There’s a certain amount of leeway we need to give the American media in election season. Certainly, when a Democratic candidate chooses to wear an argyle sweater, it’s essential news. Or when the spouse of another one decides to dress as most adult Americans today do when they have a choice, in sneakers and jeans? Okay, put it on the front page.

But there are some stories that are just too trivial to bother with. I mean, does it matter that it looks like the vice president of the United States is about to be investigated for his role in an international bribery scandal? Can we really expect the American voter to care?

That seems to be the editorial decision being made across U.S. newsrooms — which have, with minimal exception, ignored a percolating story about Dick Cheney’s possible involvement in a shady Nigerian deal that a French judge is probing.

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, now deeply enmeshed in the reconstruction of Iraq, is being investigated in France over “$180 million in payments connected with a huge Nigerian liquefied natural gas plant project won in the 1990s by a joint venture that included a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.,” according to the Dallas Morning News’ story last weekend — the only significant U.S. press coverage for this story. All of this took place while Cheney was Halliburton’s CEO. (There’s more over at the Center for American Progress.)

Now, it’s true that this investigation is proceeding in France, and we all know what the Bush administration thinks of the French. No one knows where this story will go, or whether we’ll ultimately learn whether Cheney was involved. Still, you’d think the story would merit a little notice.

But I guess the nation’s reporters and editors have more important matters to focus on. After all, if they spent too much time looking into Halliburton’s past, they might miss a vein bulging on some Democratic candidate’s forehead. And we couldn’t have that, could we?

There’s been a remarkable flow of emperor’s-new-clothes-type snapshots of the Bush administration from Ron Suskind’s book based on former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s White House recollections. Of all of them, one strikes me as especially outrageous — more so than the charge that Bush entered office intending to oust Saddam (we pretty much knew that already, didn’t we?): Dick Cheney’s dismissal of O’Neill’s concern over his administration’s surplus-squandering, budget-busting, deficit-ballooning, generation-betraying tax cuts.

When O’Neill raised the issue after the 2002 elections, the book says, Cheney told him,
“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. Matter how, exactly? Reagan proved that you can win re-election despite running up huge deficits — and I suppose what Cheney is saying here is that that is all that matters to him. We can run a huge deficit and still win re-election, so who cares?

That makes a certain hardball sense. But a little voice in the back of our heads nags us with other pieces of history: like the fact that Reagan eventually came to see that bankrupting the government was not a good idea, and both he and his successor — our current president’s father — agreed to tax increases that laid the foundation for the booming, job-creating, surplus-endowing economy of the ’90s.

And then there is the little matter of the impact of deficits beyond the election. I suppose I should not be surprised that our most boardroom-brained, most corporate presidential administration should specialize in the sort of short-term thinking that has plagued so many American businesses. But sooner or later the national debt will come home to roost, engulfing us in runaway inflation, painful tax increases, decimation of services or some miserable combination of these calamities. If the late ’90s was an era of ostrich-like wishful thinking on the part of stock-market speculators who couldn’t imagine the good times ever ending, Bush, Cheney and company are recapitulating the same mentality today — except, instead of playing fast and loose with investors’ money, they’re doing it with the entire U.S. economy.

Deficits don’t matter. Up to a point, sure. But by any measure, we are way past that point. “We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations,” Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address. But his economic policy could fairly be called “leave every child behind.”

That’s the awful, eerie poignance of “Child’s Play,” the winning entrant in MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest. May every American voter watch it, and weep.
CORRECTION: Whoops, the spot’s name is “Child’s Pay.” An actual clever title, not the cliche my eyes mistook.

I’m glad that Howard Dean, the doctor running for president, is raising the issue of Bush’s shameful stem-cell research policy. (I wrote about it in 2001, when it was announced.) Bush’s wrongheaded plan restricts vital medical research using a religious rationale that, if consistently applied, would also require the banning of a wide variety of commonly used fertility treatments. That would cause a political uproar, of course, and when has Bush ever cared about consistency? His Rove-driven policies are all about targeting electoral constituencies. Released in the summer before 9/11 with considerable ballyhoo, Bush’s stem-cell research ban (that’s essentially what it is, though he trumpeted a dubious loophole allowing extremely limited research to proceed) got lost in the post-9/11 news torrent. Dean deserves credit for putting this story back in the spotlight and reminding us where Bush went wrong.

The “liberal” label has been on a long journey from its Victorian-era origins — the root is from the Latin for “free,” of course, and the original liberals were proponents of free trade (which means that today’s anti-globalism liberals have now come a full 180 degrees).

Jeff Jarvis has been posting recently about the meaning of the term “liberal” today. Jarvis’s ardent pro-war positions have placed him at odds with a lot of people who think of themselves as liberals, but he’s determined not to give up the label.

Good for him: Liberalism should be a big tent, and surely, just as there were “Cold War liberals” who shared some positions, but not all, with their dovish liberal coevals, there has to be room for “terror war liberals” today — even if their conversations with their antiwar brethren escalate into shouting matches.

This discussion prompted Jarvis to offer extensive quotes from a 1960 John F. Kennedy speech defining liberalism. What’s fascinating to me about Kennedy’s rhetoric is not to try to parse how it relates to today’s war debate (I don’t think it much does at all) but rather to notice the one gigantic thing it’s missing: It’s entirely secular. No mention of God. No dutiful punching of the religious-belief card. All the beliefs are specifically and proudly humanist:

Human dignity — not divine dignity — as the source of national purpose. Faith in our fellow citizens — not faith in a deity or a scripture. For Kennedy, as a Catholic trying to become the first president of his faith, keeping God out of his politics made perfect political sense, but it also made moral sense. It still does.

Kennedy’s speech reminds us that one of the key freedoms liberals hold dear is freedom from state religion. By keeping government out of religion, we keep religion free for each individual. And one of the things that unites liberals today is a deep anger at our present administration’s deliberate efforts to mix up religion with government. There’s a constituency for that, to be sure. But don’t underestimate the liberal constituency. I’ve still got some “faith in my fellow citizens as individuals.”

Howard Dean’s Democratic rivals are yapping at his heels for two statements he has made that supposedly indicate how unsuited he is for the presidency. What are the two beyond-the-pale Dean quotes?

First, Dean told a New Hampshire newspaper that he believes Osama bin Laden should receive a fair trial. Here are Dean’s words: “‘I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,’ Dean said in the interview. ‘I will have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.'”

So I scratch my head and wonder, for those people who find this comment outrageous, what’s the alternative? Assuming bin Laden is captured at some point — and not killed during combat as he is being captured — what do those who object to Dean’s statement propose to do? Do we lynch the guy? Shoot him like a dog? Carry his head around on the end of a pole?

When the U.S. captured Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II, we didn’t summarily execute them — we put them on trial. Surely that respect for legal process and rejection of vigilantism is part of what we’re fighting for in the “war on terror.”

In subsequent comments Dean has said that he feels, as I imagine the great majority of Americans do, that bin Laden deserves the death penalty — but after a trial, not before. Anyone who reads the candidate’s words can see that this is what he means, and it’s surely not a controversial position. But the media’s anecdote-manufacturing machine has somehow turned this incident into a “gaffe.” Dean said something he wasn’t supposed to say. And the other Democratic candidates are seizing the incident as ammunition.

The other statement that Dean is being pilloried for is this one: “‘The capture of Saddam is a good thing which I hope very much will keep our soldiers in Iraq and around the world safer,’ Dean said. ‘But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.'”

What am I missing here: Can anyone seriously argue with that statement? Did Saddam in his tunnel pose Americans any kind of threat? Tactically, in the field in Iraq, it’s an open question whether his capture will help improve things: Maybe the ex-dictator was running the Iraqi attacks from his hole in the ground, maybe he wasn’t. That’s important for our troops and for Iraqis — and Dean gives it its due. But in terms of the big issue of our day — protecting Americans at home from more terror attacks a la 9/11 — the capture of Saddam was and is irrelevant. The war in Iraq wasn’t a war on the people who perpetrated 9/11. The terror alert is “orange,” international air traffic is being disrupted, and, we’re told, the threat of a terror attack is higher now than at any time since 9/11.

So how was it, exactly, that America got safer when Saddam was hauled into the daylight? And how is it, exactly, that Dean’s pointing this out is a “gaffe”?

More questions: Why are Dean’s rivals playing into their Republican opponents’ hands by portraying either of these statements as out-of-bounds outrages? And why is the political press — like this Sunday New York Times piece — playing along?