Just a couple of observations on the events of the last few days.
—-First, when reading the transcript of the gaggle yesterday, I find nobody asking Scott McClellan why he thinks Bob Novak is lying. He says over and over again, after all, that they “have no evidence” that the leaks emanated from the administration. He says they cannot be expected to investigate every leak that is printed in the press, (lamely neglecting the fact that this particular one is clearly a felony and breach of national security in wartime) as if such stories are routinely made up.
But, it wasn’t just any journalist who wrote this story. It was staunch conservative Bob Novak. Unless they think he made it all up, they have the evidence they need to investigate this particular leak. Bob Novak’s word.
— One item in the Post story of the 29th caught my eye and I haven’t seen much interest in it. It says:
Three weeks ago, intelligence officials said, the CIA returned to the Justice Department a standard 11-question form detailing the potential damage done by the release of the information. Officials said it may have been the first such report ever filed on the unauthorized disclosure of an operative’s name.
It would seem that despite claims that CIA referrals to the FBI are as routine as spring rain, this particular type of referral appears to be highly unusual if not unprecedented.
The bigger issue, it seems to me, is the ongoing war between the CIA and the administration. It is clear that the administration “sexed-up” the intelligence and is now trying to shift the blame to the CIA for it. When the administration stupidly attempted to make Tenet take the fall for the Niger flap the battle was drawn. The CIA is fighting back.
They were used and brow beaten into making assessments that fit the agenda of a bunch of neocon radicals. The assessments have been proven spectacularly wrong, and the CIA is left holding the bag. The congress is issuing reports that they provided lousy intelligence which means that they are going to have to defend themselves against charges of incompetence.
This is a very dangerous situation for the administration; the CIA is not the institution you want to make your enemy. The Plame affair is really only the first shot across the bow.
The standard defense today seems to be that no crime was committed because Plame wasn’t actually an undercover operative. Novak said:
“….According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives’…
The strange shill who they had on Crossfire to defend the Bush administration on this (who also claimed that because Plame was still alive, there wasn’t any credence to the story!) said something about Plame being a “glorified secretary.”
Can someone explain logically why the CIA would refer the matter to the Justice Department if Plame wasn’t undercover? Is it up to the Justice Department to determine the definition of “undercover?”
I don’t have a lot of time today so I can’t get into the Plame story as much as I’d like. As I wrote on the issue back in July:
It would be very wrong of me to speculate wildly that the infamous smear operation of the South Carolina primary that is now working right in the White House “communications shop” could possibly be behind this (or more trivially but just as telling, behind the Drudge Report expose of the “Gay Canadian” reporter.)
But, just for the sake of conversation, it is interesting to remember what has happened in the past when the Bushies found themselves on the defensive. In this Salon article Jake Tapper notes the slimeball activities of certain Bush staffers and quotes a senior McCain advisor as saying about the Florida strategy, “When the going gets tough for Governor Bush, he turns to the darker side of our party. We saw that in South Carolina, and we see that today.”
I’m certain that these same people who now work extremely closely with George W. Bush and his advisors would never resort to such dishonorable and undignified behavior in the sacred office of the President of the United States. It’s merely a coincidence that the tactics are so very similar.
The people in Dan Bartlett’s shop are professional liars and smear artists. Bartlett, Eskew and Wilkinson, particularly, are political operatives who have been elevated to the very top of the administration’s foreign policy apparatus and have been deeply involved in the “selling” of the Iraq war. From a Newsweek web exclusive article September 18, 2002:
For starters there’s Deputy Communications Director Jim Wilkinson, 32, a fast-talking Texan who has become an unlikely but keen student of Islam. He recently got back from a trip to Morocco where he continued his study of Arabic (which he can now read and write pretty well).
It was Wilkinson who spearheaded the successful Afghan women’s campaign last year. A Naval Reserve officer, Wilkinson got his start working with Bush ally Texas Rep. Dick Armey. He’s the go-to guy when the White House needs information against its enemies.
In the last few weeks, he and his underlings have weeded through hundreds of pages of news clippings, U.N. resolutions and State Department reports to compile an arsenal of documents against Saddam Hussein. They released the first round last week: “Decade of Defiance and Deception” (a broken-U.N.-resolutions hit parade).
Then there’s Tucker Eskew, 41, a savvy South Carolinian, who will soon be named the director of the new Office of Global Communications, which will be formally launched this fall. Neither a Texan nor a lifelong Bushie, he earned his stripes during the Florida election mess by becoming the campaign’s tropical smooth-talker.
During the Afghan conflict, the White House sent Eskew to London, where he worked with British spin master Alastair Campbell on setting up the first version of an actual war “war room.” Campbell was an inspiration for Bill Clinton’s 24/7 rapid-response communications team.
[…]
The Band started, not coincidentally, right after the White House had to pull an op-ed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that The Washington Post was planning to publish on Sunday, Sept. 8. The piece was an argument for preemptive strikes—President Bush’s new foreign-policy doctrine.
But that was not the message of the week as Bush planned to look more multilateral days later in front of the U.N.
Some members of the National Security Council staff raised the alarm, and the White House yanked the article. From that point on, the Band would coordinate.
They often include Mary Matalin, Tori Clarke and Richard Boucher (the mouth guards for Cheney, Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, respectively) on the daily conference calls.
This group is a foreign policy spin operation comprised of veterans of the dirtiest elements of the Bush 2000 campaign. It is the nexus of politics and policy on the Iraq war in the Bush administration.
I believe that Bartlett is one of the senior administration officials who dropped the dime on Plame. I don’t know who the other was, but it doesn’t really matter. They do not operate alone; they are entrenched within the hierarchy. These guys answer the highest reaches of the White House and the White House uses them for what they were hired to do. Lie, spin and intimidate on matters of national security.
There is a fast moving malignancy in the Bush White House. It metastisized from Campaign 2000 to Rove’s and Cheney’s office to the NSC and the political foreign policy spin operation. It is deadly.
Interestingly, this article also mentions that Bartlett and the band were in daily contact with Campbell as the dodgy dossier was being prepared … these fellows always seem to be around when clumsy lies are being told.
The issue of Clark’s supposed flip-flop on the war is as Josh Marshall says part of the media’s apparent embrace of “simplism as the new integrity.” Clark made the mistake of speaking to political reporters in complex terms instead of bumper sticker slogans, which is akin to accidentally saying the F word in front of a group of 4 year olds — they don’t understand what you’re saying but you know they’re going to embarrass you by repeating it.
He went some way toward fixing that today in the debate by joking good-naturedly, “in my 9 days in politics I’ve learned never to answer a hypothetical question.”
As Franklin Foer points out in his article on the subject in TNR, Bush made a case that he needed the resolution to convince the UN that America was serious in wanting Saddam to “disarm.” Most people believed that Saddam had at least a usable cache of biological or chemical weapons — he certainly had acted as if he had something to hide. If you took Bush at his word, it appeared that he wanted to use the threat of military force to make Saddam allow inspectors back in under the imprimatur of the UN because he might let those weapons get into the hands of terrorists.
According to Foer:
[at the time] Tom Daschle argued, “I am not confident that they will not see it as a green light, which is why I admonished the administration to remember this is the first step.” Clark may be naïve for sharing this stance, and it may reveal him to be less of a dove than many liberals imagined, but it doesn’t make him a flip-flopper.
I’m not surprised that a former military man would fall into the camp of those who voted for the resolution. That camp consisted of 28 of the 50 Democrats in the Senate (including such right wingers as Tom Harkin and Chris Dodd) so it isn’t exactly an exotic position. And in the 50/50 Senate it was going to pass as long as Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman still had a breath in their bodies.
(I thought it was stupid and cynical for any Democrat who wasn’t in a tightly contested race in the south to take that position because I believed it would depress turnout in the mid-terms and we would lose the Senate — and I was right.)
I don’t trust Bush as far as I can throw him, so I can’t imagine voting to support any war he wants to wage unless it is in direct retaliation for attacking us first — like Afghanistan. Especially with Don Strangelove and Dick Razputin running the show. And, I think some of the safe seat presidential contenders made a bad political calculation that was obviously wrong. But I grant that it wasn’t an easy call for those who had to actually make it. And it most certainly wasn’t simple.
I wrote at the time that Bush would get credit for running the most courageous bluff in history if he had the guts to take yes for an answer and allow the inspections to run their course and keep Saddam on a leash. Bush had said, “If you want to keep the peace, you’ve got to have the authorization to use force,” and rather than tossing it off as the usual incoherent gibberish, many believed that this statement meant he was trying to force Saddam’s hand without actually invading.
But, neither the Senators nor General Clark had any idea how much George W. Bush was dying to shimmy into a skintight jumpsuit and prance around an aircraft carrier like a Chippendales dancer. Now they do.
How much is it worth to Howard Fineman and Chris Matthews to maintain their prize spots as first ladies of the Bush harem?
It must be quite a lot. And, they do so love their jobs.
Fineman pretty much feels the Democrats are hardly worth talking about they’re so insignificant. And, Matthews managed to get the words Wesley Clark, stinky, Monica and Marion Barry all in one sentence. Tony Blankley belched something indiscipherable. And Lawrence O’Donnell tried to defend Clark’s specificity to derisive laughter and eye rolling all around.
Ralph Reed’s up next to provide the view from the left. Feel the magic.
If you want to see the tricks of the right exposed, read Somerby. If you want to hear the tricks of the left exposed, listen to Limbaugh. But if you don’t want to get trapped inside either wing’s echo chamber, read Slate.
*sniff* Ooooh yes indeed. Listen to the rabble if you must. This Sommerby and this Limbaugh are two sides of the same dirty coin. They soil me with their equally coarse blind partisanship so that I cannot even bear to read or listen to them myself.
Take my advice. For a truly vapid and incomprehensible (yet edifyingly elitist) waste of time, do read His Grace’s fine paeons to the terminally passionless and intellectually banal.
Then have a bracing snifter of brandy and treat yourself to a good wank.
Lame, theatrical, embarrassing. But, you can’t help but love those battling Gabor sisters.
This is what the voters have to choose from in California. An arrogant Austrian prick, a typical GOP Nazi, a testy new age Greenie, a glib professional provacateur and Mr. Spacely.
Does everyone finally understand how Gray Davis won two elections?
The press isn’t giving the whole story on Iraq. They are being biased as usual. The media only cares about violence. If it bleeds it leads. Shame, shame on them. Little schoolchildren are learning arithmetic. US soldiers are playing soccer with grateful Iraqis. Everything is going really well.
Don’t believe anything you see unless you see it on FoxNews.
Michael Tomasky has an interesting read about this ridiculous whisper campaign about the evil Clintons being behind the Clark campaign. He points out the obvious truth that most Americans aren’t exactly frothing at the mouth about Clinton anymore, if they ever were. In fact, the entirely predictable knee jerk grab for the Clenis whenever things get dicey is getting almost funny.
However, he doesn’t mention the oft repeated observation that blaming the Clintons for everything from global warming to male pattern baldness usually gets some dollars flowing from the rubes. (Not that the greedy bastards need any more cash — it’s getting to the point where it might actually be easier for them to just buy every American a new car if they’ll vote for Junior than run a campaign.)
But, there is a small, vocal minority on the left who have always disliked Clinton and what they perceive as his creature, the DLC. Safire and the boys may be helping to stoke that little bonfire. Either that, or Safire is simply consumed with lust for Hillary — he’s completely insane on the subject.
I have had some serious strategic disagreements with the DLC this past year (and they need to enter the new millenium, anyway) but they are members of the team and I’m not pushing anybody off the bus as we’re heading into what is very likely to be another close election.
As for what the whole “evil Clinton cabal” thing actually accomplishes, I think Tomasky has it right. It is very, very tired. I can’t imagine that anybody but the most obsessed wing-nuts do anything but roll their eyes and yawn.
They need a new schtick. The France bashing really isn’t working, Osama and Saddam are probably holed up in Uzbekistan watching re-runs of “Mannix” on TVLand, and “liberals” have been reduced to a bunch of ineffectual, treasonous pussies. They have to find a new object for their loathing or the AM radio ratings are going to tank.
I wonder if those couple of arrests down in Gitmo might just portend the development of a new target.
For some reason I never hear the real reason the Texas redistricting plan is undemocratic. It’s not because they are redistricting just 2 years after it was done by a court. That’s not customary and if it’s practiced widely it’s going to throw the machinery of democracy for a loop. But, it’s not strictly undemocratic.
The reason this reprehensible ploy is undemocratic is because the reason that Republicans hold fewer congressional seats than their Republican majority would normally call for is because there are some Texas Republicans who split their ticket and vote for a Democratic representative.
I’m sure that DeLay has held guys like Martin Frost’s head in the toilet at the Capitol gym and threatened to cut of his “funding” if he didn’t switch to Republican, but it didn’t work. And, I’m sure they’ve done everything possible to get those rural Republicans to vote for someone else and that didn’t work either. Those Texans like their congressman and they don’t care that he is a Democrat.
These Democrats, as you might expect, are not exactly bleeding heart liberals and vote like republicans more often than not. DeLay wants to get rid of them purely for reasons of Party strength, not ideology.
So, he and Rove are doing an end run by redistributing the constituents who like these Democrats into uncohesive districts, many of which make no sense at all in terms of common concerns and affinity.
Basically, DeLay is using technical rules to deny members of his own party the right to have the congressman of their choice. That sure sounds undemocratic to me.