Dick Morris built his career as a
political gun-for-hire, working, it seems for virtually anyone who would pay
him cold hard cash. How else to explain someone who could toil for
both Jesse Helms and Bill Clinton?
Since his toe-sucking-whore fiasco,
Morris has rebuilt a career not as a pollster or political consultant to
politicians, but as a columnist and a political analyst on Fox News.
Whenever I want to know what will
happen, I listen to what Morris says, and then assume the opposite will be
the case. More often than that, this is quite an accurate method to
predict political events. For example, when I heard Dick Morris opine
that he knew that Hillary Clinton was not going to run for the Senate, I
thought "I guess she's running."
Enough random Morris-bashing. He
obviously does possess certain highly developed political skills, or Clinton
wouldn't have kept him around all those years. Which brings us to the
point of this commentary:
A big part of Morris's new career as
pundit is lambasting Bill Clinton for Clinton's errors while in office, with
the spin that if only Clinton had listened to Morris, things would have
turned out much better. Morris breathlessly reveals "inside
information" to bolster his points.
Morris in now engaged in a multi-part
series of appearances on Fox in which he is revealing all the
recommendations to fight terrorism that Morris made, and Bill Clinton failed
to implement. The underlying premise of the series is that Clinton's
failure to listen to Dick Morris helped create the terrorism mess we're in
now. As Morris snidely concluded, "The guy just didn't get
it."
I'm no great fan of Bill Clinton, and
I frankly don't want to get into the details of what Morris says he
recommended and Bill Clinton didn't do. Let's assume everything Morris
says he recommended he did recommend, and everything he says Bill Clinton
failed to do, Bill Clinton failed to do.
What I want to ask is, if at that
time it was so obvious to Dick Morris that Clinton's failure to follow
Morris's recommendations was endangering the nation, why didn't Morris at
that time do something about it? Why didn't Morris threaten to
resign and go public if Clinton didn't take those steps that Morris at
that time knew were so important? Why didn't Morris -- if he did
"get it" -- quit and go public to warn the American people about
the grave risk Clinton was creating by failing to follow Morris's
recommendations about fighting terrorism? Damn, Morris could have gone
back to some of his Republican buddies and given them the ammo to
blast Clinton for his republic-endangering failure to follow Morris's
anti-terrorism steps.
One reason that Morris didn't take any
of those public steps could be that he's a moral coward, and didn't want to
upset his boss, the most powerful man in the world.
While not wanting to denigrate the
possibility that Morris is a moral coward, I think in this instance
the more likely explanation is that at that time, Morris, like
Clinton, like -- with a few exceptions -- virtually all of Congress, the
media and the American public, just did not take seriously the threat of a
terrorist attack on American soil. The exceptions who were at that
time speaking out publicly about the vulnerability of our nation to
terrorist attack are the only ones who have the right to be Monday-morning
quarterbacking now.
Dick, if you're going to be a
Monday-morning quarterback, you should avoid areas where you yourself could
have influenced the course of events in just the manner you are criticizing
others for failing to do!
