Via Kos, I see that Bob Novak is reporting that Republicans are begging Katherine Harris to drop out of the Florida senate race. Wasn’t that the issue that old Bob and James Carville were bantering about when Novak lost it on the air?
ED HENRY: katherine harris went onto the house of representatives. now she wants to move over to the united states senate. today she got the news that the speaker of the florida house won’t challenge her for the republican nomination. she is blaming unnamed newspapers for tarnishing her image by doctoring her makeup with photo shop. that computer program. bob, have you been investigating this story?
BOB NOVAK: no, but i’ve had the same experience that she did. a lot of my trouble in the world is they’ve doctored my makeup and the colorized me in a lot of newspapers on my picture. i sympathize with her.
HENRY: who did it?
NOVAK: i can’t tell you.
JAMES CARVILL: yeah, the two happiest people in america today about this decision is bill nelson and jay leno. i mean —
HENRY: bill nelson the democratic senator.
CARVILLE: and jay leno. they’re going to go nuts over this. they’re messing with my makeup. you don’t know who it is. i mean, let’s say this. she’s going to be good for the humor circuit and the speech circuit. she’s good for a lot. i think that nelson, it’s no secret the white house wanted the speaker to run. i suspect the nelson people are feeling pretty good here today.
NOVAK: a couple of points here. the first place, don’t be too sure she’s going to lose. all the establishment’s against her. i’ve seen these republican — anti-establishment candidates do pretty well. ronald reagan, i guarantee you the establishment wasn’t for him. we just elected a senator from oklahoma, senator tom colebert, everybody in the establishment was against him. she might get elected. [CROSS TALK]
NOVAK: let me finish what i’m going to say, james. i know you hate to hear me
CARVILLE: he’s got to show she is right wingers he’s got backbone. show them you’re tough.
NOVAK: i think that’s bullshit and i hate that. just let it go.
I don’t know that this has anything to do with anything. I just thought it would be fun to relive the moment when Novak was forced to go back into his coffin for the duration.
I have turned off all the cable news stations for the rest of the day. Watching the macabre death watch of Stanley Williams gives me the same sick feeling in my gut that seeing those videos of hostages in Iraq does. The endless slide show of pictures of the guy while a little clock in the corner counts down the hours until he will be killed is beyond my ken. I just don’t see how this helps anything. Life without parole sounds like civilized justice to me. This state sanctioned cold-blooded execution stuff is something else entirely.
In other news, Mexico just outlawed the death penalty, leaving the United States among the following countries that allow it:
* Afghanistan * Antigua and Barbuda * Bahamas * Bahrain * Bangladesh * Barbados * Belarus * Belize * Botswana * Burundi * Cameroon * Chad * China (People’s Republic) * Comoros * Congo (Democratic Republic) * Cuba * Dominica * Egypt * Equatorial Guinea * Eritrea * Ethiopia * Gabon * Ghana * Guatemala * Guinea * Guyana * India * Indonesia * Iran * Iraq * Jamaica * Japan * Jordan * Kazakhstan * Korea, North * Korea, South * Kuwait * Kyrgyzstan * Laos * Lebanon * Lesotho * Liberia * Libya * Malawi * Malaysia * Mongolia * Nigeria * Oman * Pakistan * Palestinian Authority * Philippines * Qatar * Rwanda * St. Kitts and Nevis * St. Lucia * St. Vincent and the Grenadines * Saudi Arabia * Sierra Leone * Singapore * Somalia * Sudan * Swaziland * Syria * Taiwan * Tajikistan * Tanzania * Thailand * Trinidad and Tobago * Uganda * United Arab Emirates * United States * Uzbekistan * Vietnam * Yemen * Zambia * Zimbabwe
Interesting company, isn’t it? With the exception of Belize, Guatamala and some Caribbean islands we are the only country in North America, South America or Europe to have the death penalty.
Can someone explain to me again about how we are defending western civilization against the barbarians. I don’t think I quite understand it.
Update: Guyana is in S. America and Belarus is in Eastern Europe. My bad. Point stays the same.
Is it really true that it’s ethical for one journalist to reveal a colleague’s confidential source to a third source?
I’m in desperate need of an emergency panel on blogger ethics because I’m confused. David Corn says that Viveca Novak screwed up by not telling her editors that Luskin was using a conversation she’d never mentioned to anyone as a get out of jail card for Karl Rove. That sounds right to me. She really should have told her editors. This was a big story and had they known about Luskin’s reaction perhaps they would have pursued the story differently and gotten the truth out to the public.
But Corn also says that she did nothing wrong when she told Luskin that Rove being Matt Cooper’s source was all over TIME magazine, which I really don’t understand at all. Novak herself admits that it was a mistake:
Toward the end of one of our meetings, I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of “Karl doesn’t have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt.” I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, “Are you sure about that? That’s not what I hear around TIME.” He looked surprised and very serious. “There’s nothing in the phone logs,” he said. In the course of the investigation, the logs of all Rove’s calls around the July 2003 time period–when two stories, including Matt’s, were published mentioning that Plame was Wilson’s wife–had been combed, and Luskin was telling me there were no references to Matt. (Cooper called via the White House switchboard, which may be why there is no record.)
I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised. I had been pushing back against what I thought was his attempt to lead me astray. I hadn’t believed that I was disclosing anything he didn’t already know. Maybe this was a feint. Maybe his client was lying to him. But at any rate, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I hadn’t intended to tip Luskin off to anything. I was supposed to be the information gatherer. It’s true that reporters and sources often trade information, but that’s not what this was about. If I could have a do-over, I would have kept my mouth shut; since I didn’t, I wish I had told my bureau chief about the exchange. Luskin walked me to my car and said something like, “Thank you. This is important.”
She says she was uncomfortable. She hadn’t intended to “tip Luskin off.” If she had a do-over, she would have kept her mouth shut. Yet Corn insists that she did nothing wrong.
Although Corn expends a great deal of energy lighting up the straw man, I haven’t seen anyone accusing her of being a right wing operative. It’s not her politics that are at issue. It’s her ethics. “Pushing back” shouldn’t include exposing her colleague Matt Cooper’s source to a third party. She ended up becoming part of the story and the investigation because of that. It’s a major screw up that shines yet another bright light on the curious ethical habits of the DC establishment.
Apparently others at TIME magazine, not just Cooper and his editors, knew that Karl Rove was personally blabbing to the press that Plame was CIA. (Half of Washington seems to have known it.) Viveca Novak knew and blabbed it to Karl Rove’s lawyer over drinks at Cafe Deluxe, Lawrence O’Donnell knew and kept it secret for months because he didn’t want to be subpoenaed and God knows how many other people knew it and passed it on to other privileged insiders or kept it to themselves for selfish reasons. Can’t reporters like Corn understand why we poor hapless rubes out here in the hinterlands (not to mention the Justice department) find their shrieking for the last year and half about the sanctity of the confidential source just a little bit self-serving?
I’ve never quarrelled with Matt Cooper taking his promise to keep Karl Rove’s name confidential all the way to the Supreme Court. (I wondered about Judith Miller being entitled to the reporter’s privilege when it was clear that she had not written a story and had not been assigned one, however.) I understand that reporters need to keep their sources identities secret at times. What I don’t understand is the practice of going back to powerful sources who lie to you again and again and granting them anonymity so that they can spread scurrilous stories without having to take responsibility for them. I don’t understand why it’s ok for a reporter to spill the name of a colleague’s confidential source over drinks at Cafe Deluxe or why the public should accept that a newsroom and friends and cocktail party guests should know the names of these confidential sources, but the people (even “the people” as represented by the government) should not. I don’t know why a reporter can keep important information on ice for months and years because they want to break the news in a book long after it has any relevance. It seems to me that the Beltway press corps wants it both ways. They don’t want to be forced to tell the law or the public who their confidential sources are but they reserve for themselves the pleasure of blabbing it to their friends, other sources and each other.
The DC press corps has no idea how they look to the rest of the country after more than a decade of running with GOP trumped up scandals, pimping for impeachment, trivializing the effects of an unorthodox presidential election in 2000, and then saluting smartly and following Dick Cheney over the cliff on Iraq. We liberals never thought of the press as particularly partisan. We thought of it as competent or incompetent. But for a lot of reasons, for the last 15 years the DC press corps have far too often aligned themselves with a manipulative GOP political establishment to the point where it’s been hard to see where one ends and the other begins. It’s not a matter of political preference. It’s insiderism. And when you become an insider in a corrupt system, for money, access, fame, fun whatever … you become corrupt yourself.
I’m not surprised that the WaPo staffers don’t like links to bloggers and others on the WaPo site. We are very critical. And I’m sure that we are often unfair and often flat wrong. But it would behoove these guys to stop consoling themselves with the notion that they “must be doing something right” if both sides are mad at them, and take a good look at the nature of these complaints. The right has spent the last quarter century in an organized campaign to work the refs and push the dialog to the right. The complaints coming from the left are the result of pent-up frustration at the tabloidization, the celebrity chasing, the insiderism. We have no organized campaign and we don’t see the media as being politically biased. We see it as abdicating its duty to sort out the important from the trivial and connect the dots in these confusing times that are ruled by spin, PR and marketing on all sides.
This country cannot survive without proper journalism. Blogs can’t do it. We need newspapers and news broadcasters who keep foremost in their minds the fact that they are indispensible to a functioning democracy. For the last fifteen years Washington politics have been covered as if they are high school with money. The DC press corps needs to reacquaint themselves with the idea that their purpose is not to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can keep their confidences. Their job is to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can get to the truth and write about it.
Update: Firedoglake has more on the WaPo ombudsman letter linked above that discusses the dissatisfaction of the staffers about linking and Dan Froomkin. Jane sets the story straight as only she can.
There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.
This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics — or their criticisms — head on.
The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so — not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.
Update: For those who don’t understand why it is wrong to reveal Cooper’s source to the source’s lawyer, it’s called the law of unintended consequences, which I think this story illustrates quite well. She had no way of knowing how blurting that information out would affect the story, or the case, but she does now. The rule of thumb is that if you know the name of your colleague’s source, keep your mouth shut. Period. She could have “pushed back” in any number of ways that didn’t include revealing Rove’s name. It was careless and cavalier and she’s paying for it (and the proverbial cover-up) now.
Aside from being a bad son (like his hero, Junior Bush) and publicly disrespecting his much more accomplished father, Chris Wallace is an idiot. Via Americablog:
Asked about DNC chair Howard Dean’s recent prediction that the U.S. would lose the war in Iraq, Wallace told Carr:
“We are in a war. We do have 150,000-plus American soldiers over there. I mean, it’s Tokyo Rose, for God sakes, going on radio saying we can’t win the war.”
I guess he’s unaware of Tokyo Rose’s story (which is typical because he’s a rightwing moron):
Iva Ikuko Toguri is the woman who was tried as Tokyo Rose. She is a first-generation Japanese-American who happened to be visiting a sick relative in Japan in 1941. When war was declared between Japan and the U.S., Toguri was trapped in Japan and pressured by Japanese military police to renounce her American citizenship. She refused. Instead, she learned Japanese and took two jobs to support herself while she sought a way to return home.
One of her jobs was as a typist for Radio Tokyo. There she met American and Australian prisoners of war who were being forced to broadcast radio propaganda. Toguri scavenged black-market food, medicine, and supplies for these POWs. When Radio Tokyo wanted a female voice for their propaganda shows, the POWs selected Toguri. She was one of many female, English-speaking voices on Radio Tokyo, and she took the radio name of “Orphan Ann.” Her POW friends wrote her scripts and tried to sneak in pro-American messages whenever possible.
After the war, several reporters went to Japan to find and interview the infamous Tokyo Rose, offering a large cash payment for an interview. A woman at Radio Tokyo pointed the reporters to Iva Toguri, and Toguri, thinking that she and her new husband, Felipe d’Aquino, could use the money, agreed to be interviewed. She even signed a contract stating that she was the infamous Tokyo Rose. A reporter gave the interview notes to U.S. Army Counter Intelligence, and in 1945, the U.S. arrested and imprisoned Toguri in Japan. She was released in 1946, but was arrested again in 1948, and taken to the U.S. to be tried for treason.
Her trial was considered the most expensive in American history at that time. The U.S. government stacked the deck against Toguri and her meager defense, and the judge later admitted he was prejudiced against her from the start. Toguri was found guilty of only one of the eight treason charges — “That she did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships.” She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000. Because she was a model prisoner, Toguri was released early in 1956, although she was served with a deportation order which took two years to fight.
In 1976, the TV news show 60 Minutes told the Tokyo Rose story from Toguri’s point of view. This led to a full pardon for Toguri from President Gerald Ford in 1977.
Chris should have listened to his father. He might have learned something.
In the spring of ’04, responding to to Karl Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin saying out of the blue over drinks one night, “Karl doesn’t have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt,” Viveca Novak just happened to let it slip that it was all over TIME magazine that Karl Rove was the leaker. Luskin said “thank you. This is important.”
She didn’t tell her editors or the public during the entire time a first amendment challenge was being waged against her magazine all the way to the Supreme Court. She said nothing as her colleague Cooper faced jail time up until the last possible moment, not even when Rove’s lawyer essentially AGAIN, more than a year after she told him otherwise, said those magic words — this time to the Wall Street Journal (“If Matt Cooper’s going to jail, it’s not for Karl Rove.”)
She didn’t tell her editors or the public when Luskin informed her that she was going to be called by the prosecutor nor did she tell them when she hired a lawyer and gave the prosecutor a statement. It was only when she was actually called to give a deposition under oath that she decided that she needed to reveal that Luskin had proferred her as Rove’s alibi.
She made no notes of her numerous conversations with Luskin even though she claims that she was working on the Rove story. And she can’t remember when the conversations specifically took place. Apparently, she didn’t think it was important to make a note of it, even though she was allegedly working on the story at the time.
She wishes she could have a do-over. She says she would do it differently. Like, for instance, she wouldn’t go around revealing Matt Cooper’s sources. Cuz, it’s like mortifying. Totally.
Most amazingly, after she had already talked to the prosecutor for the first time and still not told her editors of her own involvement (or had told them that day) she wrote her story about about Bob Woodward:
But he said nothing then or in the months that followed as Fitzgerald launched his investigation and all Washington was consumed by a debate over spies and secrets and sources. Woodward kept what he knew secret even from Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. But as the case heated up this fall and Woodward joined in the reporting, “I learned something more” about the leak, he told TIME, which prompted him to finally tell Downie of his 2003 conversation.
[…]
Challenged on his public statements as well as his private conduct, Woodward explained that he had “hunkered down” out of fear of being subpoenaed at a time when reporters like Miller and TIME’s Matthew Cooper were being jailed or threatened with jail unless they revealed their sources. Elsewhere in the newsroom, Post colleagues were none too happy. On an internal chat board, columnist Jonathan Yardley argued that “this is the logical and perhaps inevitable outcome when an institution permits an individual to become larger than the institution itself.”
I can guess what the internal TIME chat board will be saying tomorrow: “Oh, and fuck you very much Viv. Your glass house needs cleaning.”
She continued:
It was a rough week all around. The White House confronted another twist that could only prolong a politically damaging case. Fitzgerald confirmed that he would be presenting evidence to a new grand jury. Other possible targets had to be worried that there is still an aggressive investigation going on with the possibility of further indictments to come. And Fitzgerald, a tireless prosecutor with a reputation for thoroughness, had to wonder, after two years and millions of dollars and countless hours of hunting, what else is out there that he missed.
Yes, Fitzgerald was being uncharacteristically sloppy. Clearly, he should have rendered the entire press corps to Gitmo and injected them with sodium pentathol. After all, nobody in Washington takes any notes or has any conscious memory of any conversations they ever have, so there really isn’t any other way to get the facts.
Truthfully, I suspect that Fitzgerald was as sadly mistaken about how the media functions in this country as the public was. We all thought that journalists were chomping at the bit to reveal news and when they got a tip they worked hard to find a way to report it. In Viveca Novak’s case, had she just shared what she knew with her editors, for instance, they might have put it together with other information they had from other reporters and maybe found a way to publish a story.
I suppose we were all led astray by “All The President’s Men” (ironically) which showed journalists using anonymously sourced information as a tip to pursue stories further or confirmation of facts they already knew, not as social currency or exclusive information for a book to be published long after the information means anything. Our bad. Apparently, it’s fine for reporters to “gossip” freely among their fellow insiders about their sacred anonymous sources, but a federal crime to tell the public about it. We rubes are supposed to uncritically read their dispatches and buy their books so they can be well paid — and leave the democracy business to our betters.
Update: In retrospect, TIME should have pulled that story she wrote on Woodward or reported immediately that she had been called to testify. It looks bad. She was writing that story on November 18th and she knew she was even more implicated than Woodward. She told her editor on Sunday the 20th so perhaps they couldn’t pull it back by that point. I’m surprised she wasn’t fired on the spot, to tell you the truth. Her behavior is more egregious than Miller’s.
(And once again, why in the hell did Woodward pick her to talk to?)
Update II: James Wolcott calls for another panel on blogger ethics
In case anyone still wonder why the cheese eating surrender monkeys and the ungrateful bastards we liberated from Hitler didn’t join in our war party, here’s the reason:
More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.
The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.
The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet, the French former official. He said the French investigated at the CIA’s request.
Chouet’s account was “at odds with our understanding of the issue,” a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.
However, the essence of Chouet’s account — that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it, and warned the CIA — was extensively corroborated by the former CIA official and a current French government official, who both spoke on condition of anonymity.
The repeated warnings from France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.
It was not the first time a foreign government tried to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence.
In the notorious “Curveball” case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraqi biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball’s claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable and might be a fabricator.
And remember, even our closest ally in the coalition of the willing was saying this at the time:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Let’s hear again about how every foreign government agreed with our assessment that Iraq had WMD.
Oh, and not that it matters, but let’s also remember what Karl Rove was telling Time magazine in July of 2003 about this:
“not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger … “
If you would like to have a surreal experience akin to the effects of downing ten shots of cheap tequila, tune in to FoxNews as they eulogize Richard Pryor. Apparently he invented dirty words. (It’s going to come as a helluva surprise to Lenny Bruce — not to mention Redd Foxx.) He rejected the comedy of the good comedian, Bill Cosby, and went down the “wrong path” that led us to where we are today with all this R rated badness. One of the commentators said that when he went on TV in the mid 70’s he “wasn’t ready for prime time.” (Actually, prime time wasn’t ready for him.) Another said that “every black comic owes him something.”
(Is it possible that right wingers are all actually zombies who died sometime before the 60’s and have been walking among us as the undead ever since then? I just don’t know what else can explain their terminal cultural obtuseness.)
I saw Richard Pryor in concert in 1974 at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California. I just realized that he was only 34 years old at the time. (Of course, I was only 18, so everyone seemed pretty old to me then.) He was on the cusp of achieving huge mainstream fame that year from his album “That Ni**er’s Crazy.”
I’d never seen anything like Pryor before. It was more than comedy, and it sure as hell was more than “R” rated. It was cultural observation so universal and so penetrating that I saw the world differently from that night on. He didn’t just talk about race, although he talked about it a lot and in the most bracing, uncompromising terms possible. He also talked about men and women, age, relationships, family, politics and culture so hilariously that my jaw literally ached the next day. He was rude, profane and sexist. But there was also this undercurrent of vulnerability and melancholy running beneath the comedy that exposed a canny understanding of human foible. His personal angst seemed to me to be almost uncomfortably plain.
I looked around me in that theatre that night, in which I and my little friend Kathy were among a fair minority of whites, and I realized that we were all laughing uproariously together at this shocking, dirty, racially charged stuff. As someone who grew up in a racist household (and had always had a visceral reaction against it) it was an enormous, overwhelming relief. I understood Richard Pryor, the African Americans in the audience understood Richard Pryor and Richard Pryor and the African Americans understood me. He was right up front, saying it all clearly and without restraint. He wasn’t being polite and pretending that race wasn’t an issue. And it didn’t matter. Nobody, not one person, in that audience was angry. In fact, not one person in that audience was anything but doubled over in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He had our number, all of us, the whole flawed species.
He’s been sick a long time and so it’s no surprise that he died a a sadly early death. I’ve been missing him for quite a while. If you haven’t ever had a chance to see him in concert when he was in his prime, check it out on DVD. Maybe it won’t be funny or salient to people today, I don’t know. At the time, it was a revelation.
In its relentless quest to abdicate global leadership and assume the role of rogue nation, the Bush administration is making a complete ass of itself in the global warming talks:
In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations’ 1992 treaty on climate change.
The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on what was to have been the last day of the talks, during which the administration has been repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.
At a closed session of about 50 delegates, Dr. Watson objected to the proposed title of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to carry out the 1992 climate treaty, participants said. He then got up from the table and departed.
Environmentalists here called his actions the capstone of two weeks of American efforts to prevent any fresh initiatives from being discussed. “This shows just how willing the U.S. administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change project at the World Wildlife Fund.
In the end, though, some adjustments of wording – including a shift from “mechanisms” to the softer word “opportunities” in one statement – ended the dispute.
Hey, I like breathing dirt and I assume that everyone else in the world likes breathing dirt too. Good for us.
In his Friday speech, Clinton blasted the Bush administration’s opposition as “flat wrong.”
But the speech almost didn’t happen.
The contretemps started late Thursday afternoon, when the Associated Press ran a story saying that Clinton had been added at the last minute to the gathering’s speaking schedule at the request of conference organizers. According to the source, barely minutes after the news leaked, conference organizers called Clinton aides and told them that Bush-administration officials were displeased.
“The organizers said the Bush people were threatening to pull out of the deal,” the source said. After some deliberation between Clinton and his aides, Clinton decided he wouldn’t speak, added the source: “President Clinton immediately said, ‘There’s no way that I’m gonna let petty politics get in the way of the deal. So I’m not gonna come.’ That’s the message [the Clinton people] sent back to the organizers.”
But the organizers of the conference didn’t want to accept a Bush-administration dictum. They asked Clinton that he go ahead with the speech. “The organizers decided to call the administration’s bluff,” the source said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna push [the Bush people] back on this.’”
Several hours went by, and at the Clinton Foundation’s holiday party on Thursday night, the former president and his aides still thought they weren’t going to Montreal. “The staff that was supposed to go with him had canceled their travel plans,” the source said.
At around 8:30 p.m., organizers called Clinton aides and said that they’d successfully called the bluff of Bush officials, adding that Bush’s aides had backed off and indicated that Clinton’s appearance wouldn’t in fact have adverse diplomatic consequences.
Via Wolcott I see that the spokesmodel of Open Robe Media, Atlas Shrugged, has a hilarious picture of Howard Dean up photoshopped as Hitler. But it’s ok because it’s totally funny:
Hey guys, its a joke. Helllllllllllllllllllllo, its F-U-N-N-Y (even if Dean’s remarks were far from funny, futile maybe, treasonous maybe, stupid for sure, humorous – not). Actually, the pic is hysterical. I never said he was Hitler, never even called him a Nazi. A clown for sure. That’s a clown pic – this is a clown pic too. Conversely, when the left calls Bush Hitler, they are dead serious. You can not compare the two. The above picture is hysterical. You clowns are as bad as the one in the picture. Sheesh.
Smart as a whip.
Update: For some real fun, read the comments. This one, I thought, was particularly insightful:
The country is driven by Cindy Sheehan. We republicans haven’t got a chance….until election day. You dheminnocrats are sure simple minded. You make up the news and then believe it. Then, you take a phony poll and declare victory. The only thing missing is reality.
But don’t worry, when the train of life is leaving you behind at the station of stupidity, I’ll fart in your general direction.
