Croooow Blog

It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade--an overture the official saw as a possible effort to buy uranium.

That's according to a new book Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had been trying to buy enriched "yellowcake" uranium. Wilson wrote that he did not learn the identity of the Iraqi official until this January, when he talked again with his Niger source.

More...

"Nightline" resorts to absurd lies to defend itself:

That is good to know because otherwise we might be left thinking that Friday's broadcast, which ABC will simulcast on its Jumbotron in New York's Times Square, is a cheap, content-free stunt designed to tug at our heartstrings and bag a big number on the second night of the May ratings race.

Koppel, also in the announcement, acknowledged that Memorial Day might have been "the most logical occasion" to do the program. Ya think?

"But we felt that the impact would actually be greater on a day when the entire nation is not focused on war dead," he said.

Ah yes, and, of course, Memorial Day falls outside the May sweeps, when viewer levels are used by the networks to set advertising rates. Memorial Day is also traditionally a day of very low television viewing. He forgot to mention that stuff.

Sievers and others we spoke with at ABC News insisted they did not realize that the May sweeps start tomorrow.

Additionally, he told Poynter Online yesterday that the idea came out of a brainstorming session and Koppel was all for it, as was the management of ABC News. Imagine, nobody at ABC News stopped to think that telecasting this thing on the second night of the May sweeps might appear like an unseemly sweeps ratings grab.

Who'd have thought that the only people in broadcast TV with no awareness of ratings sweeps periods all work at ABC News? I mean, what are the odds, really?

"Honestly, we did not know that's when the sweeps begins," Sievers told The TV Column. "We don't pay a lot of attention to that."

He also said he and his colleagues don't expect the "Nightline" telecast "to be a huge ratings hit -- we don't know whether people will watch the whole thing or 20 seconds."

"Obviously we want people to watch -- not because of ratings, but if nobody watches, it's a shame. But that's not what we're trying to do," Sievers said. "If somebody watches 20 seconds and says, 'I got it,' that's fine with me."

UPDATE: What he said. Flashback to a few months ago:

Nightline's ratings will go up tonight, and we are conscious of our ratings, because ratings mean advertisers, advertisers mean money, and money means survival.

UPDATE II: Welcome Goldstein readers! Here's another flashback (very coincidental that Jacko is in the news today too):

When Leroy Sievers, executive producer of one of network news' most esteemed programs, ABC's "Nightline," sent out an e-mail memo on November 19 telling the show's newsletter subscribers that the staff was bumping coverage of President Bush's visit to London for news about pop star Michael Jackson's arrest on multiple counts of child molestation, well, you would have thought he'd just said Ted Koppel would be broadcasting live from MTV's spring- break beach house--in a Speedo. The memo was quickly posted on media news sites with commentary dripping with surprise and thick disdain.

"Even 'Nightline'?" Sievers squeaks, mimicking the general sentiment that was aimed at him. Is nothing sacred? We'd expect this from the likes of "Dateline," but "Nightline"? Et tu, Ted?

Sievers says he sent the memo after a late-morning meeting with the entire staff, a meeting that featured a rather intense back and forth about what to do--it was anything but a given that a presidential diplomatic visit was of more gravity than a freaky pop star's supposed sexual misadventures. They went around and around about it, about half the staff believing that Bush was the way to go. Michael Jackson, they felt, was "lurid and meaningless," a scandalous pouf of a story that really didn't warrant the Ted Koppel treatment. But others adamantly felt that here is one of the best-known figures on the planet, involved in something sordid, but something he could possibly buy his way out of. Plus, they argued, the president could still be fresh the next day.

"We agonized over this one," Sievers says. In the end, after a show of hands, Michael won. "It was pretty obvious that was the way to go.... It's a big story."

Big and popular. The report was "Nightline's" top-rated show of the year, handily besting Koppel's reportage from the war in Iraq. Though the Jackson piece was no dispatch from the front, its ratings are deserved and its subject matter is nothing to be ashamed of, Sievers says. He says "Nightline" reported this story like it would any other, thoughtfully and with a hard-news mentality. "We treated it as a serious story," he says.

Tonight on Nightline, a first on network television: You will hear audio tapes of two executions carried out by the state of Georgia in 1984. The tapes will document two electrocutions, one of them requiring the procedures to be repeated because the condemned inmate was still breathing after the first jolt of electricity. These are but two of the 711 executions that have been administered around the country since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.[...]

It should also be noted that our radio affiliate in Atlanta, WSB, ran portions of these tapes in 1995 for a series called "Voices from the Chair." Other southeastern broadcasters have also run excerpts of these tapes.

We will air them nationally this evening because they are official recordings of state-sanctioned executions. After some discussion among the staff about broadcasting these tapes, the consensus is that the public has a right to hear them.

And the slippery slope fallacy rears its ugly head:

Asked if the photos of soldiers killed in the first phase of America's response to the 9/11 attacks would be included with those killed in Iraq, Koppel told to radio host Sean Hannity, "You know something, it's a perfectly legitimate question.

"But you know, if you say the kids in Afghanistan, you know, how much further are you going to go, Sean. You know how many guys have died in how many different countries?"

The ABC newsman said also that he had no plans to produce a future tribute to the U.S. heroes and victims who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, insisting that reading 3,000 names on-the-air would simply take too long.

UPDATE III: Well, what do ya know?

An average of about 4.5 percent of the TV households in the nation's largest markets watched the controversial telecast, in which anchor Ted Koppel read the names of approximately 700 U.S. servicemen and -women who have been killed in Iraq. Final viewer figures will be out later this week.

The preliminary rating is about 22 percent higher than the show had done the previous Friday in the metered markets. In fact, it's the biggest metered-market rating for "Nightline" during a May sweeps since 2002. [...]

The early numbers may have come as something of a surprise to Koppel and "Nightline" Executive Producer Leroy Sievers. During their Outraged Virtue Tour last week -- launched after The TV Column said it might appear unseemly to run this program during a competitive ratings derby, and after Sinclair pulled the show from its ABC stations -- the two men consistently said they did not expect many people to watch the broadcast.

The tour included CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," ABC's "Good Morning America," PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and NPR's "Morning Edition" and "On the Media."

National ratings come out later in the week. Industry executives say that because of the unusual nature of the "Nightline" broadcast, it's difficult to estimate how many people watched nationwide based on the limited market sample, but most predicted the final numbers would be in excess of what the program usually draws.

ABC News "specialed out" the program, running it without national advertising, which means the ratings will not be included in the May sweeps average for "Nightline." A spokesman for ABC News said, "This was never about a rating, never about a number -- it was always a tribute to the fallen. . . . We thought it spoke for itself."

Still, pulling in a number like this has to be encouraging for a show that just came off its weakest February sweeps in more than a decade in total viewers and among the 25-to-54-year-olds who are the currency of news programming. Oh, that was the wrong thing to say, wasn't it, "Nightline" folks? Try to forget it. Put it out of your minds.

Once again: good for goose, good for gander...

The airbrushing continues...

LotL:

Classified Pentagon intelligence findings: Many bombings against Americans in Iraq, and the more sophisticated of the guerrilla attacks in Fallujah, are organized, often carried out by members of Saddam Hussein's secret service, who planned for insurgency even before fall of Baghdad, the NEW YORK TIMES is planning to report in an exclusive splash Thursday.... Developing...

Lautenberg and Leaky question patriotism and Cole has 'em nailed...

Ed Gillespie told Chris Matthews that he saw his "job interview with John K... interview with John Kerry..."

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Matthews' body was apparently taken over by Terry McAwful... well, at least MSNBC doesn't pretend to be "fair and balanced"... Meanwhile, the "Bush can't admit mistakes" meme mutated into "Bush says he never makes mistakes" last night...

UPDATE II: Another Matthews lie:

“Let me ask you about a year ago. There's a great picture that will probably be in our post-production here tonight on television of the President and the aircraft carrier. Looking great. He looked great. And he said it was the end of all combat activity.

Some "highlights" from the Village Voice's list of unserious, tinfoil-hat-worthy questions for Bush:

5. Why was Flight 77 allowed to plow into the Pentagon 52 minutes after Flight 11 had smashed into the WTC?

10. Please explain why you remained at the Sarasota, Florida, elementary school for a press conference after you had finished listening to the children read, when, as a terrorist target, your presence potentially jeopardized their lives?

14. Who approved the flight of the bin Laden family out of the United States when commercial flights were grounded, when there was time for only minimal questioning by the FBI, and especially when two of those same individuals had links to WAMY, a charity suspected of funding terrorism? Why were bin Laden family members granted that special privilege and protection, when protection wasn't available to American families whose loved ones were killed on 9-11?

Tell me again about the evil Rupert Murdoch's plans to pass along conservative propaganda worldwide:

FOX spokeswoman Florence Grace said the pic “is meant to entertain audiences with a mix of spectacle and emotion. If it also increases awareness and inspires audiences to take an interest in some of the issues raised in the film, then all the better.”

With 77% reporting it's Specter ahead 51-49%... go here for the latest...

UPDATE: Now it's tied... 85% reporting...

UPDATE II: LotL:

89 percent of precincts reporting -

Arlen Specter, 434,398 - 50 percent

Pat Toomey, 426,087 - 50 percent

Cole takes on the Nazimedia slimeballs for their latest disgusting statements...

Bevan delivers a devastating retort to the JFKerry.../Dem line on the medals...

Kenneth Timmerman reports:

New evidence out of Iraq suggests that the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is having better success than is being reported. Key assertions by the intelligence community that were widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W. Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all. But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight. "There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.

Both Duelfer and Kay found that Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects." They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.

But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence. "Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.

"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.

UPDATE: This story about the foiled terror plot in Jordan is looking more important by the day:

At least one of the al-Qaida plotters arrested in Jordan earlier this month as part of a weapons of mass destruction plot that Jordanian officials say could have killed 80,000 people revealed on Monday that he was trained in Iraq before the U.S. invaded in March 2003.

In a confession broadcast on Jordanian television, the unnamed WMD conspirator revealed: "In Iraq, I started training in explosives and poisons. I gave my complete obedience to [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi," the al-Qaida WMD specialist whose base of operations was in Iraq.

Excerpts from the WMD conspirator's confession broadcast by ABC's "Nightline" late Monday show that the WMD plot was planned and trained for in Iraq more than a year before the U.S. invasion, with the terror suspect admitting, "After the fall of Afghanistan, I met Zarqawi again in Iraq."

U.S. forces vanquished the Taliban government in Kabul in December 2001 - 15 months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"Some of the details appear to be fairly significant in terms of the planning," reported "Nightline's" Chris Bury: "$170,000, a lot of meetings, getting instructions from people in Iraq, people inside Syria."

"This doesn't appear to be a mom-and-pop operation," he added.

Yesterday, the head of Hot Air America was claiming on C-Span that the Godfather brainwashes unsuspecting listeners... Today, he's outta there... Guess he's not good at the "brainwashing" business...

Remember Noah alleging that Lynne Cheney got pregnant to keep Dick out of 'Nam? The tinfoil-hat meme has spread:

But the Thunder Road Group, a consultancy working for America Coming Together, one of the Democrat-leaning "Section 527" political operations, said Mr. Cheney's fifth deferment came when his wife became pregnant.

The group noted that the rules governing the draft changed Oct. 26, 1965, to allow married, childless men to be drafted.

Mr. Cheney received a deferment three months later on the grounds that his wife was pregnant. The Cheneys' first child, Elizabeth, was born, the group noted, "nine months and two days after childless men were deemed eligible for the draft."

The accusation that Mr. Cheney used the pregnancy to avoid serving in Vietnam was made in the 2000 campaign, and resurfaced in a March opinion article on Slate.com and several Web discussion forums, including one sponsored by Mother Jones magazine.

But as Mr. Cheney has raised his profile on defense issues, Democrats said the charge is worth examining.

"The facts are out there, and we're just presenting them. It looks as if a little bit more went into the Cheney family-planning decision, but who knows," said Sarah Leonard, a spokeswoman for the Thunder Road Group.

"For Dick Cheney, who did everything he could to avoid serving in Vietnam, to attack John Kerry, a man who had the courage to put his life on the line, is a new low," she said.

The Bush campaign was outraged at the pregnancy charges.

"This is an outrageous and despicable attack, and Senator Kerry should repudiate it," spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

The Kerry campaign said yesterday that Mr. Cheney was "smearing John Kerry's patriotism," and Mr. McAuliffe said Democrats have learned from past elections that they must answer such charges instantly and forcefully.

"We shockingly saw what they did to Max Cleland in 2002," Mr. McAuliffe said of the former Democratic senator from Georgia, who lost his seat after a barrage of ads criticizing him for supporting a filibuster to delay creating the Department of Homeland Security.

"We remember how their ads put Max Cleland's face next to Osama bin Laden's and told America that a triple amputee who fought in Vietnam would not defend the security of his country," he said.

Ijaz on the Sep. 11 commission:

On the central point of contention, whether Sudan offered to extradite archterrorist Osama bin Laden to the United States in 1996 before his al Qaeda militants became an organized global threat, the commission's staff report said: "Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel bin Laden to the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer." Taken individually, both statements are probably accurate. But the gap left between what the commission wants ordinary Americans to believe by its deftly crafted statement, and the truth of what happened at that time is wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer through it.

The JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam webmasters caught...

Another soldier complains about biased coverage... (Thanks to CN.)

Like the Talkmaster, the A-word is rarely if ever mentioned here, but here are some examples of how every left-wing cause has become consumed with Bush hatred:

"I wish Barbara Bush had had choice available to her." That was a snippet of an ongoing conversation — and it was characteristic of more than one — overhead Sunday night on an Amtrak train from Washington, D.C., to New York City. The train was filled with March for Women's Lives participants.

And that was characteristic of the whole weekend. At a pre-march rally on Saturday night at the D.C. Armory by RFK Stadium, California congresswoman Maxine Waters told George W. Bush to "go to hell." Going to hell with him, said Waters, should be John Ashcroft, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice. In a brief, non-impromptu speech, that's what a member of the United States Congress chose to say. (You'll be amused — or horrified — to know she was introduced as "the future president of the United States.")

"If Only Barbara Bush Had Choice," read one sign. "Barbara Chose Poorly," read another.

UPDATE: Cole comments...

There could be more here than meets the eye:

An explosion that killed al least three U.S. personnel in Baghdad was an ambush of a top-secret unit detailed to search for weapons of mass destruction, United Press International has confirmed.

The military initially claimed that a detail of U.S. Army soldiers were about to raid a suspected bomb making factory when two were killed after an explosion. Several Iraqis in the area at the time told UPI that the building exploded when the soldiers tried to enter the house.

Although coalition spokesman Maj. Gen. Mark Kimmitt admitted that the owner of the home "was suspected of supplying chemical agents," he refused to confirm that the troops belonged to the top secret Iraq Survey Group, a task force of Central Intelligence Agency, Special Forces soldiers and other biological, chemical and nuclear weapons experts.

Kimmett would only say that, "The inspection was by a number of coalition forces."

But at the scene of the blast in Baghdad's Waziriya district -- which destroyed four military Humvee vehicles -- UPI witnessed clear evidence that the troops belonged to the ISG, including credentials looted from the vehicles by local Iraqi youth.

Nat Hentoff on Charles Pickering...

"Coincidentally," the Gorelick memo saved the ex-president's hide...

Variety's Peter Bart comes out swinging against the NYT's anti-Passion bias...

Vincent Carroll nails it about last week's "Meet the Depressed"...

The American Grandstander, Fisked... get out the popcorn...

In reporting the "Worst of John Kerry," Slate passed this along:

In December 2002, The New Yorker reported that "Kerry had never implied" the medals he threw were his. "Indeed, the protesters that day had tossed all sorts of things—dog tags, photographs, discharge papers, insignia." Kerry's only mistake was that "he had complicated the story with an excess of honesty, recalling that he'd also tossed several medals that had been given him by veterans who were unable to make the trip."

In 1984, the [Washington] Post reported that Kerry said "he had disagreed with the decision to throw away medals but agreed to toss those of another veteran at the man's request." In 1985, Kerry told the Post, "It's such a personal thing. They're my medals. I'll do what I want with them. … People say, 'You didn't throw your medals away.' Who said I had to? And why should I? It's my business. I did not want to throw my medals away."

In sum, Kerry seems innocent of duplicity but guilty of an extremely nuanced moral code, according to which it's OK to throw away your ribbons and somebody else's medals, but not your medals.

Contradicting his statements as a candidate for president, Sen. John Kerry claimed in a 1971 television interview that he threw away as many as nine of his combat medals to protest the war in Vietnam.

"I gave back, I can't remember, 6, 7, 8, 9 medals," Kerry said in an interview on a Washington, D.C. news program on WRC-TV's called Viewpoints on November 6, 1971, according to a tape obtained by ABCNEWS.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Kerry has denied that he threw away any of his 11 medals during an anti-war protest in April, 1971.

His campaign Web site calls it a "right wing fiction" and a smear. And in an interview with ABCNEWS' Peter Jennings last December, he said it was a "myth."

But Kerry told a much different story on Viewpoints. Asked about the anti-war veterans who threw their medals away, Kerry said "they decided to give them back to their country."

Kerry was asked if he gave back the Bronze Star, Silver Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for combat duty as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam. "Well, and above that, [I] gave back the others," he said.

The statement directly contradicts Kerry's most recent claims on the disputed subject to the Los Angeles Times last Friday. "I never ever implied that I did it, " Kerry told the newspaper, responding to the question of whether he threw away his medals in protest.

"I'm proud of my medals. I always was proud of them," he told Jennings in December, adding that he had only thrown away his "ribbons" and the medals of two other veterans who could not attend the protest.

Eight years later in 1996, Kerry said while he did throw out his ribbons, he didn't throw out his own medals because he "didn't have time to go home [to New York] and get them," he told The Boston Globe.

UPDATE: Implosion...

And I thought JFKerry... was against attacking Bush on the National Guard...

UPDATE II: He's definitely imploding because he's starting to recall Hodean... You'll remember he blamed his pushing of a "Bush knew" conspiracy theory on Fox, when in fact he first stated it in a radio interview... Based on this report, JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam is using the "Blame Fox" lie too:

He continued, "This is being pushed yesterday by Karen Hughes at the White House, on Fox."

On Sunday, Hughes, a Bush adviser, said on CNN's Late Edition, "I also was very troubled by the fact that he participated in the ceremony where veterans threw their medals away, and he only pretended to throw his ... I think that's very revealing.

"Did he think he did commit them or not? And who else did? And what was he really saying? Was he totally exaggerating? Was he making it up? I think the press ought to follow some line of inquiry about that."

UPDATE III: JFKerry...'s story falls apart further, as Tim Graham writes:

Can you imagine George W. Bush having the audacity to tell a network anchor "that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard"? Kudos to ABC's bloodhound Brian Ross for going to the record from 1971 and finding the discrepancy between Kerry's multiple stories about his throwing away his medals, I mean ribbons, I mean other people's medals, I mean I threw other people's medals after the event. Huh? How can liberals now insist that Bush can't handle a press conference after this blustery piece of so-called damage control? No wonder the liberal media have been nervous about applying a fraction of scrutiny. You KNOW Clinton watched this attempt to be slippery and said, "What a stinking amateur."

UPDATE V: JFKerry...:

“God, they’re doing the work of the Republican National Committee.”

The Boston Globe reminds us why Fonda matters...

UPDATE: Jacobs noticed this buried in an NYT story as well:

Of 16 categories for rating, including professional knowledge, moral courage and loyalty, Mr. Hibbard checked "not observed" in 12.

Epstein has a status report on the Prague meeting story...

In case there were any more doubt of where "60 Minutes" is coming from...

LotL:Like I said... the press was in such a rush to discredit Bush, they ran these photos without some basic fact-checking. And yes, when the mainstream press refers to Halliburton as "Dick Cheney's company" over and over again, a lawsuit against Halliburton is relevant and the mainstream press, in the anti-Bush frenzy to rush out the photos in an election year, didn't bother to note this:

WASHINGTON POST, REUTERS, CNN, AP RUN PHOTOS OF SPACE SHUTTLE COFFINS -- AS IRAQ WAR DEAD! ... AFTER INTERNET MIX-UP: Russ Kick of thememoryhole.org filed a Freedom of Information Act requesting 'all photographs showing caskets (or other devices) containing the remains of US military personnel at Dover AFB. This would include, but not be limited to, caskets arriving, caskets departing, and any funerary rites/rituals being performed. The timeframe for these photos is from 01 February 2003 to the present.'

But Kick appears to have assumed all the photos given to him were of the WAR ON TERROR/IRAQ dead!

On Thursday NASA claimed more than 70 photos featured in Kick's war dead -- were photos of Space Shuttle Columbia's crew! The shuttle blew up on 2/1/03.

'An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia's seven astronauts,' NASA said.

CNN aired space shuttle coffins as Iraq dead from thememoryhole.org. The Washington Post printed a shuttle dead photo on page A10. [The paper is planning a correction on Saturday, sources tell DRUDGE.] Reuters is also distributing a photo of the Columbia crew remains. AP has a screen grab of the first page of photos - all of which are of Columbia crew remains. AP titles the image as 'A page from the Memory Hole.org's homepage shows photographs of American war dead arriving at Dover Air Force, the nation's largest military mortuary, Thursday, April 22, 2004'... It is not clear if other media outlets are currently featuring space shuttle coffins in their rotations... Developing...

Then there's thisfrom the NYT, which is having a banner week indeed:

Among the national television news organizations, only the Fox News Channel had no plans to use any of the photos or explore the issue of why they had been barred from use in the news media, a channel spokesman said.

JFKerry... lied on "Meet the Depressed"...

Good stuff that I missed on the PDB blame game...

Iraqi WMDs in Europe? Stay tuned...

Dorothy Rabinowitz writes about the overexposed, anti-Bush "Jersey Girls"... This blog has had more on that, and the other side has gotten its message out a little, but not nearly as much... There was a single appearance of one on "Hardball"... and this call to the Godfather:

CALLER: Uh-huh. One of them is probably my daughter-in-law. First of all, I'd like to say, Rush, that I am sick and tired of all this Bush-bashing. I lost my son, John Patrick Salamone on 9/11, 2001, and I thank God every day that George Bush was our president, and I pray to God that he will be reelected in November.

RUSH: Where was your son?

CALLER: He worked in the north tower, the 104th floor, for Canter Fitzgerald.

RUSH: Well, Cantor --

CALLER: I do however put some blame on Mr. Clinton. Instead of concentrating on work and instead of playing sex games in the Oval Office, maybe there wouldn't have been a 9/11.

RUSH: What are you --

CALLER: As far as John Kerry is concerned, yes, he was a war hero, but does he remember the party that sent him there? Does he remember the party that brought him home?

RUSH: Probably, but would like to forget it.

CALLER: Yeah. For the past two and a half years my grandchildren have been safe in this country and I thank God for George W. Bush for that.

RUSH: Well, what do you think of the people of the 9/11 families that are speaking out against Bush and attending the committee hearings?


CALLER: I cannot understand it. I just can't. I think a lot of them are just thinking money, power. They can't let this go. Rush, I just don't understand it. I mean it's time to let it go. You know, I was very, very upset. I happen to have been right there when it happened. I was in New Jersey, and I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to my son. But I know he's in a better place now, and I know the reason he died was so that his children and their children will be free from terrorism, and that's the only thing that keeps me going.

Gay-baiting Sen. Max Baucus' wife has been arrested for assault over some mulch... we've known for a while that both Baucuses were Idiotarians... Terry Hinshaw reminds us of a statement she made a year ago:

"I think [Saddam Hussein] is very proud of the history of his country. I think it's we Americans who don't know the facts about what anthropologists call 'the cradle of civilization.' When we watch the bombing on television, we really don't seem to understand or appreciate that some of these places are sacred. . . . I disagree with those who say that Saddam Hussein doesn't think about this. He cares about these places and their people."

It happened again... time to blame talk radio:

Conservatives in general, and conservative radio talk show hosts in particular, are responsible for causing death threats against 9-11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick? NPR’s Nina Totenberg sure seemed to imply so in a Monday Morning Edition story, which Rush Limbaugh highlighted on his radio show on Tuesday. In it, she simplistically summarized how John Ashcroft “blamed a policy of the Clinton administration for 9/11,” a reference to his revelation that Gorelick wrote a memo which codified the bar of the CIA sharing with the FBI information about terrorists, and then the threats came as she noted how “within 48 hours, House GOP leader Tom DeLay and House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner were calling for Gorelick’s resignation. And conservative talk shows were taking up the battle cry.”

Following a clip of Limbaugh on his radio show criticizing Gorelick, without mentioning how Gorelick herself conceded in the 1995 memo that the guidelines she was imposing “go beyond what is legally required,” Totenberg launched into a lengthy defense of Gorelick and the policy she outlined. To counter Limbaugh, Totenberg intoned: “In fact, however, by all independent accounts, the wall was not created during the Clinton administration but by the Reagan and first Bush Administrations in the 1980s in response to court rulings.[...]

Of course, faithful CyberAlert readers will recall that Totenberg issued a death threat of her own a few years ago against Senator Jesse Helms.

Back on the July 8, 1995 Inside Washington, Totenberg had this reaction to Senator Jesse Helms’ complaint that AIDS research was getting a disproportionate share of federal research money. Inside Washington host Tina Gulland asked: "I don’t think I have any Jesse Helms defenders here. Nina?"

Totenberg replied: "Not me, I think he ought to be worried about what’s going on in the Good Lord’s mind, because if there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it."

Interesting Woodward piece...

The plot thickens on the Big Me's testimony... Someone here is dissembling big-time, and if it's not the Big Me, it's Kerrey... of course, if Altie were correct the mainstream press would be all over this...

UPDATE: More...

Kenneth Timmerman writes about the discredited American Grandstander...

So will JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam take his statements on this back anytime soon?

A debunking of Iraq myths, courtesy the Blogfather...

Another instance that makes you wonder a) why the NYT is as respected as it is to this day and b) why the mainstream press couldn't be bothered about the Dodd/Byrd controversy...

God bless Pat Tillman and all those like him...

A surprise from Republicans - for once, they're not letting an important issue go:

Eleven Republican senators sent a letter to the September 11 commission yesterday, asking that panel member Jamie S. Gorelick testify publicly about her role in defining the relationship between law enforcement and intelligence during her tenure in the Clinton Justice Department.

"It is our firm belief that any committee report or recommendations will be incomplete without public testimony by Ms. Gorelick about her activities while serving as deputy attorney general," Sen. Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Republican, wrote in the letter.

Ten other Republicans signed the note, which was released last night after being sent to commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, a Republican, and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat.

The senators did not call for her resignation from the commission, as some Republican House members have.

Volokh throws down the gauntlet over "Bushisms"...

UPDATE:Meanwhile, another "Kerryism"...

Oil-for-food update...

One meme on the left these days is that because "BUSH LIED!!!" everything he does is automatically suspect... but one person opposing the president has stood up to say that ultimately he will support the president's war efforts, despite his belief that he lied:

There is a cloud over this presidency. It was created by the president's decision to lie to the American people[...] the cloud of mistrust over [the president] must not be a barrier to support for U.S. action today.

I think I missed this the first time around:

Defending Clinton, Clarke replied (emphasis added): "The FBI and the CIA refused to say who did it in October of 2000. The president was therefore faced with the problem: 'Can I go ahead and bomb somebody in retaliation for the attack on the Cole when my CIA director and my FBI director won't say who did it?' Now this is the same president who, when he [previously] bombed … al Qaeda camps, because George Tenet and I and Sandy Berger recommended he do it, in order to get bin Laden and the leadership team, where we thought they were going to be meeting, the reaction he faced to that was the so-called wag-the-dog phenomenon.… [The media and Congress] said 'This is all about Monica Lewinsky. This is all about your political problems.' So now the same president, who had that experience the last time he fired cruise missiles at bin Laden, wants to fire cruise missiles at bin Laden, but now he's got a CIA director and an FBI director who won't say bin Laden did it. I would still have done it. I recommended doing it. Do I think it was a mistake that we didn't do it? Yes. But let's understand the context."

The key line is italicized. Clarke asserts that President Clinton wanted to fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan to kill bin Laden, on Clarke's own recommendation, but finally decided against it because of wag-the-dog accusations he had encountered during the Lewinsky scandal.

That's worth bearing in mind the next time Clinton defenders argue that his personal indiscretions were his own business. If the fallout over the Lewinsky scandal in any way colored his decision not to go after bin Laden in 2000 -- as Clarke alleges -- then history will judge Clinton's inability to keep his pants zipped in a far different light.

Some on the left have conceded that Clarke goes too easy on the Big Me... of course, it logically follows that he's too hard on Bush, but that isn't conceded...

Rut-roh:

Vietnam combat records posted on John F. Kerry's campaign website for the month of January 1969 as evidence of his service aboard swift boat No. 94 describe action that occurred before Kerry was skipper of that craft, according to the officer who said he commanded the boat at the time.

On the site, the Massachusetts senator is described as the skipper of Navy boat No. 94 during several actions in late January 1969.

However, Edward Peck, who was the skipper of the 94 before Kerry took over, said combat reports posted by the campaign for January 1969 involve action when he was the skipper, not Kerry. Peck, who was seriously wounded in fighting that took place on Jan. 29, 1969, said he believes Kerry campaign aides made a mistake in claiming Kerry as skipper of the 94 at that time.

On the Kerry website, the report of the combat on that day on the 94 boat is posted as occurring during Kerry's time as skipper of the boat. Peck said Kerry replaced him after the Jan. 29, 1969, event.

"Those are definitely mine," Peck said, referring to the combat reports that the Kerry campaign posted as representing Kerry's action. "There is no doubt about it."

A Kerry campaign spokesman, Michael Meehan, said in an e-mail that the campaign had obtained the combat reports for the 94 from the Navy. He did not directly address the question of why the campaign describes Kerry being skipper of the 94 at a time when Peck says he commanded the boat.

Taranto has been must-read of late... Queen Hill implies her hubby lied about Iraq... Derrick Jackson's fuzzy math... oil-for-food suspect Sevan makes a laughable excuse... Sen. Bob Graham says that Sep. 11 is so five minutes ago...

UPDATE: Even more here and here...

John Podhoretz has actually read Plan of Attack and has some interesting observations...

A massive article on USA Today's Blair, Jack Kelley...

Mikey, "Benedict Arnold"...

UPDATE: Going for the threepeat...

That other show (besides Angel) that's ending this season has a hell of a great lead actor...

Mary McGrory has passed away at 85... Condolences to family, friends and colleagues...

The controversial Marine photo has been doctored according to the soldier in it...

The UN has opened up an investigation into the oil-for-food program... ABC News, for once, deserves credit for keeping up with this story...

Good for goose, good for gander...

UPDATE: The records will supposedly be released... As for Teresa's tax returns however...

As Kaus points out, JFKerry... continues to get a leader's name wrong... Remember when Bush did something like this?

JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam has a bit of a race problem, according to CNN.com...

Hot Air America fails to impress during an average broadcast day...

Thanks once more to Carnell, here's an "O'Reilly Factor" segment from this past Wednesday:

O'REILLY: Thanks for staying with us, I'm Bill O'Reilly. In the
"Unresolved Problems" segment tonight, a disturbing situation surrounding
some 9/11 families. It has come to our attention that some Americans who
lost loved ones in the terror attack have banded together to blame the
situation on President Bush. We have not seen any families doing that to
President Clinton, although there may be some we don't know about.

The disturbing aspect to this is that an argument can be made that
ideology is being driven by the dead. With us now to talk about it is
attorney Norman Siegel, who is representing the Skyscraper Safety
Campaign, a group set up by some 9/11 families, and Debra Burlingame,
whose brother was a pilot of the hijacked airliner that crashed into the
Pentagon.

So you're upset about it, you're disturbed about this politicization of
the situation?

DEBRA BURLINGAME, LOST BROTHER ON 9/11: Yes, I am very disturbed by it. I
was in the hearing room for Condoleezza Rice's testimony. And I have to
say, there were aspects of it that were like a Roman circus. I mean, there
were people applauding some of the harsher questioning. There was calling
out during the testimony. One woman yelled out, shame.

O'REILLY: Were these family members?

BURLINGAME: Yes, oh yes.

O'REILLY: They were family members doing this.

BURLINGAME: Yes. And I just felt that they were -- they clearly to me had
an agenda. Now whether that agenda was they're simply angry and they want
answers or if there is something more to it, I don't know. But I think
they need to be very, very careful because the media has latched onto
them, refers to them as the 9/11 family members...

O'REILLY: Yes. There is no question about it. And let me amplify what Ms.
Burlingame is saying. We called these people today to come in here and
they wouldn't. And you know what was interesting? They all e- mail each
other. It's organized. And we see them show up on MSNBC in blocks, little
blocks they show up. And they're all anti-Bush. There is not any Clinton
criticism.

Now are you ideological or are you coming at it from an ideology?

BURLINGAME: Well, I keep referring to myself as a pod person because I was
very much a pro-Clinton supporter. I voted for him in two elections. I was
a supporter of Vice President Gore in his bid for the presidency. And now
I'm very much a supporter of President Bush.

O'REILLY: Why?

BURLINGAME: Because I saw the way -- to me 9/11, as he says, changed
everything for me.

O'REILLY: All right. So you like him as a terror warrior.

BURLINGAME: That's right.

O'REILLY: All right. Are you angry as the others are about the -- there is
no question that both presidents did not engage the terrorists as they
could have. I mean, it's hindsight, we all know that. But they could have
done a better job. Are you angry at them?

BURLINGAME: No.

O'REILLY: Neither man?

BURLINGAME: No, at neither man am I angry. I was initially. I mean, you've
just lost your loved one in a brutal fashion. But I think that not only my
brother but the nation was sucker punched.

O'REILLY: OK. What do you think counselor, because you know the families,
you are representing some of them?

NORMAN SIEGEL, ATTORNEY: Well, we shouldn't engage in monolithic
stereotypes. I think the vast majority of 9/11 family members are not
involved in the public discourse. I think there are some who have and
continue to be very critical and very angry. But I don't think it's
ideologically driven. The ones that I know, they are critical of Clinton.
They're critical of most people who are in the elected system because they
don't think that they're telling the truth. They don't think they're
responsive and they're angry that people weren't there for them after
9/11.

I think that what happens is the media and the partisan political people
latch onto some of them, use them, some of them get used, some use the
political people. But by and large...

O'REILLY: But you can't possibly think that there aren't some anti- Bush
family members out there trading in that, because we know them. We've seen
them. I've had them on the air here.

SIEGEL: What is remarkable to me is the people that I have been working
with for the last year-and-a-half. The evolution, somewhat an evolution
from you, too, in some ways, from where they were, very often apolitical,
into being now what I call public citizens who are speaking out. Without
some of these folks there would not be a 9/11 Commission.

O'REILLY: We don't mind that at all. I would be doing the same thing if I
lost people. I speak out and I didn't lose anybody. That's fine.

SIEGEL: Do you speak out?

(LAUGHTER)

O'REILLY: Yes. But it's not a selective, partisan, targeted, let's use my
dead brother to make a president look bad, no matter if it were Clinton, I
would be having the same discussion with you. I think there is something
morally wrong with that.

SIEGEL: My answer would be the same. I think that some of the family
members that I know are very critical of Clinton as well. They're
critical...

O'REILLY: That's fine, if they're critical of the whole system across the
board.

SIEGEL: But Clinton is not the president right now. So they're interacting...

O'REILLY: Yes. But you don't go, as Ms. Burlingame pointed out, to a
hearing and boo and applaud and try to make somebody look bad. That's
using the dead to promote ideology and I'm offended by that.

SIEGEL: I'm not sure it's ideology. I think what it is, is people who may
be in not great taste are acting out. That's a First Amendment right.
People can...

O'REILLY: Yes. They have a right to do it and I have the right to call
them on it.

SIEGEL: To criticize them, there's no doubt about it.

O'REILLY: And if they're going to do that they ought to go up to Chappaqua
with a sign, too, you know, spend a little time and go right up there.

SIEGEL: But the action is in Washington right now and that where they are.
I think that if a Democrat was the president right now and you had the
same facts after 9/11, I think you would be seeing a lot of the same, 100
percent? No. But if you're asking me, are there some family members who
perhaps are now wanting Bush not to be reelected? I think the answer is
yes.

O'REILLY: And they have the right to do that but not use their dead
relatives to hammer one guy and one guy only.

Now, Ms. Burlingame, are you -- offended by this 9/11 Commission? Does
this do anything to help you at all or are these people just
grandstanders?

BURLINGAME: Well, I was very much in favor from the get go of the 9/11
Commission. And when I saw it heading down this partisan path, I got very
upset. I have to tell you, I sat in that hearing room, and when I listed
to, for instance, Commissioner Ben-Veniste hammering away at this
brilliant woman, Condoleezza Rice, as if she's public enemy number one, I
was aggrieved by that because I thought this hearing is to redress the
problems that ended up in my brother's death.

O'REILLY: See I didn't mind if Ben-Veniste asked tough questions to Dr.
Rice, but I was really angry that he didn't do the same to Richard Clarke.
He gave Clarke a pass, Ben-Veniste, so he's a tough guy. We like tough
guys here. All right. This is a tough guy show. But don't give me pounding
one and lollipop the other.

BURLINGAME: Well, there are people who say that they can tell, you know --
they can tell the political affiliation of the questioners without even
watching the screen.

O'REILLY: And it's a two-way street.

SIEGEL: There is a structural problem with the commission. From the
beginning it was bipartisan. There is no third party candidate, no
independent candidate, there's no civil rights member. There is no family
member...

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: Here's a way to solve this. Get all the politicians off it and
put in retired intelligence professionals. You are remarkably reasonable
today, counselor. I'm stunned. You must be just back from vacation. Ms.
Burlingame, thanks for coming in here. We appreciate it. Very interesting.

SIEGEL: You have hurt my national reputation.

O'REILLY: I know, you're not going to be able to go out tonight.

(LAUGHTER)

Worth saying again: The Big Me reportedly received similar warnings, in some cases, more specific...

UPDATE: Time puts the best spin on Billy Jeff's likely stories to the commission (considering how low a priority Osama was according to his own foreign policy paper in 2000)...

More on warnings here...

Powell refutes the Woodward book... will this get half the attention of the original rollout of the book?

The left and the mainstream partisan press threw all they could at Bush... Iraq is at its worst point since the fall of Baghdad... yet Bush's numbers don't budge... Somehow I doubt Woodward's sideshow (after Clarke and Suskind/O'Neill, this silliness only appeals to the Bush-hating true believers) will change that...

Welcome Sully readers! The post you're looking for is here in the updates, but there's more where that came from...

Dennis Miller quotes for last week...

Can we finally do away with this nonsense that Iraqi WMDs were some sort of invention of the Bush administration? One now has to believe that there was some grand, worldwide conspiracy to "mislead" to believe that the claims were unfounded...

The Dem/David Duke connection goes further than I realized:

Two political scientists from Hamilton College in New York compared the areas where David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klansman, ran well in 1991 with the vote for Jindal's Democratic opponent, Kathleen Blanco, in 2003. There was a remarkable correlation. Where Duke did well, Blanco did well.

Blanco, who'd served as lieutenant governor before being elected governor, did not make any racial appeals in the campaign. Yet she benefited enormously from race-influenced voting. "Our results indicate that a significant number of those who voted for David Duke, the most racist statewide candidate of the post-civil rights era, contrary to previous elections and even after controlling for other factors, swung their support from the non-white Republican to the white Democrat," Richard Skinner and Philip A. Klinkner concluded in their study.

Shields, to his credit, has apologized for his "women talk too much" remark last week on the "Capital Gang"...

Hendrie went off on another tirade Friday night against JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam, as well as the FCC... he explained to an anti-Bush caller spouting the Stern line that it's the television business lining the FCC's pockets that's getting radio in trouble...

"Sit down!" - Hodean

"That's not your business, it's mine." - JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam

"People ought to stay out of our business." - Thomas Kean

Mikey speaks... you know what that means... lies-a-plenty... (Thanks to Sully.)

A note from our April 1 guest blogger, Aeschines:

BUSH LIED!!!!

He said he "thought" 50 tons of mustard gas when they actually found half that... Likely story... clearly this was all a planned effort to mislead, as most Americans only care about chemical weapons over 25 tons. Impeach now!

A thank you note to Rice from Sep. 11 families... wonder if this'll get much play... more on this later...

Sadly, it looks more and more like the picture is real... if so, this marine should be punished to the fullest extent of military law, and I apologize to CAIR and other groups who were justifiably outraged...

Sully speaks out on the Yee case...

So, along with the FBI's 1998 flight school warning, we discover that the idea that Islamist extremists would attack the U.S. was six years old in 2001, the idea of Osama attacking U.S. planes was three years old, etc....

Back to your regularly scheduled Bush-blaming...

ALTERMAN WATCH: Altie describes himself as modest... see, lefties have a sense of humor after all...

Newsflash: JFKerry... still, still unlikable! (Where's Kaus on this? - Ed.)

A refreshing change from the Howell Raineses of the world...

Another ridiculous lefty meme rises up (like the "he goes on vacation too much!" whining):

Bush, in fact, does not read his President's Daily Briefs, but has them orally summarised every morning by the CIA director, George Tenet. President Clinton, by contrast, read them closely and alone, preventing any aides from interpreting what he wanted to know first-hand.

UPDATE: There's also this meme from Sid Vicious:

The ultimate revelation was Bush's vision of a divinely inspired apocalyptic struggle in which he is the leader of a crusade bringing the Lord's "gift." "I also have this belief, strong belief that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." But religious war is not part of official US military doctrine.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.

Turns out those "70 field investigations" weren't all they're cracked up to be... (Thanks to Knapp.)

West beat me to it... So I'll just say "ditto."

UPDATE: And then I read the AP article... here is their description of Dodd's original comments:

Dodd offered only general praise of Byrd and did not specifically mention any of Byrd's votes, views or acts. The occasion was Byrd casting his 17,000th vote. Other senators, including Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., also paid tribute to Byrd.

Dodd, D-Conn., has been criticized by some conservative commentators for saying April 1 that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., would have been a great senator and leader at any time in history, including the Civil War.

It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.

UPDATE II: Some of Dodd's critics are not persuaded... this article comes close to being a good example of how the mainstream press on the whole should have covered it from day one:

Conservatives were still not satisfied. "He's basically trying to run for cover right now," said David Almasi, director of the National Leadership Network of Conservative African-Americans, which has called on Dodd to resign.

"I don't think he can expect this to go away because he apologized."

Ian Walters, American Conservative Union communications director, agreed, saying further explanation is needed. He suggested Dodd go on a conservative radio talk show to explain himself.

Nevertheless, Dodd, a savvy politician who knows dynamite when he sees it, felt he should say he was sorry so there would be no misunderstandings.

Among those he called this week were Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau. They talked for about half an hour, and Dodd offered him an apology.

"He said that some believed the things he said about Sen. Byrd were insensitive," Shelton recalled. "He said, `I want you to know it was not intended to be a slight.' He was making sure we understood that if there was something said we found offensive, it was unintentional."

The lobbyist, who has worked closely with Dodd on a number of issues, said not to worry. "I told him I appreciated his apology, but it's not necessary," Shelton said.

If you needed any further confirmation that the people behind Hot Air America and the people behind Media Horseshit Online had about the same level of maturity, here it is...

Who in their right mind would want to do business with them now?

Best reason yet to oppose (at least parts of) the Patriot Act...

Cole has the goods on the latest photo hoax which went so far as to get CAIR outraged and demand an investigation...

UPDATE: The debate rages in Cole's comments... at this point, I'm now leaning towards the theory that both are fake...

For a long time, one of the big lefty memes on Bush has been "he won't admit he makes mistakes," a meme continuing even today... For those who were either asleep during the news conference or are unable to read transcripts, here is what Bush said:

I hope I -- I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. [...]

And my fear, of course, is that this will go on for a while -- and, therefore, it's incumbent upon us to learn from lessons or mistakes, and leave behind a better foundation for Presidents to deal with the threats we face.

Here's what I feel about that. The person responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden. That's who's responsible for killing Americans. And that's why we will stay on the offense until we bring people to justice.

UPDATE: JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam passes along the meme himself...

UPDATE II: More here...

Jack Cafferty - the next Bernard Goldberg?

Later, at about 7:26am EST, after Andy Serwer had joined the team on the couches to make a foursome, Cafferty outlined his “Cafferty File” question of the day for viewers to e-mail him with their comments: “If the New York Times and Peter Jennings and perhaps CBS News aren't enough for you, then you're going to love this. The New York Observer reports former Vice President Al Gore is close to the sealing the deal to buy a cable TV channel. Gore's team says they will make the station a, quote, 'youth oriented public affairs channel.’ Yes, that should sell pretty well.

“Can you say liberal? And the liberal talk radio station Air America debuts today. They kick things off at noon. I guess they don't like to get up early over there. Comedian Al Franken is the lead off hitter and he's calling his show 'The O'Franken Factor.’ Clever, no? His guests today will include filmmaker Michael Moore, never been interviewed I guess before, that's not exactly a big gamble.

“Anyway, the question is, does America need additional 'liberal’ media outlets? And as Soledad so rightly pointed out to me, that is not synonymous with communist -- they are quite different.”

O’Brien chipped in: “That's right before I said I wish I’d taken the day off. Because we kept going on in that vein and it started getting-”

Hemmer: “I think it's a good question -- I think there's a another good question here, too. Why hasn't a liberal radio station or TV network never taken off before?”

Cafferty explained: “We have them. Are you, did you just get off a vegetable truck from the South Bronx? They're everywhere.”

Hemmer: “It is quite obvious the intent of the message from Al Franken, but there's a business decision in here too that goes back to this theory about why people -- advertisers -- why they'd link themselves with certain people and why certain others.”

Cafferty: “The New York Times is making a few bucks for a few years; they're not exactly a right-wing fascist propaganda sheet.”

O’Brien: “You all can debate in the commercial because I've got things to do.”

Cafferty: “What do they call this joint? The Clinton News Network?”

Bill O'Reilly to Katrina vanden Heuvel:

Katrina! Time out, Katrina! You've had three times now. That's enough for you. Women talk too much.

Kate! Time out, Kate! You've had three times now. That's enough for you. Women talk too much.

Another lefty conspiracy theory dead and buried:

BEN-VENISTE: I agree with you, sir.
The problem was in the communication of information which did not reach those who might have made a difference.

Let me ask you, as my time is expiring, one question, which has been frequently put to members of this commission; probably all of us have heard this one way or another.

And we are mindful that part of the problem with the Warren commission's work on the Kennedy assassination was the failure to address certain theories that were extant and questions and much of the work was done behind closed doors. So I would like to provide you with the opportunity to answer one question that has come up repeatedly.

At some point in the spring or summer of 2001, around the time of this heightened threat alert, you apparently began to use a private chartered jet plane, changing from your use of commercial aircraft on grounds, our staff is informed, of an FBI threat assessment. And, indeed, as you told us, on September 11th itself you were on a chartered jet at the time of the attack.

Can you supply the details, sir, regarding the threat which caused you to change from commercial to private leased jet?

ASHCROFT: I am very please pleased to address this issue.

BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.

ASHCROFT: Let me indicate to you that I never ceased to use commercial aircraft for my personal travel.

ASHCROFT: My wife traveled to Germany and back in August. My wife and I traveled to Washington, D.C., on the 3rd of September before the 17th -- before the 11th attack on commercial aircraft.

I have exclusively traveled on commercial aircraft for my personal travel; continued through the year 2000, through the entirety of the threat period to the nation.

The assessment made by the security team and the Department of Justice was made early in the year. It was not related to a terrorism threat as a threat to the nation. It was related to an assessment of the security for the attorney general, given his responsibilities and the job that he undertakes. And it related to the maintenance of arms and other things by individuals who travel with the attorney general. And it was their assessment that we would be best served to use government aircraft.

These were not private chartered jet aircraft. These were aircraft of the United States government. And it was on such an aircraft that I was on my way to an event in Milwaukee on the morning of September the 11th.

BEN-VENISTE: I'm pleased to have been able to give you the opportunity to clarify that issue for all who have written to this commission and communicated in other ways about their questions about that, sir.

An hour from now's news right now! (Thanks to the Blogfather.)

The bastards responsible for this deserve death, period...

UPDATE: Ditto this... Al Jazeera, by the way, grows more despicable by the day...

NRO has been on the case of Jamie Gorelick, member of the commission and author of this memo...

UPDATE: Here's how the document was introduced by Ashcroft in the hearings today:

When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York searched for the suspects.But because of the wall, FBI Headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists.

At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote Headquarters, quote, "Whatever has happened to this - someday someone will die - and wall or not - the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems'.Let's hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decision then, especially since the biggest threat to us, UBL, is getting the most protection."

FBI Headquarters responded, quote: "We are all frustrated with this issue ... These are the rules.NSLU does not make them up."

But somebody did make these rules.Someone built this wall.

The basic architecture for the wall in the 1995 Guidelines was contained in a classified memorandum entitled "Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations."The memorandum ordered FBI Director Louis Freeh and others, quote: "We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."

This memorandum established a wall separating the criminal and intelligence investigations following the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the largest international terrorism attack on American soil prior to September 11.Although you understand the debilitating impact of the wall, I cannot imagine that the Commission knew about this memorandum, so I have declassified it for you and the public to review. Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this Commission.

Nader does his best to get headlines with a mainstream press largely against him:

"The Pentagon is quietly recruiting new members to fill local draft boards, as the machinery for drafting a new generation of young Americans is being quietly put into place," Mr. Nader said in a press release sent out to constituents and posted on his Web site during the weekend.

"Young Americans need to know that a train is coming, and it could run over their generation in the same way that the Vietnam War devastated the lives of those who came of age in the sixties."

Despite a rising tide of combat deaths and the prospect of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan for years to come, Americans continue to volunteer for duty and are re-enlisting at record rates.

The services believe a combination of patriotism and the economy is driving people to the military and keeping them there.

“The war is not only not having a negative effect, but it is helping to reinforce the number of people who want to join,” said Cmdr. John Kirby, a spokesman for the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel.

Even the Army National Guard, which has had 150,000 citizen soldiers mobilized for up to a year, has seen retention rates “going through the roof,” said Guard spokesman Maj. Robert Howell.

When not producing infomercials for books, "60 Minutes" is still capable of good reporting:

President Bush himself has said, "Pickering has got a very strong record on civil rights. Just ask the people he lives with."

60 Minutes did, and found that in Mississippi, Pickering enjoys strong support from the many blacks who know him. In his hometown of Laurel, four of the five black City Council members say they back him, because of all he's done to improve race relations. And many black attorneys who practice before him say Pickering is fair and first-rate. They include attorney Charles Lawrence, who says, "I trust him because I've been in front of him. I've had cases in front of him. And that's not to say I've always won. I haven't always won. But he, he has an understanding of the law and he applies it he applies it fairly across the board.

Deborah Gambrell, another black attorney, and another Democrat, thinks Pickering got a raw deal from those Democrats in Washington.

"This man makes for a level playing field," she says of Pickering, "and that's the thing that I admire about him."

What was her reaction when Democratic senators labeled Pickering "insensitive on racial issues"?

Her reply: "As an attorney who's appeared before him year after year representing - and I have represented the NAACP on a matter before him and representing other clients - I was shocked and appalled. Judge Pickering is not fair? Judge Pickering is insensitive? I was shocked."

Several past presidents of the NAACP in Mississippi support Pickering. But today's NAACP leaders do not. Some feel the seat should go to a black judge. The national NAACP issued a statement, calling Pickering hostile to its priorities, and all its branches in Mississippi oppose the judge.

But when Clarence McGee, who heads the NAACP in Hattiesburg, sat down for 60 Minutes with a Pickering supporter, Charles Evers, brother of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the NAACP president got an earful:

Charles Evers: You know, maybe you don't know, you know that Charles Pickering is a man helped us to break the Ku Klux Klan. Did you know that?

Clarence McGee: I heard that statement made.

Charles Evers: I mean, I know that. Do you know that?

Clarence McGee: I don't know that.

Charles Evers: I know that. Do you know about the young black man that was accused of robbing the young white woman. You know about that?

Clarence McGee: Nope.

Charles Evers: So Charles Pickering took the case. Came to trial and won the case and the young man became free.

Clarence McGee: I don't know about that.

Charles Evers: But did you also know that Charles Pickering is the man who helped integrate his churches. You know about that?

Clarence McGee: No.

Charles Evers: Well, you don't know a thing about Charles Pickering.

Noah's had a good record with the "Whopper" as of late, but this is just desperate and sad... His "evidence" that Rice told a "whopper" is info from 1998... that would be historical... and this:

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks. …

There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United StatesIs a "pattern of suspicious activity consistent with preparations" for attacks the same as a warning of a "coming attack?" Only if you wish to torture the English language for sport... There is also no indication that this is "new threat information"... Even the information from three months earlier is not "new threat information," unless as NBC used to say it was "new to them"... No one has come forth claiming such a thing... Sloppy work, Noah. He's done a good job on some, but it's interesting that he avoided the whoppers of O'Neill and Clarke, chronicled here...

Posted by Henry Hanks at 06:42 PM | TrackBack

Hitch responds to the "Iraq is Vietnam" meme...

Sully links to another stellar Blair speech...

"60 Minutes" now says they will do the bare minimum with Woodward's book... Of course, I'm still wondering about Hewitt's shares...

One can't help but think of Kaus when reading about this...

UPDATE: Here's what it says:

Senator Edward Kennedy is absolutely right when he called Iraq "Bush's Vietnam." But it's not only Bush. It's his whole damn Bunch: Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove and Ridge.

They've tried to blame the Iraq war on bad intelligence, on Al
Qaida, on terrorists, on foreigners from Iraq and Syria. Bush doesn't even know who in the hell we're fighting. The Bush Bunch calls the Iraqis insurgents. Did you know that Britain called the American revolutionaries insurgents and traitors? The Iraqis aren't insurgents. They're Iraqi patriates [sic] who want us the hell out of their country, and we should get the hell out of their country now!

We have Marines and soldiers being killed by the dozens with many more wounded. How many have to be killed before the Bush Bunch is satisfied? How many burial services of our Iraq dead has Bush attended? Any? How many military hospitals has Bush visited to talk to our wounded who have lost arms, or legs, or their eye sight, or combinations of these--how many?

And then there's Rumsfeld who said of Iraq "We have our good days and our bad days." We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say "This is one of our bad days" and pull the trigger. Do you want t salvage our country? Be a savior of our country? Then vote for John Kerry and get rid of the whole Bush Bunch!

Please make a donation of ANY amount of money you can afford and send it to John Kerry for President, Inc. . . . Do it NOW. Thank you.

The latest on l'affaire Dodd...

UPDATE: Prather has more to say...

As Kevin Drum demonstrated, a central part of American Grandstander Dick Clarke's claims is what he had to say about the "Millennium plot"... now we find out that those claims are riddled with errors... How exactly does a counterterrorism "expert" present himself as very knowledgable on a matter such as this, yet get so much wrong? Either he a) really isn't as knowledgable as he claims, putting the rest of his claims in question or b) he's deliberately misleading, distorting and/or lying, putting the rest of his claims in question... as if the other Clarke critiques linked on this blog didn't already make that clear...

UPDATE: Reno backs up Rice (not Clarke), as Roemer tries to put words in her mouth:

ROEMER: My time has just about run out.

Just to clarify one point then. You think the decision made by the guard on the border to get Ressam coming into our country to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport then was somehow related to the frenetic...

RENO: No.

ROEMER: ... active activity of the principals meeting?

RENO: No. I think she did that -- I mean, I think that was just good police work, and it was a lucky break for us.

RENO: But you've got to capitalize on lucky breaks and understand better what you can learn from them.

ROEMER: Now, the fact that these principals are meeting does have an impact on bringing the CIA director, the FBI director and you and the president together to make decisions on a regular basis.

Thank you very much.

RENO: And you asked a question: How many times I met with the president? I don't know.

A priceless exchange from "Colossalfailure:"

And so she's running again, trying to regain her seat in Congress. Good luck, Cynthia McKinney. While you're at it, here's a campaign slogan you can use: Cynthia McKinney, the party follows her lead. It's true.

BEGALA: No, first, the party did drum her out. She was defeated in the Democratic primary for Congress.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: No, it didn't. She was not -- name a party leader who denounced her. Name one.

BEGALA: Zell Miller.

So far, members of the Congressional Black Caucus are holding their views close to the vest, opting to withhold comment and any endorsement for their old colleague for now. The same goes for her fellow black congressmen in the Georgia delegation.

But former CBC chair Eddie Bernice Johnson did give Foxnews.com a quick thought on McKinney’s bid. “I have not yet found a reason not to support her,” she said.

I definitely have some feelings about any outside group exerting this kind of influence in a race, and I've been receiving angry calls from black voters all day, saying they should rally against Jewish candidates," said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

"To have non-African-Americans from around the country putting millions into a race to unseat one of our leaders for expressing her right of free speech is definitely a problem," Ms. Johnson said.

Factcheck.org continues to highlight campaign dishonesty...

F. Lee Levin points out the warnings the press isn't trumpeting because they preceded Jan. 20, 2001... More here, here and here...

In fact, the whole "scandal" over this PDB, especially the ben-Veniste claim that its title was "secret," is totally invented by the left and their puppets in the mainstream press... Don't believe me? Witness this from an NYT reporter considered "right wing:"

KING: Judith Miller, concerning briefing, paper in the press conference, is it true if Clinton was still president, given all the same situations, the Republicans would be knocking this and the Democrats would be trying to defend them.

Is this political?

MILLER: Well, I think that's what the American people are now in the process of deciding. In whether or not this is persuasive or whether or not this is the questions that have been raised are partisan. And I think that, in a way, what I can say is that, had President Clinton been president and received the famous PBD, Larry, the presidential daily brief, which now every American -- and acronym American knows, is that you can be certain there would have been an activist response to that kind of a memo.

KING: Like locking the cockpits on all airplanes?

MILLER: There are things that take a long time to do, but there certainly would have been a meeting.

UPDATE: Cole adds to the history lesson...

I wonder if Louis Freeh's claims will get the full "60 Minutes" treatment...

As noted earlier, there are lots of suspicious things going on with this JFKerry... FBI files story... the Telegraph seems to be behind the curve but at least they picked up the story...

Scott Ritter and the oil-for-food scandal intersect:

Mr Ritter has admitted accepting $400,000 from Shakir al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-born Detroit businessman, in order to finance a documentary film titled In Shifting Sands. The film's principal theme - highly controversial when it was released in 2001 - was that UN weapons inspectors had "defanged" Iraq.

Today, an investigation by the Financial Times and Italian daily business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reveals that Mr Khafaji belonged to a select group to whom the Baghdad regime awarded "allocations" for millions of barrels of oil under the UN oil-for-food programme between 1995 and 2002. These allocations were then sold on to international traders for profit.

Dennis Miller highlights...

Note here how Daschle said there was "no parallel" between Dodd and Lott's statements... So the Senate Minority Leader doesn't see the problem with saying a former Klansman who recently spewed racial epithets on national television would be "right at any time"... Hmm...

12 days later, I'm notified that I'm in the Washington Times:

John Kerry, who expressed outrage that President Bush used the subject of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction to poke fun at himself during a recent media dinner, latched onto a veteran who was equally outraged. Unfortunately, the veteran apparently was a former supporter of white supremacist David Duke.

James Taranto, in his Best of the Web Today column at www.OpinionJournal.com, quotes from Mr. Kerry's press release last week:

"How Out of Touch Can This President Be?

"George Bush insulted me as a veteran and as a friend to many still serving in Iraq. This act lowers the dialogue about weapons of mass destruction. War is the single most serious event that a President or government can carry its people into. No weapons of mass destruction have been found and that is no joke — this is for real. This cheapens the sacrifice that American soldiers and their families are dealing with every single day." — Brad Owens (Iraqi War Veteran, U.S. Army Reserves)

Mr. Taranto credited blogger Henry Hanks for calling his attention to this 1998 article from the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle:

The Richmond County Republican Party has cast out one of its candidates for the state House.

The party's executive committee voted to "disassociate itself" from House District 115 candidate Bradley Owens because of his 1992 association with then-presidential candidate David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

A picture of Mr. Owens clasping the hand of Mr. Duke appeared on the front page of the Augusta Chronicle on March 6, 1992, when the avowed white supremacist visited Langley, S.C.

Said Mr. Taranto: "As Hanks writes, the GOP refused to back Owens, 'but now he's good enough for the apparent Democratic nominee for president of the United States, simply because he's a veteran.' "

UPDATE: And now I'm being quoted without attribution...

The president, just prior to the war:

The work ahead is demanding. It will be difficult to help freedom take hold in a country that has known three decades of dictatorship, secret police, internal divisions, and war. It will be difficult to cultivate liberty and peace in the Middle East, after so many generations of strife. Yet, the security of our nation and the hope of millions depend on us, and Americans do not turn away from duties because they are hard. We have met great tests in other times, and we will meet the tests of our time.

Kathleen Parker proves once again why she's one of America's best columnists...

Considering the mountain of evidence that the Sudanese offer did indeed take place, the Big Me could very well have lied to the commission...

Well what do ya know, the August memo has a stark resemblance to Rice's description of it... who'da thunk?

More here...

UPDATE: Even more here...

A quote from our last president puts the lie to the claim that the August memo should have prevented Sep. 11...

Buck-toothed Moron will surely launch a tirade against this lying liar... er, except that it's him...

Easterbrook gets one right...

Don't forget this classic...

The plot thickens:

The author who alleges that three boxes of FBI files dealing with Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry's anti-war group were stolen from his home last month did not allow police officers to process the crime scene.
The police report of the incident also neglects to mention that the Kerry campaign dispatched a messenger to the home of author Gerald Nicosia to pick up copies of the FBI files a week before the alleged theft of the documents.

CNSNews.com has obtained a copy of the police report related to the alleged theft of three of the 14 boxes containing FBI files that Nicosia was keeping in his home. Nicosia is the author of the book "Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement" and is a supporter of Kerry.

In addition to the three boxes, Nicosia alleges that "several file folders have been removed from the remaining 11 boxes," according to the police report.

'No Signs of Forced Entry'

The March 26 report from the Twin Cities Police Department in Larkspur, Calif., noted that "there were no signs of forced entry into the residence." The department confirmed Thursday that there were still no leads or suspects.

Absent from the police report was any mention of the fact that the Kerry campaign had sent an aide to Nicosia's house in Corte Madera, Calif., to review the documents. Kerry's campaign dispatched the aide on the same day CNSNews.com reported that the FBI files showed Kerry was in attendance at a controversial 1971 meeting in Kansas City of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

That meeting allegedly involved the discussion of possibly trying to assassinate several U.S. senators still committed to the American war effort in Vietnam. Before the publication of the CNSNews.com article on March 18, Kerry had repeatedly denied being in attendance at the meeting.

Nicosia said he reached out to Kerry's campaign a week before the documents were allegedly stolen.

Silence About the Messenger

"Senator Kerry was obviously [at the Kansas City meeting in 1971]. I called the Kerry office and said, 'You know, I think you folks really should look at these documents before you make any further statements,' Nicosia told Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" on April 2.

"And ... they immediately sent a messenger to my house, got copies of the documents, and that evening Senator Kerry did issue a retraction and said based on the documents, he now believed that he was at that meeting," Nicosia said.

The police report noted that journalists, including those from the Los Angeles Times and CNN, had had access to Nicosia's home. The report also indicated that a sliding-glass-door repairman had been granted access to the home. But there is no mention of the Kerry campaign having sent a representative there.

Lizza tries to catch Cheney in a contradiction, and starts with:

Remember back during the first panicky moments of the Bush administration's response to Dick Clarke's accusations, when Dick Cheney took to Rush Limbaugh's airwaves and announced that Clarke was "out of the loop" and "clearly missed a lot of what was going on" when it came to counterterrorism policy at the White House?

Q All right, let's get straight to what the news is all about now, before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cyber security side of things, that is he was given a new assignment at some point here. I don't recall the exact time frame.

Q Cyber security, meaning Internet security?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, worried about attacks on the computer systems and the sophisticated information technology systems we have these days that an adversary would use or try to the system against us.

Q Well, now that explains a lot, that answer right there explains -- (Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, he wasn't -- he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff. And I saw part of his interview last night, and he wasn't --

Q He was demoted.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It was as though he clearly missed a lot of what was going on. For example, just three weeks after the -- after we got here, there was communication, for example, with the President of Pakistan, laying out our concerns about Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and the importance of going after the Taliban and getting them to end their support for the al Qaeda. This was, say, within three weeks of our arrival here.

So I guess, the other thing I would say about Dick Clarke is that he was here throughout those eight years, going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center; and '98, when the embassies were hit in East Africa; in 2000, when the USS Cole was hit. And the question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?

UPDATE: Lizza has corrected (but fails to acknowledge a difference at all) and Luskin tackled this earlier...

Didn't take long...

UPDATE: For the American Grandstander, it's "Dated CBS, married ABC"... I'm sure he's donating "portions" of the ABC paycheck to the families too right?

An extensive anti-Chumpsky piece...

Bob Kerrey, who wanted to know why Bush didn't do anything about the Cole, made a statement in March of 2001:

First, following a cease fire Iraq agreed to allow United Nations weapons inspectors to verify that Iraq had destroyed its capacity to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Until verification was complete the United Nations would enforce external sanctions that permitted Iraq to sell oil for food and medicine. The time needed to complete this inspection would have been a few months, if Saddam Hussein cooperated. As has come to be common practice Iraq confounded expectations by interfering, harassing and finally banning the weapons inspectors from its territory. Reliable intelligence has confirmed the reason for their behavior to be simple: They want to maintain robust programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Second, Iraq has maintained a policy so hostile to human rights—especially for the Kurdish minority in the north and the Shia in the south that no dissent is possible. Thousands have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed for opposing the current regime. With or without sanctions the 20 million people of Iraq deserve to have the United States on the side of their freedom.

Third, we have sustained a military effort to contain Iraq and that military effort has cost us lives. U.S. and British pilots fly almost daily to enforce a no-fly zone in northern Iraq that has saved the lives of Kurds and a no-fly zone in southern Iraq that has saved the lives of Shia. We have also maintained a presence at the Dhahran military installation in Saudi Arabia. This installation was a target of a truck bomb on June 25, 1996, that killed 19 U.S. airmen. It was cited by Osama bin Laden as a reason for attacking U.S. embassies in west Africa on August 7, 1998, that killed 11Americans and over 200 others. Our military presence was cited again when the U.S.S. Cole was attacked on October 12, 2000, in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 American sailors. So when the issue of military force is debated do not forget that we have an expensive military operation in place now. The question is not should our military be used; the question is how.

Fourth, when he signed the Iraqi Liberation Act into law on October 31, 1998, President Clinton began the process of shifting away from the failed policy of using military force to contain Iraq to supporting military force to replace the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein with a democratically elected government. Although our support for opposition forces has been uneven at best this new policy is still current law.

Fifth, opponents of establishing our policy objective as liberation of the people of Iraq have used a number of effective arguments to keep the status quo in place. They say we would never get support for a military operation. They also say that democracy won't work in Iraq, that Arabs aren't capable of governing themselves. Finally, they attack the legitimacy and capability of the most visible organization, the Iraqi National Congress. But these arguments are little more than excuses designed to keep us from doing what we know we should do and can do if our will is strong. The argument against military forces encourages us to ignore the hundreds of millions spent each year to contain Iraq and the 47 American lives lost since containment began. The argument that Arabs cannot govern themselves is racist and encourages us to ignore a million Arab Americans who exercise their rights when they are protected by constitution and law. The argument against the I.N.C. is little more than a parroting of Saddam Hussein's propaganda.

UPDATE: Looks like Kerrey was really tough on the Big Me over the Cole... not:

Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and now a member of the commission, said Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America" he believes Clinton should have been more aggressive in going after al-Qaida following the ship attack.

"I think he did have enough proof to take action," Kerrey said. "That's a difference of opinion."

ONE YEAR AGO...

Hendrie talking about Rice and the commission now...

UPDATE: Great minds think alike... Hendrie wonders why everyone had a straight face when Rice was asked why they didn't respond to the Cole attack... At this point, I'd be surprised if Billy Jeff were asked about that today...

Epstein takes American Grandstander to task again...

UPDATE: Missed this the first time, but Rep. Shays took him to task as well...

UPDATE II: Chris Matthews has found his new John McCain... the American Grandstander... and he's framing his analysis to reflect this... (Thanks to the Blogfather.)

The fact that this was so buried says a lot...

Phil Hendrie, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, nailed it last night, attacking Clarke, Garry Trudeau and the FCC... Wish I had a transcript...

JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam's newest employee:

Exley decided to check out the official Bush Web site, and discovered that the domain GWBush.com was unreserved. He snatched it up in December 1998. The site closely resembles the official Bush campaign Web site, but with a dark twist. An article supposedly penned by Bush defends his tax cut plan by comparing it to Mao's "Great Leap Forward" and Stalin's Soviet economic plan. The site also features doctored photos of Bush smoking a joint and snorting cocaine, many of which were submitted by fans.

UPDATE: Here's more...

Howard Stern was fined $495,000 today and dropped by Clear Channel... obviously, Bush is out to get him, so he must be voted out in... Oh yeah, Mancow, who's had nothing but praise for Bush, was fined too...

Only the latest to raise this canard:

Democratic candidate John Kerry branded President Bush's "inept" handling of Iraq a giant failure yesterday and said the June 30 power handover should be reconsidered.
"This is one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life," said the Massachusetts senator. "Where are the people with the flowers, throwing them in the streets, welcoming the American liberators the way Dick Cheney said they would be?"

If these Hot Air America folks want to show they're successful, a good first step might be to stop inviting their parents on as guests...

Richard ben-Veniste, dickweed:

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 [2001] PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you if you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was "Bin laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Now, the PDB . . .

BEN-VENISTE: Thank you. [attempting to cut her off]

RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Vensite, I would ...

BEN-VENISTE: I will get into ...

RICE: I would like to finish my point here.

BEN-VENISTE: I didn't know there was a point.

RICE: You asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.

BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.

RICE: You said, did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.

UPDATE II: Herbert finds the CAPpers to be as bad at fact-checking as ever...

One of the bigger spin points on Clarke has been that Bob Woodward's Bush at War book shows he is telling the truth... This was dealt with in Rice's testimony today:

HAMILTON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Rice, you've given us a very strong statement, with regard to the actions taken by the administration in this pre-9-11 period, and we appreciate that very much for the record.

I want to call to your attention some comments and some events on the other side of that question and give you an opportunity to respond.

You know very well that the commission is focusing on this whole question of, what priority did the Clinton administration and the Bush administration give to terrorism?

The president told Bob Woodward that he did not feel that sense of urgency. I think that's a quote from his book, or roughly a quote from Woodward's book. [...]

RICE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Let me begin with the Woodward quote, because that has gotten a lot of press. And I actually think that the quote, put in context, gives a very different picture.

The question that the president was asked by Mr. Woodward was,

Did you want to have bin Laden killed before September 11th? That was the question.

The president said, Well, I hadn't seen a plan to do that. I knew that we needed to - I think the appropriate word is 'bring him to justice.' And, of course, this is something of a trick question in that notion of self-defense which is appropriate for ...

I think you can see here a president struggling with whether he ought to be talking about pre-9-11 attempts to kill bin Laden. And so, that is the context for this quote.

And, quite frankly, I remember the director sitting here and saying he didn't want to talk about authorities on assassination. I think you can understand the discomfort of the president.

The president goes on. When Bob Woodward says, Well, I don't mean it as a trick question; I'm just trying to your state of mind, the president says, Let me put it this way. I was not - there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11th. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible. We felt he was responsible for bombings that had killed Americans. And I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice and would have given the order to do just that.

I have no hesitancy about going after him, but I didn't feel that sense of urgency and my blood was not nearly as boiling. Whose blood was nearly as boiling prior to September 11th?

And I think the context helps here.

It is also the case that the president had been told by the director of central intelligence that it was not going to be a silver bullet to kill bin Laden, that you had to do much more.

And, in fact, I think that some of us felt that the focus, so much focus, on what you did with bin Laden, not what you did with the network, not what you did with the regional circumstances, might, in fact, have been misplaced.

So I think the president is responding to go a specific set of questions.

All that I can tell you is that what the president wanted was a plan to eliminate al-Qaida so he could stop swatting at flies. He knew that we had in place the same crisis-management mechanism, indeed the same personnel, that the Clinton administration, which clearly thought it a very high priority, had in place.

And so, I think that he saw the priority as continuing the current operations and then getting a plan in place.

A growing scandal about Sen. Boozer? No wonder he's been speaking so loudly these days, perhaps to distract...

UPDATE: Memogate ain't over, folks:

Mr. Kennedy yesterday declined to condemn his ex-staffers, and an aide halted a press conference after questions turned to the memo.

Asked whether he'd read the memo, Mr. Kennedy hurried toward his office and said: "I am so troubled, as other members of the Judiciary are, in the fact that Republican staffers would burglarize this confidential material in the Judiciary Committee. ... We can't have staffers — in this case, Republican staffers — believing they can basically commit criminal crimes in order to advance a political agenda."

When he got to his office, staffers ushered him inside and shut the door. They later declined to answer any more questions about the matter because the memo — along with thousands of others — had been downloaded from Democratic computers by two Republican staffers who since have resigned.

According to the April 17, 2002, memo, Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who was Ms. Johnson's former superior, called Mr. Kennedy's office to enlist its help in keeping the 6th Circuit panel pro-affirmative action.

Ms. Jones and Ms. Johnson — neither of whom returned phone calls yesterday — are listed in court papers as attorneys for "defendant-intervenors," meaning parties given defendant status because they are directly affected by the outcome of the case.

According to the memo, Ms. Johnson had consulted on the matter with Mr. Kennedy's chief counsel, Miss Barnes, who attended the University of Michigan Law School.

"Melody and I are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case," she wrote. "Nevertheless, we recommend that Gibbons be scheduled for a later hearing: the Michigan case is important."

The memo was carbon-copied to five other Kennedy staffers, including one named "Mary Beth."

According to Senate financial records from that time, the only "Mary Beth" on staff then was Chief of Staff Mary Beth Cahill, who is now running the presidential-election campaign of fellow Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

Just in case some of you are confused out there, the USS Cole was actually not attacked during the Bush administration, it was during the administration before that... Hard to believe based on the questioning today, I know...

Rice transcript...

Well, now the Dodd story is getting somewhere... Here's Morton Kondracke from Tuesday:

KONDRACKE: Let's have a lot of word about Senator Dodd. It was a totally stupid statement to make. Obviously Robert Byrd was not a man that you would want to have leading the country during the time of the Civil War. He would have been a copperhead, probably, if he lived in the north because he was obviously in favor of slavery, wrong. And Dodd, if he had any brains, would say, "well, here's what I meant," but he issued a statement to Ed Henry of Roll Call through a spokesman saying that to interpret these remarks as somehow endorsing what Robert Byrd once thought is silly --

HUME: That's exactly what Lott said.

KONDRACKE: Exactly, exactly, so I mean this is compounding his error --

WILLIAMS: I'm amazed. I mean I don't see how Dodd could not have been thinking about the time he was in the KKK. Who in this town doesn't know of Senator Byrd's history? I mean, on Fox News Sunday he was calling people the white N-word. I don't even want to use the word. I mean this is a guy, you know, you have reason to step back and wait a minute, and here's Dodd just giving him this full-blown endorsement as if he's historical. I just think it's offensive, let me just say it for the record before you go on. It's offensive that, somehow in the Democratic Party given the tremendous support the Democrats have from the black vote in this country, that you'd have people just go on and do this kind of thing with impunity, that's ridiculous.

UPDATE: More here, courtesy the Blogfather...

JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam: The candidate who promises to flip-flop on promises:

Democrat John Kerry said Wednesday if he is elected president he will not let government programs outside of security and education grow beyond the rate of inflation, even if it means cutting some of his own campaign promises and existing government programs.

``When I say a cap on spending, I mean it,'' Kerry said in a speech at Georgetown University. ``We will have to make real choices - and that includes priorities of my own.''

Kerry said he would freeze the federal travel budget, reduce oil royalty exemptions for drilling on federal lands, cut 100,000 federal contractors and cut electricity used by the federal government by 20 percent, among other programs.

Kerry said with the growing deficit, he'll have to ``slow down'' some of his campaign promises or phase them in over a longer period. He cited proposals for early childhood education and a program that would have provided tuition to students attending state colleges in exchange for two years of national service, although he didn't say how much they would be scaled back.

Kerry's pledge to abide by spending caps could open him to criticism that his campaign promises cannot be trusted.

The talking points have been disseminated... time to attack Rice the way they attacked Tripp, Harris, et al.... now she's "Brown Sugar"... beyond-the-pale doesn't begin to describe it...

When West asked last week if the left had gone crazy... well, now I'm wondering if he has a point... JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam had an amazing gaffe on NPR:

Speaking of al-Sadr's newspaper, which was shut down by coalition forces last week after it urged violence against U.S. troops, Kerry complained to National Public Radio, "They shut a newspaper that belongs to a legitimate voice in Iraq."

In the next breath, however, the White House hopeful caught himself and quickly changed direction, adding, "Well, let me . . . change the term legitimate. It belongs to a voice — because he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment."

But Kerry again seemed to voice sympathy for the Shiite terrorist when asked whether he supported al Sadr's arrest. "Not if it’s an isolated act without the other kinds of steps necessary to change the dynamics on the ground in Iraq," Kerry told NPR, in quotes first reported by the New York Sun.

"If all we do is make war against the Iraqi people and continue an American occupation, fundamentally, without a clarity as to who and how sovereignty is being turned over, we have a very serious problem for the long run here," Kerry added. "And I think this administration is just walking dead center down into that trap."

Credit where it's due: Marshall is still MIA on l'affaire Dodd (the Talkmaster picked up on it today... he's also overjoyed that Randi Rhodes is talking about him), but he puts the "Bush lashed out at a reporter" story in context...

Luskin quotes from a devastating critique of Kruggy...

Dodge features an essay on Turkish Kurds...

Overheard on FNC:

"News Corp., the parent company of this network, is moving its corporate headquarters to New York." - Laurie Dhue

See, that wasn't so hard...

If this quote is accurate, Hans Blix isn't the only one making "at least the trains ran on time" statements:

During an interview with Senators Joe Biden and John McCain on Monday, she said that while the Butcher of Baghdad may have been "deplorable," at least he "kept the Sunnis and the Shiites apart and from killing each other."

Actually, Couric's partly right - though she failed to mention how Hussein accomplished his amazing peacekeeping miracle: by exterminating the Shiites who dared to rise up against him, including the father of the Iraqi imam who's currently leading the latest insurgency.

Last year Couric stepped into it during a chat with NBC's Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, when she asked if he could confirm reports that Saddam had escaped coalition forces by fleeing "to Tikrit, and then Mosul, and then hopefully to Syria" [our emphasis].

Fox News just "broke" the Dodd story, comparing it to the Lott firestorm... apparently there is some quiet talk about it on Capitol Hill, but that's all thus far...

Meanwhile, Dodd spoke so loudly of Lott that Newsmax took note... Oddly, they have not posted anything on his recent loutrageous comments... Thankfully, Taranto and Sully have... Also as Preston points out, Byrd's press release leaves out the Civil War reference...

UPDATE: It looks as if, at the very least, Ingraham's quotation of "you" instead of "he" was correct...

The Fox News "All Star" panel is debating it... Juan Williams appears to be at least somewhat upset over it... Fred Barnes says this proves Lott should have received a pass...

UPDATE II: The video is here under "Sound familiar?" Some exact reactions... Morton Kondracke blamed "stupidity," not racism for Dodd's comments, and Barnes remarked that earlier Kondracke said he could look into Lott's heart and see racism... Barnes said both Lott and Dodd were innocent... Williams called it "offensive" that anyone in a party which relied so much on Black votes could make such remarks "with impunity" and said their would probably be more coverage...

Roll Call has a story, called "Chris Dodd's Lott Moment?"

It looks like Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) got a little carried away with a tribute speech last week upon the occasion of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) casting his 17,000th vote in the chamber.

In words that Republicans believe sound awfully similar to the comments that knocked Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) out of the GOP leadership, Dodd said, “It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. Robert C. Byrd, in my view, would have been right at any time.”

Despite the charges of racial insensitivity that have been lobbed at Byrd over the years, Dodd added that his colleague “would have been right during the great conflict of Civil War in this nation” and at other key times. “I cannot think of a single moment in this nation’s 220-plus-year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country,” said Dodd. “Certainly today that is not any less true.”

While Byrd was not yet serving in the Senate during the Civil War, he has admitted that he was on the wrong side of history 100 years later when he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Byrd has also apologized for the fact that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan long before he became a Senator, and he was roundly criticized in 2001 for using the N-word during an interview on the Fox News Channel.

Democrats contend that Dodd’s comments are not as jarring as Lott’s claim at Strom Thurmond’s (R-S.C.) 100th birthday party that if the now-deceased Senator had been elected president as the segregationist candidate in 1948, “We wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

But Robert Traynham, the highest-ranking black Republican staffer on Capitol Hill and communications director for Senate Republican Conference Chairman Rick Santorum (Pa.), on Tuesday challenged Democrats to condemn Dodd’s comments.

“As a result of the Conference’s outreach to African-American leaders, I have heard from a number of folks that we work with who are outraged with the comments that Senator Dodd made suggesting that Senator Byrd would have been a great leader for the country, and am deeply perplexed by the silence we hear from the very same people who express outrage when they hear Republicans make comments they believe embody discriminatory sentiments,” Traynham told HOH.

Other black conservatives like commentator Armstrong Williams are also lodging charges of hypocrisy against Dodd, who told CNN during the Lott flap, “If Tom Daschle or another Democratic leader were to have made similar statements, the reaction would have been very swift. I don’t think several hours would have gone by without there being an almost unanimous call for the leader to step aside.”

Williams, who was highly critical of Lott in 2002, told HOH on Tuesday: “What [Dodd] said was worse than what Trent Lott said. It’s raw racism. The fact that the Democrats have said nothing about his racist, bigoted comments shows that when Republicans say something they get tossed out of office — but Democrats get away with it.”

Dodd spokesman Marvin Fast gave HOH an official statement noting that several of the Senator’s colleagues, including Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), delivered speeches praising Byrd. “Like Senator Frist, who called Senator Byrd a ‘legend of the Senate,’ Senator Dodd’s remarks addressed the totality of Senator Byrd’s career and not specific votes. The inference that Senator Dodd’s remarks somehow indicate support for Senator Byrd’s past actions related to civil rights is patently silly and absurdly off the mark.”

Fast added: “Senator Byrd has stated repeatedly that he regrets his vote on the 1964 civil rights bill and has called his past affiliation with the KKK the ‘most egregious mistake’ he ever made. Despite those mistakes, Senator Dodd continues to believe that Senator Byrd’s career should be measured in its totality, and that his love of our country and Constitution would make him a remarkable Senator whenever he served.”

“Senator Lott's remarks were intended to pay tribute to a remarkable man who led a remarkable life. To read anything more into these comments is wrong.”

Run out and buy the Freaks and Geeks DVDs now (or order the deluxe set here)!

This, considering that his administration outright lied about their knowledge of the genocide, is nothing less than disgusting...

David Kay corrects the inaccurate reporting of Vanity Fair... says a lot about where they're coming from...

UPDATE: Also this is must read...

Dennis Miller highlights...

If you buy Clarke's story at this point, I have a bridge you might be interested in:

The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress — 45,000 words long — makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times.

The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an "urgent" threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "ignored" it.

The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke's testimony and new book.

UPDATE: Here is the entire South Asia section of the report:

The President's trip to South Asia in March 2000 reflected the growing importance of the region to U.S. political, economic, and commercial interests. As the President emphasized, our strategy for South Asia is designed to help the peoples of that region by helping resolve long-standing conflicts, encouraging economic development, and assisting social development. Regional stability and improved bilateral ties are also important for U.S. economic interests in a region that contains one-fifth of the world's population and one of its most important emerging markets. In addition, we seek to work closely with regional countries to stem the flow of illegal drugs from South Asia, most notably from Afghanistan.

The President stressed the importance we place on reconciliation between India and Pakistan and our encouragement of direct dialogue between them to resolve all their outstanding problems. He urged also that they respect the Line of Control in Kashmir, reject violence as a means to settle their dispute, and exercise mutual restraint.

We seek to establish relationships with India and Pakistan that are defined in terms of their own individual merits and reflect the full range of U.S. strategic, political and economic interests in each country. After the President's visit to India, we are working to enhance our relationship with India at all levels. We look forward to more frequent high-level contacts including meetings between our heads of government and our cabinet officials. With Pakistan, a long-standing friend with which we seek improved relations, we are constrained by the lack of a democratic government since the October 1999 military coup. We have urged Pakistan's leaders to quickly restore civilian rule and the democratic process. The President's visit to Islamabad signified our intent to stay engaged with Pakistan and work to promote that return to democracy.

We seek, as part of our dialogue with India and Pakistan, to encourage both countries to take steps to prevent further proliferation, reduce the risk of conflict, and exercise restraint in their nuclear and missile programs. The United States does not believe that nuclear weapons have made India or Pakistan more secure. We hope they will abandon their nuclear weapons programs and join the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states. Indian and Pakistani nuclear and long-range missile tests have been dangerously destabilizing and threaten to spark a dangerous arms race in South Asia. Such a race will further undermine the global nonproliferation regime and thus threaten international security.

In concert with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, the G-8 nations, and many others in the international community, the United States has called on India and Pakistan to take a number of steps that would bring them closer to the international mainstream on nonproliferation. These include: signing and ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, joining the clear international consensus in support of a cutoff of fissile material production, strengthening export controls, and refraining from an arms race in nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. We have also urged them to resume their direct dialogue and take decisive steps to reduce tensions in South Asia. In that regard, we have urged India and Pakistan to agree to a multilateral moratorium on the production of fissile material, pending the conclusion of a Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty (FIVICT).

Afghanistan remains a serious threat to U.S. worldwide interests because of the Taliban's continued sheltering of international terrorists and its increasing export of illicit drugs. Afghanistan remains the primary safehaven for terrorists threatening the United States, including Usama bin Ladin. The United Nations and the United States have levied sanctions against the Taliban for harboring Usama bin Ladin and other terrorists, and will continue to pressure the Taliban until it complies with international requests to bring bin Ladin to justice. The United States remains concerned about those countries, including Pakistan, that support the Taliban and allow it to continue to harbor such radical elements. We are engaged in energetic diplomatic efforts, including through the United Nations and with Russia and other concerned countries, to address these concerns on an urgent basis.

Here is the other reference:

When terrorism occurs, despite our best efforts, we can neither forget the crime nor ever give up on bringing its perpetrators to justice. We make no concessions to terrorists. Since 1993, a dozen terrorist fugitives have been apprehended overseas and rendered, formally or informally, to the United States to answer for their crimes. These include the perpetrators of the World Trade Center bombing, the attack outside CIA headquarters, and an attack on a Pan Am flight more than 18 years ago. In 1998, the U.S. Armed Forces carried out strikes against a chemical weapons target and an active terrorist base operated by Usama bin Ladin, whose terror network had carried out bombings of American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and planned still other attacks against Americans. We will likewise pursue the criminals responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

UPDATE II: Note also the "energetic diplomatic efforts"... no reference to military options in the future...

UPDATE III: Hey, great minds think alike...

UPDATE IV: I emitted "low mordant chuckles" when I was reminded of Clarke's "no higher priority" claim... We now know what Clarke has been saying... "Hey rubes!"

Take a look at this too...

The Captain, Edward Morrissey has a series of posts on all this, plus there's this from Taranto:

Then there's this April 3, 2001, report from The Wall Street Journal (link for WSJ.com subscribers):

U.S. counterterrorism experts began warning during the latter years of the Clinton administration that invoking Mr. bin Laden's name too often could be counterproductive. But getting senior officials to restrain their rhetoric proved impossible.

"We totally failed in the last administration to get the cabinet-level people to stop saying 'bin Laden,' " says one U.S. official. "That greatly contributed to his image as the great white whale." In one of her last interviews before leaving office, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said of Mr. bin Laden: "He clearly is viewed as one of the major threats to the way the rest of the world operates."

That view was, and still is, what officials believe. But National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard Clark[e], who held the same job during the Clinton administration, has been urging Mr. Bush's national security team not to talk about Mr. bin Laden in such alarmist terms, preferably not at all.

Last week, as we noted, the Washington Post reported on a speech Rice was to have given on Sept. 11, 2001, which "contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups." The implication was that Clarke was right, and the Bush administration was asleep at the switch.

But note this, from the April 2001 Journal report: "Neither Secretary of State Colin Powell nor National Security Council adviser Condoleezza Rice have [sic] mentioned Mr. bin Laden since taking office, according to a database search of their public statements. That may be due more to the press of other events than anything, aides say. But the shift in emphasis is sure to please Arab and European governments, which long have complained that the U.S. was fueling the bin Laden mystique."

Normally, nonsense like this would be a "new low" for most columnists... but this is Kruggy we're talking about so it's hard to say...

It's come to this... now even a WaPo editor can't defend its blatant bias and misleading reporting:

“Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn’t on Terrorism,” read the top of the front page story in the April 1 Washington Post. The subhead for the article by Robin Wright, who recently jumped to the Post from the Los Angeles Times: “Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense.” [...]

On Inside Washington, a show carried by many PBS stations and which is aired by, and produced at, Gannett’s station in Washington, DC, WUSA-TV, a CBS affiliate, this exchange took place during the program taped on Friday:

Host Gordon Peterson: “According to the Washington Post, the speech Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver on September 11th had to do with missile defense and not terrorism.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer: “You want to get me started on this story as well? That is the cheapest shot that I can imagine.”

Colbert King, Washington Post editorial writer: “I must rise to Robin Wright’s defense who wrote that.”

Krauthammer: “Go ahead and I’ll rebut it.”

King: “Okay. It goes this way [waves hand toward Krauthammer as if giving up]. And then go. [pause, starts to laugh] I can’t. I really can’t. It was not the strongest story, although it got a lot of play.”

Peterson: “What are you doing, rebutting your own argument?”

King: “Yeah. I cannot with a straight face make this case. I resign from the Washington Post!”

Wow, did this (from February... of this year) get lost in the shuffle:

Citing press accounts and congressional testimony on the issue, Waxman says the public “needs reassurance” that the Bush administration conducted an “appropriate investigation” of the Saudis that were allowed to leave.

“If such investigation did not occur, the public deserves to know why,” Waxman said. The lawmaker, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, has been increasingly active in his minority oversight role.

A committee aide said Waxman decided to send the letter now “because there was never any satisfactory answer” on the questions that were out there.

Waxman asked for the identity of all Saudi citizens allowed to leave in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, specifically inquiring about Abdullah and Omar bin Laden.

In his letter, he argued that bin Laden’s family members may have had both general or specific information on the al Qaeda terrorist network, including the terrorist leader’s whereabouts.

At a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing last year, Richard Clarke, who has headed the National Security Council’s counterterrorism security group, said: “What happened was that shortly after 9-11, when it became clear that most of the terrorists of 9-11 were Saudis, the Saudi government feared that there would be retribution and vigilantism in the United States against Saudis. That seemed to be a reasonable fear.”

Clarke said this kind of thing is done “all the time,” adding he organized similar flights to help Americans abroad.

“The list of personnel that were being evacuated was provided to the FBI,” Clarke said. “We asked the FBI to see if there was anyone on the evacuation list that they wanted to detain and question. And the FBI told us there was no one on the list that they wanted to detain.”

Clarke said there were members of bin Laden’s family on a flight leaving the country, but added that the family “is enormous” and that “the members of the bin Laden family who were living in the United States, [those] we were aware of.”

“Without going into more in open testimony, let me just say we were aware there were members of the bin Laden family living in the United States, and had they been doing anything wrong we would have known about it. Let me stop there,”
Clarke said.

Waxman argued that Clarke’s testimony at another hearing does not match media accounts in which “both the FBI and the State Department have denied involvement in facilitating flying the Saudi citizens out of the country."

UPDATE: Here, Clarke told Vanity Fair he gave final approval for the flight...

Welcome Instapunditeers! Go here for the post you want...

Some questions for Clarke, who was (subtly) savaged on SNL, very late in the show, this weekend...

Wonderfalls, we hardly knew ye...

Wasn't able to blog this weekend but thankfully, Farber has led the charge on this unbelievable statement by Sen. Dodd (emphasis mine):

Dodd said of Byrd, "You would have been a great senator at any moment....you would have been right at the founding of this country, right during the Civil War....I can't think of a single moment in this nation's 220+ year history where you would not have been a valuable asset to this country."

UPDATE: Dodd isn't the only one with Lott disease...

UPDATE II: I enjoy Farber's blog, so I'm puzzled by his reaction... (In fairness, he was reacting only to the statement quoted on Byrd's website, so that part of my post might possibly be seen as misleading, only if you didn't bother to click on the link to his blog.) Ingraham played audio of portions of Dodd's speech, in which he made these statements on her show Friday. I wasn't taking notes, nor did I hear the whole program, so I can't necessarily attest that he said exactly what Ingraham quotes, but again, this is far from evidence that she lied. Byrd's official site quotes some similar remarks by Dodd ("It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. Robert C. Byrd, in my view, would have been right at any time..."), and from the audio I heard, it's clear that he went on praising Byrd in this manner for a while, so I have no reason to believe the quotes are inaccurate. In fact, I clearly remember hearing him making the "asset" remark to describe Byrd, so at minimum, a portion of the quote is likely accurate. And again, there is no reason to believe it is not, unless one has a policy of never quoting talk show hosts. The mainstream press obviously hasn't mentioned any of these quotes and Dodd still made an unbelievable, idiotic statement... I don't get what the problem is here, exactly, other than that one can't source all of the Ingraham quotes, which does not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "lie" make.

UPDATE III: This appears to be a complete quote, parts of which coincide with the Ingraham quote... I certainly won't go as far as this blogger in his analysis, though:

It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time . ROBERT C. BYRD , in my view, would have been right at any time . He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.

UPDATE IV: Here it is, in full:

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I add my voice as well to my seatmate, if I may. I sit in this chair by choice. Senator Byrd sits in his chair by choice as well, but he makes the choice before I do. I wanted to find out where he was going to sit so I could sit next to him. I did that because I wanted to sit next to the best, to learn everything I possibly could about the ability of this institution to provide the kind of leadership I think the country expects of us.

Several thoughts come to mind. This is a day of obvious significance in the number of votes that have been cast, 17,000, but it is far more important to talk about quality than quantity. Quantity is not an insignificant achievement, but the quality of my colleague and friend's service is what I think about when the name ROBERT C. BYRD comes to my mind.

I carry with me every single day, 7 days a week, a rather threadbare copy of the United States Constitution given to me many years ago--I can't even read it well now; it is so worn out--I may need a new copy--given to me by my seatmate, ROBERT C. BYRD. I revere it. I tell people why I carry it because it reminds me of the incredible gift given to me by the people of Connecticut to serve in this Chamber, to remind me of the importance of an oath we all made, and that is to do everything we can to preserve, protect, and defend the principles upon which this Nation was founded. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my mind, is the embodiment of that goal.

It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.

I join my colleagues in thanking the Senator from West Virginia for the privilege of serving with him. He has now had to endure two members of my family as colleagues. Senator Byrd was elected to the Senate in 1958 along with my father. He served with my father in the House. I have now had the privilege of serving with Senator Byrd for 24 years, twice the length of service of my father. That is an awful lot of time to put up with members of the Dodd family. We thank Senator Byrd for his endurance through all of that time.

There is no one I admire more, there is no one to whom I listen more closely and carefully when he speaks on any subject matter. I echo the comments of my colleague from Massachusetts. If I had to pick out any particular point of service for which I admire the Senator most, it is his unyielding defense of the Constitution. All matters come and go. We cast votes on such a variety of issues, but Senator Byrd's determination to defend and protect this document which serves as our rudder as we sail through the most difficult of waters is something that I admire beyond all else.

I join in this moment in saying: Thank you for your service, thank you for your friendship, and I look forward to many more years of sitting next to you on the floor of the Senate.

I yield the floor.

UPDATE V: So what did Dodd say back when?

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Connecticut, came close Sunday on "Late Edition."

"If Tom Daschle or another Democratic leader were to have made similar statements, the reaction would have been very swift," Dodd said. "I don't think several hours would have gone by without there being an almost unanimous call for the leader to step aside."

Dodd said the problem lies with the Republican Party.

"Mainstream Republican thinking over the last 40 years has been opposed to an awful lot of the civil rights legislation," he said. "So this isn't just about Trent Lott, it's about a party that needs to come to terms with this view here -- that you go to the South, you say one thing to one group of people and another thing nationally."

Dodd said that unless the Republicans address the issue of race relations head on, "they're going to pay an awful price politically and it hurts the country terribly in my view."

Dodd agreed that the Republicans should make the decision about Lott but added that if the senator were to stay, a move to censure him "takes on more of a reality."

"But it ought to be bipartisan," he said. "It ought not to be Democrats versus Republicans."

UPDATE VI: I knew that Farber was better than this and he's made a classy, humble apology... Go visit his blog already and, for that matter, hire him if you can...

The spin that Bush was not interested in going after al Qaeda just prior to the attacks is a lie, plain and simple...

Why hasn't this quote been around lately?

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, helped found Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He said he respects war protesters: "I've been there. I know how tough it is." He also defended voting last year for a resolution authorizing the president to use force against Iraq. "If you don't believe ... Saddam Hussein is a threat with nuclear weapons, then you shouldn't vote for me," he said.

More on Rwanda (and the Big Me... and Clarke) here...

Miniter and Mylroie on American Grandstander...

Meanwhile on "Hardball," he made an excuse for his attack on Rice:

MR. MATTHEWS: That’s a contradiction. You said—

MR. CLARKE: --.

MR. MATTHEWS: --she wasn’t familiar with al Qaeda and here she is, the year before, talking about bin Laden’s operation, maybe heading out to—

MR. CLARKE: Chris, did you hear what she said? She talked about bin Laden.

MR. MATTHEWS: Right.

MR. CLARKE: And what I said in the passage you’re referring to in the book, it’s when I said al Qaeda she looked confused. When I said bin Laden, she recognized who I was talking about.

Cole wrote my post on Kos for me...

Saletan takes JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam's "vote for me, I'm easily fooled!" act and runs with it... Astonishingly, we're spoon-fed spin such as this:

What do all these flip-floppers have in common? Not subject matter: DiIulio worked on social policy, O'Neill on economics, Clarke on national security. Not party: Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt are Democrats; O'Neill is a Republican; Clarke worked for President Reagan and both Bushes as well as for President Clinton.

If the Dems want to go forward with the argument that flip-flopping and "being fooled" is honorable or a sign that they should run the country, they can be my guest...

Sad news to report... Aeschines had to be treated for severe depression after reading this... We hope he will be better in about a year...

Oh, yeah, April Fool's.

I knew right-wingers were weird, but wow...

By the way, did I mention how much I hate the concept of a "free market?"

Oh, those Working for Change people are such cards! The Supreme Court shut them down... April Fool! So funny, yet scary! Some days, I fear that I will be taken away by John Ashcroft to a work camp... Bush MUST be defeated!

And now Alan Colmes is saying he's a conservative... Eh, no big loss for us lefties... er, centrists... Everyone who works at Faux News is a conservative anyway, dont'cha know...

It's so good to read so many wise quotes in one place...

It is of the utmost importance that we get to the bottom of whether or not BUSH LIED!!!! to David Letterman (we all know how CNN is nothing but a White House mouthpiece... ooh! almost time for "Crossfire" with my heroes Carville and Begala!)... Time to start impeachment proceedings...

I'm so excited to hear that Sean Hannity has seen the light! He has now said he no longer supports Bush and supports Kerry! I'm sure Sean would like us all to donate to Kerry's campaign below...

Henry rudely calls Salon.com "We're not dead!" The truth is that Salon tells the truth (and you should become a premium member by clicking here.) Today's edition, exploring the evils of our horrible president, is no exception. Check it out!

I must confess, I looooove Air America radio! Al Franken is hilarious! Holding "Ann Coulter" against her will in the green room, and portraying her as racist! Joking about that lard-butt Rush's drug problem! Great stuff! It's so great that we on the left, er, I mean, center, finally have a voice to counter the outrageous rhetoric and personal attacks from the right! (And by the way, I also love the truth-tellers at MoveOn.org, as well as totally-honest non-partisan Richard Clarke!)

Don't forget to click below!

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy grows larger, my friends... They have now conquered a left-wing, er, I mean centrist media criticism organization... The media anti-Bush? Surely, Eric Alterman wouldn't lie...

Oh, and donate to the banner below:

I would like to thank Henry first and foremost for allowing equal time on his blog. First of all, I'd like to say that Bush is a liar, and you should click on this banner to donate to get this neocon frat-boy embarrassment out of office.

I'd like to welcome a new blogger to Croooow Blog. His name is Aeschines and his views are... well, they differ from mine. Please welcome him/her/it (I'm not quite sure) to our humble blog.