It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
I’ve written a lot about “up-is-downism” and “epistemic relativism” and “bizarro world” trying to analyse the Republicans’ alternate reality, wondering whether it comes from a full absorbtion into the field of public relations, a consciously created competing discourse or simple lying with a straight face. All of that is bullshit. It’s a form of mass hysteria —- along the lines of the Salem Witch trials or the audience at an NSynch NSync concert.
Via Jesse at Pandagon,(who will give you the full hilarious run-down) I see that the Cornerites are all a twitter at the new Geena Davis show “Commander In Chief.” They are having little giggle fits at the idea that a woman president would be, like, so cute when she’s negotiating and baking cookies!
Here’s little taste of the more serious side of the discussion from Jonah “Doughy Pant Load” Goldberg:
The idea that a female liberal president would be more “feminine” than Bill Clinton is absurd, laughable, factually untrue. Bill Clinton was weepy, huggy and at all times pain-feeling. He’d wax eloquent on the glories of talk and empathy. At the end of one marathon meeting which accomplished nothing, he stretched out in his chair and said “That was great” as if he was about to light a cigarette. Feminists declared him the first female president. He talked of security not in the sense of blowing up terrorists but of leaving no children behind…And, sad to say, it was so successful that George W. Bush and Karl Rove copied it with their treacly “compassionate conservatism.” It took 9/11 to remind George W. Bush why Republicans are called the Daddy Party.
Actually, I’d heard about that all night meeting too, except I’d heard that at the end of it, he stretched out in his chair and said “that was great — Monica.”
And I believe he lit a cigar if I’m not mistaken.
I don’t actually blame Jonah. With a mother like his it’s hard to see how he could have come out unscathed. But this is just sad. The little guy wrote that whole thing without even realizing what he was revealing about his issues with women — and why Republican males like him hated Bill Clinton.
Crooks and Liars is featuring a rather nutty exchange on Faux news in which it’s posited that al Qaeda set up the poor Brazilian schmuck in the London subway in order to discredit the US and British governments. That’s kooky, all right.
But there’s a lot of that going around, I’m afraid. After quoting from Deborah Orrin’s breathless scoop that Valerie Wilson went to a Springsteen fundraiser for Kerry, Orrin Judd speculates:
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that MoveOn, ActUp, and the rest of them are just CIA fronts.
For those of you who aren’t following the latest line of thinking in wingnuttia, the whole Plame deal was an elaborate scheme by a cabal of evil CIA hippies who were trying to bring the president down. Just ask Senator Pat Roberts if you think I’m kidding.
Joe Conason has a nice piece here about how the right is preparing the ground to slime Pat Fitzgerald. Now that Senator Roberts has narrowed the scope of his interest in the Plame case, I think it’s pretty clear that the little trial balloon about hearings (and my speculation about them granting immunity) was premature. The Dem Senators understood that better than I did — they are keeping the heat on Roberts to hold hearings that he now quite clearly doesn’t want to have. It really didn’t make sense to pre-emptively slime Fitzgerald or haul Rove before the committee. They don’t know what Fitzgerald has. And if I’m not mistaken, the special prosecutor, unlike the Independent Counsel, has no requirement to file a report if there is no indictment.
Therefore, if Fitzgerald doesn’t indict, there is every reason to believe that all we’ll ever find out is that … no law was technically broken. The Republicans have wisely decided to back off at least until they know what they are dealing with. Why make him mad?
But if Fitzgerald does indict somebody — and the spectre of a trial looms — you can bet they’ll be ready to try to bury him.
While I have been engaging in the blogospheric pie fight over the liberal hawks’ approach to national security to some extent, I do think it’s important also to engage in a substantive response to the the DLC on this. Kevin links to a very good article at Democracy Arsenal that challenges the DLC’s overreliance on the military to solve problems. This is a huge issue, particularly in light of the threats we actually face.
I was actually quite stunned to realize that they had signed on so fully to the idea that the GWOT or the G-SAVE or whatever, is a military challenge when quite clearly it is something else entirely. After all we’ve seen from 9/11 to Bali to Madrid to London — and our our ineffectual and impotent performance in Iraq — you would think that even hawks would have done some tweaking of the old superpower handbook.
But they haven’t. And they even went a step further, indicating that criticising the methods that the Bush administration has employed thus far is naive (or vaguely anti-American) when it seems to me that it is vital to publicly reject their approach in order to repair the damage. The Bush administration has employed some catastrophically bad tactics and methods that have destroyed our credibility and our moral authority — two things that are essential in repelling terrorism, attracting allies and keeping foreign enemies from overreaching. And in squandering those things the Bush administration has created recruiting propaganda for the terrorists and probably ruined any chance the liberal hawks might have had to test their Wilsonian experiment in exporting democracy.
First, the Bush administration continues to this day to tell the entire world that our intelligence services are completely untrustworthy. By invading a country without provocation, failing to find the WMD which would have justified the preemption doctrine, failing to prepare for the post war and then blaming the CIA and the state departments for that failure, they are saying to the world that the greatest military power the world has ever known is entirely incompetent. It leads enemies to overreach and it leads friends to be wary of letting us take the lead.
The only thing that can set this right is to publicly hold the Bush administration accountable for its politicising of the war for its own ends. To hush it up is to make us less safe, not more.
Second, by using torture and humiliation tactics we have shown the Muslim world that we are uncivilized. This is not just a matter, as Will Marshall said, of us not being grown-ups and undertanding that bad apples will blow off steam. It is clear that these things were ordered at the highest levels. And, as it has been reported today in even greater detail than before, there was a huge amount of dissension within the military about using these tactics for a variety of reasons. The primary concern for them is that it puts our own troops in danger, both morally and physically.
Marshall says that we have no credibility on torture unless we also condemn the acts of the barbaric insurgency in Iraq. This is precisely the opposite of the truth. Civilized people take for granted that anyone who blows up innocent people is barbaric. It does not have to be individually condemned. The behavior of the insurgency is not our responsiblity. The tactics and methods of the US Military are. It is incumbent upon us to take specific note of our own people who do barbaric things and show the world that we condemn it in the harshest possible terms. We cannot hope to export our democratic freedoms and demonstrate their benefits unless we hold ourselves to this higher standard — and exporting our democratic freedoms is what these liberal hawks so fervently believe we must do.
So, they are defeating their own stated purpose of keeping the country safe by allowing the Bush administration to get away with exploding the myth that US intelligence is virtually omnipotent and possibly emboldening would be enemies.
They are defeating their own stated purpose of defending the military, by refusing to stand with those within it who objected to the way the Bush administration ignored its rules and regulations.
They are defeating their own stated purpose of spreading democracy by refusing to demonstrate our system’s higher moral and ethical standards to people who are skeptical of our power.
If we are looking to the DLC for smart thinking on national security, we’d better look elsewhere. In all these ways the policies of the DLC hawks have already failed even by their own standards.
Atrios points today to this article in the Village Voice by Rick Perlstein which I encourage you to read. It’s short and to the point. I think Perlstein has really gotten to the heart of why the Democratic party is having such a difficult problem getting through to people; we’re not staying true true to our long term vision.
However, I’d like to draw your attention to an interview this week with Perlstein in this week’s In These Times in which he discusses his book “the Stockticker and the SuperJumbo” which is only 8 bucks and is filled with interesting insights not just from him but other writers and thinkers in response to his ideas. You get a very real sense of the outlines of the debate within the party.
I’d like to discuss one thing in particular that Perlstein notes in the book and the interview and which I touched upon in my post earlier this week about Will Marshall and the DLC. I took issue with Marshall’s point that liberals had been traumatized by the “protest politics” of the 60’s to such an extent that they could not rationally deal with national security — particularly the military. He characterized this as a feature of the grassroots liberal activists which I disagreed with because the “Move-On” left is quite a diverse group and it’s certainly intergenerational. I do not believe that the grassroots were traumatized by the protest politics of the 60’s — although I’m sure there are some among us who were. We are a large group.
However, there is one group of Democrats who most certainly were traumatized by the protest politics of the 60’s. Unfortunately, contrary to what Marshall set forth in his piece, the Democrats who are still carrying around that baggage are now the leaders of the Democratic party — and particularly the leaders of the DLC. Indeed, their entire political careers have been forged in response to their early radicalism and subsequent political losses in 1972 and beyond.
The rest of us have indeed “moved on,” going with the flow of changing political tides and reassessing our priorities as most people do as they go through life. But the people who came of age as political leaders in 1972 through the Reagan losses have been forever chastened by their youthful enthusiasm and as a result have an emotional aversion to bold, confrontational politics. Perlstein says:
The trauma of the generation of people who are running the Democratic Party was being blindsided by the political failures of left-of-center boldness. If you look at a lot of the most resonant and stalwart centrists and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democrats, for a lot of them, their political coming-of-age was being blindsided by conservatism. For Bill Clinton, it was losing the governorship in 1980. For Joe Lieberman, it was losing a congressional race in 1980. For Evan Bayh, the chair of the DLC, it was seeing his dad lose his Senate seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. But the formative traumas of my generation of Democrats—and I’m 35—have been the failures of left-of-center timidity. So there really is a structural generational battle among Democrats. People of a certain age are terrified that the electorate is going to associate them with the excesses of the ’60s, but most voters are too young to remember that stuff. The Republicans keep trying to paint the Democrats as the party of the hippies and punks who burn the flag.
I’m a baby boomer myself, although I’m 10 years younger than the vanguard leaders of the 60’s, and I certainly understood the tremendous frustration that we felt as Reaganism exploded across the 80’s. I was deeply demoralized for a long time and I supported the DLC’s attempt to reposition the party away from sectarian social issues to a more mainstream middle class economic focus. What I didn’t count on was that while we settled into our grown-up middle aged persona, the right wing was going to have a doozy of a mid-life crisis and hurl themselves into true radicalism. It was a failure of imagination of epic proportions on my part.
But when they impeached the president on trumped up charges, I learned. And I realized that as you fight the political battles of the day, all you have to hang on to are the core beliefs that brought you into the arena in the first place.
As Perlstein demonstrates in his book, the key to long term political success is to have big things you stand for over the long haul. People understand different political realitites. Life happens. But they want to know what you care deeply about and what you want to accomplish even when you haven’t a chance in hell of actually accomplishing it any time soon. Perlstein calls it laying down “markers:”
It’s a gambling term. A marker basically is a commitment to pay. In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit would say, “that guy holds my marker.” It’s something you can’t back out of, on pain of getting your knees broken. The marker that Republicans have is that everyone who runs for office has to sign a pledge—it’s enforced by their own knee-breaker, Grover Norquist—that on pain of political death they’re not going to raise taxes.
My thesis is that a commitment that doesn’t waver adds value by the very fact of the commitment. The evidence is that even though the individual initiatives that make up the conservative project poll quite poorly, they’ve managed to succeed simply because everyone knows what the Republicans stand for. And the most profound exit poll finding in the last election had nothing to do with moral values, it was all the people who said that they disagreed with the Republicans on individual issues, but they voted for George W. Bush anyway because they knew what he stood for.
I think this is spot on. And it applies particularly to times in which we have the strange political freedom in which to operate without the responsibility of governance. We do not have to appease the pork barrel needs of legislators. We don’t have to massage corporate donors. We can, instead, use the opportunity to advance ideas that have no particular hope of passage but that illustrate what we stand for.
And we don’t have to do it merely by submitting ten point plans and stirring manifestos, although that’s certainly legitimate. What we should do is promote big ideas and attach those ideas to the Democratic party across the spectrum of political activity.
Perlstein sugggests that every Democrat put on his or her website that they support “guaranteed health insurance for all Americans.” Simple and sweet. Do we all agree that every American should have guaranteed health care? I think so. Should we say it out loud, so that the American people know that we support guaranteed health insurance for all Americans? Uh, yes.
I would also say that there are other ways to express our long term committments to more abstract ideals, like a right to privacy. When we question Judge Roberts we should make it clear what the stakes are in that battle. We shouldn’t just talk about Roe, although that’s important, we should put Roe in the context of all the other intrusions people will suffer both by the government and corporations if we don’t acknowledge this as settled law and fundamental to our liberties. We are going to lose this nomination battle, but it is a good forum for staking out a long term position on privacy rights vis a vis everything from the Patriot Act to birth control. The libertarian strain that guys like Paul Hackett represents needs to be woven into our agenda for the long haul so that we can continue to fight for the freedom to be left alone by religious extremists and zealous police agencies alike.
I agree with Matt Yglesias that this is also a good opportunity for the Democrats to stand together and just say no. We don’t have to trash the guy, if that’s something that’s unpalatable, but we certainly don’t have to allow any free votes for a very right wing ideologue either. Unlike social security, we will not win the battle, but we stake out a position much more strongly if we hold together as a caucus instead of allowing free “gimmes” to Senators who want to appear above the fray. Nobody should be above the fray.
Tactics and strategies are, by necessity, subject to changing circumstances. Our goals and aspirations shouldn’t be. Thinking big is what progressives do, and we pay a price for that at times when people adjust to progress. But we cannot survive if people don’t know what we stand for. We need to take every opportunity to make that known and then stick to it even when it’s impossible to achieve in the next election cycle or two.
The Democratic party apparatus for a variety of reasons have become risk averse. We in the grassroots have to help them see that this is not wise. It means that we are going to be perceived by some as intemperate and unpleasant at times. But that’s ok. As Perlstein says:
We do have a timid bunch of folks in the Democratic Party, but that doesn’t mean all is lost. Timid and cautious people can often express their timidity and cautiousness by being swept up in a tide. We’ve got to provide the tide and let them surf it.
Update: Publius at legal Fiction makes a similar point about the “60’s trauma” in this excellent post.
So it looks like Paul Hackett actually has a chance. I can’t tell you how happily surprised I am. According to Swing State Project he’s within five points in a district in which the Democrat hasn’t achieved more than 30% in over twenty years. it’s still a long shot, but this is a very good sign.
Hackett is, of course, a particularly attractive candidate being a good looking Iraq veteran family man and all. But the fact that he’s making inroads in such a conservative district is pretty amazing in this era of GOP dominance in the red states. Let’s hope it’s a bellweather.
I cannot help but make note of the fact that the allegedly anti-military Move-on crowd have embraced Hackett so fervently. I would hope that this is noticed by the critics who say that there is an anti-patriotic strain in the grassroots. Clearly, we of the rank and file do not actually have a problem with the military — we love this guy.
What this points up is the fact that the DLC badly misunderstands the reasons why the grassroots reject their leadership. It’s only partially to do with policy and has almost nothing to do with ideology. It’s about tactics and strategy. We see their split-the-difference “third way” approach — particularly their rhetoric — as a form of appeasement that may have made sense in a time of shared power but that is now self-defeating and dangerous.This is particularly so in light of the demonstrable ruthlessness of the opposition and their willingness to go far beyond any normal political limits.
We like Hackett because he’s a strong, tough talking Democrat who takes it to the Republicans. I would imagine that there are plenty of gun control advocates among the urban netroots who nonetheless have given money to his campaign. And I know for a fact that there are quite a few like me who did not support the Iraq war, who nonetheless are proud of brave men like Hackett who subscribe to the military ethos of service to country. We certainly don’t hold the insane decisions of ivory tower neocons against him — we know the difference between those who make the policies and those who carry them out — it’s spelled out in our constitution.
The grassroots are not united in pacifism or any other particular ideology. The grassroots are united in our belief that the Republicans are dangerous radicals who are driving this country off of a cliff. And we’ve concluded that accomodationist rhetoric at a time of total GOP political dominance is suicidal, particularly when the Republicans are losing the support of the American people on virtually every issue. We think that it’s time for a confrontational strategy that shines a light on the Republicans’ radicalism. We believe that the country is yearning for some authentic straight talk about real issues and real problems and real solutions — including national security — instead of half baked esoteric reworkings of Republican talking points disguised as Democratic moderation.
We believe that you can’t be perceived as strong unless you are willing to fight the political fight head on. It’s that simple. It’s about speaking truth to power. We don’t hate the military and we aren’t afraid to protect the country. In fact, our entire ethos is just the opposite. The legendary “fighting liberal” image that the hawks evoke with such nostalgia — is us.
Paul Hackett is one of us.
It’s getting down to the wire. If anyone is in the vicinity and can volunteer over the next few days until the election — or if you have another couple of bucks to send his way — here’s the info:
There had been some talk that the Democrats had a secret plan for Karen Hughes when every one of them failed to show up for the hearings on Friday and that they would unveil it on Tuesday when the hearings reconvened. Well…
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved the nomination of Karen Hughes, a former political adviser to President Bush, as the State Department’s top public relations official.
The Senate is expected to complete the confirmation process this week before leaving for its August recess.
Hughes’ main assignment as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is to reverse anti-American sentiment around the world.
I’m sure there would have been no political value in getting Hughes on camera admitting that she’d been called before the grand jury. Not would it have been valuable to have on-camera reporters on the cable and evening news explaining to their viewers that Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe evidently reached up to all of president’s Bush’s closest advisors, even Hughes.
It’s a good thing we don’t waste our time with such crass political tactics. Besides, Republicans might might say we are mean and nobody votes for mean. Well, unless it’s being mean to a Democrat in which case people seem to positively love it.
Where does the government sponsored MNBA tough-love end? The bankruptcy bill wasn’t enough, apparently. They now want to drive people who are struggling in a weak labor market into bankruptcy by abruptly doubling their monthly credit card bills. I guess there’s no use wasting time in getting people into their properly indentured forever status.
Seriously, I can understand why the credit card companies want to do this now that they are protected from people having their debts discharged when they suddenly can’t make their monthly payments. But on what basis does a Republican government excuse its meddling into the private financial affairs of American citizens?
This sounds like a good campaign issue to me. It hits home — it’s like Gray Davis doubling the car tax in California; it’s an increase everybody notices. If the Bush administration is actually pushing it, the Democrats ought to staple this little GOP corporate collusion right on the foreheads of Republicans everywhere in the ’06 election.
Update: Apparently a lot of progressives think that this is a good idea. The government should be in the business of forcing people to save more money, lower their credit card debt faster and behave more responsibly.
Unfortunately, the problem is that a large number of people who are paying only their minimums right now are people who just can’t afford to pay any more. And while it’s always nice to assume that people who get themselves into debt are all bums who aren’t smart enough or don’t care enough to manage their money properly, we actually have no idea why individuals have such high debt — but the statistics show that good many of them are people who suffered a protracted job loss, a health crisis or a divorce. Some of them are juggling high debt because they are changing careers, they started a business or they took some other entrepreneurial chance. The large numbers of good people in a temporary jam are, sadly, going to get lumped in with all the people we feel need to be taught a lesson.
This piss poor labor economy has been propped up by easy credit for a long time by people who wanted to keep the party going. Individuals who have not been getting raises or who can’t change jobs because of employer based health care have had to manage inflation and necessary big ticket items with credit at ever higher interest rates. They’ve met their obligations, but apparently that’s not good enough. Now, the government needs to raise the national savings rate because the government itself is spending like drunken sailors so they are going to put the onus on people who are living under the high stress of a stagnant job market and high debt to do it. Somehow that just doesn’t seem right to me.
The credit card companies get “hurt” by a slight dip in their usurious profits and the individual working stiff gets to learn a lesson in not eating.
This is a suckers issue for Democrats. Telling working people that we think the government should encourage their credit card companies to raise their payments because they need to learn how to manage their money is something even I find offensive — and I’m a liberal Democrat. Let the credit card companies eat it for a while by telling them to tighten their new credit requirements — don’t just suddenly lower the boom on people. Make all new debt subject to the higher minimums. But if people are carrying a heavy load like 300 dollars a months in minimums which they can just manage — doubling it to 600(+ interest) one month is enough to put them on the spiral of late payments, 30% interest and financial doom. Real live people are going to be hurt quite badly if this happens.
I hate MBNA as much as any person but “sticking it to ’em” by pressuring them to abruptly raise the payments of their customers isn’t really a winning way to deal with this, in my book.
Here is another article that explains what’s happening in greater detail.
In every single article it discusses the long term good of people paying down their debt faster. And they also discuss the singular hell that people are going to be facing when this abruptly happens to them and they don’t have the ability to come up with the cash.
I’m sure there are a lot of people whohave just been too dumb to realize that they should pay more than the minimums each month in order to keep up with the compounding interest on their debt. This may help them. But it’s also quite obvious that alot of people are going to be thrown to the wolves on this:
Of course, if your finances are already squeezed to the breaking point, the rate hike is a bitter pill to swallow — good for you in the long run, but hard to take right now.
“If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and your minimum payment goes from $200 to $275, spread over five cards, that’s an extra $375 a month,” says Brauer. “A lot of families can’t come up with that.” The banks already know that and are planning for it. Bank of America, one of the first to raise minimum payment requirements, worked an extra $130 million into its 2005 budget to cover projected losses from defaulting cardholders.
The same defaulting cardholders who are now going to have to pay much higher fees to go bankrupt and who, if they make above the median in their state, will no longer be allowed to file chapter 7. Quite the double whammy.
I have been skeptical that Patrick Fitzgerald would broaden the scope of his investigation to include anything beyond the narrow question of who leaked Valerie Plame’s name to Robert Novak and other reporters. I thought it was possible that if he uncovered perjury or obstruction in the course of that investigation he might run with it. But, this WaPo article indicates that he might have gone beyond that narrow question:
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.
Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street. In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa.
Most of the questioning of CIA and State Department officials took place in 2004, the sources said.
It remains unclear whether Fitzgerald uncovered any wrongdoing in this or any other portion of his nearly 18-month investigation. All that is known at this point are the names of some people he has interviewed, what questions he has asked and whom he has focused on.
This is interesting, but I have to say that I’m not getting my hopes up. Unless he’s got a high level witness who’s spilling his guts, I have my doubts that this will blow the lid off of the Iraq lies. His investigation, after all, is said to have been pretty much wrapped up in 2004. How thoroughly could he have investigated this in that time? On the other hand it’s very intriguing that he looked into it at all and it’s at least possible that he could have exposed the white house effort to shift the blame for the yellowcake mess.
One thing is clear. The turf war between the White House and the CIA is now open warfare:
Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson’s wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.
Harlow said that after Novak’s call, he checked Plame’s status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame’s name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified information.
In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to “asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause ‘difficulties’ if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson’s wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name.”
Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.
Wilson unleashed a multimedia attack on Bush’s claim on July 6, 2003, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in an interview in The Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in which he accused the president of “twisting” intelligence.
Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to have remained in Bush’s speech. As part of this effort, then-national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not believe Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors in the leak case, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.
[…]
A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet’s statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, had a role in Tenet’s statement.
Fitzgerald has run a very tight investigation for it not to have come out before now that he interviewed the head of the CIA and his top deputy. (And it certainly makes it important to know if John Bolton was one of those who was interviewed and if he lied about it to the Senate…)
If he’s on to something really serious, perhaps even reaching the president, it may very well explain why Pat Roberts has been hinting around about investigating Fitzgerald and talking openly about holding hearings into whether the CIA is handling its covert agents properly. They are firing shots across the bow now — at both Fitzgerald and the Agency.
*By the way, the mysterious stranger mentioned in the article is covered in depth in Wilson’s book — and Wilson evidently went to great lengths to document the meeting at the time it happened.
**And you have to love the fact that it now looks very much like Robert Novak knew that Plame was covert and published her identity anyway. He really is a Prime DFL.
UPDATE: This is truly scary, but I think Susie may be on to something. The hearings may just be an efficent way to grant immunity to the perpetrators. There would be nothing Fitzgerald or anyone else could do about it. Wow.
And as we speak, the Democrats are all clamoring for hearings. Is it possible they didn’t anticipate this possibility?
At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., unveiled an Internet “Accountability Clock” to highlight the lack of congressional hearings in the 742 days since Plame’s identity was disclosed after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, attacked some of the administration’s pre-war claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
Lautenberg noted that he had served in the Senate under four presidents, but that “for the first time … I’m watching the United States shirk its duty to check the powers of the White House.”
The Republican majorities in the House and Senate are giving the president “a free pass” on the CIA leak controversy, he charged.
Spokesman for Frist and Hastert did not respond immediately to requests for comment Monday.
But within hours of the release of Kerry’s letter, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, announced his panel would hold hearings on toughening legislation barring unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
Similarly, Hoekstra’s counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., disclosed he will preside over hearings on how the intelligence community determines which officers need their identities protected and are covered by the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
It would be Frist-worthy if the Democrats actually helped enable the GOP to derail Fitzgerald’s investigation.
On the other hand, they’ve given no indication that they are willing to get into this case in public, which they would have to do if they give Rove and Libby immunity and call them before the panel. But you never know. If the shit is really hitting the fan they may just be willing to take some lumps, call them as witnesses and “explain” under immunity how it really wasn’t a bad thing to expose Plame because she wasn’t really covert. In which case, Fitzgerald’s case is over.
I can see them doing this and I can see them getting away with it too. It’s just confusing enough and clever enough to baffle the press corpse and leave the Democrats gasping impotently on the sidelines.