Quindlen - Free Pass for the President

http://www.msnbc.com/news/972867.asp

"“No evidence,” the president finally was forced to admit publicly, that this was so.
The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune ran this extraordinary exercise in backpedaling on page one, where it belonged, but most other major papers buried it inside. The New York Times gave the story barely 300 words on page A22. The New York Post didn’t mention it at all, perhaps because it happened soon after it turned out the link between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck had also been overstated.
Until now George W. Bush has been uncommonly lucky. He has managed to turn a budget surplus into the most monumental deficit in history, in part because of ill-conceived tax cuts. He mounted a war in Iraq with the promise of weapons of mass destruction that have never materialized. He went after two sworn enemies, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and has managed to apprehend neither despite the most expensive intelligence-gathering apparatus on earth. He used Saddam and Al Qaeda in the same sentence in his State of the Union address, then had to confess that his innuendo had false underpinnings. He traveled the other day to the United Nations to ask for help from a body whose members he treated with utter, unilateral contempt not long ago.
To truly appreciate what a free pass the president has gotten, it is necessary only to imagine what the response from Republicans—and reporters—would have been if Bill Clinton had been responsible for one of those things, much less all of them."

I wish this piece were more about the title, but it changes focus a bit.

Eventually, the truth will come out and catch up with him.....

I do like some of the quips Ms. Quindlen came up with, such as:
...Clinton is one reason George W. has developed a Teflon coating slicker and thicker than that of Ronald Reagan. Bush’s predecessor set the bar low: as long as the American people were convinced that the president was not having sex in the Oval Office, they felt mollified.
The tenor of the last election also gave President Bush little to live up to. If there was one prevailing theme, it was that he was none too bright....yet, the Teflon has begun to show telltale scratches. The war is dragging on and soldiers continue to die, and increasingly Americans—even Americans in the military—are asking what the point was. The economy is a mess, the tax cut a sop. There was never a better time to ask for sacrifice from the American people than in the wake of September 11. Except for that of the soldiers, no sacrifice was demanded except the sacrifice of removing your shoes in airports and ceding your civil liberties to John Ashcroft.
This is what happens when personality trumps positions. It’s also what happens when the major parties are pinatas, bright and empty.

She hit the nail on the proverbial head