TPM Reader AR responds from the other side of the aisle ...
I must agree on at least one point that your Republican friend makes. There is a perception that Democratic politicians run when attacked that is rooted in a good bit of reality. My observations of the Kerry campaign (fairly up close) suggest that pusillanimous and risk averse consultants run campaigns. The are constantly polling the current situation and reacting. They rarely test how reframing the debate might change perceptions. You do not see ads attacking a messenger, attacking a message, using humor, using emotion and doing so on a sustained basis to build a brand.I was not the least bit surprised by the attack on Murtha (remember how they attacked Kerry). I'll bet you a dollar that the Democratic response (if there is one) will be a) unorganized (from Biden through Dean), b) incoherent (or at least internally inconsistent), c) slow, d) measured, and e) cerebral. All the wrong things to do. What they need to do is show some blood and gore, use a couple of veterans, and ask the question -- is this worth it? If it is, why are the families of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Delay, Hastert, Rumsfeld et. al. not on the front lines? As we say in Marketing, an anecdote is worth a thousand data points.
As you can see from the last few posts, this topic is generating quite a bit of discussion. And it makes no sense to keep it just in the main TPM mailbox. So we've opened up this thread at TPMCafe to discuss it further.
--Josh Marshall
Earlier this evening I was exchanging emails with a longtime Republican reader. And in the course of that exchange I mentioned that while I understood the pushback against John Murtha and the announcement he made last week I didn't understand quite the ferocity of it. After all, how many non-political junkies outside of his district have ever even heard of John Murtha? As I said, I don't quite understand the full measure of ferocity behind the response.
Here's how this reader responded ...
I do, Josh.Instant response is what you do in a modern election campaign (unless you are way, way ahead). Discrediting a critic's argument isn't enough, because it takes too much time in an environment when time is everything. Campaign politics are the primary frame of reference for politicians in Washington today. Republicans of late have practiced this trade more aggressively, though I doubt that most of them are any more insensitive to non-campaign considerations than their Democratic colleagues.
Another factor, I think you'd agree, is that a lot of politicians tend to take cues from Presidents of their party. Reagan led a generation of GOP politicians to speak with sunny optimism; Clinton influenced Democratic politicians to project empathy in a somewhat ostentatious way. Bush, being more than a little insecure, tends to want to lash out at critics even when this is not politically necessary or productive, and this tendency has radiated downwards through his administration and outward to some Republicans, particularly in the House. Karl Rove's influence on GOP political operatives may be even more profound, and GOP political operatives have vast influence in Republican politics.
Finally and very frankly, Democratic politicians tend to be wimps. Anyone can see how easily they get pushed around by interest groups in their own party; when criticized aggressively, they tend to seek sympathy rather than hitting back. This encourages Republican political operatives to use rough tactics.
I don't think this is a matter of ideology. In fact I don't know what it is. I just know if I were a Republican politician there wouldn't be many Democratic politicians I would be afraid of. Maybe it's a reflection on my own personality that I take for granted the importance in politics of generating concern that one might be a very bad enemy to have. But of course I'm not actually in politics, something I don't expect to change.
Food for thought.
--Josh Marshall
I was just reading over a news account of the president's speech in South Korea in which he said "We will stay in the fight until we have achieved the ... victory that our brave troops have fought for." In the speech, he describes the war as being fought in theaters in Beslan, Bali, Riyadh, Madrid, Iraq -- virtually every place in the world over the last four years where any Muslim fundamentalists have blown anything up.
The real problem though -- and this becomes clear listening to the president, and increasingly from his supporters -- is that the president no longer has any coherent idea of what the war he's fighting amounts to or what victory would look like.
He says we'll fight it out to victory or that "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." But it's been a really long time since I've heard any coherent plan for what we're trying to do besides slogans like this.
If we're honest I think what the president is saying is this: We're going to stay in Iraq until the place calms down and we can leave with a sense that we've accomplished something.
Isn't that basically the idea?
We're not going to leave as long as the place is a slaughterhouse and a total mess because leaving then will look like we couldn't accomplish what we wanted to accomplish and got run out and thus, in whatever sense, got beat.
I think perceptions of national power and 'credibility' actually mean something. But a sensible fear of losing either was a good reason not to get into this situation in the first place.
And I don't see where, at the moment, we have any real or coherent strategy for calming the place down -- either a military strategy or a political one, though Ivo Daalder thinks there are some signs of progress on the political front.
So at the moment, there's not even a reasoned fight between staying in and getting out. Getting out is the only coherent strategy or approach on the table. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. But it is clear and defineable. On the other hand, there is the president, who hasn't put forward any concrete description of what our goals are or any coherent (let alone, a good plan) plan for accomplishing them. Under President Bush's leadership, in Iraq, we've become the national embodiment of the eternal Mr. Micawber, always waiting "for something to turn up."
--Josh Marshall
A note from TPM Reader ZG ...
I don't know if I am more angry or confused about this evening's congressional proceedings and, in a sense the everything going on with the Republicans. They won the elections; am I crazy to think they should, I don't know, do SOMETHING? What was the point of tonight's little stunt? Who let Rep. Schmidt make her remarks? How could anyone defend them? I'm having problems seeing what the big picture is (what a victory for us would look like), but I feel that so many Republican "leaders" have forgotten that a big picture even exists! (Aside, I hate the exclamation point. I've always thought it to be a pointless punctuation mark, but I've finally found a use for it.)I'd have to imagine that even the most ardent Bush supporters, and I'd hope that Bush and Co., would agree that things aren't going perfectly in Iraq and hence, there's room for improvement. I am in no way a military expert, so I have almost no clue about what our Iraq policy should be. I'm certain, however, that the strategy of "Let's just say everything is going fine and maybe that will become true" is not the way to go. Seeing the way the government is currently operating makes me think the most hardcore Libertarians have a point. Why have a government if this is how they're going to spend their time?
Quite apart from all the policy particulars, can't you understand the exasperation?
--Josh Marshall
It gets worse: House Republicans request ethics probe (sub.req.) of Murtha.
--Josh Marshall
Phony GOP Iraq withdrawal bill starts a bonfire this evening on the House floor. Check it out on C-SPAN if you have the chance.
Late Update: During the debate, Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) came on the floor and read a letter purporting to be from a United States Marine which said something to the effect of "Please tell Murtha, cowards cut and run, Marines never do." The clear 'feel' of her statement was that she was calling him a coward. The House burst into yells and pandemonium. Schmidt was forced to come back to the House floor and ask that her remarks be stricken from the record. This is the woman, remember, who barely beat Hackett just months ago -- quite an auspicious start.
Here's what Schmidt said, word for word: "Yesterday I stood at Arlington National Cemetery attending the funeral of a young marine in my district. He believed in what we were doing is the right thing and had the courage to lay his life on the line to do it. A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bop, Ohio Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do. Danny and the rest of America and the world want the assurance from this body – that we will see this through."
--Josh Marshall
Very nice map of what's coming down the pike in the Abramoff case contained in the Scanlon indictment. Especially the references to Representative #1, aka Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) ...
19. From in or about January 2000 through in or about April 2004, SCANLON and Lobbyist A [Abramoff], together and separately, provided a stream of things of value to Representative #1 [Ney] and members of his staff, including but not limited to a lavish trip to Scotland to play golf on world-famous courses, tickets to sporting events and other entertainment, regular meals at Lobbyist A's upscale restaurant, and campaign contributions for Representative #1, his political action committee, and other political committees on behalf of Representative #1.20. From in or about January 2000 through in or about April 2004, SCANLON and Lobbyist A, together and separately, sought and received Representative #1's agreement to perform a series of official acts, including but not limited to, agreements to support and pass legislation, agreements to place statements into the Congressional Record, meetings with Lobbyist A and SCANLON’s clients, and advancing the application of a client of Lobbyist A for a license to install wireless telephone infrastructure in the House of Representatives.
Note the free meals at Abramoff's restaurant. He wasn't the only member of the House on that gravy train.
--Josh Marshall
Flipped: Abramoff business partner Scanlon charged, ready to plea out and cooperate.
John Bresnahan picks up the story in Roll Call (sub.req.) ...
Michael Scanlon has agreed to testify against one-time business partner Jack Abramoff in any future criminal case involving the ex-lobbying superstar.The Justice Department has filed a “criminal information” document in federal court related to Scanlon, and there will be a hearing before a federal judge Monday afternoon.
At that time, Scanlon is expected to plead guilty to one felony count of conspiracy. Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), would then testify against Abramoff and anyone else indicted in the case, according to Justice Department sources.
Release the hounds.
--Josh Marshall
We've now made it past the half-way point in our goal of getting 3000 contributors for our TPM Muckraking Fund Fundraiser. We're now at 1552 readers contributing. A very big and heartfelt thank you to everyone who's contributed. You'll each be hearing from us soon by email to express our appreciation. We're going to do our very best to make sure the new site is one you'll want to visit every day.
--Josh Marshall
Some of the White House jabs against their critics these days are so fatuous and simple-minded that it's hard not to step back every so often and wonder if they're even serious.
One of the silliest goes like this. We invaded because Iraq was "a threat". And all the Democrats agree that Iraq was "a threat". And, heck, here's this quote from Bill Clinton saying that Saddam was "a threat". So clearly everyone agreed with the president. So what's the problem?
Perhaps it seems like I'm oversimplifying the argument. But I really must plead its inherently moronic nature.
Sure, lots of people thought Iraq was a threat. But North Korea is a very serious threat. And we haven't invaded North Korea. And Iran's no bed of roses either. But we haven't invaded Iran, though I guess perhaps I shouldn't speak too soon.
For better or worse there was a vast consensus within the American political establishment that Saddam Hussein was a threat to American interests and that he must at least be maintaining some stocks of chemical weapons. It is even true that in 1998 the Congress passed and the president signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which put the US on record as supporting 'regime change' in Iraq, though we should not forget that this law was intentionally foisted on the president at a moment of maximum political weakness by most of the same connivers that brought us the real war four years later.
All true. But not everyone thought we should invade Iraq. And that's the heart of this. You could easily substitute "WMDs" for "a threat" in the sentences above. The question is 'how much of a threat'? Do we need to invade? Do we need to invade right now? Do we have to invade right now before we even get a chance to see if the suspicions which are the premise of our invasion are even accurate?
Various people of different political stripes said 'no' to one or more of these questions. And that's the heart of the matter. It's almost comical when you take a moment to think about it. President Bush has spent most of his presidency swinging around the cudgel that he has the character and the strength to defend the country when his political opponents don't. Now suddenly we learn that all the Democrats he's run against for four years as not tough enough to defend the country actually supported all of these decisions and would have done everything the same way had they been in power. What an extraordinary development.
Yesterday I linked to this exceptional post Mark Schmitt did today over at TPMCafe. What Mark tries to do is get into the mindset that's governed this administration, something that I tried to do, though I think not that well, in this article from two years ago. What we have here with President Bush and his key advisors is something more complicated and deep-rooted than garden variety lying. As Mark puts it ...
the whole practice of evaluating all information going into the war not for its truth value, but for whether it promoted or hindered the administration's goal of being free to go to war. The President could have been given every bit of intelligence information available, and he and/or Cheney would have reached the same decision because they would have discarded, discounted, or disregarded most of it. Information that was Useful to that goal was put in one box, Not Useful put in another. Entire categories of information were assigned to the Not Useful box because their source was deemed an opponent of U.S. military action, or assumed to have some other motive.
This is a deep insight into Mr. Bush and his coterie.
Garden variety lying is knowing it's Y and saying it's X -- Lyndon Johnson at the Gulf of Tonkin. This is a much deeper indifference to factual information in itself.
People ask me sometimes whether I think the president thought Saddam did have big stockpiles of WMD or whether he knew Saddam didn't and lied about it. Or the same with Iraq's alleged links to al Qaida. This even leads to a sort of inverted conspiracy theorizing when people ask, "If he knew there was no WMD, why didn't they at least try to plant some to avoid the catastrophic embarrassment which ensued after the war."
The real answer, I think, is as banal as it is devastating: I don't think they ever gave it much thought -- not in the sense of trying to get to the heart of the matter. A lawyer assembles a case. Whether his client is innocent or not is sort of beside the point. He's trying to get him acquitted. Very similar here. The point was to invade. Non-conventional weapons made it a real possibility. A connection to 9/11 would make it a slam dunk. Some of each might get you just past the goal line. And if that didn't something else might.
This is why there was the bum's rush for the inspections process. I'm sure they figured there were some chemical weapons to be found somewhere. But why take the chance that there weren't, or more likely, why take the chance there wouldn't be enough? That would defeat the whole purpose.
Thinking through these points would be and someday will be an important, critical conversation for this country to have. Because it is a toxic approach to governance which has suffused this administration. It will also be important to understand and come to terms with how various other parties and players set the ground work for, facilitated and enabled what happened over the last few years. George W. Bush and his crew may be the bad actors. But bad actors can't accomplish bad acts on this scale on their own in a nation of 300,000,000 people. At the moment, though, we can't even get those debate started because simply discussing the heart of the issue -- that the administration recklessly and dishonestly gamed the country into war -- triggers a new hurricane of lies, distortions and attempts to confuse.
--Josh Marshall
John Snow: "Millions of Americans have benefited from these important tax policies either directly through lower taxes or indirectly through new and better jobs and greater economic security for families."
Which category are you in?
--Josh Marshall
Joe Wilson has just posted a piece at TPMCafe on whether the Post should do an internal inquiry into the Woodward matter as the Times did with Judy Miller. Hint: He's for it.
--Josh Marshall
Rep Geoff Davis (R-KY) today on Rep. Murtha: "I think it's important to understand the political climate in which these shameful statements have been made. Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can't do that there, so they've brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress. And, frankly, the liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound, fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies."
--Josh Marshall
Remember Rep. Heather Wilson (R) of New Mexico?
She was the one who spent weeks early this year trying to use word games to bamboozle her constituents about what her position was on Social Security. (See this post from February when it finally occurred to me to try calling Wilson's press secretary from my new cell phone rather than my office number and -- voila! -- the guy who never seemed to be at the phone for days on end suddenly answered.)
Now she's got an opponent. And apparently she's a top-tier one, New Mexico AG Patricia Madrid.
Last week Roll Call said that "Wilson's outlook changed dramatically when state Attorney General Patricia Madrid (D) announced recently that she would run." And they put Wilson in the list of top ten most vulnerable members of the House.
--Josh Marshall
Murtha on Cheney: "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."
--Josh Marshall
Mark Schmitt: "We're asking very traditional questions: Was information withheld? Was there deceit about the information? Those are the familiar Watergate/Iran-contra questions. But they overlook the Ideology of Information that the administration created. By this I mean the whole practice of evaluating all information going into the war not for its truth value, but for whether it promoted or hindered the administration's goal of being free to go to war. The President could have been given every bit of intelligence information available, and he and/or Cheney would have reached the same decision because they would have discarded, discounted, or disregarded most of it. Information that was Useful to that goal was put in one box, Not Useful put in another. Entire categories of information were assigned to the Not Useful box because their source was deemed an opponent of U.S. military action, or assumed to have some other motive."
--Josh Marshall
House Republicans just had another legislative trainwreck this afternoon as they failed to pass another big spending bill because of defections by GOP moderates.
If you look in this AP story you find this ...
Twenty-two Republicans voted against the measure, many of them moderates who also are swing votes on the budget-cutting legislation....
The defeat upset Republican plans to finish up nearly all the spending bills before leaving for the Thanksgiving recess. Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, manager of the bill, said it may now get thrown into a year-end "omnibus" over which members have little control.
The point here is, who cares about this vote? Republicans control the body. So they can just stick this stuff back in the big omnibus bill at the end of the year when everything comes down to just one vote. Presumeably, then, these moderates will feel obliged to vote for the whole thing.
Doesn't this set these twenty-two moderates up for one of those juicy, 'I voted for it before I voted against it' moments?
Of course, it does.
And the same thing applies to the ANWR stuff from last week and a bunch of these other recent legislative defeats. Somebody needs to compile the lists of who these Reps are, what they voted against today and keep the list on hand to see if they vote for it later this year.
--Josh Marshall
Roll Call (sub.req.) ...
The partisan spat over the veracity of testimony by oil company executives last week spilled over into personal barbs on the Senate floor Wednesday, with Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) accusing Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) of impugning his character on the chamber floor.“It’s been brought to my attention that the Senator from Illinois has unfairly maligned my character,” Stevens declared on the floor almost three hours after Durbin accused Stevens of making it easier for oil executives to lie to Congress about whether their companies were involved in closed-door energy policy meetings with Vice President Cheney in 2001.
How often do witnesses not get sworn in when they go before congressional committees?
--Josh Marshall
Ivo Daalder explains what Rep. John Murtha's (D-PA) call today for a US military withdrawal from Iraq means and questions whether he's right.
--Josh Marshall
There will be many such resources. But Knight-Ridder today has a good article summarizing and discussing several of the key falsehoods and distortions the president and his aides are now pressing on the public.
--Josh Marshall
There's one point that's important to remember about the White House's pushback to cover up its collective dishonesty about Iraq. We've noted before that in scandals or political nominations the decisive issue is not the number of opponents, the intensity of their opposition or even the quality of their arguments. The decisive issue is most often whether the scandalee or the nominee has some committed base of support, even if it only amounts to a distinct minority.
A parallel dynamic is in play with respect to what the White House is trying to accomplish with this current pushback.
Virtually all of the arguments the White House is now advancing are transparently ridiculous on their face to anyone who has closely followed this evolving debate over the last three years.
But that doesn't matter. The White House doesn't need to win any debates. What they need is for their core supporters to have something to say. Anything. And to be able to say it loudly. The one thing that would be fatal for the White House from its defenders would be silence.
I don't say this as a counsel of pessimism or futility. It's just important to understand, to know what they're trying to achieve. The good news is that most Americans have already figured this out. Clear majorities of the public now believe this president misled them about Iraq. And they'll certainly grow. The key is to press these on the specifics, why they said these things they knew weren't true.
--Josh Marshall
Ahhh. But sayin' it don't make it so.
Vice President Cheney was quite long last night with attacks that read like projection, calling his critics "dishonest and reprehensible" for their "cynical and pernicious falsehoods".
But he won't answer the questions.
He won't address the specifics because they're too unrefutable and damning. And that's probably one of the reasons why a decisive majority of American now think he and the president misled them. (Last WSJ/NBC poll, 57% "think that President Bush deliberately misled people to make the case for war.")
So Mr. Cheney can storm and scream all he wants. But he won't answer why he repeatedly misled Americans by claiming that the 9/11 ringleader Mohamad Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence not long before September 11th. Over and over and over. He can't answer that question because there is no answer. By every moral and factual standard, he provided false evidence to the American people. He lied. Over and over and over.
As late as January 2004, he was still trying to convince Americans of the by-then totally discredited 'mobile biological weapons lab' canard.
During the lead up to war, Cheney repeatedly claimed that Iraq was harboring and training al Qaida terrorists -- claims for which there was, at best, no good evidence. (For these and other examples, see this list. For some more fact-checking of the White House, see this article from Knight-Ridder.)
There's nothing more to say to Mr. Cheney than a) answer the questions and b) come clean.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader DM checks in ...
You need to get a transcript of Sen. Durbin’s comments on the Spike O’Dell show on WGN Chicago about 7:35 this morning. The gist of it is that he said for the President to say that we all had the same pre-war intelligence is just flat wrong. Also additional comments about the aluminum tubes issue.
Anyone know where we can get a copy of this?
--Josh Marshall
I think Matt Yglesias mentioned this in one of his recent posts. But it seems sort of silly for people to be claiming that the Woodward revelation demonstrates that Fitzgerald's investigation was somehow incomplete or flawed because he didn't find out about Woodward's role.
My recollection is that Fitzgerald said quite clearly in his press conference that he'd been prevented from getting the whole story and that a key reason for this was Libby's perjury and obstruction.
Remember the analogy about kicking sand in the umpire's face?
And there's another point just brought to my attention by TPM Reader NH. A lot is being made of the supposed fact that Woodward's revelation disproves one of Fitzgerald's claims, namely, that Libby was the first person to tell a reporter about Plame.
Libby's new lawyer Theodore V. Wells Jr. said this new information proved that Fitzgerald's accusations was "totally inaccurate."
The article in Thursday's Post makes the same point, if with far less inflammatory words: "Woodward testified Monday that contrary to Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's public statements, a senior government official -- not Libby -- was the first Bush administration official to tell a reporter about Plame and her role at the CIA."
But look what Fitzgerald actually said (emphasis added) ...
But Mr. Novak was not the first reporter to be told that Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, Ambassador Wilson's wife Valerie, worked at the CIA. Several other reporters were told.In fact, Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson.
Fitzgerald chose his words carefully. He didn't state as a fact that Libby was the first government official to leak Plame's identity. Nor did he hang any of his indictment on Libby's having been the first.
What he said is that Libby's was the earliest instance he'd found of an official leaking Plame's identity.
In truth, this whole point seems like a tempest in a teapot. For better or worse, I doubt that precisely what Fitzgerald said about who was first will play any role at Libby's trial. But it seems worth running this bit of imprecision to ground before it becomes a 'fact' by endless repetition.
--Josh Marshall
So maybe it was one of those two people who spoke to Fitzgerald not under oath.
This just out from the NYT ...
A senior administration official said that neither President Bush himself, nor his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., nor his counselor, Dan Bartlett, was Mr. Woodward's source. So did spokesmen for former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, former C.I.A. Director George J. Tenet and his deputy John E. McLaughlin.A lawyer for Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff who has acknowledged conversations with reporters about the case and remains under investigation, said Mr. Rove was not Mr. Woodward's source.
Vice President Cheney did not join the parade of denials. A spokeswoman said he would have no comment on an ongoing investigation. Several other officials could not be reached for comment.
Remember, there are only so many 'senior administration officials'. I wouldn't have much difficulty believing that Cheney is the ur-leaker. It's been obvious for some time that he's the prime mover in this whole affair. What I find hard to believe is that he came forward to Fitzgerald on his own volition. We shall see.
Late Update: Steve Soto nicely unpacks what it might mean for the president if the mystery SAO is Steve Hadley.
--Josh Marshall
Kerry on Cheney: "It is hard to name a government official with less credibility on Iraq than Vice President Cheney. The Vice President continues to mislead America about how we got into Iraq and what must be done to complete the still unaccomplished mission."
--Josh Marshall
Hour by hour, it seems like there's more muck to be raked down in DC. So thanks to everyone who's contributed so far to our TPM Muckraker Fund Fundraiser. We've had 1372 readers contribute so far. And we're trying to get to 1500 by the end of the evening. Join us.
As I've said before, this is for a new TPM blog dedicated to wall-to-wall coverage of the various threads of public corruption, self-dealing and sundry shenanigans afflicting Washington today -- Abramoff, Safavian, Reed, Norquist, the Duke, DeLay, Pombo, Ney, Burns. Ahh, the list goes on and on. Specifically, we're raisng funds for salaries for one and hopefully two full-time reporter bloggers who will lead up the new site.
More research, more posts, more bringing the whole story together for you everyday.
Important Note: As we noted earlier, a relatively small number of readers have tried to contribute through our paypal link and to get repeated error messages. We've set up a special page which provides solutions which should help most readers solve this error message problem.
--Josh Marshall
With Cheney coming out tonight to preach more falsehoods to the 30+ percent of the population still willing to listen, let's remember that this is the established, all-too-familiar strategy.
How do you go after a decorated war veteran running against a quasi-draft-dodger? Hit him hard for cowardice and disloyalty to country.
How do you knock out a respected juvenile court judge? Spread rumors that he's a pedophile.
You can see pretty clearly that Karl Rove is back in the saddle because what we're seeing now is straight from the Karl Rove play book. You throw them off balance by charging directly into their line of fire.
When the veil is finally being lifted on your history of lies, hit hard against the other side for 'rewriting history' or trying to deceive the public.
According to Drudge, a knock line from Cheney's speech this evening has him saying, "yet in Washington you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate. But in the last several weeks we have seen a wild departure from that tradition."
The up-is-downism is truly bracing -- hilarious or outrageous depending on your mood. And you can feel the belligerence and instinctual reliance on blunt force in all things that allows Cheney to say such things with a straight face or any hint of fear that sensible will see him digging himself still deeper.
All there is to do is just keep cataloging this man's history of lies and attempted cons. That's all that's necessary. They can't hide. But don't forget that this latest gambit is only the first flash of what we'll see from this crew as they swing over the downward arc of Fortune's wheel.
--Josh Marshall
Since I wrote my initial thoughts on the Woodward matter earlier today -- what I called "preliminary impressions" -- I've already revised some of my opinions, in large measure in response to a number of reader emails. I'll try to do a follow-up on that point later this evening.
But for now I want to share a few thoughts that have occurred to me about this mystery Senior Administration Official (SAO) who came forward to Patrick Fitzgerald.
One thing we learned toward the end of the build-up toward the Libby indictment is that Fitzgerald interviewed or deposed quite a few people in the course of his investigation. The SAO category includes a good number of people. But not that many. Is this someone Fitzgerald had never interviewed or brought before the grand jury? My recollection is that Fitzgerald talked in one fashion or another to most SAOs, maybe the great majority of them.
Whoever Fitzgerald talked to you would certainly think he'd have been sure to ask a question which would force the person being questioned to answer who, if anyone, they'd discussed Plame's identity with.
"Did you know Plame's identity?" "Did you discuss Plame's identity with anyone outside the White House?" etc.
You can probably see where I'm going here. Did this mystery SAO's testimony contradict earlier testimony provided in the course of the investigation?
Unless Fitzgerald had never spoken to this person, it's hard to see how that wouldn't have been the case.
Unless of course it was someone who'd been interviewed in some very cursory manner or perhaps not under oath.
Thoughts?
--Josh Marshall
Tonight Cheney comes out swinging against critics of White House lies, deceptions and sundry Iraq bamboozlements.
--Josh Marshall
The Times story on the Woodward/Post revelation.
And you thought cock fighting was illegal.
--Josh Marshall
Yglesias on how the Woodward revelation doesn't help Libby; Didion on Woodward fatal flaw.
--Josh Marshall
So it looks like the November 14th deadline Bill Frist set for a plan to pursue "phase two" of the senate Iraq intel investigation has come and gone. There's been progress apparently. But no resolution. No plan on looking into what happened in Doug Feith's office. And apparently no agreement from the majority as to whether the committee will actually be able to interview any of the key people in the administration. Roberts, Frist and Co. are still stonewalling for the White House.
--Josh Marshall
Thank you again to everyone who's contributed to our Muckraking fundraiser. We're now at 1306 contributors. And we're hoping to get to 1500 by the end of the day, which will put us at the half-way point to our goal of 3000.
One point, to address a question a number of you have asked. And if you've already contributed or aren't interested in doing so, please skip down to the non-fundraiser-related post below.
The great majority of you seem to be having no problem using the Paypal interface we use to collect contributions. Yet a small but steady number of you have tried, sometimes repeatedly, and keep getting an error message.
First, an extra thanks not only for wanting to contribute but going to such trouble to try to do so and then alerting us to the problem. If you've had this problem too and haven't written yet, please let us know.
We're trying to isolate what the problem is. If and when we can, we'll let you know in a post to the site. If we can't, we'll set up an alternative set up for contributing online. And we'll let you know that in a post too.
Again, thanks for your contributions. We'll do our best to make sure you're pleased with the result.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader SB responds to my post below ...
I agree that under normal circumstances, Woodward would have had no obligation to reveal this info to the public. But the actual circumstances in this case are different. Woodward was about to publish (or had just published) a book purporting to give an accurate picture of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The fact that Woodward kept all of this secret under these circumstances just destroys his integrity as a journalist.Woodward gives a strong impression that the CIA should bear a great deal, if not most, of the blame for the Iraq invasion in his oft repeated interview quoting George Tennet as saying “Slam Dunk” on the issue of WMDs in Iraq. The revelation about Woodward’s secret knowledge destroys Woodward’s credibility in my view because Woodward never did anything to correct the information in his book. The independent CIA investigation of the Iraq/Niger yellowcake story and Tennet’s repeated refusal to sanction the accuracy of the yellowcake story just doesn’t fit with the “Slam Dunk” picture. Now we know that Woodward had early inside information of the smear campaign against Wilson (and possibly the CIA). A credible journalist wouldn’t have kept this information concealed when the information tends to undercut information in the journalist’s just published book.
SB broadens out the picture from Woodward's public stance about the Fitzgerald investigation, which I note below. I'll give the matter more thought.
--Josh Marshall
I just gave another close read to Bob Woodward's statement about his deposition in the Fitzgerald investigation. And I wanted to go back through the statement, the accompanying Post story and whatever else we might know to think through what, if anything, Woodward might have done wrong.
Let's start with the first fact. Woodward knew key information about the leak and was probably the first person to receive the leak. And yet this is the first we're hearing about it, more than two years later.
I can't see where there's anything wrong with this. Woodward was told something in a confidential conversation with a source. He didn't write an article based on it, as Bob Novak did. So I don't see where he needs to tell the public about the conversation. He could have chosen to write about the leak story itself, using the insight he gained as the target of one of the leaks, as Walter Pincus did. But I don't think he was under an obligation to do so.
Then there's the fact that Pat Fitzgerald didn't know about it until quite recently. I don't see where this is a problem either. Woodward was maintaining a confidence and I don't think he had any affirmative obligation or necessarily any right to step forward and tell the investigator what he knew. Whatever you think about Judy Miller, Matt Cooper fought Fitzgerald's investigation for some time -- and I don't know anyone who thinks Cooper got into any ethical jams in his part of this story. In his case, I think with all the other journalists, they got pulled in when Fitzgerald's investigation led him to them. None of them just came forward on their own, at least as far as I know.
Where he gets into trouble I think are on two points.
First, he didn't tell his editor, Len Downie, anything about this. Downie's legendary predecessor Ben Bradlee told Editor & Publisher today that he doesn't see anything wrong with that. "I don't see anything wrong with that. He doesn't have to disclose every goddamn thing he knows ... He's got his finger in a lot of pies ... Woodward never has 'no involvement' because he is who he is. He's always poking around the White House because he's always writing a book about the White House. So it doesn't surprise me that he knows a lot about that."
I really don't think that cuts it.
This isn't just any pie. This is a story that has embroiled Washington for more than two years, as much as a media and media ethics story as a legal and national security story. The Post's chief rival for the status of national political paper of record, The New York Times, has been involved in a debilitating entanglement with the case for more than a year. And one of its most renowned reporters has now, in effect, been fired, in large part, over her messy involvement in this case and her failure to come clean with her editors about the nature of that involvement.
This isn't just another pie Woodward had his finger in. Given the context and everything that surrounds this case, not telling Downie amounted to concealing it.
My big question is: did Downie really never ask? Seems hard to imagine. The Times asked their reporters. And Woodward would have been a very obvious person to ask.
Second, what he told the public. As I've said, Woodward had no obligation to discuss this publicly and in most respects probably no right. But he has been an aggressive critic of the investigation itself, challenging the premise that there was any underlying wrongdoing in this case. By becoming a partisan in the context of the leak case without revealing that he was at the center of it, really a party to it, he wasn't being honest with his audience. I don't see much way around that.
Now, his antipathy toward the investigation seems much easier to understand.
These are preliminary impressions. And I'd be eager to hear your views. I had intended to discuss this at a bit more length. But it's just been brought to my attention that a few minutes ago Howie Kurtz published an article in the Post in which Woodward apologizes to the Post. So I'm going to read that and follow up with more impressions later.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader BB is confused ...
I confess to be completely bewildered with the ability of this administration to make statements that clearly contradict their actions without being completely laughed off the American and world stage.Bush says we do not torture, that the scandal at Abu Graib was just a few bad apples, and doesn't even respond to the many other instances of prisoner abuse (including death) -- BUT he WILL veto a bill that bans torture of prisoners. We read articles about one and then articles about the other but most of the time only the columnists are there pointing out the transparent duplicty of it all. Why are elected Dems so silent? Why did it take McCain to make this an issue?
Bush can say these things with a straight face because that's the kind of guy he is, and the right-wing scream machine will back him in this because that's who they are -- but how the heck does the MSM reduce this complete nonsense to he-said/she-said when it's really a case of pathological deceit?
Good question.
--Josh Marshall
If you haven't seen it already, definitely take a moment to check out the debate/exchange we have going on over at TPMCafe Book Club about America's history with political Islam. Bob Dreyfuss, Steve Clemons, Jane Arraf and John Stuart Blackton are discussing Bob's new book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. It's a fascinating discussion.
--Josh Marshall
Ahhh, the ghost of Brownies past.
From the Times: "New Jersey officials said yesterday that Bernard B. Kerik abused his position as New York City correction commissioner in the late 1990's by accepting tens of thousands of dollars from a construction company that he was helping to pursue business with the city. They say the company has long had ties to organized crime."
--Josh Marshall
As I said earlier today we're going to try to put our research energies for the rest of this week into compiling a detailed list of White House deceptions and lies in the lead up to war, along with a White House mendacity taxonomy distinguishing all the different flavors or deception, mistatement, exaggeration and generalized bamboozlement.
We've already got in almost 150 tips from readers for our list. And clearly cataloging all this mumbojumbo and dishonesty is going to be a time-consuming task. But while we're at it I just can't help passing on some gems.
Dick Cheney ever try to tell people Saddam might be behind 9/11?
Hmm, let's see ....
Russert: Do you still believe there's no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?Cheney: Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that--it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point, but that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.
That's from Meet the Press on December 9th, 2001. And remember, this was a claim that was floated and then rapidly discredited by, among other things, evidence that Atta was in the US at the time of the alleged meeting in Prague. The Czechs themselves eventually gave up on it.
A year later, Cheney was back at it again on Russert's show, for a chat on September 8th, 2002 ...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the al-Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn't he there, again, it's the intelligence business.Mr. RUSSERT: What does the CIA say about that? Is it credible?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: It's credible. But, you know, I think a way to put it would be it's unconfirmed at this point. We've got...
Then in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News on January 9th, 2004 ...
On the separate issue, on the 9/11 question, we've never had confirmation one way or another. We did have reporting that was public, that came out shortly after the 9/11 attack, provided by the Czech government, suggesting there had been a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and a man named al-Ani (Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani), who was an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, at the embassy there, in April of '01, prior to the 9/11 attacks. It has never been -- we've never been able to collect any more information on that. That was the one that possibly tied the two together to 9/11.
Cheney just couldn't help spreading the Atta-in-Prague canard every chance he got and floating what were at best intentionally misleading claims about not being able to confirm one way or another whether Saddam was behind 9/11. Except, that is, when he denied saying anything about an Atta meeting in Prague. Or well ... let's go to Gloria Borger interviewing the veep in June 17th, 2004 ...
BORGER: Well, let's get to Mohamed Atta for a minute because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, I never said that.
BORGER: OK.
Vice Pres. CHENEY: I never said that.
BORGER: I think that is...
Vice Pres. CHENEY: Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9 of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down, we just don't know.
BORGER: Well, this report says it didn't happen.
Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, this report says they haven't found any evidence.
BORGER: That it happened.
Vice Pres. CHENEY: Right.
BORGER: But you haven't found the evidence that it happened either, have you?
Vice Pres. CHENEY: No. All we have is that one report from the Czechs. We just don't know.
Did Dick Cheney ever say anything misleading about Saddam and al Qaida and 9/11, anything he knew wasn't true? Face it. It's not even close. Really, it's an indictment of the state of our public discourse that it's even much of a debate at this late moment. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Like I said a couple days ago, let's unpack all the transcripts. Get it all out there. What everybody and anybody said. These guys are just as guilty as sin.
--Josh Marshall
Meanwhile, in other news (WaPo): "A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress."
I need to get one of my economist friends to walk me through the declining marginal value of Bush scandals/lie revelations under current circumstances.
Late Update: TPM Reader PJ cuts to the essentials: "The significant thing here is that Cheney remained silent while his cronies in the oil industry lied to Congress. He knew they were lying, and said nothing."
--Josh Marshall
So the news is out from the Post now -- both in a statement from Bob Woodward and in an article from the Post.
The details still seem sketchy and I suspect we're going to find out a lot more in the next few days. But it now seems that Woodward -- who has long been publicly critical of the Fitzgerald investigation -- has been part of it from the beginning. Literally, the beginning.
From the Post account it appears that Woodward was told of Valerie Plame's identity before any other journalist by an as-yet-unnamed senior administration official who is not Karl Rove or Scooter Libby.
More problematically for Woodward, he didn't tell his own Post editors about any of this until last month and then only after the unnamed senior administration official came forward to Fitzgerald and told him about it. That apparently led Fitzgerald to subpoena Woodward
Woodward claims that he told Post reporter Walter Pincus about it at the time. But Pincus says he has no recollection of such a conversation.
From the Post article ...
Woodward's statement said he testified: "I told Walter Pincus, a reporter at The Post, without naming my source, that I understood Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as a WMD analyst."Pincus said he does not recall Woodward telling him that. In an interview, Pincus said he cannot imagine he would have forgotten such a conversation around the same time he was writing about Wilson.
"Are you kidding?" Pincus said. "I certainly would have remembered that."
Pincus said Woodward may be confused about the timing and the exact nature of the conversation. He said he remembers Woodward making a vague mention to him in October 2003. That month, Pincus had written a story explaining how an administration source had contacted him about Wilson. He recalled Woodward telling him that Pincus was not the only person who had been contacted.
There's quite a bit here -- both as a media story and in the potential implications for the leak probe (Libby's lawyers are already using this as a cudgel against Fitzgerald's case, arguing that there are clearly key facts Fitzgerald did not know). And I'll need some time to digest them. At a minimum, though, Woodward seems to have some explaining to do, at least for the fact that he became an aggressive commentator on the leak story without ever disclosing his own role in it, not even to his editors.
--Josh Marshall
You can see right now the sort of ferocity and the hurricane of bamboozlement this White House is capable of unleashing when faced with a pretty much impossible to challenge case that they misled the American people in making the case for the Iraq war.
Much the same with public corruption and all the interwoven scandals only now bubbling to the surface in Washington and through the various tentacles of the DC political machine -- Abramoff, Safavian, DeLay, Reed, Norquist, Scanlon, Ney, Burns, Pombo, Tobin, the Duke, Tomlinson, the yet to be discovered cronies at FEMA and DHS. The same wave after wave of bamboozlement and misdirection is in store as these stories unfold.
So, yes, this is another bid for our fundraiser. But let me take just a quick moment to explain again what we're trying to do. We want to create a site, a blog devoted to a meticulously factual chronicling, explaining and aggressively reporting on the web of corruption in today's Washington. Basically, more focused, more frequently updated, and making more connections than any well-balanced person could possibly want. In all seriousness, these are really complicated stories (not usually ethically complicated, but factually so). And the forest is always threatening to get lost for the trees. We want to set up a special TPM site devoted to keeping these stories in focus. And we want to hire one and hopefully two full-time people -- reporter-bloggers -- to help keep us and all our readers up to speed on the story.
That's what this is for, basically for salaries for these two yet-to-be-hired (yet to be found, for that matter) people. We don't and never will charge for access to any of our sites. So if you think this is a site you're likely to read often and get something out of, we're asking if you can chip in some funds for the not insubstantial costs of launching the new site and getting it on its feet.
That's our pitch. It'll be an experiment in blog-journalism. And we'll do our best to make it fun in addition to worthwhile. So if you'd like to join us and make a contribution, click right here. As of 4:16 PM we're up to 768 contributors. And we're going to do our best to get to 1000 by the end of the evening.
--Josh Marshall
Desperate Santorum makes play for post-Enlightenment Era voter bloc ...
U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said Saturday that he doesn't believe that intelligent design belongs in the science classroom.Santorum's comments to The Times are a shift from his position of several years ago, when he wrote in a Washington Times editorial that intelligent design is a "legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom."
But on Saturday, the Republican said that, "Science leads you where it leads you."
Actually, to insulate themselves from charges of liberal bias aren't journalists supposed to refer to this as "what some Democrats refer to as 'science'"?
Just asking.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, the White House has now finally engaged the debate over the exaggerations, misleading claims and falsehoods by which it led the nation to war. So we need the facts on the table. And this is an effort that is perfectly suited to refereed collective online research.
So here's what I propose.
What is needed is a list of specifics. Specific dates, specific statements and specific explanations of context, intent and consequence.
I would propose a few broad categories and we'll likely add to these or refine them as we go. First, instance, the 'smoking gun' and 'mushroom cloud' line wasn't a lie because it didn't assert any factual claim. I'd call it a "reckless exaggeration", given the facts we knew at the time.
Or how about the repeated claims that Saddam "supported terrorists". When asked to provide evidence for this, White House spokespeople will often point to the fact that Saddam offered financial support to the families of dead suicide bombers from the West Bank and Gaza. In other cases, they'll note that has-been uber-secular-terrorist Abu Nidal was living in Baghdad before the war. In both cases, you can say this counts as 'supporting terrorists'. But the point of these statements was to convey the impression that Saddam had and was supporting the terrorists we're fighting now, Islamist terrorists and specifically al Qaida. So I'd categorize claims like these as "intentionally misleading statements".
Then we get to statements like the one Dick Cheney made when he claimed that we'd neither been able to confirm or discredit claims that Mohammad Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague not long before the attacks. I think we can say this was a straight up "lie". Several US intelligence agencies had looked into this. And each had come back either not believing the claim or with specific and solid evidence to refute it. So Cheney was just lying. And of course there was an even larger meta-lie here or intentional deception since Cheney was trying to send the message that there was reason to believe Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks.
In any case, we'll likely need to refine these categories and perhaps expand them. But the key is precision and a systematic effort to distinguish among and categorize the various degrees and techniques of Bush White House mendacity and bamboozlement.
What we need from you is to send in examples. For the sake of simplicity and focus we'll restrict the possible speakers to the president, the vice-president, cabinet secretaries, the president's press secretary and the national security advisor. We'll write them up on the site and then collect and organize them on a separate page for easy reference.
Send your emails to the regular comment email address linked up on the upper right hand side of the site. Use the subject line "Road to War". Then give us a specific quote you think qualifies as some breed of exaggeration, misleading statement or lie. We'll need the specific quote, a date, the speaker, and a link or citation to verify it.
It should not be difficult to compile a long, long list.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader SS adds a piece to the puzzle ...
Another point that seems to be missed is that you can only call the 2002 vote a "vote for war" if you assumed that Bush was lying about how he was going to use the authorization (to pressure Saddam to get him to disarm) and that he had already decide to take out Saddam. That is obviously a fair assumption now but could senator have fairly assumed that in 2002? Is Bush saying that senator should have assumed he was lying when they voted?
I think this may be one of those cases where, like I noted last evening, neither side wants to engage because neither looks great. I think the answer is, yes in many cases, it was already getting pretty clear that the president was lying even then, though the full measure of his bad faith hadn't yet revealed itself. On the other hand, I think many senators don't want to cut a president off at the knees when he is trying to use a show of force to achieve a good end. It's a tradition that makes a good deal of sense if you're not dealing with a president like George W. Bush.
--Josh Marshall
A short note from TPM Reader KS ...
I would have defended my position for war by saying that prez needed authority to wage a war so he could push Saddam into agreeing for more inspections and controls. How come dems never say such a thing?
My thoughts on this in an upcoming post.
--Josh Marshall
A note from TPM Reader MS ...
While it may be clear to many of us how the Bush admins arguments for the war differ from the position of Democrats who were willing to give the president the authority, these nuance distinctions are lost to most of the public. What I think most people can grasp and Bush cannot wiggle out of is the timing. If we keep pointing out that regardless of the severity or seriousness of the threat Saddam may have posed, we had a process in place to determine these issues, and it was the RUSH TO WAR that distinguishes the administration position from everyone else. Both domestic and international leaders agreed that we had a right and even an obligation to determine whether Saddam was a threat, and if so, what to do about it, but this process was PREEMPTED by the decision to invade before knowing all the important facts. Let's hold them accountable for that premature decision and forget arguing about who thought what in 1999 or 2002. We could have reached a consensus with the international community and our own intelligence agencies if we had allowed the facts to come out from the inspections, and more complete intelligence that would have come from that process.Thus the accusation is that they pre-empted that process specifically to avoid the possibility that the consensus would have been not to invade. They were determined to invade and that's what led to the intelligence manipulations. That's what we need to focus on. The decision had already been made regardless of the intelligence. Once people realize that the invasion was already planned and the NIE or PDB had nothing to do with that decision, the issue will be framed in a way they can't respond to except to deny it.
This isn't the only point, but it's one of the key ones.
--Josh Marshall
Here's a short and insightful post by Matt Yglesias on the meaning of what's happening today in the Senate with the competing 'time limit on Iraq involvement' resolutions.
Bill Frist and the GOP leadership generally have lost effective control of the senate on this and other issues. Frist is struggling to create the appearance of a battle between two contending resolutions -- a battle he can win -- when really he is giving way in the face of the one the Dems are pushing. He's fighting for an orderly retreat rather than a rout.
--Josh Marshall
Continued and very sincere thanks to everyone who has contributed so far to our TPM Muckraking Fund fundraiser. Twenty-four hours in, we're up to 680 contributors, which means we're just a bit shy of a quarter of the way to our goal. We're going to try to get to a 1000 by the end of today. We've found the muck. Now we need your help to buy up a few good rakes. More soon.
--Josh Marshall
You've most likely heard of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff who's been making the media rounds recently, discussing what really happened during the lead-up to war and after. This evening he's going to be on Chris Lydon's Open Source radio show. He'll be taking listener questions both off the air and also from the show's website. If it doesn't play in your area, they also stream it from the site.
--Josh Marshall
E.J.Dionne: "There is a great missing element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do all he could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them should have raised."
This is an extremely good point. As is often the case in fierce debates some of the most relevant angles of discussion are left untouched because they serve neither side's purpose. This is most certainly one of them.
--Josh Marshall
It seems that National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley has now become a key White House point men for deflecting blame for the president's dishonest road to war. Fair enough, it's a logical role for the head of the NSC.
But Hadley turns out to be a perfect illustration of the doublespeak the administration is now peddling.
As I've noted several times, the White House has hung a lot of its credibility on a slippery distinction. The two major investigations of the WMD debacle found little if any evidence of the White House's pressuring analysts to alter their analytic judgments and estimates of Iraqi WMD capacity. What no commission has yet been allowed to examine is how the White House used those analyses.
Which brings us back to Steve Hadley.
Twice during the lead-up to war, Hadley pushed the CIA to sign off on the president using the Niger uranium claims in speeches dramatizing the danger Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. In December 2002 he failed. In January 2003 he succeeded.
The essential facts aren't even in dispute.
In the summer of 2003 Hadley stepped forward with a choreographed apology to the president for allowing the claim into the 2003 State of the Union address. According to Hadley, by January 2003 he had forgotten the two memos he had received from the CIA asking that the Niger claim be removed from the president's speech and the personal call for George Tenet asking the charge to be removed. "The high standards the president set were not met," said Hadley.
This little charade never completely cleared up why, having allegedly forgotten the episode from October, Hadley and his staff again argued with the CIA's Alan Foley in an attempt to get the claim into a speech.
But the basic point is clear.
You have the CIA's analysis: that the Niger claim was unsubstantiated and not credible. Then there was what Hadley and the White House wanted to do with it: have the president level the charge in a high profile speech with no indication the president's intel advisors doubted it was true.
I think this pretty nicely captures the distinction between pressuring analysts to change their judgments and what the president does with the intelligence. And Hadley's your guy if you want to ask the question. Yes, this is only one episode in the long story of obfuscation and misdirection. But it seems to capture the essential point with great clarity. Why did Hadley twice fight to get the CIA to sign off on the president's making a claim that they didn't think was true? Someone should ask him.
--Josh Marshall
A short note from TPM Reader MC ...
I've obviously missed something. When did it become appropriate for the Commander-in-Chief to go onto a military installation before a military crowd and denounce the opposition party? I cannot remember a time in my 21-year career when anything remotely like this happened. Is it just me or are we embarked on something very dark and dangerous for our democracy?
He might have added that it's also on the eve of a trip abroad.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader RW checks in ...
Does the White House’s push back on the intelligence remind you of anything? That’s right—the Social Security battle of earlier this year. Bush and the Republicans trying to sell something by avoiding specifics and trying to get cover from Democrats—except this time all they got is quotes from three years ago, not Allen Boyd. Let’s hope we don’t see town hall meetings on this one—imagine the backdrops: “Didn’t Manipulate Intelligence.” Regular folks get up on the stage with the President and say they were fooled by the Niger documents too.
Not a precise comparison certainly. But the same fingerprints.
--Josh Marshall
Thanks again to everyone who's contributed so far to our fundraiser.
As of just before 8:00 PM on the east coast we're at 377 contributors so far. And to keep on schedule for our goal we'd love to get to 500 before the end of the evening.
For details about the project we're raising funds for, click here. And to contribute right now, click here.
--Josh Marshall
Feeling the heat?
First the White House lashed out at the Washington Post article that recounted the half-truths and untruths in the president's last speech on Iraq. Now the White House plays push back against Sen. Levin with this 'fact-sheet' on Iraq.
Let me comment briefly on the particular claims the White House makes in this fact sheet before proceeding to a more general point because their argument here shows yet more examples of the White House pattern of cherry-picking and misdirection.
The White House fact sheet picks up on this statement that Levin made today on CNN ...
But before the war, the President was saying that you cannot distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Iraq. As a matter of fact, he said that so often that he tried to connect Saddam Hussein with the attackers on us, on 9/11, so often, so frequently and so successfully, even though it was wrong, that the American people overwhelmingly thought, because of the President's misstatements that as a matter of fact, Saddam Hussein had participated in the attack on us on 9/11. That was a deception. That was clearly misinformation. It had a huge effect on the American people.
The White House press release then goes on to say that contrary to this statement, Levin and others Dems have said that "Iraq Was A Part Of The War On Terror ..."
Here are the two statements they adduce from Levin ...
Sen. Levin: "The War Against Terrorism Will Not Be Finished As Long As [Saddam Hussein] Is In Power." (CNN's "Late Edition," 12/16/01)Sen. Levin: "We Begin With The Common Belief That Saddam Hussein Is A Tyrant And A Threat To The Peace And Stability Of The Region." (Committee On Armed Services, U.S. Senate, Hearing, 9/19/02)
Now, let's unpack this. Levin's point is muddled because he clearly misspoke when he criticized the president for "saying that you cannot distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Iraq." (Presumeably, identifying Saddam with Iraq ain't too much of a stretch.) If you look at the statement in its entirety, it's quite clear that Levin is talking about connecting Saddam Hussein and al Qaida. Here's the entirety of what Levin said (with key points in italics) ...
S. O'BRIEN: You heard what Dan Bartlett had to say, which was essentially, in a nutshell, it's unfair for Democrats who supported the war to now say that the president or the administration misled the public. The information was wrong. Everybody was misled.LEVIN: Actually, some of the information in the intelligence community was very right and what the administration is doing is trying to, they are continuing a pattern here of deception of the American people.
He just said that the Democrats don't have the facts or the critics don't have the facts and rather than attacking the critics they should be responding to the questions which have been raised. For instance, the intelligence community, the Defense Intelligence Agency, said before the war -- and I'm now reading the unclassified statement of the Defense Intelligence Agency prior to the war -- "that Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements."
But before the war, the president was saying that you cannot distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
As a matter of fact, he said that so often they tried to connect Saddam Hussein with the attackers on us on 9/11, so often, so frequently and so successfully, even though it was wrong, that the American people overwhelmingly thought, because of the president's misstatements that, as a matter of fact, Saddam Hussein had participated in the attack on us on 9/11.
That is -- that was a deception. That was clearly misinformation.
The issue here is the White House attempt to connect Saddam Hussein with al Qaida and 9/11. Levin can answer for himself why he made some hot-headed statements about Iraq a few months after 9/11. And there are plenty of stupid things cowardly Democrats said in the first couple years about Iraq, and especially the first couple months.
But he's quite right about this. It was "deception" and it was "misinformation". And most Americans now understand that.
I went through this stuff at admittedly tedious length to make a point: this is just more of the same word-games, misdirection and mendacity. More of the same, more leopards that can't change their spots.
President Bush and his administration spent 18 months trying to convince the American people that there was a tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida and even to the 9/11 attacks. There wasn't. There was never any evidence for that. But they knew the charge would be effective. And, for them, that was more than enough.
They can't wash out the taint of that cynicism and infamy no matter how much they try and no matter how loud they yell.
As I said above, many Democrats ran scared in the face of this once-popular president's onslaught and said many things they probably now wish they hadn't. Let's catalog those statements and let them answer for their cowardice and wobbliness. But the president was president -- a fact of accountability he never seems to grasp. He drove the train. He and his advisors cynically worked to convince the public that Saddam was tied to 9/11 -- an explosive claim in the aftermath of the 9/11 horror. That's something they knew wasn't true and which none of the president's critics, to be the best of my knowledge, ever agreed with or argued for. President Bush and his administration are on the line for that.
Now they want to go back and try to wriggle out from under the past we all remember. So to use his words, bring it on. The facts indict him. And his White House's ferocious desperation in response shows they know it.
Let them dig through the transcripts. And if there's collateral damage among today's accusers, so be it. Let the facts get hashed out and the chips fall. There's only one side of this argument running scared from the truth. We know what happened. We were there. We all remember.
--Josh Marshall
Courtesy of the good compilers at pollingreport.com, here is a listing of the last nine public polls. Here we list the organization, followed by the date, followed by the approval rating in bold ...
CNN/USA Today/Gallup 11/11-13/05 37Newsweek 11/10-11/05 36
FOX/Opinion Dynamics RV 11/8-9/05 36
AP-Ipsos * 11/7-9/05 37
NBC/Wall Street Journal 11/4-7/05 38
Pew 11/3-6/05 36
AP-Ipsos * 10/31 - 11/2/05 37
ABC/Washington Post 10/30 - 11/2/05 39
CBS 10/30 - 11/1/05 35
Pretty much a consensus, ain't it?
--Josh Marshall
CNN-USAToday: Bush at 37%.
And this must be the harshest blow: "A 53% majority say they trust what Bush says less than they trusted previous presidents while they were in office. In a specific comparison with President Clinton, those surveyed by 48%-36% say they trust Bush less."
Given the record, it's shocking that it's even that close. Still, someone in Chappaqua must be smiling.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader DS checks in ...
Has anyone given serious thought to the possibility that Bush himself may not have been aware of the conflicting evidence, the caveats, etc.? I strongly suspect that Cheney and Rumsfeld presented him with one sexed-up dossier after another, each of which left out the doubts and uncertainties felt at the lower levels. And Bush would have been none the wiser. After all, it is well known that Bush doesn't look beyond his advisors for news of the world, for corroboration, or for counterfactuals with which to test his working hypotheses. And they all knew this about him in advance. He was ripe for manipulation. And Cheney is nothing if not a manipulator. [Even Rove isn't beneath such knavery.]I wouldn't be surprised if the story of the lead-up to war turns out to be the story of this cabal crafting a persuasive story, presenting it to Bush in carefully calibrated doses, and getting him to do what they had decided long in advance they wanted to do. And it was all made possible by Bush's almost total lack of curiosity and intellectual discipline.
Disturbing, but to my mind highly plausible.
At the end of the day, I don't find this theory persuasive. I don't see much reason to assume that the president is any less capable of such bad-faith and bad acts than those around him. I don't find it plausible that even in 'the bubble' he could really be that out of touch. And as America Abroad contributors Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay argue in their book America Unbound, there are many reasons to believe that the president's foreign policy is not something foisted on him by others but grounded in his own philosophy about force, power and America's place in the world.
Still, there's way too much we don't know about what's happened in the last five years to make any definitive judgments. So it's worth considering.
And I do think DS is on to something when he notes the president's lack of seriousness about facutal information and his indifference to critically evaluating evidence or challenging his own assumptions. The president's laziness, hubris and unwillingness to hold himself or anyone else accountable for anything will prove to have been at the heart of all of this.
--Josh Marshall
Kevin Drum had a piece up last night on his site in which he explained one of the many -- and likely the most clear-cut -- pieces of evidence that the Bush administration intentionally misled the American public in the lead-up to war.
What Kevin does is to highlight five major bullet point arguments the administration used for war. On each of these points, information has now come out, which the administration knew about at the time, which seriously undercuts or simply discredits the claim.
In each case the White House either made no effort to let the public know this information or, far more often, took active steps to withhold the information from the public.
One example Kevin gives is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the al Qaida prisoner who claimed that Saddam had given al Qaida operatives training in biological and chemical weaponry. What the administration neglected to tell the public was that the information had been obtained through torture and that our own intelligence agents thought he'd likely made the whole thing up.
Notwithstanding this terrorism-related example, one area Kevin largely leaves aside is the general topic of Saddam and al Qaida, and specifically whether the two were in league with each other and likely to work together to attack the United States.
His reasoning, I think, is that unlike most of the WMD stuff, the terrorism issue was largely aired at the time. Most of the contrary evidence managed to find its way into the press. So someone following the story reasonably closely could figure out that what the administration was saying was largely a crock.
Given how clear-cut Kevin's other examples are (of very important evidence withheld from the public), I think he's right not to blur the picture by getting too much into the terrorism question. But the whole argument about Saddam as an active or potential ally of al Qaida is still a huge example of White House dishonesty in making the case for war -- in some ways it's almost the biggest one.
Just because contrary evidence managed to get out into the media blood stream, that doesn't mean that the White House didn't work for more than a year -- and with no little success -- to convince the public -- by subtle and heavy-handed means -- of what was really just a bogus argument that they knew was a crock.
I think we all realize that in making an argument to the country to take some major step, a White House or a president probably won't fall over themselves in every case to list off every contrary bit of evidence or data. During the lead-up to our Bosnian intervention I don't think Bill Clinton did or needed to dedicate a section of each speech to World War II-era Croatian atrocities against Serbs when he was making his case that ethnic cleansing by Serbs in Bosnia had to be stopped.
But when you see case after case when the president tries to lead the country to war using arguments or claims which not only turned out to be false but which he had little or no reason to believe were true at the time, at a certain point you need to just call it what it is. He didn't tell the truth. He tried to mislead the people he swore to protect. He fibbed, gambled and lost. And now he should be helf accountable for the consequences of his actions.
--Josh Marshall
As roughly a million TPM Readers have now pointed out to me, Jane Mayer had an excellent piece on the torture question back in July in The New Yorker. And she delved into the SERE tie noted in the post below.
--Josh Marshall
I feel like I've never followed the minute details of the torture debate (sort of shows where we've gotten to, that there's a 'torture debate) as much as I'd like to or should have. But be sure to check out this piece on the Times OpEd page today which looks into the backstory of how we got here. I'm curious how widely this has been reported before. But, in brief, we built our current (literal and figurative) torture manual by going back and studying how wartime enemy regimes have tortured our soldiers in the past.
As the article explains, there was a "classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody."
As the piece goes on to explain, "The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went 'up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques' for 'high-profile, high-value' detainees."
In a sense we can take some solace these days from the fact that the enablers and justifiers of torture seem more and more isolated and embattled. But it still appears to be our standing policy. And this almost novelistic detail just makes the story all the more grim.
--Josh Marshall
Thanks to everyone who's contributed so far. And, so far, so good. Our goal is to come close to getting contributions from one-half of 1% of our estimated monthly audience. Our monthly unique visitors number hovers between 750,000 and 800,000 at TPM. So we've pegged our goal at getting 3,000 readers contributing.
So far we're coming up on 140 contributors. So we've got a long way to go. And it won't be easy. But it's a solid start. (Click here to contribute right now.)
I'm juggling blog business stuff today with blogging proper. But shortly we'll bring you the story of the fellow who got caught with a seat on the Abramoff freebie bandwagon and told the folks back home that it was too bad, that's just how things work in Washington.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, I've threatened and described what we're doing in several posts. So here we go. This is 5th Anniversary week at TPM. Today is day one of our 6th year online. And we're celebrating by kicking off our new fundraiser.
I'll be following up with a number of posts describing our plans for expanded coverage of politics, public corruption and the 2006 election cycle and what this fundraiser is for. But here are the essentials ...
We're going to launch a new blog dedicated to chronicling, explaining and reporting on the interconnected web of public corruption scandals bubbling up out of the reigning Washington political machine. As we move into next year the coverage will also expand into how these different stories are playing in congressional elections around the country. What are we raising the money for? Simple. Salaries.
One of the reasons so few blogs do sustained, original reporting is that it's hard, time-consuming work. And that's near to impossible to do if you've got another full-time job making claims on your time. We want to hire one and hopefully two full-time reporter-bloggers to dig into this story, explain recent press reportage and distill it, work sources on Capitol Hill and around Washington, and report on it every day exclusively for you. We hope it'll be a site you'll want to visit every day.
Anyway, that's the pitch. It's an experiment and we hope you'll be part of it with us. We'll be following up with more details about what we're planning throughout the week. Click here to make a contribution right now. And thank you so much in advance.
--Josh Marshall
The truth hurts. The White House tries to push back against the Washington Post article calling the president to task on his intel distortions.
--Josh Marshall
Bob Dreyfuss has just kicked off our latest TPMCafe Book Club, explaining why he wrote his new book Devil's Game.
Here's the beginning of Bob's kick-off post ...
I wrote Devil's Game to fill in a gap amid the millions of words that have been written about political Islam and U.S. policy since September 11, 2001.It's the story before the story, and it helps answer the question: How did we get into this mess? It's my contention that part of the answer to that question, at least, is that for half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I call the "Islamic right" as convenient partners in the Cold War.
I approached this book not as an historian, but as a journalist. A great deal of it is based on scores of interviews with men and women from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. military, and the private sector who participated in many of these events. And I relied on dozens of published works. Most of the sources I interviewed are quoted on the record, and virtually every fact in the book is footnoted.
Click here to read the rest of Bob's post and join us all this week for a lively discussion of Bob's argument.
--Josh Marshall
Fascinating. Andrew Sullivan takes his blog in-house at Time.com. I wish him luck. Despite our frequent -- though it seems diminishing -- disagreements, Andrew's has always been one of the few blogs I've read consistently, every day, for years.
When I read this just now over at Andrew's site, I couldn't help thinking about it at least a bit in the context of the changes we're now planning for this site and where we've already been.
As you can see by the flashy little ribbon on the top marquee, Sunday was the fifth anniversary of this website. I started TPM during the Florida recount on November 13th, 2000. At the time, to the best of my knowledge, there were only two political blogs. Actually, only two blogs at all, though I'm pretty sure I'd still never heard the word 'blog' and wouldn't for a good year or so more.
Now, before you reach for the keyboard to send me an email correcting me on my blog history, let me be clear: Blogs had already been around for some time at the end of 2000. There were quite a few of them. And most were about topics other than politics.
My point is simply that I didn't know anything about that at the time. I knew of two blogs: Mickey Kaus's Kausfiles.com and Andrew Sullivan's site. If memory serves, Kaus started around September 1999, give or take. And Andrew started a bit less than a year later. Mickey's site especially -- because I'd been reading it for a year and I knew Mickey personally -- was my model when I started TPM.
Now both of those sites are, or are soon to be, under the wing of a major media corporation. Kaus is part of Slate, which is owned by the Washington Post. Andrew will be part of Time, which is owned by Time-Warner. And tomorrow we're starting a fundraiser to help launch our third blog and fairly ambitious plans for expanded coverage of politics during the election year.
Now, given all the anxieties about media consolidation these days, it may sound like I'm warming to a paean to TPM's continuing independence. But I'm not, at least not in the editorial sense. Knowing both the people and at least one of the media companies, I don't think there's even the slightest chance that either would ever get leaned on by editors at Slate or Time. Or rather, I'm pretty confident that that would never happen, and that if it did, they'd just up and leave and go independent again.
Over the years I've had a handful of these offers to bring TPM under the embrella of another publication. Actually, a while back, Andrew and I had a sort of joint offer, to bring both sites under the umbrella of another operation. Obviously, each time I declined. But in none of those cases was a fear of editorial interference my main reason for saying no.
As you can see, I plan to keep TPM an independent operation. Why? I think some of that is probably a life- or career-cycle thing. Mickey and Andrew were both well-established and highly-respected journalists before they ever got involved with blogging. And though I'd been a working journalist for about three years before I started TPM, that was very far from the case for me. They both had thick stacks of accomplishments already piled up. Another reason is some unquantifiable matter of 'ownership', which is probably a reflection of ambition or ego, perhaps not altogether in flattering ways.
For me, though, I think the big reason is that remaining independent allows me to continue experimenting with the medium itself. The hybrid journalism-activism projects the site did with Social Security or the DeLay Rule or Sinclair are some examples of that -- or, perhaps, three examples of one experiment. Then there's our on-going efforts with TPMCafe (which will be relaunched with myriad improvements in the near future). And now we're launching into a new effort -- part of which will be a new site -- to use the blog medium as a vehicle for sustained and focused reporting and synthesis on what we think is one of the great issues of our day.
In any case, as Andrew says in his message for the evening, let a thousand flowers bloom -- independents, ones housed in big media operations, group blogs, blog syndicates and a lot else. I've been a critic of 'blog triumphalism'. And in a lot of ways I still am. But these are exciting times to be in this field, simply because so many different things are being tried, so many avenues are being explored. Genuinely new things are being created.
--Josh Marshall
Failed New Jersey Gubernatorial candidate Doug Forrester says it was W's fault ...
Doug Forrester, in his first postelection interview, laid the blame for his loss in the governor's race last week directly at the feet of President Bush. He said the public's growing disaffection with Bush, especially after Hurricane Katrina, made it impossible for his campaign to overcome the built-in advantage Democrats have in a blue state like New Jersey."If Bush's numbers were where they were a year ago, or even six months ago, I think we would have won on Tuesday," Forrester said. "Katrina was the tipping point."
I don't know that he could have won regardless; but Bush may have made it impossible.
--Josh Marshall
RNC Chair Ken Mehlman, now with twice the lying power!
Here's the clip from Mehlman's appearance this morning on the Russert show. And I honestly found it hard to keep up with the full number of lies and half-truths that rolled out of his mouth.
I know that some of my more cautious readers will blanch at my use of the "L" word. But when so many falsehoods and misleading statements are rolled atop each other, there's really no other description that fairly categorizes what the man is doing. As for why he's doing so, it's not just that he has to as head of the RNC. He was part of the deception and perfidy to the constitution. So like the president and his advisors, Mehlman's dishonesty today is just self-protection.
Let's catalog a few of them.
One was that the Senate intel report exonerated the administration of any effort to mislead the American people over Iraq. Wrong. They specifically did not look at that question.
He also said the Silbermann/Robb Commission concluded the same thing. Wrong. They too were specifically not authorized to examine that question.
He said the British Butler Report said the same thing. First of all, who cares what a Report written to cover Tony Blair said? Second of all, it said no such thing.
He said the Duelfer Report said Saddam "was trying to reconstitute his weapons programs." That is at best a highly, highly misleading description of the report.
He said that Saddam "had supported terrrorists, had terrorists operating out of his country." There are so many different lies and canards potentially underlying this claim it's hard to know where to start. But again, wrong. None of the purported evidence for this claim has ever stood up.
This hurricane of lies scarcely covers all the false or misleading statements he made in just that one little video clip. So please take a look at the clip and send in any more examples you find of clearly false or intentionally misleading statements.
What this country will end up needing is something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission because what the country needs is not so much for particular people to go to jail but for the lies and the lies to cover up earlier lies to stop. The country can't get past what has happened or move forward until we can get the truth on the table, deal with it and move on.
--Josh Marshall
