"And I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide"
Who can forget Lincoln's Gridiron dinner punchline: "Is there a carpenter in the house? Because I've got a house divided I'm having trouble with." Or Nixon at White House Correspondents' Dinner: "You may have heard we bombed Cambodia. It's not my fault. I told them left at Laos, left."Hehehe.
Bush provided amusing descriptions of photographs Wednesday night during the annual dinner of the Radio and Television News Correspondents Association. Some showed the president in awkward poses as he looked behind furniture in the Oval Office. For those photos, Bush told the audience, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere ... nope, no weapons over there ... maybe under here?"In a vacuum, this joke could play very well, if delivered correctly. Based on the laughter it received, it seems that George delivered it very well. But that's not the point.
Laughter erupted from the crowd of journalists, politicians and their guests then and at other times during Bush's remarks. For years the dinner has featured political and topical humor, most of it playful if barbed at times.
The man who uncovered evidence the FBI tailed presidential candidate John Kerry for months in 1971 said some of those files were stolen this week.Hopefully those files will turn up soon. But something tells me that if they do, they will have a lot of badly Photoshopped pictures of Kerry-Fonda trysts in them . . . and I don't necessarily mean Jane.
Author Gerald Nicosia reported to police Friday that three of the 14 boxes of once-secret FBI files he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act were taken from his Corte Madera home Thursday.
Particular files from the remaining 11 boxes were also taken, Nicosia said, including files containing documents about Kerry that hadn't been reviewed yet by others.
"The three files folders about John Kerry were taken," Nicosia said. "Those revelations are lost now, at least to me."
ARE YOU sitting down? Another ex-government official who was fired or demoted by Bush has written a book that ... is critical of Bush! Eureka! The latest offering is Richard Clarke's new CBS-Viacom book, "Against All Enemies," which gets only a 35 on "rate a record" because the words don't make sense and you can't dance to it.Blah blah, Clarke stayed on for more than two years after that, and such.
All this was while Clarke was presiding over six unanswered al-Qaida attacks on American interests and fretting about the looming Y2K emergency. But chair-warmer Clarke claims that on the basis of Rice's "facial expression" he could tell she was not familiar with the term "al-Qaida."Apparently Coulter wants us to think that Clarke was worried about dates on bank accounts and extra water supplies, but what she hides behind her "fretting about Y2K" derision is that Clarke was working with the Clinton administration to try to stop, you know, an actual terrorist threat, that being a major bombing within the country. Of course, Coulter doesn't seem to have much of a problem with domestic bombings, having once joked "My only regret with Tim McVeigh is that he didn't go to the New York Times building." Cheap shot? Of course! How bout one more: The proximity of her views to those of Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph also deserves mention.
Isn't that just like a liberal? The chair-warmer describes Bush as a cowboy and Rumsfeld as his gunslinger -- but the black chick is a dummy. Maybe even as dumb as Clarence Thomas! Perhaps someday liberals could map out the relative intelligence of various black government officials for us. (emphases mine)
"You've got a real credibility problem," John Lehman, former Navy secretary under President Reagan, told Clarke, calling the witness "an active partisan selling a book."If you want to know what's horribly wrong with their recap, either find it in the transcript if you like, or you can click on either of the links at the beginning of this post.
Clarke responded: "I don't think it's a question of morality at all, I think it's a question of politics."
In the meeting, says Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Clarke says he tried to refute Wolfowitz. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," Clarke recalls saying. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam." A spokesman for Wolfowitz describes Clarke's account as a "fabrication." Wolfowitz always regarded Al Qaeda as "a major threat," says this official.Marshall notes that Wolfowitz wrote a very complimentary blurb for one of Mylroie's books.
I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurance. I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness.Here's the NYT recap of his testimony. Note that Judith "WMD" Miller has been kicked off the Clarke beat, with David Stout covering the testimony.
You said on "60 Minutes" that you expected "their dogs" to be set on you when your book was published, but did you think that the attacks would be so personal?There's plenty more to read there, including that Clarke is a voting Republican (you can't register in Virginia) who voted for McCain in the 2000 primaries. He also addresses why the White House kept him on, takes down a McClellan strawman about 9/11, and provides some context to the now well-known "swatting flies" comment from Dubya:
Oh yeah, absolutely, for two reasons. For one, the Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset. That's the first reason. But the second reason is that I think they're trying to bait me -- and people who agree with me -- into talking about all the trivial little things that they are raising, rather than talking about the big issues in the book.
Apparently on one occasion -- of all these many, many days when George Tenet mentioned the al-Qaida threat -- the president on one occasion said, "I want a strategy. I don't want to swat flies." Well, months or certainly weeks went by after that, and he didn't get his strategy because Condi Rice didn't hold the meeting necessary to approve it and give it to him. And yet George Bush appears not to have asked for it a second time.Next, let's quickly deal with the Bushies' hail mary pass to try to discredit Clarke, in which they released a transcript of a background briefing from August 2002 in which Clarke appears to have fonder words for Bush's anti-terrorism strategy than he does in his book and his testimony, all 15-plus hours of it, counting his closed-door testimony. How do we deal with this? Initial reactions from the left blogosphere range from unfazed to concerned to quite disheartened. Well, let's go to the transcript! Starting bottom of page 55:
THOMPSON: Mr. Clarke, as we sit here this afternoon, we have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?Sooooooo, how exactly does this damage Clarke's credibility in any way? He was working for the President, and the President asked him to give a briefing in a manner that would make the President's policies look good. If that doesn't pass your laugh test, then you're a damn hack. It's nearly incidental that Clarke was the one giving the briefing as opposed to Richard Armitage, Condi Rice, Hadley, whoever. (Yes, they have different roles in the White House, I know) Why doesn't it matter? Because since it was a "backgrounder" that means that they represent the White House views, and not necessarily those of Clarke. (thanks, Jonah!)
CLARKE: Well, I think the question is a little misleading. The press briefing you're referring to comes in the following context: Time magazine had published a cover story article highlighting what your staff briefing talks about. They had learned that, as your staff briefing notes, that there was a strategy or a plan and a series of additional options that were presented to the national security adviser and the new Bush team when they came into office. Time magazine ran a somewhat sensational story that implied that the Bush administration hadn't worked on that plan. And this, of course, coming after 9/11 caused the Bush White House a great deal of concern. So I was asked by several people in senior levels of the Bush White House to do a press backgrounder to try to explain that set of facts in a way that minimized criticism of the administration. And so I did. Now, we can get into semantic games of whether it was a strategy, or whether it was a plan, or whether it was a series of options to be decided upon. I think the facts are as they were outlined in your staff briefing.
THOMPSON: Well, let's take a look, then, at your press briefing, because I don't want to engage in semantic games. You said, the Bush administration decided, then, you know, mid-January -- that's mid- January, 2001 -- to do 2 things: one, vigorously pursue the existing the policy -- that would be the Clinton policy -- including all of the lethal covert action findings which we've now made public to some extent. Is that so? Did they decide in January of 2001 to vigorously pursue the existing Clinton policy?
CLARKE: They decided that the existing covert action findings would remain in effect.
THOMPSON: OK. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided. Now, that seems to indicate to me that proposals had been sitting on the table in the Clinton administration for a couple of years, but that the Bush administration was going to get them done. Is that a correct assumption?
CLARKE: Well, that was my hope at the time. It turned out not to be the case.
THOMPSON: Well, then why in August of 2002, over a year later, did you say that it was the case?
CLARKE: I was asked to make that case to the press. I was a special assistant to the president, and I made the case I was asked to make.
THOMPSON: Are you saying to be you were asked to make an untrue case to the press and the public, and that you went ahead and did it? MORE
CLARKE: No, sir. Not untrue. Not an untrue case. I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done. And as a special assistant to the president, one is frequently asked to do that kind of thing. I've done it for several presidents.
When asked in the hearings about whether it was moral to put the best face on an administration you work for when briefing the press, Clark said:Heh."I don't think it's a question of morality at all. I think it's a question of politics." [big applause]
In an interview Sunday evening, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, dismissed Mr. Clarke's charges as "politically motivated," "reckless" and "baseless."Those are a couple of stupid questions there, Bartlett.
"If Dick Clarke had such grave concerns about the direction of the war on terror, why did he stay on the team as long as he did, and why did he wait till the beginning of a presidential campaign to speak out?" Mr. Bartlett said. He said the book's timing showed that it was "more about politics than policy."
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