September 28, 2006

Blogometer Extra

TERROR POLITICS: Boiled Bubba Or Cooked Rice?

 The Bill Clinton-Chris Wallace brouhaha on FOX continues to make news 9/27.

  Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice wasted little time in issuing a response that was just as defensive, "refuting his accusation," Kim Priestap at Wizbang! writes, "that the Bush Administration didn't do anything regarding terrorism prior to 9/11."  Priestap quotes Rice in the New York Post:

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false - and I think the 9/11 commission understood that. ... What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years. ... We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda."

  Then progressive news site The Raw Story leapt on that, writer Larry Womack asserting that a 2001 memo to then-National Security Advisor Rice contradicted her statements to the Post.  Womack writes:

RAW STORY has found that just five days after President George W. Bush was sworn into office, a memo from counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke to Rice included the 2000 document, "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects."  This document devotes over 2 of its 13 pages of material to specifically addressing strategies for securing Pakistan's cooperation in airstrikes against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

  Spencer Ackerman at The Plank adds to that, asking Rice to "stop lying about the plans your administration inherited."  He too refers to potentially damning documents, particularly a classified doc signed by Bush that, if made public, could settle once and for all who's telling the truth in all this.  Ackerman writes:

Rice insisted, "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda."  This has been her strategy since Clarke first went public in early 2004: to quibble over the meaning of "comprehensive."  The problem with that strategy is that, whatever the Bush administration was contemplating doing before September 11 about Al Qaeda, Clarke--who worked for the National Security Council--was its primary author and driving bureaucratic force.  Attack Clarke and Rice attacks her own plan.  So the only option she sees is to suggest, again and again, that NSPD-9 is significantly different from Clarke's 2000 plan.

NSPD-9 has never been released.  Jamie Gorelick, the 9/11 Commission member, hinted during testimony that Rice's characterization of it is incorrect, and Richard Armitage agreed with her.  ... But because NSPD-9 is classified, she couldn't go into detail.  Last year, Clarke's 2000 plan, the genesis of NSPD-9, was declassified in full.  If Condi made one phone call, she could have Bush declassify NSPD-9 and then this whole dispute would be settled.  Clinton and Clarke would be exposed as liars, right, Condi?  So how about it?

  Byron York at Nation Review Online attempts to bolster Rice's side by obliquely questioning the validity, along with the existence, of the Clarke plan handed over to Bush et al.  To wit:

...National Review talked to Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, who was then a member of the House, chairing the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.  Chambliss was perplexed.  “I’ve had Dick Clarke testify before our committee several times, and we’ve invited Samuel Berger several times,” Chambliss told NR, “and this is the first I’ve ever heard of that plan.”  If it was such a big deal, Chambliss wondered, why didn’t anyone mention it?

  Ackerman takes York for a stroll down The Plank, responding to the column's trumpeting of the Chambliss remark.  "Um, Saxby?  Did you read the 9/11 Commission report?  You know, the one that cites Clarke's plan again and again?  Start on page 196 and continue to page 214.  It's helpful!"

  Finally, Ackerman takes York to task over his other arguments to dispute Clinton.  He finishes, "[T]his story does not rely on Clarke's credibility: we have the documents.  Or one of them, at least.  Better luck next time, Byron."

BLOGGERS VS. MSM: Bunch To The Gut

  Elder press statesemen David Broder at the Washington Post has been on a tear lately, hailing what he perceives as a renegade centrist faction in the Republican Party standing up to the excesses of a president gone slightly off-balance, as well as a spirited, purposeful political body of moderate temperament emerging from the raging waters of the left and right.

  In a recent column, he praised GOP Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner for defiantly standing up against President Bush's detainee bill until changes were made to bring it more in harmony with constitutional, if not international, law.  A compromise was reached, which prompted Broder to describe the three "rebels" thusly:

These are not ordinary men. McCain, from Arizona, is probably the leading candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination. Graham, from South Carolina, is the star among the younger Republican senators. Warner, from Virginia, embodies the essence of traditional Reagan conservatism: patriotism, support for the military, civility.

That these Republicans -- and others -- were ready to join the Democrats in rejecting Bush's plan caused the White House to scramble for alternatives and House Republican leaders to postpone a scheduled vote.  The revolt goes well beyond three men.

What it really signals is a new movement in this country -- what you could rightly call the independence party.

  Broder expands on this concept of an "independence party" in a subsequent column, moved by "the independence being demonstrated all over the political spectrum these days."  He goes on to list former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Gov. Tom Vilsack (D-IA), former Gov. Mark Warner (D-VA), and--perhaps inevitably--McCain, Graham, and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as "independent members of both parties--those who are prepared to defy the dictates of their interest groups and clamorous extremes" who would make fine candidates in the 2008 presidential election.

  Inspiring stuff, if you're of like mind as Broder and able to look beyond the outrages of the here and now.  But there was one remark Broder made in his first column above that particularly stirred the ire of Attytood's Will Bunch.  A press man like Broder, Bunch credits the Post icon for inspiring his career ("[T]here was a time in my life when I very much wanted to be you") but traces what he perceives as the gradual burning out of Broder's journalistic ethos and the hardening of his cynicism in the post-Watergate years through the present.  Bunch writes:

You, and your colleague Bob Woodward, and so many others, grew to admire the callous art of spincraft you'd been trained to expose -- so much so that when Hurricane Katrina devastated an American city and betrayed a stunning indifference to the fate of the nation's poorest, you could only write that Katrina "opens new opportunities for [Bush] to regain his standing with the public."

  What prompted Bunch's passionate response to his former mentor?  In his "Independence Days" column, Broder wrote, "[Y]ou can see the independence party forming -- on both sides of the aisle.  They are mobilizing to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society -- the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and..."  We'll stop there, because that's likely where Bunch stopped as well.  His reaction to that perceived dismissive slander was thus:

Like you, I am a newspaper reporter, and I share some of your core values, including a commitment to journalistic digging and hard work, and an unwillingness to accept the pat and partisan answers at face value.

And yet, I am also a blogger – professionally, and I guess by temperament.  And when I see what is coming out of your hometown in 2006 -- ugly politics driven by fear, the chucking of the constitution and our deep-seated judicial principles such as the writ of habeas corpus – it can indeed make me very angry, so angry that there are times when, yes, I must sound “vituperative” on occasion.

  Bunch's buildup continues:

The night I became angry came in March 2003, the night that your friends and colleagues in the White House press room took a dive at a nationally televised press conference, and refused to challenge the president’s specious grounds for war.  I was furious over what my profession -- the one where you had once inspired me a generation ago -- had now become.  And frankly, a lot of people on the left side became angry, too -- because, frankly, nobody was listening when they were nice.  Protest marches of half a million got inside-the-A-section type coverage; at least a little vitriol finally got your attention, Mr. Broder.

  "[Y]our cynicism is degenerative disease," Bunch writes, "and it leads to paralysis."  He concludes:

I would have been much happier, frankly, spending my 40s the way that you spent your 40s, fighting for a Pulitzer Prize instead of fighting to preserve the basics of a democracy and a free press, the things that you and I and America were able to take for granted for so long. ... [T]his journalist will use every weapon in his arsenal to preserve the values that allowed our craft to flourish in America -- including the weapon of anger. That may offend you from time to time; I guess on some level I hope that it doesn’t. ... Either way, don’t expect me to apologize for it.

Because I won’t.

Posted by Conn Carroll at September 28, 2006 05:52 AM