Category: The Dish

Here it is:

The reason given is

"We cannot approve the spot with it being Danny Glover’s opinion that the Bush Adminstration [sic] is destroying the Constitution.  If you have documentation that it is indeed being destroyed, we can look at that."

Why would anyone consent to be interviewed by a hatchet-man who works for another candidate?

It’s hurting her, I’d say. Why? Two words: Kyl-Lieberman, the dumbest thing she has done in the campaign and perhaps the vote that will one day be seen as the moment she lost the nomination. Edwards goes for the kill, allowing Obama to stay a little more on the high-ground:

"We have a real division here. I mean, among the Democratic candidates, there’s only one that voted for this resolution. And this is exactly what Bush and Cheney wanted," Edwards said.

The NIE makes Clinton’s Kyl-Lieberman vote look much, much worse. She thought she was already in the general election. But more than that, the vote shows how her basic parameters are still deeply political and totally absorbed by the need to deflect Republican criticism from the right. This is the defensive crouch of the Dems since the 1980s. She can’t come out of it at this point in her career. And by staying put, she is unable to change to suit the times. If she loses this will be the reason why. And it’s a good reason.

Morrissey, interviewing K-Lo, writes:

Mitchell Prothero and Chris Albritton claim they both e-mailed NRO in October with their challenges to the story. However, Albritton used the e-mail for The Tank, not NRO’s editors; Prothero may or may not have done the same, but Lopez got neither of them, nor did any of the other editors. One might have assumed that The Tank’s published e-mail address would go to Smith, but in fact it went nowhere. Kathryn reports that NRO cannot find any evidence that the published e-mail ever got assigned to anyone. Only when Edsall contacted her directly — her e-mail appears on her posts at The Corner — did she start checking the story, and rapidly tried to respond.

This made me crack a smile:

Kathryn said that she didn’t think Smith intended to mislead or to create fabulism, but simply got burned by a source with an overactive imagination.

Hard to disagree:

Everything this administration says on national security matters should be considered presumptively not only false, but actually the opposite of what is in fact true, until clear evidence to the contrary becomes available.

Which will be disseminated by the CIA.

You can say that again:

How outrageous is it that the best twelve months of alarmism from Bush & Cheney have come in the context of an environment where they’ve long had access to the intelligence community’s assessment? Answer: Very outrageous.

Fred Kaplan notes, however:

President Bush and the administration’s hawkish faction, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, can take some solace from the new intelligence estimate.

For instance, the NIE states, again "with high confidence," that until the fall of 2003, the Iranians were developing nuclear weapons. It also notes that they are continuing civilian work "related to uranium conversion and enrichment." Most significant, perhaps, it concludes that the Iranians halted their weapons program "primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work."

But one implication of this last assessment is that Iran’s leaders are not so hermetic—that, as the NIE puts it, "Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issues than we judged previously." The Bush administration’s campaign of pressure—the smart sanctions that it imposed and rallied other nations to join—appears to have had an effect. By the same token, inducements might spur further progress.

Kevin mused about whether Congressional pressure forced the NIE out. That’s not what Ackerman is hearing.

It’s clearly the most pertinent question. It’s November 2006. You’re an administration in lots of hot water, desperate for some good news in Iraq, eager to find some shred of evidence that your foreign policy strategy isn’t a total catastrophe – and your intelligence agencies tell you that there’s no massive urgency at all, and that the Iranians suspended the worst of their program three years ago. It helps vindicate your Iraq policy, or can be spun that way. But you don’t tell anyone about it. In fact, you actively tell the American people and the world the opposite. Why?

The only conceivably credible answer to me is that Cheney simply insisted the good news wasn’t true, and blocked its publication and dissemination. And he did this while he and the president offered up the direst warnings about Iran’s nukes – World War III and the like. Was this a bluff? Or was it willful refusal to face reality … until the agencies broke through? I definitely have a sense that Gates may have been the instigator here; and what this means is that the Rice-Gates twofer has now overwhelmed the veep.

Jonah encounters the evangelical base; and it thinks like this:

Speaking for myself, there is no policy that I think a Mormon would pursue that I find objectionable. I will not vote for a Mormon because they claim to be Christian, when they are not Christians. Electing, or even nominating, a Mormon continues to send the message to Americans that Mormons are fine and dandy, Christians like everyone else.

With the usual caveat, of course:

I don’t think I’m a bigot.

Who ever does?

Gabe Schoenfeld didn’t get the Hadley memo:

In other words, the latest NIE is not a rock-solid judgment, and as we have already seen in a number of other dramatic instances, even the intelligence community’s rock-solid judgments might not be solid at all.

NPod must have had a conniption. Hard to disagree with Joe Klein:

This puts a stake in the heart of Podhoretz et al…but it also obliterates what the entire Republican presidential field has been saying about Iran for the past year. And, with Iraq quieting, it means that the election is more likely to focus on domestic concerns, which favor Democrats–that is, as long as the real Al Qaeda, the threat that Bush has been studiously ignoring, remains quiet.

Drezner:

One obvious implication: whatever slim chance there existed of a U.S. military intervention in Iran over the next 13 months just got way, way slimmer.