Bob Woodward went in the tank when he wrote Bush At War, painting a dramatic and heroic portrait of a resolute commmander-in-chief at a time of crisis. His own credibility was torn apart as a consequence. While he regained some of his Watergate-era cred with State of Denial, he was still a hollow shell of the investigative reporter had had been while teamed with Carl Bernstein. Today, Bob Woodward makes a bid to reclaim his right call himself a journalist, breaking a story that should have the effect of a well-timed, exquisitely-placed bombshell.
Please make no effort to remove Cheney or Bush from office, and vigorously oppose any such attempts by us.
A report by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post recently indicated that Republican leaders are contemplating the forced removal of Dick Cheney from the office of Vice President, under the guise of health-related reasons. Furthermore, Ms. Quinn suggested that former Sen. and putative Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson might be drafted to accept the President’s nomination to replace Mr. Cheney.
One of the last bastions of reliable editorial page support for the Bush-Cheney regime has been the WSJ, which in spite of a history of incisive reporting and journalistic integrity has been consistently far right wing. Led by Wing Nut John Fund, they have always been there for King George the W through fair weather and foul. It would appear the readers are getting fed up.
When the facts are not on your side, suppress the facts. It is a lot easier to manage reality when there is no opposing narrative. For a couple of soldiers trying to discover the truth about prisoner treatment at Gitmo, the truth suddenly became something not suitable for public consumption.
As we consider the defensive posture of Hastert & Co. for why no effort was made to protect the House pages from a widely recognized (among Republican insider circles) threat from the predator drone known as Rep. Mark Foley, it is striking just how very familiar this situation is. In fact, on Stage 2 now, we are being treated to the Condileeza Rice version of that same old song and dance, as she takes to the media to defend her failure to anticipate the September 11 attacks.
The article in today's Washington Post about cronyism and corruption in the CPA following the Iraq invasion is important for several reasons, as already blogged here and elsewhere, the least not being that a story we all have known for some time is finally finding traction in the MSM. However, the real importance of this story, that key roles in the immediate post-war effort were given to individuals based on demonstration of their political support rather than their competence, lies in the consequences for post-war Iraq.
Ok, so just four days ago we get this critical scoop from David Corn that confirmed what many of us Plameologists, amateurs such as myself and pros such as emptywheel alike, suspected, that not only was Valerie Plame's job with the CIA all about the search for Iraq's WMD, but that she was outed by Cheney precisely because she refused to go along with the stovepiping of obviously bogus prewar intelligence from Iraqi defectors sent by the INC to drag the U.S. into invading Iraq and deposing Sadddam.
All that we needed to put it all together was corroboration that Plame was in fact working on WMD, and that the analysts really were finding there were no WMD. Corn provided evidence of the first part, and yesterday the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee reluctantly nailed down the second part.
It is finally here, folks, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war Iraq intelligence, and it is pretty damn damning:
The long-awaited report, said Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., a member of the committee, is "a devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration's unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts" to link Saddam to al-Qaida.
Most of us remember Sproul and Associates as having been behind some nefarious schemes to simultaneously register Republican-leaning voters and discourage registration by Dem-leaners during the 2004 election. It seems they're setting up shop again this year, and they're trying to use WalMart as a venue. Only this time, surprisingly, Wal-Mart isn't going along with the scheme. This is more grist for the Harold Ford Senate campaign!
All this talk about the 2006 elections got me to thinking, and reminded me of something I learned as a H.S. debater--half the battle in winning a debate is successfully defining the terms of the debate. Debate is like any other form of warfare, in that victory depends on having a good strategic plan, selecting tactics specifically to achieve your strategic objectives, and then implementing those tactics.
Political campaigns are also like football: on offense, you want to play to your strengths and at the same time attack your opponent's weaknesses. On defense, you want to take away the thing your opponent does well, so that they lose hope of ever scoring.
Let's see how to do it politically this fall, after the break...
I was in the process of navigating away from that page, but I clicked on the back button of my browser, because I figured I'd mis-read the headline, and I wanted to see what it really said...
This entry at The Swamp, an on-line feature from the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau, is a recounting of Barack Obama's remarks last night at the Gridiron Club, an annual roast-style affair in DC which attracts the glitterati of Washington (which is another way of saying that Barack wasn't just the token, um, boy, let alone the token Dem, although one could say the two have become the same thing.
When he failed to muster even a minimum of votes to gain a seat in the Iraqi parliament, most observers figured Ahmed Chalabi's political career was on hold, if not over. They thought wrong. It looks like the Office of Special Plans had a contingency plan ready in case things didn't go their way on election day.
Less than a month after Oracle Corp. hired former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's lobbying firm, the Justice Department notified Oracle that an antitrust inquiry into its proposed $5.8 billion acquisition of a rival database software firm had been dropped.
The decision, announced Tuesday by the department, was no doubt welcome news for Ashcroft's budding lobbying and consulting career that began last May, just three months after he ended a tumultuous tenure as the nation's top law-enforcement officer.
Here's why: when the Dems say they were misled by Bush, it puts Bush in an awkward position with the voters who are reconsidering their support for the war. This is because they too were misled, in precisely the same way. So when Bush says "well, you supported the war before", he could be talking to the Middle Americans that polled in favor of the war and then voted for him on account of his being the War President.
The battle shaping up over the Alito nomination promises to be the most hard-fought since Robert Bork, but we must work to ensure that it is fought on the correct battlefield. The far right will try to make Alito out to be a conservative, strict constructionist, non-activist practitioner of legal jurisprudence in a sea of activist liberal judges making law as much as interpreting it.
Going to jail. The Big House. The Slammer. Doing time.
That is what I. Lewis Libby is looking at, and being a convicted liar is what he will be remembered for. Whatever he may have dreamt his legacy of public service would be, it could not have included this. His "tireless efforts on behalf of the American people", as his work has been described by superiors like Bush and Cheney, will not be what springs to mind years from now when someone says "Scooter Libby". More likely it will be words like "perjury" and "obstruction of justice", and they will recall a man who participated in the criminal leak of a CIA officer's identity, with flagrant disregard for the consequences to her, her family, and her associates. They may also remember him as someone who kept his mouth shut and refused to rat out his co-conspirators. They may remember him taking his secrets to his grave.
