The one and only time I interviewed Mr. Bush, when he was running in 2000, he called me by the wrong name several times, which was no big deal, and I didn’t correct him. But after this went on for a while, his adviser Karen Hughes, who was sitting in on the interview, finally said: “Governor, her name’s not Alison, it’s Melinda.”
“I think I know what her name is; we just had lunch last week,” Bush responded. “Your name IS still Melinda, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t changed it since last week?”
“No.”
“OK, then. Glad we got that cleared up.”
Hughes persisted, though. “Governor, you were calling her Alison.”
“I wasn’t calling HER Alison,” he said, with apparent conviction. “I was calling YOU Alison.”
At the time, I thought this was very funny. But now I’m not so sure. I keep wondering what has become of the “humble” foreign policy Bush talked about during the 2000 campaign. Yes, 9/11 has changed our president’s view of the world and given him a new sense of mission, of “crusade” as he once said. Yet it has not altered just-war theory or the rule of law—which in the absence of personal humility, or any doubts about right action, seem particularly useful guideposts.
Ya think?
So, now we find out that the intellectually deficient inbred son has always had a messianic complex, has always believed he’s omnipotent and has always insisted that those who surround him maintain his version of reality.
Yesterday, prior to watching the Sox get vivisected by Oakland at Fenway last night, I was listening to The Radio Factor on my way home from work. Now, I’ve followed Bill O’Reilly’s career since he was just a baby megalomaniac on Boston TV. It would not now surprise me in the least if, one night on TV, right there during The Memo, O’Reilly declared himself to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
If you read this article by Michael Crowley in Slate, you’ll soon realize that not only is Kerry a charisma deficient loser, but anyone he could possibly pick as his running mate is even worse.
What’s really fun about it is that it contains every single GOP talking point ever devised to insult and demean Democrats. It will make you feel all kewl ‘n stuff when you read it because then you’ll know what to say to be above it all like the totally, like, smart dudes who write for, like, totally awesome online zines.
At our long meeting, Chalabi impressed me for three reasons. The first was that he thought the overthrow of one of the world’s foulest-ever despotisms could be accomplished. I knew enough by then to know that any Iraqi taking this position in public was risking his life and the lives of his family. I did not know Iraq very well but had visited the country several times in peace and war and met numerous Iraqis, and the second thing that impressed me was that, whenever I mentioned any name, Chalabi was able to make an exhaustive comment on him or her. (The third thing that impressed me was his astonishingly extensive knowledge of literary and political arcana, but that’s irrelevant to our purposes here.)
Isn’t that something. Ahmad greatly impressed him by “bravely” saying he thought the US could overthrow a third world dictator, he knew many names of many Iraqis and he dropped lots of political and literary references into the conversation. Imagine that. All those thing in one meeting with the Orwell worshipping, name dropping literary and political snob, Chris Hitchens. Why it was Kismet!
If I were a cynical type, I might just think that old Chris got himself conned.
In Jack Beatty’s scathing takedown of the neocon vision in The Atlantic, the sub-head reads:
In the wake of Iraq, the term “neo-conservative” may come to mean “dangerous innocence about world realities.”
Now, I don’t mean to toot my own horn, being the incredibly modest and unassuming sort that I am, but I simply must call to everyone’s attention the fact that I have been calling the Wolfowitz claque the “starry-eyed neocons” since before I started this blog even, which was way back in oh, 2003.
Tristero’s in fine form today. Read it all. He takes on the blogospheric navel gazing about whether the war was a good idea but badly executed or whether it was just a bad idea. He’s not in the mood to take a bunch of idealistic hawks’ discredited views seriously any longer.
I especially like this:
A “great” foreign policy, like a “great” Christianity, can never depend on evangelism. You simply must strive to embody greatness in your own country (and in your soul). You can’t ram greatness down someone’s throat because, by definition then, it can’t be that great.
He seems think you can’t create a democracy by invading a country, putting a gun to the people’s heads and telling them to be free or else. How odd.
Why, that’s like telling a would-be suitor that he can’t make the girl love him by throwing her to the ground and screaming “you WILL love me!” in her face.
That always works. Women love it. What’s he going on about?
In reading this extremely interesting article by Robert Parry in Consortiumnews.com about how Junior should sit down with his father and have a heart to heart with dear old Dad about the real story of Iran, Iraq and Israel (wow, what a story) I was reminded of how often I heard people say in 2000 that Bush would have his father as his closest advisor. I think that this was one thing that settled people’s minds a bit about the obvious lack of qualifications and essential knowledge that Lil’ George brought to the table. Just the other day, somebody said to me, “but his father must have warned him.”
The fact is that Bush is such a callow little ass that he doesn’t talk to his father. And he is such an arrogant piece of compost that he actually believes all the Karen Hughes propaganda that’s been spewed these last few years about the size of his codpiece:
…the alleged Iranian intelligence trap could only have been sprung because key Bush advisers were inclined to believe the bogus information in the first place, since it fit their own agendas. In addition, Bush lacked the sophistication and the knowledge to bring adequate skepticism to what he was hearing, assuming that he wanted to. Though his father has that depth of understanding, the younger Bush says he hasn’t sought out his father’s counsel on Iraq. Nor is advice from his father’s top confidants welcome.
When the elder Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft weighed in on Aug. 15, 2002, with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece warning against an invasion of Iraq, the younger Bush’s NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly gave Scowcroft a tongue-lashing. He subsequently stayed out of the debate. “Neither Scowcroft nor Bush senior wanted to injure the son’s self-confidence,” wrote Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack.
When questioned about getting his father’s advice, the younger George Bush sounds almost petulant. “I can’t remember a moment where I said to myself, maybe he can help me make the decision,” Bush told Woodward.
Bush said he couldn’t remember any specifics about conversations he may have had with his father about the conflict. “I’m not trying to be evasive,” Bush said. “I don’t remember. I could ask him and see if he remembers something. But how do you ask a person, What does it feel like to send somebody in and them lose life? Remember, I’ve already done so, for starters, in Afghanistan. “
He’s not only an incompetent president. He’s an ungrateful, backstabbing son to the man for whom he owes EVERYTHING he ever got. Why anyone would want to have a beer with this supercilious little shit is beyond me.
USA Today actually names names in this column about the Judith Miller debacle. The thesis of the piece, though, is that when The New York Times runs unskeptical articles on page one, it affects the political process more strongly than if another paper does it. In this case, when they breathlessly reported that Saddam was about to launch a nuclear missile (or close to it) it cowed many Democrats into thinking that the administration might just be right.
I suspect that this is true. And it is another example of liberals internalizing right wing cant. The “liberal” New York Times spent eight years trying to run the Democratic president out of town, both on its news pages and on the editorial pages. They assigned an openly hostile reporter to cover the Gore campaign and sent a fawning acolyte to report on Bush’s every manly move. They have been fed all kinds of propaganda and lies by GOP political operatives for years and people knew this early on. Trudy Lieberman wrote an amazing expose in the Columbia Journalism Review of the Whitewater disinformation campaign by David Bossie’s Citizens United all the way back in 1994:
Francis Shane, publisher of Citizens United’s newsletter, ClintonWatch, hesitates to say exactly whom they’ve worked with — “We don’t particularly like to pinpoint people” — but he does say, “We have worked closer with The New York Times than The Washington Times.” Jeff Gerth, The New York Times’s chief reporter on Whitewater, hesitated to talk on the record. He did say, “If Citizens United has some document that’s relevant, I take it. I check it out like anything else.”
Uh huh. Sometimes I think the Washington Times exists solely to provide a phony kind of balance so that Democrats will find the the NY Times more credible just by the contrast. Besides, The Times is “liberal,” right? Everybody knows that. They wouldn’t peddle phony stories about Democrats.
From the USA Today article:
Martin Kaplan, dean of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that “for people who are serious and thoughtful, the Times is a gatekeeper of quality in terms of what’s credible and believable. When it published those pieces, it sent signals which legitimized our going to war and calmed people’s fears that we were rushing. It turns out that the Times was hoodwinked just like the rest of the country.”
See? “Serious and thoughtful” people know that The Times is credible and believable. This in spite of the fact that they almost single handedly took down a presidency based upon proven false information provided by political operatives and then proceeded to believe many of the same people when they said that the United States was in mortal danger from Saddam Hussein.
But, they are the liberal New York Times! They can’t possibly not have our liberal best interests at heart.
Luckily there are some “realists” left:
… for anyone to suggest that the Times reports led us to war is “absurd,” says Stephanopoulos. The former Clinton administration communications chief says the newspaper’s influence is sometimes exaggerated. “In this Internet age, there is so much information. … No single newspaper has that much power or influence. People aren’t waiting for a single newspaper to hit their doorstep at 6 a.m. to set the agenda.”
Quite the little whore isn’t he? Setting aside the fact that the New York Times most definitely sets the news agenda and that Democrats are more likely to believe something if it’s in the Times, Stephanopoulos of all people knows what the New York Times is capable of unleashing. But, he’s now in the full time business of self promotion so he’s keeping his options open. Besides, This Weak is a miserable failure so he’s probably looking for work. It wouldn’t pay to tell the truth.
If anybody wants to catch up the very latest in Chalabi intrigue, Laura Rozen at War and Piece has got it goin’ on as usual.
It’s creeping closer and closer to the inner circle. According to a UPI report Rozen cites from Tuesday, the FBI is looking at two former CPA officials who are now back in the states — one still working for the pentagon and one snuggled safely in the arms of AEI.
Rozen says the two are reported to be Michael Rubin and Harold Rhode (although they have denied it.)
Michael Rubin is one of the youngest neoconservative figures to gain prominence within the George W. Bush administration. A Yale graduate whose dissertation focused on modern Iran, Rubin has traveled extensively in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan.
Rubin, an AEI scholar, was involved in several meetings and conferences officiated by Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode at AEI as part of the Bush transition team. One of the objectives of these meetings was to reshape the top leadership at the Pentagon, sidelining or removing those who were regarded as moderates. Out of these discussions came the idea for the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OSP).
Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Rubin was assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was fold into the Northern Gulf Affairs Office after the unit was implicated in cooking intelligence information to justify the Iraq war and occupation.
In a National Review article, Rubin discusses sentiments expressed whenever Secretary of State Colin Powell and Special Envoy Anthony Zinni would visit Israel.
“While working at Hebrew University this past year, I took the bus to campus each day. Whenever U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell or Special Envoy Anthony Zinni was dispatched to Israel, colleagues would urge me to stay home until after the suicide bombing. Middle Easterners understand the lesson those in the U.S. and Europe are still learning: When governments engage dictators, civilians suffer.” [Yeah. Europe doesn’t know anything about that…ed.]
I hadn’t heard of Harold Rhode, but waddaya know. It turns out that he is one of Michael Ledeen’s intellectual houseboys. And he was involved in that bizarre little bit of deja vu-vu last summer when Ledeen tried to “open up the lines of communication with Iran” by getting in touch with our old friend Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian con artist who arranged the arms for hostages deal for Ollie and the boys.
Pentagon hard-liners pressing for change of government in Iran have held secret, unauthorised meetings in Paris with an arms dealer who was a main figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Administration officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith, have held “several” meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in United States arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.
The officials who disclosed the secret meetings said the talks with Mr Ghorbanifar were not authorised by the White House and appeared to be aimed at undercutting sensitive negotiations with Iran’s Government.
A senior Administration official said the US Government had learned about the unauthorised talks by accident.
The senior official and another Administration source said the ultimate objective of Mr Feith and a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.
The immediate objective appeared to be to “antagonise Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them”.
The official confirmed that the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, complained directly to the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, several days ago about Mr Feith conducting missions that went against US policy.
A spokesman for Mr Feith’s Near East, South Asia and Special Plans office, which sources said played a key role in contacts with Mr Ghorbanifar contacts, ignored an emailed inquiry about the talks.
The senior Administration official identified two of the defence officials who met Mr Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Mr Feith’s top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defence Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary’s office.
Mr Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Mr Feith’s office, which drafted much of the Administration’s post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exilegroomed for leadership by the Pentagon.
Mr Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid 1980s when he introduced Mr Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a NSC aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair.
Rozen says that many of her colleagues have expressed skepticism because these guys couldn’t have had access to the kind of sensitive information that’s being discussed.
That may be true, but it sure looks like they have easy access to those who do. Particularly Douglas Feith, who is clearly up to his neck in this thing. Ledeen probably is too. He’s been playing the Iran angle for years.
Who duped who and how is still up for grabs, but it sure looks like Junior and the Retreads got taken to the cleaners. What a surprise. Them being grown-ups and all.
Update:
Thanks to commenter Vin Carreo, I was reminded of this article by josh Marshall from 2002 in which he dissected the entire “second tier” pentagon neocon crew, (which includes an amazing anecdote about Rhode) describing them as even more nutty than the first tier of Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest:
In the minds of these second-tier appointees, taking out Saddam Hussein is only part of a larger puzzle. Their grand vision of the Middle East goes something like this: Stage 1: Iraq becomes democratic. Stage 2: Reformers take over in Iran. That would leave the three powerhouses of the Middle East — Turkey, Iraq and Iran — democratic and pro-Western. Suddenly the Saudis wouldn’t be just one more corrupt, authoritarian Arab regime slouching toward bin Ladenism. They’d be surrounded by democratic states that would undermine Saudi rule both militarily and ideologically.
As a plan to pursue in the real world, most of the career military and the civilian employees at the Pentagon — indeed most establishment foreign policy experts — see this vision as little short of insane. But to Bush’s hawkish Pentagon appointees the real prize isn’t Baghdad, it’s Riyadh. And the Saudis know it.
Eric Boehlert has an interesting post up in Salon’s War Room ’04. Discussing the NY Times sorta culpa, he notes the similarities between the paper’s Wen Ho Lee apology and the Judy Miller debacle and then asks when it will have to answer for its even more egregious Whitewater coverage. (Never, is my guess.)
But, he says something in passing that is very important:
Of course the most troubling similarity is that in both cases Republican informants, operating with a clear political agenda, took the paper-of-record for a joy ride as they tried first to tar President Clinton with a China spy scandal in the late ’90s and then set out to launch an unprecedented U.S. preemptive U.S. war against Iraq.
I would say this is troubling indeed. I have had a number of altercations with journalists over my characterization of them being spoonfed by Republican liars but it is a fact. It has been going on for a long time now and it is unlikely to stop.
Alterman, Conason, Brock and others have written about the SCLM and the echo chamber effect and the Mighty Wurlitzer. The information is out there and available. But, I’m not sure what it’s going to take to convince the press that when a GOP operative is offering you a juicy story that is just too good to be true that it probably is.
The list of wrong stories, innuendos, misdirection, disinformation and outright lies that have been printed and broadcast on behalf of the Republican party in the mainstream press is staggering. It runs from bullshit about haircuts to rape accusations to trashing the White House to Bank Fraud to Chinese espionage to phony assertions about nuclear bombs and pending terrorist attacks. It goes on and on and on, escalating exponentially, and yet the media keeps writing up these falsehoods as if these people haven’t been proven to be liars time and time again.
Judith Miller is only the most obvious culprit because her false stories have been so blatently exposed. But, it happens every day in the major papers and networks. These journalists have cultivated “sources” who are giving them misinformation. They continue to rely on these “sources” even though they have led them astray time and time again. That these sources are also Republican operatives or GOP power players with an agenda doesn’t seem to engender much skepticism, I believe, because these sources always have such an entertaining and interesting “story” to tell.
But, why should an journalist worry much about such things? Getting stories wrong time after time after time doesn’t seem to have any impact on your career. Unless you are caught red handed plagiarizing or simply making things up out of whole cloth, if you’ve got the inside Washiington track you won’t be fired no matter how badly you get things wrong. As Judy says:
I had no reason to believe what I reported at the time was inaccurate,” Miller told me. “I believed the intelligence information I had at the time. I sure didn’t believe they were making it up. This was a learning process. You constantly have to ask the question, ‘What do you know at the time you are writing it?’ We tried really hard to get more information and we vetted information very, very carefully.”
That seems to be good enough for the New York Times which is why they are constantly being played for stooges by the Republican party. And it’s a good part of the reason why our politics are so fucked up.
In any normal organization Judith Miller would be gone. She committed journalistic malpractice of such a magnitude that people have died partially as a result of what she did. But instead, they are protecting her. After all, if she goes she’ll take all of those “great sources” with her.