Sally Quinn, Arbiter of Political Hyprocrisy

Yesterday Sally Quinn, one of the arbiters of society and mainstream opinion in Washington, D.C., had a column at the Washington Post about dumping Dick Cheney. In it she showed just how out of touch she is with what is going on.

This is what she thinks Bush should do if he had the time and Fred Thompson was his vice-president.

Bush would be left in better shape on the war and be able to concentrate on AIDS and the environment in hopes of salvaging his legacy.

To just put into perspective her keen insights about the Bush Administration,s legacy concerning the environment, this is in the Post today.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

This indeed backs up her, and everyone else's, contention that Cheney needs to go, but she should go further and insist that Bush needs to go as well.

Bush has no legacy concerning the environment except for a legacy of weakening environmental laws to the benefit of the short term gains of big business and big donating developers.

Quinn was not bashful about bashing the Clintons at every opportunity. This is her writing on the Lewinsky matter that offended her so greatly.

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The polls show that a majority of Americans do not share that outrage. Around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on; in Washington, despite Clinton's gains with the budget and the Mideast peace talks, people want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable. They want this, they say, not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well.

Yes, that's it, the boys in power want their pound of flesh and the social arbiter, nose in the air, just thinks the Clinton's were uncouth.

In the same article she quotes the journalistically bi-polar Chris Matthews.

"This is a contractual city," says Chris Matthews, who once was a top aide to the late Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. "There are no factories here. What we make are deals. It's a city based on bonds made and kept." The president, he went on, "has broken and shattered contracts publicly and shamefully. He violates the trust at the highest level of politics. Matthews, now a Washington columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and host of CNBC's "Hardball," also says, "There has to be a functional trust by reporters of the person they're covering. Clinton lies knowing that you know he's lying. It's brutal and it subjugates the person who's being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly lied to."

Clinton lies about sex, Bush and Cheney have lied about everything, but all Quinn can do is gush about Fred Thompson. Read her entire article here and witness the total hypocrisy of those people living and thriving inside the beltway.

Ms. Quinn should go and spend some more time in her labyrinth and reflect on being confused about morality and try to find some way to speak out from her newfound religion on something other than Fred Thompson's opportunity to save George Bush's legacy.

Jim Martin