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Bob Dole: The Original “Miserable Creature” |
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Bob Dole has self-righteously denounced Scott McClellan as “a miserable creature.” I don’t want to pay too much attention to this attempt to shift the focus from the Bush administration’s incompetence and malfeasance to the distracting inquiry into McClellan’s inner life, but it’s worth noting that Bob Dole did some pretty miserable things himself at a critical juncture in the nation’s history, using essentially the same tactics he is using now –smear the messenger.
In 1972, when the Washington Post broke the Watergate story, Dole was a first-term senator and chair of the RNC. Dole was working to get Nixon re-elected and responded to the Post’s reporting by claiming Woodward and Bernstein were mudslingers helping McGovern’s campaign against Nixon.   Dole groundlessly charged that the Post was writing stories about Watergate because publisher Katharine Graham hated Nixon. Dole later explained to Graham that “during a campaign they put these things in your hands, and you just read them.”
Nearly 40 years later, Dole is once again playing the familiar role of attack dog, happy to smear the messenger, now McClellan instead of the Post.Â
Note: Bob Dole sank to perhaps even greater depths in 2004, when he questioned the legitimacy of John Kerry’s war wounds, suggesting Kerry “never bled”. Yes, Bob Dole knows something about what it means to be miserable–doesn’t get much worse than falsely questioning the legitimacy of someone’s war wounds.
