Flypaper Follies

Let's not say anything rash
Wow. Howard Kurtz has just today made an amazing leap of logic, one that leaves my head spinning on several (entirely ironic/sarcastic) levels:

"It certainly appears, on the surface, like a couple of administration officials were trying to discredit a prominent White House critic by going after his wife."

Rock on with your reckless self, Howard.

Was that a snigger, Helen?
So yesterday, I'm reading the transcript of Scott McClellan and the press talking about the Revenge of Yellowcake. And they had this exchange:

QUESTION: Yes, but I'm just wondering if there was a conversation between Karl Rove and the President, or if he just talked to you, and you're here at this --

McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.

QUESTION: How does he know that?

QUESTION: How does he know that?

McCLELLAN: The President knows.

QUESTION: What, is he clairvoyant? How does he know?

I don't have a television, so there's no way for me to know: Did any of the assembled journalists snigger?

Doomed to repeat it
In the runup to Vietnam, anyone with more than a passing knowledge of communism and communist states was considered too Red to be trusted. Part of McCarthy's wondrous legacy, it was.

When it came time to make the important decisions, no one who knew much about Ho Chi Min was around to talk about it. And this led to any number of blunders, beginning with a thick-headed notion that communism was a monolith, a single Red wall soon to be crowding our borders -- unless we went in and did something about it. (In reality, Ho Chi Min was as much a nationalist as a communist, an opportunistic man using the tools at hand to form a country. And his bloody border wars with China -- and the heavily fortified border between Russia and China -- prove beyond a doubt that communism was no monolith)

Now, dig this quote from Newseek's latest on Iraq:

The day before he was supposed to leave for the region, Garner got a call from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ordered him to cut 16 of the 20 State officials from his roster. It seems that the State Department people were deemed to be Arabist apologists, or squishy about the United Nations, or in some way politically incorrect to the right-wing ideologues at the White House or the neocons in the office of the Secretary of Defense. The vetting process “got so bad that even doctors sent to restore medical services had to be anti-abortion,” recalled one of Garner’s team.

Gives "Courage of your convictions" a whole new slant, don't it?

To snigger and snigger not
I have determined that the best I can do to shine light on the Wilson/Novak mess is to offer a scandal name, "Revenge of Yellowcake," and recommend that you go to talkingpointsmemo now. Josh Marshall has nailed this thing six ways to Sunday, whatever the heck that means.

Marshall points out that the administration conducted a search of phone records recently in an attempt to nail Wesley Clark. Why not peruse them again to check the week before Novack released his column? Maybe check Karl Rove's logs? We could clear this whole thing up in no time.

I will also propose a benchmark, an indicator if you will, to delineate the exact point at which the Bush administration becomes toast: when a White House spokesman utters something like this "That is not the way this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing" (as Scott McClellan did concerning the Revenge of Yellowcake) and elicits loud, comfortable sniggers from the press corps.

I mean, could anyone who knows anything about this administration's relationship to Fox News, Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, Max Cleland, Dana Milbank, France, Germany, or Mexico, the Florida recount, its smearing of dozens of political opponents for criticism of the war, (I could go on and on) do anything but snigger at a statement like this -- unless they feared retaliation? I think not. So, when the press corps knows in its bones that Bush is gone, it will go a-sniggering. And we will know.

So we went to war over insignificant weapons of mass destruction?
Heavens to Betsy, the wrigglin' that Powell feller can do! So yesterday I ran this quote from a videotape made in early 2001:

"He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

and today he says:

"You'll note that I did not say that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. . . . "

Durn! A loopy hole. I guess he got away again.

Let's see if we can nab ole' Condi Rice: From early 2001:

"We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

today:

"... we began to get important reporting, for instance, on the fact that, in 1998, Saddam Hussein was diverting maybe $500 million in illegal funds from oil revenue by the period of 2002, not -- $3 billion in illegal revenue."

Oh no! My heads a-spinnin' with all those figures and the confusing way they're presented. We'll never catch that wascally Condi now!

Wanted: Oil-Rich Islamic punching bag
You've probably heard that the neo-cons were itching to go into Iraq long before 9/11. (I'll dig up some links on this in a few) Soon after, they convinced even sensible members (relatively speaking) of the Bush administration to put boots on the ground, pronto.

Just dig the complete and radical changes of opinion:

"He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
-- Secretary of State Colin Powell, February 24, 2001

"We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
-- National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, April, 2001

Apparently there's video footage of Powell. Think it will ever hit the networks? Fox News?

Denial? Deny this:

"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."
-- President Bush on May 30, 2002, referring to trailers now known to have been used to support weather balloons

"Draft Report Said to Cite No Success in Iraq Arms Hunt"
New York Times, September 25, 2003

"Iraq Weapons Report Won't Be Conclusive
U.S. Has Sought to Lower Expectations For Evidence Amid Growing Criticism"
Washington Post, September 25, 2003

Media stirs. Right attacks.
More on Glenn Reynolds attack on the media in Iraq. The right has done an exceptional job of cowing the media for the last decade. Now that it's turning on its former master, Reynolds and others are bringing out the bull whip. But their case is weak. Reynolds says today that his attacks last week were ahead of the curve and backs it up with "Now even Dan Rather is apologizing." Follow the link and you go to the Media Resource Center site. These guys ain't swimmin' in credibility, if I may say so, and I may, since it's my blog. And because here's what they quote as Dan Rather's apology, which came after a report on crime in Iraq: "A reminder that television sometimes has trouble with perspective, so you may want to note that in some areas of Iraq, things are peaceful." The guy's practically on his knees!

Stop the presses! They've installed new toilets in Tikrit!
Glenn Reynolds has decided that he can best serve his leader by killing the messenger -- now that the message doesn't fit his mindset. He's going on and on about biased coverage in Iraq. I suggested to Glenn in an email that he check his local newspaper. Is soccer field construction running above the fold? How about that new bathroom in the elementary school? No? Could it be that such things just aren't as newsworthy as car bombs and combat deaths? It could be and it is. Is this a new concept for Glenn? I bet not. He's a smart guy. I bet he's more than familiar with the way the news biz works. It's just helpful to ignore it so that he can keep hammering away at that messenger, now that he disagrees with the message.

No, it's certainly not denial
Josh Marshall's column in The Hill comes as close as anything I can find to explaining the Bush administration's bizarre approach to the U.N. Bush is stuck in denial and anger, the first few stages of grieving over his failed Iraq policy, Marshall theorizes. The denial explains why Bush gave basically the same speech yesterday that he gave in November (I pity those forced to listen to his righteous monotone rendition of tired rationalizations, flag waving, and bromides. I made it through perhaps five words before I switched channels on the radio). And the anger explains the overall tenor of the speech, as well as this childish incident described in Slate:

The WP notes that the White House also took other opportunities yesterday to show off its diplomatic skills: "Just before [French President Jacques] Chirac addressed the assembly, Bush and his top aides—Secretary of State Colin Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte—left the hall."

The activist court
I'm generally not a huge E. J. Dionne fan. But damned if he didn't nail it today in a most satisfying way for those of us still steaming over Bush vs Gore. Long live the Notorious 9th!

You can't anticipate the past, Rummy
Here's the kind of logic-defying statements that the Bush administration still gets away with. This, from Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday. You can read the whole thing here.

"I must say we did not anticipate that Saddam Hussein in October, I believe it was, and his forces would open up the prisons and let out some large number in excess of 100,000 criminals and people to be turned loose on the Iraqi people. We're now having to deal with those people."

Did you miss that in the news, Rummy? Because I caught it. It was big at the time. So you knew (or should have known) it happened. You didn't have to "anticipate" it. You could easily have planned for it. Brought in more MPs and such.

Oh, it's sticky all right
There's a beautiful Republican rationalization for Iraq, one that claims we purposefully created a place where terrorists can bring it on. It's called the Flypaper Theory. Iraq is now like flypaper, see, attracting all the bad guys in a fiendishly clever trap. Instead of attacking civilians, they waste their precious jihad on well-armed troops, the theory goes. Unfortunately, the analogy would work only if flypaper helped accelerate the reproductive rate of flies. (Not to insinuate that Iraqis resemble flies.)

Now they won't help us!
Just because they didn't want this war, and lobbied against it, and we called them bad names and insulted their national character and tried (childishly and ineffectively) to eliminate traces of their culture in the U.S., the French won't help us in Iraq! Can you believe it! Tom Friedman can't. He's aghast at their perfidy, which I believe to be a type of cheese.

I too am of the opinion that the French aren't acting in the best interest of the region. But this is not a new development. They weren't entirely helpful in the former Yugoslavia, but you didn't hear the Clintonistas talking about surrender monkeys. Then again, the Clintonistas seemed to have a firmer grasp of the word "diplomacy."�

Now we can bad-mouth the war
In case you've been waiting, Andrew Sullivan says it's OK to criticize the war effort now. You may recall that there was a time when questioning the war on terror was unpatriotic and worse, in the eyes of Sullivan and other conservatives. Then, a few weeks ago, he told his readers that it's just smart to try to talk through this whole war thing.

"The issue should never be: do you support the president? The issue should be: is what the president doing going to work? I'm not omniscient, but it's simply crazy to deny the real problems we are facing right now and the need for clear and urgent thinking about them. Many Americans who support the war agree. That's not going wobbly; it's doing what any thinking person should do, which is try and figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it."

When did it change? What made it OK, and no longer traitorous? Not sure. I've emailed him, but he hasn't replied or posted my emails. Maybe if you email him too (andrew@andrewsullivan.com), we can get more details etc. so we can know where we should all stand (at attention) on this crucial issue.

The thing is, Republicans, you want to talk about important items like this calmly and intelligently BEFORE you do them. And no one can do this calmly and intelligently when they're being labeled traitors, appeasers, defeatists, America-haters, and worse.

A little hardship
E.J. Dionne comes out against Iraq funding in a most forceful piece of editorial work. A beautiful little missive that lays tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and the administration's true approach to people right out in the open. Bonus quote from the ever-judicious Rick Santorum!

Uncle Dick's dustup with the truth
In case you didn't see it, Dick Cheney tried to pull a fast one on "Meet the Press" last Sunday. Or several fast ones, insinuating that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Tim Russert looked steely-eyed, but swallowed it whole. The existence of Russert and his ilk explains why 69% of Americans think that Saddam's buddies were flying the jetliners. Luckily, Russert's more alert conterparts aren't letting the administration get away with it. They're in retreat. Heavens to Betsy, even Donald Rumsfeld won't try to slide that one by again.