It's worth saying, of course, that on many of these issues, it's a good thing that Bush-flip-flopped -- I'm glad the president finally supported a department of homeland security, came clean about the missing WMDs and the lack of a Saddam-al Qaeda link, caved on allowing a 9/11 commission and on granting it more time, and realized that "nation-building" of one form or another will be an inescapable part of our role in the world for decades to come. But the others are all bad flip-flops!
--Nick Confessore
In a sharply critical audit, the Pentagon's inspector general has concluded that the Air Force "should not proceed" with its $23.5 billion plan to lease 100 Boeing 767 aircraft as aerial refueling tankers until it addresses a number of violations of contracting rules in the deal.This excellent investigative report by Joe Galloway of Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau explains some of the reasons why this deal was such a disaster:The audit dated March 29, a portion of which was obtained by the Tribune, concludes that "the Air Force used an inappropriate procurement strategy and did not demonstrate best business practices or prudent acquisition procedures to provide sufficient accountability for the expenditure of $23.5 billion for the KC-767A tanker program."
The contract should not be completed unless it can be rewritten to address "five statutory provisions that have not yet been satisfied."
The audit, which was ordered by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, is a severe blow to the lucrative tanker contract, and to Boeing's hopes that it soon will move forward.
Senators briefed Wednesday by Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, the Pentagon's internal watchdog, said the audit raises serious concerns about the deal but said they would withhold final judgment on whether the deal can go forward until other pending investigations are completed.
"Now as we look at the facts, they are very serious," Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after the briefing.
Congress has approved the deal, but the Pentagon put the contract on hold after questions were raised about it.
"I think they [the inspector general's office] made it pretty clear--the deal to buy tankers from Boeing isn't done, but the deal to lease from Boeing is finished," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which has been highly critical of the tanker lease contract. "They didn't like how it went down."
The audit report suggests that the Air Force must either fix all of the problems the inspector general uncovered--a substantial task--or scrap the tanker deal and launch a new bidding process. That no doubt would include other companies, such as Boeing's chief competitor, Airbus.
The audit disclosed that the contract the Air Force and Boeing agreed to would have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars--and perhaps several billion--more than if the Air Force had followed standard government procurement rules.
The Air Force gave the Boeing Co. five months to rewrite the official specifications for 100 aerial refueling tankers so that the company's aircraft would win a $23.5 billion deal, according to e-mail and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.Because we can't let those dirty Frenchman get the deal, eh, Ted? Even if it means that the new tankers are worse than the old ones?In the process, Boeing eliminated 19 of the 26 capabilities the Air Force originally wanted, and the Air Force acquiesced in order to keep the price down.
The Air Force then gave Boeing competitor Airbus, a European company, 12 days to bid on the project and awarded the contract to Boeing even though Airbus met more than 20 of the original 26 specifications and offered a price that was $10 billion less than Boeing's.
The Boeing tanker deal has been under investigation since it became public 2 1/2 years ago and has been suspended pending the outcome of the probes.
But the e-mail and other documents show just how intent the Air Force was on steering the deal to Boeing, even though Airbus' tankers were more capable and cost less.
In one document, Bob Gower, Boeing's vice president for tankers, noted that one objective in rewriting the specifications was to "prevent an AoA from being conducted.'' "AoA'' stands for "analysis of alternatives'' or, in essence, a look at serious competitors.
Among the original Air Force requirements Boeing eliminated was that the new tanker be equipped to refuel all the military services' aircraft, refuel multiple aircraft simultaneously and carry passengers, wounded soldiers and cargo. Boeing also eliminated an Air Force requirement that the new tankers be at least as effective and efficient as the 40-year-old KC-135 tankers they would replace.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., demanded the Boeing documents in his role as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. Senate investigators made the Boeing documents available to Knight Ridder.
Air Force Undersecretary for Acquisitions Marvin Sambur defended the Boeing deal. "This was not a competitive-bid process,'' he said. "The Air Force was ordered by Congress to work with Boeing on the new tanker program.''
Sambur was referring to a line item inserted into the appropriations bill in 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, that said the Air Force should lease 100 767s from Boeing to be used as tankers.
--Nick Confessore
With a preaching-to-the-converted tone, Franken ripped President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter ("a walking horror show," he called her), the target of several parodies in which the conservative commentator was portrayed -- in rather mean fashion -- as an ill-tempered, cursing, borderline racist.And this:
Franken got off a good rant now and then, such as when he talked about Bush's television ads: "They can't show the carrier footage with him in front of 'Mission Accomplished' -- it just looked stupid. Now I think they can't do 9/11. The only thing they're going to be able to do is ads of him clearing brush."Though I didn't catch Franken's show yesterday, I'm sure it was edgy and to-the-bone. And Kurtz is free to dislike that kind of thing. But sheesh, when did Kurtz get so prissy about talk radio? Did he just discover that talk radio is "mean," "insensitive," and "preaches to the converted"?But a mock news interview with an Arab man at the London airport who seemed to suggest he was bringing on board a dog who had swallowed box cutters seemed insensitive as well as unfunny.
Maybe so. After all, when Kurtz did a "Media Notes" column on Rush Limbaugh, he didn't hear anything mean and nasty or any preaching to the converted. Rather, he concluded that Limbaugh "aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy." Indeed, Kurtz mocked anyone who found Limbaugh's tirades "harsh." Go figure.
--Nick Confessore
On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.That this was the administration's attitude has been pretty clear for a while to anyone who cared to look at the record of statements made before 9-11, but this puts the pieces together rather nicely. It's often said that of course the administration didn't take terrorism as seriously before 9-11 as it seems they should have in retrospect -- no one did. That's true as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that even before 9-11 there was a fairly robust debate about what America's national security priorities should be. Bill Clinton's administration came to be focused on postmodern, transnational issues while Rice and the Bush team felt that traditional nation states still posed the main threat.The speech provides telling insight into the administration's thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.
The speech was postponed in the chaos of the day, part of which Rice spent in a bunker. It mentioned terrorism, but did so in the context used in other Bush administration speeches in early 2001: as one of the dangers from rogue nations, such as Iraq, that might use weapons of terror, rather than from the cells of extremists now considered the main security threat to the United States.
The text also implicitly challenged the Clinton administration's policy, saying it did not do enough about the real threat -- long-range missiles.
"We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway," according to excerpts of the speech provided to The Washington Post. "[But] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of mace and then decide to leave your windows open?"
As Josh Marshall points out the case that ballistic missiles fired by rogue regimes was not a serious threat has always been fairly clear -- you can't dodge responsibility for launching an ICBM so it's easy to deter countries from using them.
The really striking thing about the right and missile defense, however, is that even after we got rather conclusive proof that al-Qaeda is a more serious threat than rogue missiles, they're still pushing it. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 a media campaign was launched designed to argue that the attacks somehow demonstrated the need for a system. Right now we're spending way, way, way more money on beginning to deploy a system that doesn't even work than we are on elementary efforts to secure the homeland against terrorists.
--Matthew Yglesias
Take a look at his "One Nation, Slightly Divisible", the article that spawned a million Red America vs. Blue America clichés. The general thrust is that Blue America is rich, sophisticated, and liberal while Red America is working class, moral, and conservative. This theory is a bit hard to square with the actual data indicating that if you slice America up into six income brackets Gore won the three at the bottom and Bush won the three at the top, even while Gore voters tended to live in high cost of living areas.
The reason is that Brooks chose Montgomery Country, Maryland -- specifically, Bethesda -- as his exemplar of Blue America. We're given no reason, however, to think Bethesda is actually typical of the region he's trying to profile. If he'd picked, say, Silver Springs or the Bronx or my particular slice of Blue America (Columbia Heights in the District of Columbia) he'd have found a very different story -- lots of working class African-Americans and Latinos, many churches, and no Pottery Barns. Brooks lives in the area, so it surely hasn't escaped his attention that the bluest state of them all -- Washington, DC -- is, outside of a few neighborhoods, nothing like Bethesda. The racial divide in American politics is dismissed in a single paragraph noting that Montgomery County is more diverse than Franklin County, Pennsylvania, but he shows no indication of having visited the parts of Montgomery County where the minorities actually live.
Similarly, why is Franklin County the authentic representative of Red America? Why not Douglas County, Colorado where Bush won 65 percent of the vote and the median household income is almost twice the national average. The Starbucks being contemplated here should be built by now.
Papering over these inconvenient facts isn't just sloppy journalism; it serves to obscure the persistence of class division in American life -- a theme that's quite explicit in the article. Painting conservatism as the ideology of ordinary working people pitted against hoity-toity liberal elitists while the Republican Party puts forward budget after budget geared toward the needs of the super-rich looks to me like a deliberate effort to obscure what's really going on.
--Matthew Yglesias
For those who haven't read it, the article, by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia magazine, spends most of its word-count assessing the literal truth of various Brooksian claims, most of them from a piece he did about the divide between Red and Blue America in 2001. Brooks merits this detailed fact-check, Issenberg says, because "he postures as a public intellectual--and has been received as one."I think this is too fair to Brooks. Look, Jeff Foxworthy is a comic sociologist. Brooks is allegedly a journalist. That means what he writes is supposed to be true. And, in fact, as his whiny responses to Issenberg's queries illustrate, Brooks does indeed wish us to take his observations as revealing of some broader truths about American sociology. When I see Brooks describe himself as a "comic sociologist," I don't see him giving us a disclaimer. Quite the opposite. I see him wanting it both ways -- the authority of the journalist describing the world accurately and latitude of the comedian who need not plumb too deeply his crude stereotypes.I guess the latter point is true. Brooks clearly has public-intellectual pretensions. But a public intellectual is hardly the same thing as an empirical sociologist--which is the last thing Brooks would claim to be. In fact, Brooks explicitly labels his craft "comic sociology"--hardly the sort of description that evokes images of multivariate regressions and rigorous survey methodologies.
Noam goes onto say that he thinks Issenberg is missing the point, which is that Brooks is basically right: "Yes, there are pockets of Blue in Red states, and pockets of Red in Blue states. But, by and large, there do seem to be some stark cultural differences between the kinds of people you find in one type of state versus the other." I find this to be the sort of observation that is so true as to be useless, an argument about culture not much more advanced than -- with apologies to "The Simpsons" -- black guys drive a car like this, but white guys, they just drive a car like this."
But maybe that's just me.
UPDATE: Ruy Teixeira -- a guy who actually does slog through statistical tables and hard data -- has some more thoughts on Brooks.
--Nick Confessore
--Nick Confessore
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader is getting a little help from his friends -- and from George W. Bush's friends.No one should be under any illusions that these donors have been convinced by the merits of Nader's case, and I think we can expect to see him pick up more than a few more of these sorts of contributions in the months to come.Nearly 10 percent of the Nader contributors who have given him at least $250 each have a history of supporting the Republican president, national GOP candidates or the party, according to computer-assisted review of financial records by The Dallas Morning News.
Among the new crop of Nader donors: actor and former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, Florida frozen-food magnate Jeno Paulucci and Pennsylvania oil company executive Terrence Jacobs. All have strong ties to the GOP.
--Matthew Yglesias
He argued a federal Department of Homeland Security wasn't needed, then devised a plan to create one.And those are just the commission-related flops.He resisted a commission to investigate Iraq intelligence failures, but then relented.
He also initially opposed the creation of the independent commission to examine if the 2001 attacks could have been prevented, before getting behind the idea under pressure from victims' families.
He opposed, and then supported, a two-month extension of the commission's work, after the panel said protracted disputes over access to White House documents left too little time.
He at first said any access to the president by the commission would be limited to just one hour but relaxed the limit earlier this month.
--Matthew Yglesias
THE MOUTHS OF BABES. The backpage of the Washington PostStyle section features the one-page KidsPost, where the news of the day is broken down for Washington's next generation of wonks. Today's story on Condoleezza Rice reads like a pre-Richard Clarke controversy assignment, planned as part of a series of puffy Women's History Month profiles, with this addendum tacked on for the little ones: "Rice has been in the news a lot lately because she hasn't testified in public to a special group studying what happened on Sept. 11, 2001."
This exchange caught my eye, though, as the sort of self-characterization Rice probably won't, post-controversy, be making in the future:
KidsPost: What will you do after the White House?
Rice: I have no idea. I'm a terrible planner....
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Gail Sheehy has been writing some nice pieces about the widows and their battle against the Bush administration for The New York Observer. "Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush" was published last August, and "Four 9/11 Moms Watch Rumsfeld And Grumble" went up online this week. Without the women's tireless advocacy, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States would never have come into being. Last week, the four widows, led by Breitweiser, walked out of the 9-11 hearings the commission was holding to protest Condoleeza Rice's refusal to testify under oath. Less than a week later, the Bush administration caved to their demand and has reached an agreement with the commission under which Rice will testify under oath.
Now, a lot of people wound up agreeing with the New Jersey widows over the past week -- from Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to the entire 9-11 commission itself -- but it's hard to imagine that the controversy would have built to the level it did if the four widows had not first opened the floodgates and put pressure on the 10 commissioners to pressure the White House for Rice's testimony. Similarly, Richard Clarke may be the man who's made the most damning, high-profile criticisms of the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror to date, but he would never have been in a position to do so under oath and at length on television if it hadn't been for the work of Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg, Patty Casazza, and Lorie van Auken.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
The immensity of the task in Iraq is really breathtaking. Iraq is a large country, with the north as different from the south as Boston is from Birmingham. All at once, America and its allies are trying to modernize a primitive banking system, assess and exhume scores of mass graves, revive Iraqi agriculture, create a respectable press corps, recruit and train police and a new army, replace worn-out and antiquated infrastructure, establish regulatory agencies like an Iraqi version of the Federal Communications Commission, start a public broadcasting system, and persuade Iraqis they're better off without heavily subsidized food, gasoline, and electricity. And that's just off the top of my head.The problem, you see, wasn't with the administration's ill-advised decision to go to war or with its egregiously bad pre-war planning for the post-war situation. No, the only problem in Iraq is that the uncooperative population is failing to fulfill their role in the president's world-historical vision.Iraqis want help. Indeed, they demand it and are angry and frustrated when they don't get it instantly. But they appear to hate being helped. Their expectation was an America capable of supplanting Saddam in less than three weeks would improve everything overnight. When that didn't happen, they grew frustrated. Now they're conflicted between lashing out at the American occupation and trying to get the full benefit of it. For success to be achieved, they need to buy into the program fully--democracy, free markets, rule of law, property rights, political compromise, and patience. They need an attitude adjustment.
. . .
For the past year, America and its allies have held Iraq together. Bremer's handpicked Iraqi Governing Council was willing to compromise and sacrifice for the common good. The question is whether elected officials will do the same or represent their narrow ethnic, religious, or regional constituencies. I have my doubts. But an American official who's worked closely with Iraqis and whose views I respect differs. "Don't underestimate the sense of Iraqi national pride, despite the strong sectarian identification," he says. "Saddam's equal-opportunity repression has created a sense of community among very disparate factions. Kurds and Shia and even many Sunnis have mass grave and torture chamber victimhood in common....Attend something as seemingly superficial as an Iraqi sports event and you'll see what I mean about national pride."
Should national unity prevail, Iraq's chances of becoming a stable democracy will improve dramatically. I'd like to see one other thing in Iraq, an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another. A grateful Iraqi heart would be a sign of a new Iraqi attitude and a signal of sure success.
It's all well and good to say that Iraqis should be more thankful to the United States, should be more committed to a united, democratic, pluralistic state, and should, in general, be making things easier for Paul Bremer, but the fact of the matter is that they aren't. A president needs to be making policies designed for the real world, not for a world in which everyone behaves in a manner that would be convenient for his policies. That building the sort of stable democracy Barnes -- and Bush -- said was their goal in Iraq would be an extraordinarily difficult task was predictable -- and, indeed, widely predicted -- before the war began.
Instead of actually addressing these concerns, however, war proponents wrestled with the straw man argument that skeptics believed Arabs were genetically incapable of democracy. Instead of presenting a workable plan for nation-building, they gave us self-serving reassurances from exile leaders. All this was based on the notion that if we liberated Iraq, America would deserve to be loved by the Iraqi people.
Others warned that the world doesn't work like this -- that suspicion of American motives runs deep in Arab public opinion, that people don't like to see their nation defeated in war and occupied, and that hostility to America's Israel policy runs deeper than simple manipulation of opinion by unpopular dictators -- but Barnes and co. didn't listen. And now their plan is to complain that things haven't worked out the way they wanted. Please. Hope is not a plan, as they say, but the neoconservative approach to Iraq was fundamentally premised on rosy assumptions all the way through with no good backup in case stubborn reality cared to intrude. The country deserves something better than this.
--Matthew Yglesias
Let the sunshine in.
--Nick Confessore
Harkin managed to get the Senate leadership to give him a vote on the amendment. The Hill reports:
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Finance Committee chairman and floor manager of the JOBS bill — a manufacturing tax cut — told Harkin in a floor statement this month that his amendment was lined up to be voted on.Who is Mitch McConnell (besides a hardnosed conservative ideologue and Senate majority whip)?Last week, however, the GOP leadership took the bill directly to a cloture vote — it failed 51-47 — killing all amendments. The Democrats say this was a betrayal, but Amy Call, spokeswoman for Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), counters there was no agreement at leadership level, merely between Grassley and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), ranking member on Finance.
Several sources on both sides of the aisle and from outside Congress say Frist, like Grassley, had been willing to allow a vote on the overtime amendment but [Sen. Mitch] McConnell insisted that it be dropped.
Why, the husband of labor secretary Elaine Chao, of course.
That must make for some great pillow talk.
--Nick Confessore
Facing GOP attacks for advocating higher gas taxes as a senator, the Massachusetts Democrat will call on President Bush to apply greater pressure on oil-producing nations to increase production, in a bid to drive down crude oil prices, and to temporarily suspend filling U.S. oil reserves, said Stephanie Cutter, a Kerry spokeswoman.Media hype aside, though, gas prices aren't actually at record prices in any real sense. The nominal price has never been higher, but that's because of inflation. As this chart (which is accurate despite having been compiled by Stephen Moore) shows, prices were higher than they are now for a fairly sustained period in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Kerry will argue that diverting oil intended for U.S. reserves directly to the market will help depress gas prices, though analysts say that probably would have a negligible effect. Kerry also intends to reiterate his longer-term plans for decreasing the country's dependence on foreign oil and increasing its reliance on cleaner-burning alternative forms of energy.
As summer approaches, soaring gasoline costs are emerging as a top pocketbook concern of consumers and businesses with steep transportation costs, with prices at the pump topping $2 a gallon on the West Coast and averaging a record-high $1.80 nationwide.
Obviously, consumers would rather pay less at the pump than more, and for reasons that are a bit beyond me the media (local television news, in particular) loves to run stories about allegedly "record" prices (you may remember wall-to-wall coverage of the new records 2003, 2001, 1998, and 1997) so there's probably no stopping politicians from trying to do something about it, but focusing too intently on short-term nominal price swings often gets in the way of addressing long-term problems about the environment and the foreign policy dilemmas posed by overreliance on fossile fuels.
--Matthew Yglesias
A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows a remarkable turnaround in 17 battleground states where polls and historic trends indicate the race will be close, and where the Bush campaign has aired TV ads. Those ads say Bush has provided "steady leadership in times of change" while portraying Kerry as a tax-hiking, flip-flopping liberal. (Related item: Latest poll results)The ads have been one factor in wiping away an inflated lead Kerry held in those states. Most of them have had primaries or caucuses that allowed Democrats to dominate the news and Kerry to emerge as a victor. In a survey taken in mid-February, Kerry led Bush by 28 percentage points in those states, 63% to 35%. Now Bush leads Kerry in them by six points, 51% to 45%.
In contrast, there has been much less volatility in states where the ads haven't aired. Kerry held a four-point lead in them in February; Bush holds a two-point lead now.
The Bush campaign also has begun defining Kerry before he has defined himself. In the states where the ads have run, Kerry's unfavorable rating has risen 16 points since mid-February. In the other states, it's up just five points. The margin of error for each group of states is +/-5 percentage points.
"For Kerry having won the nomination, voters came away not knowing much about him," says Kathryn Dunn Tenpas of the Brookings Institution, author of a study of re-election campaigns titled Presidents as Candidates. "He's a blank slate to a lot of people, so negative ads can have a big impact."
Now, I happen to think that, seven months before the election, there's a little too much attention paid to the day-to-day fluctuations in the polls -- especially with a candidate in the field like Kerry, who is a strong closer but tends to appear weaker than he is before the end of a race. Six weeks before Kerry's 1996 re-election, Republican Massachusetts Gov. William Weld was happily leading in the polls in his race for Kerry's senate seat, and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean looked like a sure bet to win the Democratic nomination as close as one month before the 2004 Iowa caucuses. Nonetheless, the Bush campaign is working on a long-term project to undermine Kerry that could pay massive dividends later this year by framing Kerry now in such a way that whatever he does come autumn is viewed through the Bush campaign's narrative about him.
Meanwhile, Kerry's effort to define himself has been hampered by his lack of funds and by his need for a vacation. Kerry, as has been well-documented, has not thus far been the kind of candidate who has reached out and grabbed the nation with his powerful oratory, compelling personality, or innovative domestic agenda. But he has been viewed, at the very least, as a credible -- and sometimes even strong -- alternative to Bush by the Democratic party base and some percentage of swing voters. The upcoming election may well be defined in wholly negative terms -- that is, neither candidate can really win it, but one of them can be made to lose. Right now, it looks like Bush is winning the war to make Kerry lose, and winning it in the states that will matter.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Read through and you'll see Kerry does not, in fact, support raising gas taxes by fifty cents per dollar. Rather, he supported doing so ten years ago as a deficit-reduction measure. Now circumstances have changed (among other things, gas taxes have gone up somewhat) and he has different ideas. Of the remaining ten instances of support, five are votes against tax cuts, and four of those are votes on just one issue. The compilers of the list then double-count Kerry's support of Bill Clinton's 1993 budget, count a vote against a hostile amendment to the budget, and double-count Kerry's vote for a BTU tax.
I'm seeing two or maybe three instances of support for higher gas taxes here, all of which were in the context of the 1993 deficit-reduction package. The budget, despite Republican assurances at the time that it would destroy the American economy, turned out to be a pretty big success. The methods on display here are familiar to the ones used to generate bogus claims that Kerry voted to raise taxes 350 times as a Senator. So I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing.
--Matthew Yglesias
I'm 55 years old, I thought of voting for Eldridge Cleaver in 1968 (I was too young to vote by about 10 days). After the Democrats crammed Hubert Humphrey down our throats at the 1968 Democratic convention. After the election, which Nixon won by 100,000 votes, I realized how self-indulgent that would have been. Sometimes a blow against the establishment is a blow against all the people we say we want to help. There is a big difference between a vote for John Kerry and a vote for George Bush, and no vote at all. The last two stand for keeping things the way they are. The first may not be as much change as you want, but it will be a step in the right direction and it will be a start, and most importantly more people will have health care etc. I guarantee you if you vote for Kerry you will be disappointed, and I also guarantee you if you had voted for me and I had won you would have been disappointed too at some point. But governing in the real world means you can really make things better, dropping out means hope is dead. So thanks for hanging in there! Get all those punx back on board. This isn't about electing Kerry, and it wasn't about electing me, it's about taking the country back for people like you, no matter how long it takes! Thanks again, Howard Dean
Hmmm. I'll leave it to someone else to delve into the deeper meanings behind "sometimes a blow against the establishment is a blow against all the people we say we want to help" and just say that writing publicly, "I guarantee you if you vote for Kerry you will be disappointed," is not exactly called supporting the nominee. Further, if Dean really does hope to have a political future, and all indications are that he does, admitting that he once backed Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who ran for president on the anti-Vietnam War Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1968, doesn't exactly do much to help dispel doubts that he's some kind of wild-eyed radical.
It's comments like these that made one former key Dean staffer, a real true believer back in the day, confess to me recently, "I am so glad this man is not the nominee."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
John Kerry cited a Bible verse to criticize leaders who have "faith but has no deeds," prompting President Bush's spokesman to accuse Kerry of exploiting Scripture for a political attack.What tha? What does Kerry's position on abortion rights have to do with his quoting scripture about faith and good deeds? Well, nothing. But what Pickler's aiming for, one gathers, is to rebut Kerry's implicit charge that Bush is a hypocrite (for claiming to be a good Christian while in fact neglecting the poor) with a counter-charge that Kerry is a hypocrite because he's a pro-choice Catholic. I don't think this one sticks, but it's interetsing to see Pickler doing the RNC's work for them.Kerry never mentioned Bush by name during his speech Sunday at New North Side Baptist Church, but aimed his criticism at "our present national leadership." Kerry cited Scripture in his appeal for the worshippers, including James 2:14, "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?"
"The Scriptures say, what does it profit, my brother, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?" Kerry said. "When we look at what is happening in America today, where are the works of compassion?"
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Kerry's comment "was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and a sad exploitation of Scripture for a political attack."
Kerry told worshippers in the largely black congregation that the country's leadership has served the privileged while ignoring people across America who live in neighborhoods like theirs.
"Today we are told that, after 3 million lost jobs and so many lost hopes, America is now turning a corner," the pending Democratic presidential nominee said. "But those who say that, they're not standing on the corner of Highland Street, where two 15-year-old teenagers were hit in a drive-by shooting last week."
Kerry is Roman Catholic, but his support for abortion rights is at odds with Vatican teachings.
"I don't tell church officials what to do, and church officials shouldn't tell American politicians what to do in the context of our public life," Kerry said in an interview with Time posted on the magazine's Web site Sunday.
Speaking of which, the Bush campaign's response to Kerry's speech -- "was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and a sad exploitation of Scripture for a political attack" -- is so over the top it's laughable. If quoting Scripture to make political points is now off-limits, President Bush is going to have a problem.
--Nick Confessore
The Christian journalistic goal, then, is true objectivity: presentation of the God’s-eye view. We acknowledge our inability to do that, since we are sinners with fallen wills and very limited understanding. Nevertheless, we do not give up. The Koran calls Allah "inscrutable," but the Bible shows that God reveals his thoughts to man. Much remains hidden, as Job learned, and much we see darkly, as the apostle Paul pointed out. Still, we do have some sight, and when we study the Bible to see what God says about issues, we can come closer to that God’s-eye view.I'm on record as believing that it's almost impossible for reporters to be truly objective even under the best of circumstances. There are simply too many decisions, conscious and unconscious, that go into writing even a straight news story. (I also think the current journalistic culture tends to confuse "objectivity" with "neutrality," which is wholly different.) But those who puport to write objective journalism -- newspaper reporters -- should still strive for it. What Olasky advocates is not "true objectivity," as he puts it, but the opposite: Slanting one's coverage so that the reader sees the world not as it is but as it ought to be under Olasky's particular version of Christian doctine. He wants to create missionaries, not journalists. By newspaper standards, Olasky's vision is an embarassment. No aspiring journalist should be taught it.The opportunity to approach true objectivity also depends on the nature of the issue. White-water rafters speak of six classes of rapids: class-one rapids are easy enough for a novice to navigate, and class-six rapids whisper death. The issues that journalists report are rapids; providentially, the Bible is clear enough so that many of them fall into class one or two. Here are the classes and examples:
Class one: explicit biblical embrace or condemnation. The Bible condemns homosexuality so clearly that only the most shameless of those who twist Scripture can try to assert the practice’s biblical acceptability. Biblical objectivity means showing the evil of homosexuality; balancing such stories by giving equal time to gay activists is ungodly journalism. Similarly, in an article showing the sad consequences of heterosexual adultery there is no need to quote proadultery sources.
Class two: clearly implicit biblical position. Even though there is no explicit biblical injunction to place children in Christian or home schools, the emphasis on providing a godly education under parental supervision is clear. Biblical objectivity means supporting the establishment and improvement of Bible-based education, and criticizing government schools, in the understanding that turning education over to "professionals" who have no regard for God is an abdication of biblical parental responsibility.
Class three: partisans of both sides quote Scripture but careful study allows biblical conclusions. On poverty-fighting issues, partisans from the left talk of God’s "preferential option" for the poor, but the biblical understanding of justice means giving the poor full legal rights and not treating them as more worthy than the rich by virtue of their class position. Since even widows are not automatically entitled to aid, broad entitlement programs are suspect. Biblically, provision of material help should be coupled with the provision of spiritual lessons; the poor should be given the opportunity to glean but challenged to work.
Class four: biblical understanding backed by historical experience. Even though there is no indisputable biblical commandment that strictly limits government, chapter 8 of 1 Samuel describes the dangers of human kingship, and it is clearly bad theology to see government as savior in areas such as health care. The historical record over the centuries is clear, and in recent American experience we have particular reason to be suspicious of the person who says, "I’m from the government and I’m here to help you."
Class five: biblical sense of human nature. On class-five issues there is no clear biblical mandate and no clear historical trail, but certain understandings of human nature can be brought to bear. For example, those who believe that peace is natural emphasize negotiations and disarmament. A biblical understanding of sin, however, leads to some tough questions: What if war is the natural habit of sinful, post-Fall man? What if some leaders see war as a useful way to gain more power in the belief that they can achieve victory without overwhelming losses? History is full of mistaken calculations of that sort–dictators have a tendency to overrate their own power–but they may still plunge ahead unless restrained by the obvious power of their adversaries. Objectivity in such a situation emphasizes discernment rather than credulity: If we do not assume a benign human nature concerning warfare, we need to plan for military preparedness and raise the cost of war to potential aggressors.
Class six: Navigable only by experts, who might themselves be overturned. On a class-six issue there is no clear biblical position, no historical trail for the discerning to apply, and not much else to mark our path. On an issue of this kind–NAFTA is a good example–you should balance views and perspectives.
So I was surprised to see so many reporters for allegedly serious newspapers listed as members of Olsasky's "guest faculty." They include: Skip Bayless of the Mercury News, Don Boykin of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Steve Coleman of the Associated Press radio, Hamil Harris of the Washington Post, Karima Haynes of the Los Angeles Times, Frank Lockwood of the Lexington Herald-Leader, James Patterson of the Indianapolis Star, and Roy Rivenburg of the Los Angeles Times.
I've not been to any of the classes these folks teach. But it's worth pointing out that the reportorial values the World Journalism Institute espouses are not remotely compatible with those of the news organizations these journalists work for.
--Nick Confessore
The most underreported and encouraging story in the Middle East in the past year has been the emergence in public of homegrown civic movements demanding political change. Two years ago they were nonexistent or in jail. Now they are out in the open even in the most politically backward places in the region: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria. They are made up not only of intellectuals but of businessmen, women, students, teachers and journalists. Unlike their governments -- and the old school of U.S. and European Arabists -- they don't believe that change should be gradual, and they reject the dictators' claim that democracy would only empower Islamic extremists. It is the delay of change, they say, that is increasingly dangerous.This is a perfect example of what Abu Aardvark, a pseudonymous academic Middle East specialist, calls the Tom Friedman fallacy -- a mistaken belief that the Arab world magically popped into existence on September 11, 2001:These people weren't created by George W. Bush. They are the homegrown answer to a decadent political order, and they ride a powerful historical current. But they will tell you frankly: The new U.S. democratization policy, far from being an unwanted imposition, has given them a voice, an audience and at least a partial shield against repression -- three things they didn't have one year ago.
The Bush narrative insists that Arab reform efforts essentially begin with the Iraq war, and for people whose interest in the Middle East began on September 11 this might sound plausible. But a more realistic narrative goes like this: towards the end of the 1990s, pressures for reform began to build up across the Arab world, driven partly by the growing pressures for economic opening and even more by the revolutionary impact of the new Arab media like al Jazeera. After September 11, virtually every Arab government clamped down hard, often using the excuse of fighting terrorism to reclaim their more authoritarian powers. With the runup to the Iraq war, these leaders were terrified of their mobilized publics and kept a really tight leash out of fear. Now that the war is over, these regimes are loosening up a little bit after a period of unusually high repression - keeping in mind that they still face all of the economic, political, and media pressures which drove the demand for reform in the late 1990s.Indeed, by embracing a set of policies toward Israel and Iraq that are very unpopular among average Middle Easterners, the Bush administration has made it much easier for local dictators (the ones not threatened by forcible regime change) to try and discredit their democratic opponents by painting them as tools of a disliked American regime. So, yes, the reformers are out there, they're more lively than they were two years ago, and they deserve to be listened to, but don't expect to hear a chorus of praise for the president's foreign policy.I would like it to be different. Contrary to what some folks seem to think, I'm not a gloomsayer about the hopes for Arab reform. There's nothing I would rather see than genuine democratic openings in the Arab states. Do I want to deny Bush credit for movements towards Arab reform? Well, yeah - because he doesn't deserve it. I only wish that the Bush administration were doing things that would actually help with that - which is certainly within the power of an American administration that genuinely cares about such things. Invading Iraq was at best an indirect, and more likely a counterproductive, way to spark such reform. Journalists who misread history in order to fit that narrative aren't doing anyone any favors.
--Matthew Yglesias
According to an article in The New York Times Magazine, a nonpublicized meeting was held here in New York early last December attended by John Kerry and a number of liberal-leaning journalists, including CNN's Jeff Greenfield, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, Richard Cohen, whose column appears in this newspaper, and Frank Rich of the aforementioned New York Times.Coaching? That's hardly the impression I got from reading the article in question, a profile of Al Franken. Given Kerry's famously (but perhaps rightly) hedged position on the war in Iraq, it sounded to me like Kelly was hammering him to get a straight answer, like any reporter would. We already know from Eric Alterman, who was at the room, that Alterman asked Kerry a series of hard questions about his early support for a war most Democrats opposed. (He wrote about it in his blog, and the post is reprinted here.) Another lefty journalist in the room, William Rivers Pitt, wrote about the meeting here. ("The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge.")Now, this powwow might have been just an innocent "get to know you" soiree, but there are hints it might have been quite something else. One of the attendees, Jim Kelly, the managing editor of Time magazine, was quoted as saying that Kerry was asked a number of times about his vote on Iraq, and, according to Kelly, "by the third go-round the answer was getting shorter and more relevant."
The "third go-round"? That sounds like coaching to me, but I could be wrong. Maybe the Massachusetts senator simply wasn't making himself clear.
Now, I don't doubt that Kerry agreed to this meeting because he thought it would help him. He wanted a chance to explain his war vote and other issues to a group of elite journalists, most of them opinion-writers and opinion-leaders. He did it on the record, presumably with the expectation that most or many of them would write about it. (You have to marvel at the postmodern idiocy of O'Reilly's term "nonpublicized.") If it went badly, Kerry would have been worse off. If it went well, he'd have been better off. Either way, this was hardly a convocation of the vast left-wing media conspiracy.
--Nick Confessore
By then, the drug industry had spent more than two decades fending off growing evidence of a possible link between PPA and hemorrhagic stroke. But Patton and Newenham were among hundreds of PPA consumers who suffered attacks after a landmark study -- sponsored by the drug industry itself -- concluded in October 1999 that the use of PPA was associated with an increased risk of that deadliest form of stroke.Outrageous -- enough to give you a stoke.Recently obtained internal company documents show that rather than alerting the public during cold season, drug makers launched a yearlong campaign to keep the results quiet and stall government regulation. By the time the FDA acted, 13 months and hundreds of strokes later, the companies had reformulated their brand names with little interruption in sales. The market for PPA has been estimated at $500 million to $1 billion annually.
In the interim, Americans continued to purchase PPA products right off the shelf and assume they were safe.
"It never even dawned on us," said Tim A. Bybee, [13-year-old stoke sufferer Tricia] Newenham's stepfather, speaking of the Triaminic cold syrup Tricia took shortly before her stroke. "It was in the store. Everyone uses it. It must be all right."
The Times reviewed thousands of pages of documents produced through discovery in PPA lawsuits and obtained from the FDA through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents demonstrate that the pharmaceutical industry consistently challenged any notion that PPA could be dangerous and dismissed evidence to the contrary. They also show that the manufacturers assured the public that PPA was safe even as some FDA scientists and industry officials were raising concerns.
As early as 1982, an FDA report warned that PPA had "the ability to cause cardiovascular effects, cerebral hemorrhage and cardiac arrhythmias." Two years later, a memo from the medical services department at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, which made the PPA products Triaminic and Tavist-D, referred to PPA as "an agent known to cause hypertension and stroke."
Yet the drug companies accelerated their marketing of PPA, winning FDA approval to sell prescription PPA products on an over-the-counter basis and introducing flavorful new formulas for children.
Upon learning that the 1999 study had found a stroke link, the drug makers opened a relentless assault on its methodology and on the integrity of the Yale University researchers who conducted it. They did so despite having paid for the five-year, $5-million study themselves, approving its protocol and handpicking investigators who had previously expressed skepticism about a link between PPA and stroke.
Some documents show that the companies hoped to survive the 2000 cold season without pulling PPA products. Rarely do the internal memos indicate concern by corporate officials that PPA might pose a threat to the public.
--Nick Confessore
It's not possible to be an independent voice and also be edited for content, so the columnists are permitted to operate without the kind of direct supervision that the paper's other writers receive. They are hired by the publisher and serve at his pleasure. They file their columns to an editorial department copy editor, who checks for spelling, grammatical errors and adherence to the paper's style. If a column appears to be potentially libelous or in bad taste, the copy editor alerts me. I have the power to pull the column entirely, but that has never, to my knowledge, happened under me or any of my predecessors. The columnists are invariable responsive and cooperative if I call to voice a concern.Is Collins really of the belief that opinion-writing and editing are incompatible? After all, political opinion magazines of the left and right publish reported opinion pieces every issue, and those pieces are edited.
In any case, the person who I think will be most affected by this new policy is Times columnist David Brooks. It is both with great pleasure and great sour grapes that I point you towards this piece by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia magazine. Sour grapes because yours truly has for months been planning exactly such an investigation of the Brooks oeuvre, and in fact had planned to publish it pretty soon. Great pleasure because when another journalist scoops you, you at least want them to do the topic justice, and Issenberg did a helluva job -- he fact-checked many of the Brooksian generalizations that had also caught my eye during the past couple of years and, as a bonus, backed Brooks himself into a hilariously self-serving and unconvincing defense of his bad journalism. Here's a sample:
A few years ago, journalist David Brooks wrote a celebrated article for the Atlantic Monthly, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," in which he examined the country's cultural split in the aftermath of the 2000 election, contrasting the red states that went for Bush and the blue ones for Gore. To see the vast nation whose condition he diagnosed, Brooks compared two counties: Maryland's Montgomery (Blue), where he himself lives, and Pennsylvania's Franklin (a Red county in a Blue state). "I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is," Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across "the Meatloaf Line; from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters." Franklin County was a place where "no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings … [where] people don't complain that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny," he wrote. "In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing."And another:Brooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called "status detail," those telling symbols -- the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles -- that immediately fix a person in place, time and class. Through his articles, a best-selling book, and now a twice-a-week column in what is arguably journalism's most prized locale, the New York Times op-ed page, Brooks has become a must-read, charming us into seeing events in the news through his worldview.
There's just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin's strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That's probably not, however, QVC country. "I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country," says Doug Rose, the network's vice president of merchandising and brand development. "Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas." Rose's standard PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code -- Beverly Hills, 90210 -- covered in little red dots that each represent one QVC customer address, to debunk "the myth that they're all little old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day."
"Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors," Brooks wrote. "When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens." Actually, six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.
"We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books," Brooks asserted. A 2003 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America's most literate cities doesn't necessarily agree. Among the study's criteria was the presence of bookstores and libraries; 20 of the 30 most literate cities were in Red states.
"Very few of us," Brooks wrote of his fellow Blue Americans, "could name even five nascar drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country." He might want to take his name-recognition test to the streets of the 2002 nascar Winston Cup Series's highest-rated television markets -- three of the top five were in Blue states. (Philadelphia was fifth nationally.)
Brooks could be dismissed as little more than a snarky punch-line artist, except that he postures as a public intellectual -- and has been received as one.
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu -- steak au jus, ?slippery beef pot pie,' or whatever -- I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee's," he wrote. "I'd scan the menu and realize that I'd been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ?seafood delight' trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."And another:Taking Brooks's cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The "Steak and Lobster" combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. "Most of our checks are over $20," said Becka, my waitress. "There are a lot of ways to spend over $20."
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts "turn-of-the-century elegance." I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entr? of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn's proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks's article. They laughed. After it was published in the Atlantic, the nearby Mercersburg Academy boarding school invited Brooks as part of its speaker series. He spent the night at the inn. "For breakfast I made a goat-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato tart," Sandy said. "He said he just wanted scrambled eggs."
[M]any of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured. He describes the ladies of Sprinkler City as "trim Jennifer Aniston women [who] wear capris and sleeveless tops and look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady." That chain of women's gyms has three locations -- all in New Jersey, far from any Sprinkler City. "The roads," Brooks writes, "have been given names like Innovation Boulevard and Entrepreneur Avenue." There are no Entrepreneur Avenues anywhere in the country, according to the business-directory database Referenceusa, and only two Innovation Boulevards -- in non-Sprinkler cities Fort Wayne, Indiana, and State College, Pennsylvania. There is also an Innovation Boulevard in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.Oh, heck, just read the whole damn thing. It's brilliant -- a grade-A skewering. And richly deserved.
--Nick Confessore
Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle here ... it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress.Once again, it looks like the real reason Rice doesn't want to testify is that she doesn't like to talk under circumstances where she's obliged to tell the truth. Sandy Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have both testified under oath. Also -- no one is asking Rice to testify before the Congress; they're asking her to testify before an independent commission. Also -- the principles in question concerns whether or not presidential advisers can be forced to testify before congress which, again, no one is asking her to do. It's very clear that she can testify any time she wants to and I, for one, would be interested to hear what she has to say.
--Matthew Yglesias
The Columnists.
- David Brooks. Let's avoid discussing the actual substance of Richard Clarke's book -- he's a liar.
- Jim Hoagland. Let's avoid discussing the actual substance of Clarke's book -- politicians are all liars.
- Thomas Friedman. Let's avoid discussing the substance of Clarke's book -- bipartisanship is good.
- Nicholas Kristof. Genocide in Sudan and no one seems to care.
- George Will. Jim DeMint wants to transform the welfare state into a series of generous tax shelters for the rich -- vote for him!
- Maureen Dowd. Why talk about issues when I can psychoanalyze instead?
- Saad Eddin Ibrahim on Arab democracy.
- Meet The Press. Clarke says he's telling the truth.
- Face The Nation. Colin Powell says Clarke is lying.
- This Week. Don Rumsfeld says Clarke is lying.
We have several choices to make. The first is whether we want to pay attention to the real world, or prefer to keep to abstract discussions suitable to some seminar. Suppose we adopt the first alternative. Then there is another choice: electing Bush or seeking to prevent his election. Naturally, Bush has an overwhelming funding advantage, thanks to the extraordinary gifts he lavishes on the super-rich and the corporate sector generally and his stellar record in demolishing the progressive legislation that has resulted from intense popular struggle over many years. Since US elections are pretty much bought, he will therefore win, unless there is a very powerful popular mobilization to overcome these enormous and usually decisive advantages. That leaves us with a choice: help elect Bush, or do something to try to prevent it.It's a matter of judgment, of course, but mine is that those who favor electing Bush are making a very serious error. The people around him are likely to cause very serious, perhaps irreparable, harm if given another mandate. Activist movements, if at all serious, pay virtually no attention to which faction of the business party is in office, but continue with their daily work, from which elections are a diversion -- which we cannot ignore, any more than we can ignore the sun rising; they exist.
There are also tactical questions. Those who prefer to ignore the real world are also undermining any hope of reaching any popular constituency. Few are likely to pay attention to someone who approaches them by saying, loud and clear: "I don't care whether you have a slightly better chance to receive health care or to support your elderly mother; or whether there will be a physical environment in which your children might have a decent life; or a world in which children may escape destruction as a result of the violence that is inspired by the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Cheney-etc. crowd, which could become extreme; and on, and on. Repeat: "slightly better." That matters to sensible people, surely the great mass of people who are the potential victims. So those who prefer to ignore the real world are also saying: "please ignore me." And they will achieve that result.
He's certainly arguing against Bush, at any rate.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
EVEN THE APOLOGY. Bill Frist seems to have further determined that Richard Clarke's graceful and powerful apology to the families of the victims of September 11 is the first thing that has to be obliterated for the adminstration's surgical process of dismembering Clarke's reputation to be a success. Today, on the Senate floor, Frist accused Clarke of making "a theatrical apology" and proclaimed that it was not "his right, his privilege or his responsibility" to do so. "Mr. Clarke can and will answer for his own conduct -- but that is all," Frist said.
Though Bush may be adopting "no apologies" as his new motto, it won't be so easy for the GOP to erase Clarke's words. The apology was one of those all-too-rare moments where a public figure speaks the exact words that people are aching to hear. For this, Clarke has won the hearts of many families of the victims of 9-11, and, I expect, of thousands across this country. Now Frist wants to undo all that. Yet once a public figure takes up residence in the emotional lives of thousands, that affection and loyalty is difficult to dislodge. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is someone who underwent the transformation from public official to public hero in the days that followed 9-11. Clarke has now undergone that transformation, too.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
CNN Strategy to Become Number One #So the president told some jokes about sending people to die. Whatevs. To our minds, the biggest scandal to come out of Thursday's RTCA [Radio and Television Correspondents Association] dinner are the desperate tactics deployed by CNN to, well, sex up its after party. We hear that the ratings-desperate net flew up a passel of anchor-babes-in-training from Atlanta for the specific purpose of decorating their post-dinner disco inferno and finally beating out rival Fox for the best party prize.
Says our informant, who talked to one of the attractive accessories: "I felt bad for them. They didn't have tickets to the dinner and stood outside in the smoking lounge [until the party started]. They didn't seem to know why they were there."
Way to recreate the '70s, CNN -- at least in terms of prefeminist partying. Very classy!
If this is really is the case -- that CNN is flying junior female reporters to parties for their decorative qualities -- it seems like the sort of thing Howard Kurtz or someone should look into.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
This move is a clear sign of just how desperate -- and vicious -- the Bush attack machine is becoming now that Clarke's book has become a bonafide best-seller. But it also seems to me that going this route, though appealing to innate Republican ruthlessness -- ah, fond memories of 1998! -- could backfire on the GOP, much as the Clinton impeachment hearings that distracted America from al-Qaeda's attacks in East Africa did in the late '90s. And that's because proceeding down this route will guarantee that questions about Bush's handling of al-Qaeda before September 11 will remain front and center for months to come, along with any questions that are concocted about Clarke's credibility. It's called overkill for a reason.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
The competing bills will now go to a conference committee for reconciliation, where the GOP congressional leadership can ensure that Democrats and moderate Republicans alike are shut out of the process and a bill gets sent back to the Senate that's essentially identical to the House bill. Traditionally at this point, Senate moderates chicken out, vote for the conference report, and then point to their earlier vote on the Senate bill as a signal of their moderation.
Two Senate Republicans who favor restrictions on new tax cuts, John McCain of Arizona and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, said they would vote against the final budget if the provision was deleted.This, rather than the earlier vote, will be the real test of whether Collins, Snowe, and whatever other alleged deficit hawks may still exist in the Republican Party are actually serious about fiscal discipline or just talking a good game for the folks back home.That could leave the fate of the budget in the hands of the two other moderate Republicans who voted for the provision: Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine. Neither has said how she would vote.
Ms. Collins said Thursday that she did not want to "issue threats, but I do hope the final version will contain strong budget enforcement rules."
--Matthew Yglesias
In May, the NSC began to intercept communications between Al Qaeda operatives discussing the attack, one that could be larger than any previous operation. One message, describing the scope of the expected devastation, used the word "Hiroshima."The intercepts prompted concern throughout the government. By June, CIA director Tenet was "nearly frantic" about the "chatter" in the system, the discrete yet unspecified indicators that al-Qaeda was up to something. Attorney General John Ashcroft began taking a privately chartered jet for security reasons. Embassies and entire military commands went on highest alert. On July 5, NSC Director for Terrorism Richard Clarke summoned CT [counter-terrrorism] officers from a dozen federal agencies to the White House Situation Room, and told them to cancel any vacation plans. "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," he said.
But it doesn't sound like the relevant vacation plans were cancelled. Indeed, the vacations of senior White House personnel in the summer of 2001 interferred with the rapid development of a plan to combat al-Qaeda, according to testimony Clarke gave to the 9-11 Commission on Wednesday:
MR. ROEMER: So, does this slow the process down to go to the deputies rather than to the principals or a small group, as you had previously done?MR. CLARKE: It slowed it down enormously, by months. First of all, the deputies committee didn't meet urgently in January or February. Then, when the deputies committee did meet, it took the issue of al Qaeda as part of a cluster of policy issues, including nuclear proliferation in South Asia, democratization in Pakistan, how to treat the problems, the various problems, including narcotics and other problems in Afghanistan, and, launched on a series of deputies meetings extending over several months to address al Qaeda in the context of all of those interrelated issues. That process probably ended, I think, in July of 2001, so we were readying for a principals' meeting in July, but the principals' calendar was full, and then they went on vacation, many of them, in August, so we couldn't meet in August, and therefore the principals met in September.
Worth recalling at this point -- and in this age of short memories -- was that George W. Bush took one of the longest presidential vacations in recent presidential history that year. He and many of his most senior aides were simply not in Washington during the critical month of August during the summer of threat that preceded the September 11 attack. And this lengthy vacation was very controversial at the time. According to this contemporaneous USA Today piece about the criticisms:
White House officials point out that the president is never off the clock. They refer to the 30 days at his Texas ranch — now it's called the Western White House — as a working vacation. He'll receive daily national security updates and handle the duties of the Oval Office from his 1,583-acre spread near Crawford.But some Republican loyalists worry about critics who say Bush lets Vice President Cheney and other top officials do most of the work. They're also concerned about the reaction of the average American, who gets 13 vacation days each year.
"It can foster other images," says William Benoit, a professor of political communication at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Maybe he's lazy, maybe he's not determined. It feeds into the impression that he's not in charge."
Bush didn't just take one of the longest summer vacations in presidential history that year; he also spent a considerable amount of time leading up to the summer on vacation or "working" vacations. According to a CBS piece on presidential vacations:
Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, The Manchester Guardian calculated that Mr. Bush, in his first seven months of office spent 42 percent of his time on holiday, "a whopping 54 days at his Texas ranch, 38 days at the presidential retreat at Camp David and four more at his parents' place in Kennebunkport, Maine."That changed when the job became fundamentally more serious after the terrorist attacks. But Mr. Bush still rests, although his month-long retreat of August 2001 – the longest presidential vacation in 32 years – is no longer politically prudent while the war on terrorism is being waged.
One of the questions that has to be asked now is whether and how the fact that Bush spent such a considerable amount of his first eight months in office on vacation contributed to his administration's slow development of a plan to fight al-Qaeda.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
What's my policy on blind quotes, you may ask? I think quotes are overrated, period, but that's because I'm an opinion journalist and thus allowed to express thoughts of my own, whereas as a newspaper reporter needs official comment on events about which they write. And I agree with Overholser that instead of writing "White House and Pentagon officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity described Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated," the Post's Barton Gellman should have written the following in his Richard Clarke story of March 22: "White House and Pentagon officials declined to address Clarke's charges." Which gets me to my main concern. What's more important than whether a quote is blind or not is whether or not the reporter allows the quote to include tendentous, untruthful, or hypocritical assertions. Dana Milbank, for instance, is very good at weaving pertinent information alongside such quotes that signal to the reader that the quotee is full of it. And that should be standard practice in the daily media.
--Nick Confessore
Publicly the media has focused on the Senate Democrats' failed filibuster attempts to stall the appointments of Judges William Pryor and Charles Pickering, while privately Bush has bypassed the Senate twice and installed the duo in recess appointments. However, one might be surprised to learn that while the Administration claims Democratic "obstructionism," the Senate has blockedonly six of the President's nominees, and confirmed 171.
Visit MovingIdeas.org to read "Judging Bush’s Record: Contested Judicial Appointments," and find out what the progressive community is doing to combat Bush's judicial appointments. Plus, read the records of three of the most notorious judicial appointees still before the Senate.
--Editors of MovingIdeas.org
But while talk of the book continues to burn on many tongues here, the number of policy makers who have actually read all of its 304 pages remains a subject of some debate. Some prominent Republicans made a point this week of noting that they had not read the book, including Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, and Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to their spokesmen.
The other critical D.C. player who admited not yet having read it: Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
But most Republicans remain cautiously optimistic that this week's events won't significantly erode public approval of Bush's handling of the terrorist threat. They base their view largely on the belief that that confidence is rooted in real-world events -- the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, above all, the absence of additional attacks inside the United States since that searing day in 2001.Other people have made some good points in response. As Noam Scheiber says one effect of Clarke's revelation is to lay the groundwork for the idea that if -- God forbid -- we do see another terrorist attack that Bush should be held accountable for his poor management of counterterrorism rather than given a "rally 'round the flag" reward. Moreover, as my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta wrote yesterday there have actually been an awful lot of terrorist attacks since 9/11, far more than we saw in the pre-9/11 era, so the facts on the ground aren't as favorable to Bush as a singleminded focus on the US would make it seem.Some independent analysts agree that those critical of Bush's terrorism tactics face the same problem the president does on the economy: Voters' actual experiences, rather than arguments from either side, are most likely to shape their attitudes.
"People aren't going to judge Bush on the basis of what the commission says; they are going to judge him on the basis of performance," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent polling organization.
Last but by no means least, John Kerry doesn't actually need to beat Bush on terrorism to win the election. The president has no areas of strength outside of national security, so all Kerry needs to do is avoid getting trounced in this area and he can win. Whatever the scale of the impact, it's hard to see how the business we've seen this week could be construed as helping the president; Kerry really only needs to do a little damage on this front in order to win, and he has plenty of time to try and inflict it.
--Matthew Yglesias
Under mounting pressure from Democrats about its response to the investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the White House offered Thursday to have Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, answer more questions from the Sept. 11 panel. At the same time, President Bush forcefully denied accusations that he had ignored the severity of the threat from Al Qaeda.So Rice's position is that she's happy to rebut Richard Clarke's sworn testimony but only if she's under no obligation to tell the truth. Who has a credibility problem now?The White House announced late Thursday that Ms. Rice was willing to appear before the panel again, but only in private and not under oath. Some Republicans said that Mr. Bush was being undercut by the perception that a senior White House official would not cooperate, while his aides were out pummeling Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief who has accused the Bush administration of not heeding warnings before Sept. 11.
--Matthew Yglesias
President Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions, officials say.Certainly Rice is looking worse and worse in this affair. But more importantly, it's obvious that what Clarke has said is true: Neither the outgoing Clinton administration nor Clarke himself could convince the president's top aides, and thus the president himself, that this was a serious problem. Note, too, that the White House's defense -- there were only "scattered hints of al-Qaida activity" -- is flatly wrong. We now know that there was in fact a rising degree of intelligence "chatter" during the summer of 2001, and that the White House's relative indifference to it nearly led a couple of intelligence analysts resigning and going public.The White House acknowledged the dearth of top-level meetings devoted to the subject of terrorism by the "principals committee" of the National Security Council. Yet it has aggressively defended the level of attention, given only scattered hints of al-Qaida activity.
One current security council official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that intensive planning of anti-terrorism strategies was largely the role of midlevel committees at the NSC - not the Cabinet-level players.
"The president was being briefed. The principals were being briefed, perhaps not together," this official said.
The description of the 90 to 100 meetings was confirmed by three White House officials.
Critics said the low number of terrorism meetings by the most senior members of the security council indicated the administration's priorities were elsewhere.
"What were the principals doing to bring this to the attention of the president?" asked P.J. Crowley, council spokesman for the Clinton administration. "Given our growing understanding of this threat that we built in '90s about the emerging threat of terrorism, they just didn't seem to get it."
Clinton officials said their council principals met every two to three weeks to discuss terrorist threats after mid-1998. Those meetings increased during times of heightened terrorist concerns, such as immediately prior to the millennium celebrations, when the principals met nearly every day to discuss threat levels.
Bush's principals committee was focused on missile defense, Iraq, China, international economic policy, global warming and the U.S. stance toward Russia, a subject of particular interest to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, a Russian expert who has now worked for both Bush presidents.
--Nick Confessore
--Nick Confessore
But what's surprised me is the level of consciousness among the press that, in fact, the White House is waging war on his credibility. I suppose that, since this is primarily a question of tactics versus substance -- the kind of reporting the political media prefers to wallow in -- that's no great surprise. But read Dana Milbank's news analysis in today's Washington Post:
If the critique presented by Clarke, who left the Bush White House after two years, is to be accepted, a key rationale for Bush's reelection has been lost. In Clarke's view, the Bush administration ignored his pleas to make terrorism a high priority before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, reacted inadequately to the attacks and then strengthened terrorists by persistently pursuing war in Iraq. Bush aides are not about to let that version stand.Every one is very, very conscious of the stakes here, and it's good that the Post is letting their readers know about them. Because they also did a very good job explaining the substance, with this front-page story by Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus:Shortly before the hearing, the White House violated its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002. The White House press secretary read passages from the 2002 remarks at his televised briefing, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who has declined to give public testimony to the commission, called reporters into her office to highlight the discrepancy. "There are two very different stories here," she said. "These stories can't be reconciled."
Back at the hearing, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, a Republican member of the commission, took up the cause, waving the Fox News transcript with one hand and Clarke's critical book in the other. "Which is true?" Thompson demanded, folding his arms and glowering down at the witness.
Clarke, appearing unfazed by the apparent contradiction between his current criticism and previous praise, spoke to Thompson as if addressing a slow student.
"I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done, and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done," he explained. "I've done it for several presidents."
With each effort by Thompson to highlight Clarke's inconsistency -- "the policy on Uzbekistan, was it changed?" -- Clarke tutored the commissioner about the obligations of a White House aide. Thompson, who had far exceeded his allotted time, frowned contemptuously. "I think a lot of things beyond the tenor and the tone bother me about this," he said. During a second round of questioning, Thompson returned to the subject, questioning Clarke's "standard of candor and morality."
"I don't think it's a question of morality at all; I think it's a question of politics," Clarke snapped.
Thompson had to wait for Sept. 11, 2001, victims' relatives in the gallery to stop applauding before he pleaded ignorance of the ways of Washington. "I'm from the Midwest, so I think I'll leave it there," he said. Moments later, Thompson left the hearing room and did not return.
Democrats teed up easy questions for him. Commissioner Timothy J. Roemer got Clarke, who served in four administrations, to say that there was "no higher" priority than terrorism under President Bill Clinton, but the Bush administration "either didn't believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem."
Kerrey did his part to make Clarke a hero. "I feel badly," he told the witness, "because I presume that you are at the moment receiving terrible phone messages and e-mail messages."
Democrat Jamie S. Gorelick continued the praise. After one Clarke pronouncement, she replied: "Well, that's a very sobering statement, particularly from someone whose reputation is as aggressive as your reputation is."
Republican commissioners labored to change that reputation. Fred F. Fielding implied that Clarke may have perjured himself when he spoke to a congressional investigation into the attacks but did not raise complaints about Bush's Iraq policy then. Clarke, though the back of his neck and head were a burning red, replied coolly: "I wasn't asked, sir."
The gallery drew quiet when Lehman questioned Clarke. "I have genuinely been a fan of yours," he began, and then he said how he had hoped Clarke would be "the Rosetta Stone" for the commission. "But now we have the book," Lehman said, suggesting it was a partisan tract.
Clarke was ready for that challenge. "Let me talk about partisanship here, since you raised it," he said, noting that he registered as a Republican in 2000 and served President Ronald Reagan. "The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign," Clarke said. "So let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one."
When Clarke finished his answer, there was a long pause, and the gallery was silent. Lehman smiled slightly and nodded. He had no further questions.
President Bush's top counterterrorism adviser warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al Qaeda network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed yesterday.A bad day for the White House. (Not just because this Clarke stuff has sidetracked their campaign against John Kerry.) And a very bad day for Condoleeza Rice, who comes out looking like quite the hack. As Dan Froomkin puts it in his White House Briefing column today, among the things we've learned from Rice is that "When you're the national security adviser, it's really important for the public to understand your position so you give lots of interviews to the press -- but you can't answer questions under oath before a legislatively-chartered body because that would be a violation of the Constitution."Richard A. Clarke, who served as a senior White House counterterrorism official under three successive presidents, wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, urging "policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier," according to a summary of the letter included in a commission staff report. Clarke also cites the same plea in his new book.
Clarke told the commission in testimony yesterday afternoon that whereas the Clinton administration treated terrorism as its highest priority, the Bush administration did not consider it to be an urgent issue before the attacks.
"I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue," Clarke told the 10-member panel. ". . . There was a process underway to address al Qaeda. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way."
Clarke's appearance before the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, climaxed days of furor over claims in his book that the Bush administration did not do enough to pursue al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001, and has neglected the war on terrorism since then because of an obsession with waging war on Iraq.
The second day of this week's commission hearings also produced new revelations about events before the attacks, including a denial of the White House's long-standing claim that Bush requested a briefing on the domestic threat posed by al Qaeda in August 2001.
--Nick Confessore
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has begun quiet discussions with a handful of colleagues about the possibility that he will have to step down from his leadership post temporarily if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury investigating alleged campaign finance abuses.But will they honor the rule?The probe, which is being conducted by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, centers on whether Texans for a Republican Majority, a group and its affiliated political action committee started by DeLay, broke a Texas law prohibiting the use of corporate donations in political campaigns during the 2002 state legislative elections.
Republican Conference rules state that a member of the elected leadership who has been indicted on a felony carrying a penalty of at least two years in prison must temporarily step down from the post. He or she may return to the job if found not guilty or if the charges are reduced below a felony or dismissed.
Texas Rep. John Carter (R), a former Williamson County district judge, said an indictment “is not intended to be a declaration of guilt” and that it would be “pretty rough” if DeLay had to relinquish the Majority Leader post without having been convicted of anything.We'll see. But apparently, it doesn't apply to investigations the GOP deems "political."Repeating a well-known legal adage, Carter said, “A DA can indict a ham sandwich given the opportunity.”
--Nick Confessore
