Musings from Brian J. Noggle

WWCD? WFC?

In a shotgun blast of a column today, Richard Roeper pulls together a series of musings on the tsunami in Southeast Asia (mostly potshots at the West, its citizens, or the current administration) and poses this question:

To my Republicans friends: Be honest now. If Bill Clinton had waited three days to make a public statement about the worst natural disaster in a generation, how would you have reacted? If Clinton initially pledged $35 million in relief even as we were hearing that his inauguration parties were going to cost $40 million, would you have slammed him for that?

Don't contact me; I'm just asking you to be honest with yourselves. If you'd find fault with Clinton for such behavior, why didn't you criticize Bush for his slow and uninspired response?

Roeper doesn't quite understand the way our Republican hearts work. If Bill Clinton had offered any relief at all, we would have accused him of trying to distract the media from his latest scandal.

The question elevates a trivial topic to a completely new level of trivial trivialism. The whole "Bush waited three days" nonsense would grate on me if I took it seriously, as seriously as some people (including, apparently, Richard Roeper) do. Who cares what Bush did? He's the President of the United States, for crying out loud, not the Great All Father from whom all teachings and wisdom is derived. He could have said less, or nothing, and my wife and I would have contributed what we contributed. But we're independent people who don't need direction from Annan or Bush.

But to continue dragging Clinton and Clinton bashing into any backlash against left-of-the-aisle trivial carping? Bill Clinton's presidency ended five years ago. To ask what we would have done in 1998, during an unprecedented economic expansion, if a tsunami had hit and had Bill Clinton somehow not managed to publicly bite his lip for three days? What's the point of the exercise?

Other than justification for inane commentary about the three day period in which the president might have, you know, been educating himself to the scope of the disaster, deliberating about the proper response, and perhaps even calculating how much of the United States government's deficit should be spent on non-citizens and its relation to the incredible sums voluntarily given by American citizens to private relief efforts.

What would Clinton have done, and how would his critics responded? Who cares? Unlike some people, I have matured and have moved on.

- posted by Brian J. @ 1:49 PM