Here’s a question worth asking: whatever John Kerry’s record, could he afford in office to be weak on terror? Wouldn’t he be obliged to continue Bush’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and even, as he has already promised, actually increase troop levels in those countries? I don’t think it’s out of the question. John McCain knows Kerry and says he doesn’t believe he’d be “weak on defense.” Sometimes, a Democrat has to be tougher than a Republican in this area – if only to credentialize himself. I can certainly conceive of Richard Holbrooke being a tougher secretary of state than Colin Powell. I’m not yet convinced and want to hear much more from Kerry. But I’m persuadable. Four more years of religious-right social policy and Nixonian fiscal policy is not something I really want to support.
POLAND WOBBLES: Al Qaeda’s stunning success in Madrid continues to reverberate. By far the most worrying so far is the new equivocation from the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski. But what strikes me as truly worrying is Kwasniewski’s reference to the WMD stockpile intelligence fiasco. “But naturally I also feel undomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction.” Although I hope Poland stays the course in Iraq, I do think he has a point. and he’s not the only one. A considerable number of Americans – including many in the pro-war camp – believe this administration has not been forthright enough about the reasons for the intelligence failure. What the president should have done, in my view, was give a talk to the American people a few months ago, tell them exactly what we had and hadn’t found, and explain that, although some of the intelligence turned out to be flawed, he still took the right decision in the circumstances. Bush made too much of the WMDs before the war as a casus belli not to confront this issue directly when it emerged we were wrong. Instead, he acted defensively. He first denied there was a problem, then he dismissed the problem, then he justified his actions regardless, without taking full responsibility for the errors. In a word, it made him look insecure and weak. Yes, there was a risk in fessing up directly to an intelligence failure. But it turns out that the risk of simply ducking and spinning was greater. The reason he has lost standing is because insecurity is not something people look for in a war leader. There were many times that Churchill had to tell Britons of mistakes or failures or difficulties. When confronted with errors of the kind that Bush’s intelligence made in Iraq, a good war leader steps up to the plate. When asked about the lack of stockpiles of WMDs as opposed to evidence of possible WMD programs, such a leader doesn’t irritatedly respond, “What’s the difference?” Part of the Aznar lesson is that people don’t like being bamboozled. If Bush doesn’t learn that soon, he may learn it the hard way in November.
SPEAKING OF WHICH: Imagine for a moment that there is a Democratic administration in the White House. Now imagine that at a time of soaring deficits and a looming social security crisis, the president endorses a huge new entitlement program for seniors, designed purely for electoral purposes. Now imagine that he deliberately low-balls the costs of this program, to the tune of something like 30 percent. Would Republicans be outraged? You bet they would. Now imagine that the official designated to provide accurate costing figures was told that if he released the real numbers, he would be fired. Now stop imagining. It appears that all this occurred in the Bush administration over the Medicare prescription drug program. The administration pressured its own officials to mislead the Congress and the public about the scope of the expenses involved. Here’s how the New York Times reported the incident, when a Congressional aide, Ms Cybele Bjorkland, tried to get the real numbers from the actuary responsible for the costing:
Ms. Bjorklund had been pressing Mr. Foster, [Medicare’s chief actuary], for his numbers since June. When he refused, telling her he could be fired, she said, she confronted his boss, Thomas A. Scully, then the Medicare administrator. ‘If Rick Foster gives that to you,’ Ms. Bjorklund remembered Mr. Scully telling her, ‘I’ll fire him so fast his head will spin.’ Mr. Scully denies making such threats.
What on earth was going on here? I thought conservatives were supposed to be responsible for conserving the country’s fiscal health and honest about the costs of entitlements. I smell Rove here. He wanted a political victory. He has no principles. He doesn’t give a damn about the country’s fiscal health. So he lied and put pressure on others to lie. Every single one of us will be paying higher taxes for years because of this.
FACT-CHECKING JOSH: Begravia Despatch goes after Josh Marshall.
The Dish 