Impeach Coach Bush?
I have no feelings about Neuheisel one way or another, but there's no denying that the guy is a hell of a football coach. His team went 11-1 in 2000 and won the Rose Bowl. That is a serious thing for a college football program. A successful, nationally ranked program that contends for a big bowl is worth millions, if not tens of millions, to the university. Fairly or unfairly (actually we might as well just say it: unfairly) the professional fates of college presidents depend almost entirely on sports coaches, of whom a significant percentage will naturally and appropriately be moral degenerates.
You can discover the cure for lupus and be a multiple Nobel Laureate, but if your school's team doesn't get you serious tv money, you're back to teaching 101 classes in a heartbeat.
So one would think that a winning coach would have to leave a string of bodies up and down both coastlines in order to move a college president to fire him. But no?in the current environment, if your coach bets on a pool (a pool: a miserable, absurdly unsatisfying activity if there ever was one) with his neighbor, or lies about having interviewed with the 49ers, you pull the plug immediately on your school's massive investment.
Why? Because our media won't tolerate anything else. We all know how these scandals work. Coach screws up. Embarrassing videotape/photograph/stripper testimonial circulates on every network, reaching 50 million Americans 15 times a day. Time passes. If the college president so much as hesitates to fire the coach, hell breaks loose.
Just look at the impatient headlines and editorials preceding Neuheisel's firing. The Oregonian: "The Huskies Should Have Folded This Hand a Long Time Ago." Albuquerque Tribune (Albuquerque? How can anyone in Albuquerque have a strong opinion about Rick Neuheisel's job status?): "Neuheisel Needs an Ethics Class." The Birmingham News: "Neuheisel Has to Go." Dallas Morning News: "'Do As I Say, Not As I Do' No Longer Excusable." And so on. This kind of thing then goes on and on and on until finally the end comes, with the college president marching off for the dreary press conference in which he/she appears on camera literally ashen-faced, his/her face a mask of infinite disappointment, as the inevitable firing is made official.
The point here is that none of this would happen without the media. If this were an in-house matter, the coach could have a roulette wheel on the sideline and he'd keep his job, so long as he won. That's how much NCAA rules mean. As Charles Barkley once said about his academic eligibility, "As long as I was leading the SEC in rebounding, my grades would be fine." He did, and they were.
Now let's jump out of the sports world and look at real life. Here, things are different. You can do just about anything in the real world and get away with it. This is particularly true if you're the president of the United States. Forget about lying about a job interview with the 49ers: You can lie to the entire world, for a full year or more, in order to send thousands to their deaths in an insane military adventure, and be fairly confident that that terrible Monday morning?in which you wake up with the whole world clamoring for your dismissal?will never come.
In the past few weeks, I've been following the "missing weapons of mass destruction" story with some interest, unsure of what to make of it all. From where I sat, things got interesting several weeks ago when the New York Times reported that Donald Rumsfeld had ordered an investigation into the possibility that the White House was provided with faulty intelligence on Iraq. This obvious post-factum effort at wagon-circling seemed to suggest that the White House anticipated a scandal serious enough that they would need the option of turning the intelligence community into the fall guy for the whole thing, should it come to that. Thus the groundwork.
But where were they imagining that heat would come from?
The Democrats? It doesn't look like it. If Bush indeed lied in his State of the Union address when he repeatedly declared unequivocally that Iraq possessed large quantities of chemical and biological weapons, and that it was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," then that would clearly be an impeachable offense.
Former White House counsel John Dean, who ought to know, said as much in a little-circulated article published on the CNN website. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data," he wrote, "if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause." Dean added: "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked."
Despite a seeming legal basis for it, the Democrats have yet to so much as threaten impeachment, settling for timid calls for an investigation. There are no Newt Gingriches or Ken Lays out there emptying the armories for a fight. Bush would appear to be safe there until election season, when of course the Democratic candidates will make whatever they can out of the issue without causing any actual damage.
And the media? With a few exceptions?the shame-covered Times among them?the press has universally responded to the weapons of mass destruction story by asking not did Bush lie, but where are they? Try it yourself: a simple Google news search on the phrase "Saddam's weapons" turns up, at this writing, 908 hits. The simple lingual trick of continually referring in an affirmative manner to "the weapons of mass destruction," presupposing at the sentence level that they not only did exist but still do in some form or another (in some cases, the present-tense reference to the weapons seems to indicate not even their existence, but their continued political viability as a war excuse), is itself a clear expression of support for the Bush position. And almost every paper in the country uses it.
The NCAA prohibits gambling. Technically, Rick Neuheisel broke the rules. From coast to coast, America made it clear it wouldn't stand for that. But the Constitution? The presidency? Let's let it slide. We won the war, didn't we?