A RedStater comes out for McCain.
Hadley Flailing
An unimpressive performance. The key point seems to be that new evidence emerged just in the past two weeks that made it possible to reassess Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Is this true? Scott Horton:
One highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that cause the issuance of the assessment.” So what, I asked, caused the last-minute change and the sudden issuance of the summary of the NIE? My source had no idea.
He speculated, however, that a hardening of attitudes within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence community, and in Israel against the air war in Iran had caused Cheney and his team to fold their cards. “But I’d leave that with a final note of caution,” the source added, “Cheney sometimes appears to give up, but he’s a tenacious son-of-a-bitch. He may very well be back at it tomorrow.”
My hunch is that this is the final collapse of the neocon wing of the Bush administration. They simply couldn’t survive Iraq.
A McCain Memo
The campaign insists they’re back on track. Dave Weigel pours on the cold water here.
An Ad Fox News Won’t Run
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."
Jesse Helms HIV Travel Ban Update
Today, Immigration Equality will hold a press conference to raise awareness of the issue. Here’s a fact sheet on the latest Bush administration proposal that would place new burdens on foreigners with HIV barred formally from entering the US. Here’s a page where you can download a PDF guide to the policy in general. I wrote about it here. It’s insane that in 2007, US policy on HIV should still be following the guidelines that Jesse Helms forged. Even Helms repented of his hostility to people with HIV in the end. But his law remains in place. Wouldn’t it be a fitting legacy for this president’s largely excellent record on HIV and AIDS if he urged Congress to get rid of this provision, which places the US in the same camp as Sudan and Saudi Arabia on treating immigrants and foreign tourists with HIV.
Huck Ducks Hewitt
Why would anyone consent to be interviewed by a hatchet-man who works for another candidate?
The View From Your Window
Clifton, New Jersey, 2 pm.
How The NIE On Iran Could Foil Clinton
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.
Obama and the NIE
A reader writes:
Am I missing something, or doesn’t this whole thing make Obama look pretty prescient about opposing the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment on Iran, and Clinton look like a dupe (again!) for supporting it. Clinton was willing to give the President some legal justification for bombing Iran to destroy a fictitious WMD program, and Obama again smelled that something was rotten.
Played right, I think this is a huge new chip for Obama.
It certainly can’t hurt.
Clearing Up The Emails
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.
