Which side to believe?

Help! I'm trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, between having to believe a government agency on one hand and a major American political party on the other. It isn't pretty.\nIn this corner we have the General Services Administration, or GSA. The GSA said last week that when the Clinton Administration vacated the White House and associated office space, "the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." Similarly, in February officials at Andrews Air Force Base denied reports of damage ("looting" was apparently claimed) to Air Force One, the Presidential airplane.\nIn the other corner we have certain high-profile leaders of the Republican party, such as Bob Barr, and their friends in the liberal media, who claimed that outgoing Clinton-Gore staffers "stripped" Air Force One and "trashed" the White House. Radio host Oliver North (impersonating longtime Clinton flack James Carville) put it like this: "We should expect from white trash what they did at the White House." Others, like Paula Zahn of FoxNews, took a more upscale tack: "All right, but this is the White House, for God's sakes. We're not talking about people living in a fraternity." Tom Schatz, of Citizens Against Government Waste, spelled it out: "They turned it into Animal House." Will members of university Greek systems protest these slurs on their lifestyle?\nYou see my dilemma: there's no one I can really believe. Of course I'm more likely to believe the GSA than Bob Barr or Oliver North. It's clear enough that the Republican Right is up to its old tricks again, familiar from the days that led to Clinton's impeachment. The tactic is simple. Remember how the Republicans would leak some damaging rumor -- say, that the videotape of Clinton's testimony before a grand jury would show him losing his temper, cursing and stamping out of the courtroom. The liberal media would obligingly report these rumors, even embroidering and enhancing it. When the videotape was shown, it bore no resemblance to the rumor. Oops! Our mistake, the media would blush -- and then run to the next Republican crying wolf.\nYou'd think that having taken back the White House would have satisfied them. But it seems they will never get over having lost it in 1992, or having failed to eject Clinton before his terms ended.\nThe Republicans had their own dilemma: Clinton certainly did a lot of bad things, including illegal ones, but the Republicans approved of most of them: the abolition of welfare, the bombing of Baghdad, the degradation of the environment, "free trade" agreements that are really protectionism for the biggest corporations. To those of us with functional memories, their complaints of Clinton's lies and corruption are ironic. When did the Republicans get religion? They'd never minded Reagan's lies and corruption, which set a standard Clinton never quite managed to equal, though heaven knows he tried. (I'm still trying to make sense of a local right-winger's remark I once overheard, that he had liked Reagan before he sold out to big business. When was this? Reagan has been a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of American corporate interests ever since General Electric acquired him in the 1950s.)\nWorst of all, the Gingrich disciples who tried to shut down the Federal government in 1995 failed. They were only able to enact those parts of their program that Clinton supported, and that wasn't enough for them, or soon enough. For the rest, they were never able to muster public support, which they blamed on Clinton but should have blamed on themselves. The impeachment debacle made it even clearer: most Americans sided with Clinton against his enemies. I can't help wondering if the accusations that Clinton's people "vandalized" the White House were mainly projection: the radical\nRepublicans tried to vandalize the entire United States. Now Bush's people are pushing through as much as they can, as fast as they can, filling up government posts with their relatives and cronies. The accusations of vandalism, having been refuted, can be abandoned, albeit with poor grace, as the Republicans and their Democratic collaborators gear up to turn this country into a nuclear waste dump.