TELLING THE TRUTH AS AN INNOVATIVE POLITICAL STRATEGY....I'm always afraid that if I suggest that politicians should just tell the truth it tags me as terminally naive, but I really wonder why the Bush administration hasn't done exactly that in the case of Dick Clarke. Take a look at Clarke's two major charges:

1. The Bushies didn't take terrorism seriously enough when they first took office.

2. After 9/11, they were too obsessed with Iraq, which has been a distraction from the war on terror.
   

Why the furious barrage of personal smears and frenzied counterattacks? Why not just tell the truth?

1. In retrospect, of course we wish we had paid more attention to terrorism. Everybody in the U.S. government does. After all, 3000 people died. It was a terrible misjudgment and a wakeup call for all of us. (I'm sure they could figure out a better way to say it, but you get the idea.)

2. Yes, we did focus on Iraq, and for good reasons. (Proceed to give reasons, which hopefully they can do by now without a second thought.)
   

Would anyone have held it against them if they admitted that they, like everyone else, underestimated terrorism prior to 9/11? I don't think so. And the Iraq war as a response to terrorism is a longstanding policy dispute. Surely they could just acknowledge it and then lay out the usual arguments.

The Bush administration has always had only one gear, full speed ahead with all guns blazing, but this is a case where that's probably hurt them. I suspect that if they had taken a different approach they could have defused Clarke's allegations quickly and the whole thing would have died down by now. Somehow, though, I doubt they've learned any lessons from this.

WILL SHE OR WON'T SHE?....This is getting ridiculous. CBS News reports that Condi may testify after all:

Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts...tells CBSNews.com the change in policy is being discussed at the highest levels in the White House. Rice reportedly believes that it might be positive for her to appear. But President Bush makes the final decision, and is thus far against it, says Roberts.

But here's what the Washington Post says:

The leading possibility is for Rice to submit to another private session with the commissioners and allow them to release a transcript, the aides said. The aides said they believe no consideration is being given to yielding to the commission's request that she testify under oath and in public.

....The White House did not allow a recording to be made of what Rice said when she met privately with the commissioners for four hours in February, the aides said

The executive privilege issue has always been a crock since no one is compelling her to testify and therefore no precedent would be set. But regardless, what's the difference between testifying in private and then releasing a transcript vs. simply testifying in public in the first place? If they aren't afraid of making the content of her testimony public, what are they afraid of? Her facial expressions? Her tone of voice?

Weird.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall has more transcript shenanigans. And as long as you're over there, he's also asking exactly the right question about why we're still treating Ahmed Chalabi with kid gloves.

DAVID BROOKS vs. THE WORLD....Oh hell, someone has to defend David Brooks. Why not me? Here's an excerpt from Sasha Issenberg's much blogged Philadelphia magazine takedown on Brooks:

Brooks, however, does more than popularize inaccessible academic work; he distorts it....Brooks takes their findings and, regardless of origin, applies to them what one might call the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Brooks is hardly alone in thinking this. In fact, it's practically gospel among anyone who markets products of any kind to consumers of any kind. "You Are Where You Live" is the slogan of Claritas' widely-used PRIZM market segmentation system, and it's no joke. People spend billions of dollars based on the results of market segmentation like this, and they do it because it works. Your intuition (and Brooks' thesis) are correct: people in different parts of the country really are different.

(Care to find out what kind person you probably are? Go here and type in your ZIP code. Yeah, yeah, I know, they sure have you pegged wrong, don't they? Sure they do. Then go ahead and type in the ZIP code of your aunt in Peoria and see the difference.)

Look, I don't know if Brooks played fast and loose with the facts in Franklin County, PA, or not. But surely it's noncontroversial that, say, the average resident of the midwest really does have different values and different interests than urban coastal dwellers? And that popular magazine writers frequently overplay those differences in an effort to write engaging copy? This strikes me as something less than shocking.

So while it may be true that Brooks sometimes strains too hard to make his points, I suspect Issenberg is straining just as hard. After all, even in strongly Red counties you'll find plenty of liberals and and in strongly Blue counties you'll find plenty of conservatives. (Go to a party here in heavily Republican Orange County, for example, and four out of ten people you meet will nonetheless be Democrats. And every one of us will make the same lame joke about how happy we are to finally meet another one.)

If Brooks' generalizations are wrong, that's fine. Skewer away. But finding exceptions to Brooks' generalizations is both trivial and pedantic, especially when Issenberg admits multiple times that Brooks really does have a point. I've been pretty unimpressed with Brooks' New York Times columns so far, but this time I have a feeling I'm on his side: Issenberg just didn't get the joke. Lighten up.

CONSERVATIVES AND THEIR BOOKS....Jonah Goldberg thinks liberals don't read enough:

One thing that really does fascinate me...is the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history. Obviously this is a sweeping -- and therefore unfair -- generalization. But I read a lot of liberal stuff and have attended more than a few college confabs with liberal speakers speaking on the subject of liberalism itself. And it seems to me that liberals are intellectually deracinated. Read conservative publications or attend conservative conferences and there will almost always be at least some mention of our intellectual forefathers and often a spirited debate about them. The same goes for Libertarians, at least that branch which can be called a part or partner of the conservative movement.

But isn't the answer to this pretty obvious? Conservatives, almost by definition, are absorbed by the past. What's more, their message doesn't change much over time (tradition is good, stable society is good, the masses should get back to work and stop complaining) so it makes perfect sense to keep reading them. In fact, if you take the conservative reverence for tradition seriously, it almost demands that you have considerable respect for your forebears.

Liberalism is precisely the opposite. We don't wonder what Charles Beard would think of something? Of course not. The whole point of liberalism is change, so who cares what Beard would have thought? By now he's just an old fuddy duddy.

Those with a reverence for the past read long dead authors and feel at home. Those who disdain the past and relish cultural change won't give them the time of day. Right?

UPDATE: Last paragraph modified slightly based on comments.

WHY THE SOCIALISTS WON....PART FOUR....I promise not to belabor this forever, but yesterday I asked about polling data on the Spanish election and one of my readers translated the following and emailed it to me:

• Over 90% of the populace had decided their vote before the attacks.
  

• 8% decided after the attacks.
  

• 60% believe the government incorrectly informed the people about the authors of the attacks, and didn't share all available information.
  

• 60% believe information was manipulated and hidden.
  

• 30% believe the government told the truth.
  

• 25% of PP (Conservative Party) voters believe the government mishandled the information. 65% of PP voters believe the government told the truth.
  

The original is here, and another poll about troop withdrawl is here. My correspondent says that both polls are from the "very respected liberal radio" Cadena Ser on March 22.

BUSH AND TERRORISM....Dick Clarke complains in his book that before 9/11 the Bush administration did not take terrorism as seriously as the Clinton administration had. Is he right? Let's go to the tape:

• General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff: the Bush administration pushed terrorism "farther to the back burner."

• Bush administration terrorism report, April 2001, via CNN: When asked why the Administration had reduced the focus on Osama bin Laden, "a senior Bush State Department official told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden."

• Thomas Maertens, NSC nonproliferation director for Clinton and Bush: "[Clarke] was the guy pushing hardest, saying again and again that something big was going to happen, including possibly here in the U.S." But Maertens said the Bush White House was reluctant to believe a holdover from the previous administration. "They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration," he said. "So anything they did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it."

• Lieutenant General Don Kerrick, Clinton deputy NSA who was held over for several months by Bush, comparing Bush's sense of urgency regarding terrorism to Clinton's: "Candidly speaking, I didn’t detect that kind of focus." And this: "I don't think it was above the waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen."

• President Bush himself, quoted by Bob Woodward: "I didn’t feel a sense of urgency about al Qaeda. It was not my focus; it was not the focus of my team."
  

That's a lot of backup for Clarke's position. Frankly, a lot of us didn't take terrorism seriously enough before 9/11, so I'm not sure there's any great shame in all this. Still, the Bush White House should quit smearing Clarke and own up to the truth: terrorism wasn't a top priority during their first few months in office. 9/11 was a wakeup call for them, just as it was for the rest of the country.

THE EDUCATION OF RICHARD CLARKE....Having finished Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies I now find myself almost afraid to comment on it. With the battle lines already drawn along the predictable lines, it almost seems pointless. If you're a liberal he's a heroic truthteller and if you're a conservative he's a bitter Bush hater. Is anyone going to change their mind at this point?

Maybe not, but let's try to sort out what Clarke actually says and why he says it anyway, because I don't think it's entirely obvious just from the snippets we've seen on TV over the past week. The story is a little more complicated than it appears.

To begin with, the bulk of the book is a fairly straightforward description of terrorism during the 90s: what happened, how we responded, how we eventually put the al-Qaeda pieces together, and what kinds of institutional problems prevented a more effective response. It is largely concerned with Clarke's efforts to get official Washington to take terrorism seriously — he is scathing toward the FBI and the military, and only slightly less so toward the CIA — and there's not much question that during this period Clarke was fundamentally nonpartisan, mostly just a bulldog who was obsessed with terrorism and frequently upset that the rest of the world didn't share his obsession.

So what was it that seemingly turned him into a Democratic partisan? Oddly enough, it appears that the turning point came in August 1998 and was a combination of two things: the Monica Lewinsky scandal and al-Qaeda's attacks on two American embassies. It was only a couple of years earlier that the CIA had finally connected the dots and figured out that the al-Qaeda organization even existed, and the embassy bombings were their first major attack since then. Unfortunately, Republican opportunism made it hard to fight back. Although Clarke says he was "beyond mad" at Clinton for failing to keep his zipper shut, he became flatly infuriated with the recklessness of his conservative opposition:

I was angrier, almost incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton's enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to hurt not just Clinton but the country by turning the President's personal problem into a global, public circus for their own political ends. Now I feared that the timing of the President's interrogation about the scandal, August 17, would get in the way of our hitting the al Qaeda meeting.

....Our response to two deadly terroist attacks was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.

For a true believer like Clarke, the partisan posturing in response to what he thought was the most important problem facing our country must have convinced him that many Republicans simply didn't take national security seriously. And what he saw when Bush took office must have convinced him even further:

• Although neither administration ended up hitting back as hard as Clarke wanted, he makes it clear that at least the Clinton team considered it a high priority. The Bush team was more interested in missile defense and relations with China.

• Even though the Clinton and Bush policies ended up being largely the same prior to 9/11 — Condi Rice's denials notwithstanding — Clarke believes the Clinton team was better at execution. Several terrorist plots were foiled in December 1999 due to a heightened alert status approved by Clinton, and he thinks 9/11 could have been foiled too if the Bush team had adopted the same approach in the summer of 2001.

• Finally, there was Bush's post-9/11 response. Clarke believes that the Bush team failed to understand that al-Qaeda was something fundamentally new. "You give bin Laden too much credit," Paul Wolfowitz said in an April 2000 meeting. "He could not do all these things...without a state sponsor." As a result of this belief, after 9/11 the Bush team wanted to go after Iraq while Clarke wanted to go directly after al-Qaeda.
  

This last point is a critical one, of course, and goes to the heart of many of the post-9/11 differences between Bush and his critics. Here's how Clarke describes what he learned when the intelligence community first discovered the existence of al-Qaeda in 1996:

The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the success of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radical Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire.

From his point of view, then, Bush's post-9/11 obsession with attacking states was simply playing into al-Qaeda's hands. "It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.'"

Clarke surely knows that it would have helped his credibility if he had treated the Clinton and Bush administrations more evenhandedly, but he obviously thought the differences between them ran too deep to do that. During the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship, but he felt that at least everyone took it seriously and helped to push. Then in January 2001 he suddenly found himself working for an administration that didn't take terrorism seriously, didn't execute well even when they did acknowledge the problem, and then after 9/11 remained so stubbornly ignorant of al-Qaeda's aims that they played directly into its hands.

Is it any wonder he has little good to say about them?

POT, KETTLE, ETC....Hmmm, do you think the Bush team has become a little oversensitive lately?

"What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but doesn't have works," [John] Kerry said, quoting James 2:14. "When we look at what is happening in America today, where are the works of compassion?"

The Bush-Cheney camp cited that quote as an improper use of the Christian scriptures to take a veiled slap at Bush, a conservative Christian, and his claim to being a compassionate conservative.

"John Kerry's comment at New Northside Baptist Church was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse, and a sad exploitation of scripture for a political attack," said Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt.

Quoting scripture and then criticizing your opponent is "beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse" in a presidential campaign? Who makes up this stuff?

RELIGION AND THE PRESIDENCY....Is America ready for a Catholic president? You'd think that question was settled half a century ago, but Karen Tumulty and Perry Bacon Jr. make an interesting point in Time today:

Still, when Kennedy ran for President in 1960, a candidate could go through an entire campaign without ever having to declare his position on abortion—much less stem cells, cloning or gay marriage. It was before Roe v. Wade, bioethics, school vouchers, gay rights and a host of other social issues became the ideological fault lines that divide the two political parties and also divide some Catholics from their church.

There's clearly something to this. In an odd twist, at the same time that Americans have gotten over their anti-Catholic bigotry of days past the Catholic Church itself has become far more politicized. If Kerry ends up having any problems because of his faith, it's less likely to be caused by lingering prejudice than by the church itself turning on one of its own.

Ironic, isn't it?

WHY THE SOCIALISTS WON....PART THREE....A week ago I suggested several reasons why the Socialists came from behind to win the election in Spain after the Madrid bombings. But I admitted there was really no way to know until somebody went out and did some polling.

Today, courtesy of Tacitus, the Washington Post provides an answer. Sort of:

Interviews and polling research suggest that voters who ousted the pro-American government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar after the Madrid bombings did so at least in part because they believed Spain's participation in the Iraq war had provoked the attacks. Polls in Britain and Italy, whose governments have also been high-profile supporters of the war, suggest voters there fear their countries have also joined al Qaeda's hit list.

This is maddeningly vague, especially since it doesn't indicate what other reasons people gave for voting Socialist. Still, it's a data point.

Does anybody out there read the Spanish press? Are there any more details available on this poll?

TANKER WAR....Back when the Air Force was looking for a new fleet of tankers, it turned out that Boeing's 767 wasn't really all that well suited for the job. What to do? Let Boeing rewrite the specs:

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 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.

....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 troops 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.

Hey, I'll give 'em a pass on the whole Airbus thing. After all, they're made in France, aren't they? Can't have that.

But it sure would be nice if the shiny new tankers were at least as good as the ancient rattletraps they were replacing. And maybe they could shave $10 billion off their price while they're at it.

"CURVEBALL"....Even for those of us who already accept that our prewar intelligence was wildly wrong and that Ahmed Chalabi bears a lot of the blame, this story in Sunday's LA Times is still incredibly disheartening:

The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," according to current and former intelligence officials.

....U.N. weapons inspectors hypothesized that such trucks might exist, officials said. They then asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Hussein, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.

Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army.

....Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information. In part because of that, some U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA may have inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.

It's actually even worse than it sounds just from this excerpt. You really need the read the whole story to appreciate the full magnitude of what happened here. David Kay is the only person who comes out of it looking good.

Ahmed Chalabi deserves to be strung up by his thumbs and left for the vultures to feast on. It is simply unbelievable that we still have anything to do with him.

HOORAY FOR BROADBAND!....Another bold policy initiative from President Bush:

"We ought to have universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007," Bush said. "And then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter consumers have plenty of choices."

"It's important that we stay on the cutting edge of technological change, and one way to do so is to have a bold plan for broadband," he said. Bush did not elaborate on how he would accomplish the 2007 goal.

I'll just bet he didn't elaborate, especially since somebody in the White House obviously pulled that date out of their ass without even bothering to pick up the phone and find out if it was possible. Hell, South Korea's been working toward this goal for nearly a decade and they still aren't quite there yet. And that's in a country 1% our size.

These guys really don't even pretend to care about whether stuff is possible before they start yapping about it, do they? Besides, I thought Republicans were in favor of the free market handling this kind of stuff. What's with the "bold plan"?

On the other hand, it is bold. Did I mention that?

POSTSCRIPT: I should make clear that I actually think having universal broadband access is a worthy goal. Maybe it requires a government program, maybe it doesn't, but it sure isn't going to happen by 2007. And frankly, with this gang in charge, I'd just as soon keep the free market in charge in any case.

BUBBLE, BUBBLE....A couple of days ago Brad DeLong wrote about the need for the Fed to keep interest rates low, and who can disagree? With the job market as flabby as it is, the last thing we need is to slow down the economy by raising interest rates.

At the same time, though, Brad quotes Gerard Baker at length on the topic, and Baker is scathing toward those who are apprehensive about the effect that continuing low interest rates have on, for example, housing prices. "Sado-monetarists," he says, "should be restrained before they do us all needless harm."

Now perhaps living in Southern California makes me oversensitive to this, but it really does seem as though the housing market is pretty frothy at the moment. And if there is a housing bubble right now, and if it eventually gets pricked, as bubbles eventually always do, that could have a catastrophic effect on already weak economy, right? Just like the dotcom bust, except that the economy already sucks to begin with.

Or maybe not. But the nice thing about being a blogger is that I don't have to just sit around and wonder about this. I know Brad reads this blog, so maybe he'll take pity on my obvious bewilderment and offer us his ideas on this:

• Is it your thought that there actually isn't a housing bubble right now?

• Or is there indeed a housing bubble, but it's going to last a long time so it's nothing to worry about?

• Or is the housing bubble both real and likely to burst in the near future, but for some reason you believe it won't really do that much harm?

• Or is all of the above true, but there's nothing much we can do about it?

• Or something else?
  

Basically, my question is this: there's plenty of controversy over whether the Fed should pay attention to asset bubbles in the first place. Alan Greenspan apparently thinks not. However, assuming that the problem is real but that we don't want to raise interest rates just to cool down a bubbly housing market, is there anything else that can be done? What kind of leverage is available to slow down a housing bubble aside from raising interest rates? And should we use it?

I QUIT....Mark Schmitt is writing about the conventions of resignation letters over at The Decembrist, which reminds me of my personal favorite resignation letter of all time:

I have cleaned out my desk and will not be back.

This was scrawled on a piece of greenbar paper ripped from a nearby printer. I can't say that we were exactly surprised that this person decided to quit, but the way she did it sure provided us with some welcome comic relief.