Archive for September, 2006
What The Dickens?
Is it the best of times, is it the worst of times? The reason I ask is that it’s hard enough to decipher the garble-izer in chief at the best of times. What is one to make of the remarks he made yesterday, while announcing that he would declassify selected portions of the NIE whose [...]
Condi Wins Hands Down
The media’s coverage of the he-said-she-said dispute between Bill Clinton and Condoleezza Rice makes me truly despair. Clinton has charged angrily that the Bush administration did essentially nothing about the threat that Osama bin Laden represented during their first eight months in office. Did essentially nothing, although the threat was brought forcefully to their attention, [...]
The Envy Of Other Nations
As recently as last month, President Bush was claiming, in his speeches about the economy, that the American economy was “the envy of the industrialized world”. He frequently singles out Japan and European countries, as he did in his State of the Union address this year. The World Economic Forum has just released its annual [...]
NIE Estimates
(1) The One We Know President Bush certainly made it sound very much like we were going to see almost the entire document: “You can read it for yourself,” he said. We were promised the NIE would be declassified “in such a way that we’ll be able to protect sources and methods†And now all [...]
Mixed Messages
As reported just about everywhere, it seems that the President has agreed to declassify and release sections of the controversial NIE report, the one which supposedly makes a case that the Iraq war has contributed to the spread of global terrorism and has made us less safe. Note the qualifier there—only parts of the NIE [...]
Diluting The Detainee Mistreatment Bill
WaPo reports that the proposed bill has just been diluted a bit more. In the version originally proposed by Senators Warner, McCain and Graham, the definition of “unlawful combatants†to whom the bill applied was those “engaged in hostilities against the United States.” This definition survived in the compromise version. But in recent days the [...]
Traitors In The Media
(1) Go ahead and add The Associated Press to the list of certified treasonous individuals and organizations who have been judged guilty of rooting for the other side in TWAT: Jules Crittenden, city editor of the Boston Herald, wrote in a column Sunday, “The Associated Press, the reliable just-the-facts news agency you and I once [...]
Army Chief Of Staff Disses Rumsfeld
I have figured out what the basic flaw is in our whole Iraq policy. As President Bush has patiently explained, over and over again, he listens to the generals. And no one can fault that. The problem is that after listening to the generals he goes with what Rumsfeld wants. And Rumsfeld listens to nobody, [...]
Bush’s Explanation: Why He Didn’t Retaliate For U.S.S. Cole Bombing
Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the 9/11 Commission, appeared this evening on The Situation Room to talk to Wolf Blitzer about why President Bush did not respond in any way or form to the U.S.S. Cole bombing, once the CIA had determined that al-Qaeda was responsible. The Cole bombing occurred on October 12, 2000. [...]
Banana Republic?
I don’t remember if I’ve ever seen a Top Ten list of signs that you may be a banana republic. But surely it’s not a good sign if you have to stand up before the world press and declare that you’re not a banana republic? Scoffing at rumors that he had been overthrown in a [...]