THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

ANOTHER BUSH LEAPS TO CLINTON'S DEFENSE | 2001-02-24

One of the basic items of Western thought is called Occam's Razor. Occam said that you should not make more assumptions than you need to explain what's going on. My Pontiac, South Carolina, rendering of this highly intellectual premise would be, "What you see is probably what you get."

President Bush has asked us, essentially, to forget anything Clinton might have done wrong.

I wouldn't mind that so much if I didn't have one thing that no respectable conservative is allowed to possess: a memory.

I remember that almost every time Clinton was squared off against the Republican Congress, the same scene would appear on TV screens

There stood former Presidents Bush and Ford, backing Clinton.

It would be nice to believe that Bush's defense of Clinton resulted from statesmanship or from a desire to "move on." But when what he does is simply a repeat of what a Bush always does, Occam's Razor sort of requires me to think it's just another Bush wimpout.