of 30. But did he also lie about it
to the press?
It was Friday morning, and Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News was
sitting on the Bush campaign plane as we flew from Milwaukee to Grand Rapids,
Mich. Slater was telling his fellow journalists about his conversation with Bush
in the fall of 1998, when he asked Bush if he had ever been arrested since 1968
and Bush said, "No."
Suddenly Bush communications director Karen Hughes appeared. (Cue Darth
Vader theme song.)
Her jaw was clenched. Her eyes were shooting piercing glares into Slater's
amiable mug. "That conversation was off the record, wasn't it, Wayne?" she
said.
Slater said it wasn't. The mood grew even tenser. The crowd increased in
size.
So Hughes tried again, explaining why she had cut off the 1998
conversation, which had left Slater with the impression that Bush was on the
brink of correcting his lie before Hughes abruptly ended the conversation.
Bush "was hinting that something had happened, that's why I stepped in and
stopped the conversation," she said.
But, on the hyprocisy scale, this is my favorite clip:
More questions. Why didn't the governor tell Slater that he had been
arrested after 1968?
"The governor at the time, remember the governor has twin daughters at
a very impressionable age, he had made a decision as a father that he has been
very forthcoming in acknowledging that he made mistakes," Hughes said. "In
acknowledging that he drank too much in the past before he quit drinking 14
years ago. But he had made a decision as a father that he did not want to set
that bad example for his daughters or for any other children."
Would the daughter excuse have been OK for President Clinton to use during
the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Would it have been OK if Clinton had said that he
lied under oath so as not to set a bad example for Chelsea?
"The only time the governor was directly asked ... if he'd ever been
arrested for drinking, and he replied, 'I do not have a perfect record,'" Hughes
said, completely avoiding the question. "Throughout this campaign he has been
very forthcoming with the American people that he made mistakes as a youth, that
he did things as a youth that he is not proud of, and he has been very open
about that."
Is a 30-year-old a youth?
No answer. Later she would say, "It was before he was married, It was
before he had children."
