Month: April 2006

A baby is born at 1:23 p.m. on 4-5-06 and weighs 7 pounds.

Tom Maguire sees it differently:

"[A]s Mr. Gerstein noted, and as the excerpt printed by Mr. Sullivan makes clear, we don’t know what Cheney and Bush discussed before Bush authorized the partial disclosure of the NIE.  President Bush may have been vitally interested specifically in discrediting Joe Wilson; he may not have heard the name, and simply authorized the disclosure to help with the White House side of the press coverage.  That said, Bush’s involvement preceded the July 8 meeting with Judy Miller, (p. 19/20 of .pdf), which is not great news.
So, was "Bush Nailed" for helping with a White House PR pushback? I’ll bet he gets involved with White House message management pretty regularly."

Make your own mind up. But it seems to me that a president who routinely decries leaking of classified information has now been revealed as someone who purposefully and with premeditation leaked classified information, gave his veep special clearance to do so, and did so during a very heated debate about possible malfeasance with respect to pre-war intelligence handling. Tom is within his rights to cling on to the scintilla of doubt that still exists. But at what point does that approach naivete? (When National Review maintains radio silence – ed.) Do we really think this president doesn’t know how to play hardball? A reader speculates:

"It seems I recall headlines a few months ago that questioned the relationship between Bush and Cheney, suggesting that it was very brittle.  Those have since gone away, at least from the first few pages, so it’s debatable as to whether there was any truth to the speculation.
Still, in light of the new information in the Plame case, might it be possible that Cheney and Bush have become so divided that Cheney, with the hunting dog (Fitzgerald) getting closer, has thrown the president under the bus?"

It may be a warning shot not to mess with Cheney, as the Bush meltdown continues. 

A new interest in an ancient text.

One conservative think-tank agrees with me on the Massachusetts healthcare plan. Another one disagrees. Make your own mind up.

Tiger Hawk dissects a know-nothing anti-immigrant proposal. His bottom line:

The question should not be whether we can keep out Mexicans, but what we should do about the rising Hispanic culture in this country? Can we create a system under which Mexican immigrants are happy to fly the Star-Spangled Banner, sing our songs, join us in our wars, think of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams as "founding fathers," and otherwise honor our great traditions? I think we can, but we have to let go of the twin sins of nativism and unthinking "multiculturalism" to do it.

Yep and yep.

(Photo: Steven Senne/AP.)

There’s a definite uptick in reports suggesting that the Bush administration is planning for one.

"I’ve mostly laid off Joseph Wilson, not wanting to let the issue of his (execrable) character interfere with the question of who outed his wife as a covert CIA officer. But this from Daily Kos:

You know when they first started trying to come up with a way to discredit me, which we now know started in March of 2003, they went through the old standbys. "He’s had 3 wives, he’s a womanizer, he’s done drugs." But then they realized they couldn’t use those because I’ve never actually denied them. I mean I’m the first to admit that, unlike Ken Mehlman and David Dreier, I really like women.

is simply intolerable. (I’d hope the report was libelous if it weren’t written by an obviously infatuated Kossack with the handle "tlh lib.") The whole entry makes it sound likely that Wilson is now completely drunk on the sound of his own voice. I was glad to see one commenter call Wilson on his completely gratuitous gay-baiting. No one bothered to complain about Wilson’s expressed desire to punch Zalmay Khalilzad in the face.
Isn’t there some way we can send this jerk back to Team Bush, where he obviously belongs? It’s too bad. Given Wilson’s history, he could have been an effective anti-Bush spokesman, if he weren’t such a toad," – liberal blogger, Mark Kleiman, today.

I hadn’t read much of blogger/writer/analyst Thomas Barnett before a reader sent me his way. This post strikes me as a remarkably candid and persuasive account of why we should not give up in Iraq. In transforming a post-totalitarian, ethnically divided, economically ruined pseudo-country, we cannot expect instant results. I don’t think anyone now seriously doubts that we made huge errors in the beginning and that the Bush administration was far too cocky and intransigent for at least two years. (One more time: Fire Rumsfeld Now.) But so many of the U.S. military have performed amazing work; so many other good people have contributed to this enormous project; and this endeavor is far too important to get swallowed up by domestic posturing. Let’s just agree that Bush screwed up. But let’s not forget either:

Saying we ‘lost the war’ in Iraq is simply saying ‘I want a return to the old days of the Powell Doctrine,’ which only got us 9/11 and the rising Occidentalism of the Salafis who think American ‘staying power’ is defined by helicopters fleeing over the horizon with their tail rotors between their legs.
The Powell Doctrine was perfect for the old Neocons, because it was a strategy of limited regret, limited impact, limited success and guaranteed long-term reliance on military arms to do nothing more than maintain a declining status quo.
But the Bushies went beyond those limitations on Iraq, which I thought and still think was completely necessary. Yes, it exposed a lot of bad thinking, bad planning, bad force structure, bad doctrine, bad operations, etc. in the U.S. military, but all those exposures have led to necessary change–and change long-delayed at that.

Barnett, however, is open-minded about the possibilities of our current moment, and even thinks John Kerry’s ideas are worth considering. I still think that a Kerry administration would have been able to move this endeavor forward more effectively than the incompetents who helped screw it up. But we are where we are. And I’m not in any mood to throw in the towel or to give up on the only president we have for three years. Barnett helps explain why.

Update: Tom Barnett responds. I had no idea we were together at Harvard.

His policy was quite clear, it seems:

"We think our national boundaries should be respected. That’s a biblical principle also," said Christian Coalition lobbyist Jim Backlin.

Immigration is turning into a fascinating debate. While you can unite Latino and White and black evangelicals in hostility to gays, you can’t easily unite them in opposition to illegal immigrants. And so one more fissure in the Rove realignment appears. And hope blossoms. They have just one more summer of gay-bashing to reverse the damage.

We have a missing link. No, I don’t mean the post-fish. I mean the Bush connection in the Plame leak. It turns out that, according to Libby, it was the president who first sanctioned the leak of the NIE data to discredit Joseph Wilson. Money quote:

"Defendant testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the NIE was ‘pretty definitive’ against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the vice president thought that it was ‘very important’ for the key judgments of the NIE to come out," Mr. Fitzgerald wrote.
Mr. Libby is said to have testified that "at first" he rebuffed Mr. Cheney’s suggestion to release the information because the estimate was classified. However, according to the vice presidential aide, Mr. Cheney subsequently said he got permission for the release directly from Mr. Bush. "Defendant testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE," the prosecution filing said.

Just a small point. Cheney’s judgment in this matter is extremely odd. Who really cared about Joseph Wilson’s op-ed? Why the extreme defensiveness and then recklessness of the Plame leak? We’re either talking extreme hubris here, or someone who felt he had a lot to hide. Or an admixture of the two.