Great commentary by Bill McGurn.

In the media week that has been Scott McClellan, my former colleague has had his motives questioned, his character impugned, and his own book dismissed as something he could not possibly have written himself.

Yet in the midst of the storm, the press has largely skipped over what is at once Scott's central claim, and his silliest argument: that the president's big mistake was to embrace the "permanent campaign" and that this led to a strategy that meant "never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned."

The decisions on Iraq that followed Scott's departure tell a much different story. Whether you agree with the surge or not, that decision was one of the defining acts of his presidency. And what Scott apparently still has not recognized is that his own heave-ho was the prelude to exactly the kind of reconsideration he says was impossible in the Bush White House.

Exhibit A is the sacking of Don Rumsfeld immediately after the 2006 elections that gave the Democrats control of Congress. The "after" is critical, because the president was blasted for his timing by many in his own party. Arlen Specter complained that he would still be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee if the president had made the move before the elections. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that the president's timing probably cost Republicans control of the Senate and 10 to 15 seats in the House.

These men had a point. But the timing also said something about George W. Bush: A president who makes a decision knowing that it could cost his party control of Congress can be accused of many things, but subsuming all his decisions to the "permanent campaign" cannot seriously be one of them.

The president's decision to replace his Defense secretary was followed by an even more thorough rethink of his war policy. Anyone who has spent time in government knows that changing a major policy midstream is like trying to make a U-turn with an aircraft carrier. And anyone who was in the White House in late 2006 knows that the dramatic shift in Iraq that we now almost take for granted was the result of one man: George W. Bush.

Scott and the other critics accuse the president of stubbornness. In my experience, when the pundits accuse you of being stubborn, often all it means is that you don't accept the conventional wisdom of the Beltway establishment – and that you are unwilling to run up the white flag and bow to their superiority.

The president I served had concerns that were far removed from this audience. Constantly he would remind his speechwriting team to keep in mind how his words would be heard by others. By an enemy who believed Iraq was theirs for the taking. By Iraqi families being asked to stand up and have faith in the United States. And by some second lieutenant in some godforsaken town in Iraq about to lead other Americans into battle.

So for several intense weeks, my colleague Chris Michel and I isolated ourselves in a tiny room in the West Wing, trying to capture the new policy in a coherent draft. Early one Saturday, Dan Bartlett came by to check on our progress.

Dan is a straight shooter. He knew that the new policy risked losing the support of the few remaining hawks, because they wanted many more troops than the five brigades the president would be proposing. He also knew that most everyone else in America wanted to hear that our men and women in Iraq were coming home. Dan did not kid himself – or us – about how it would go down, at least in the short term. "No one wants to hear what this speech is going to tell them," he told us.

The president understood this too. But he also understood that the moral and strategic purposes of the U.S. demanded a president willing to stand up and do the unpopular thing – no matter what the polls or pundits were saying.

So on the evening of Jan. 10, 2007, Mr. Bush looked into the television cameras and gave the speech nobody wanted to hear. He told the American people that the central policy of his administration was not working, he took all responsibility for the mistakes, and he offered a fix that he knew many would regard with skepticism. It is hard to imagine any presidential act more removed from "the permanent campaign."

Of course, only a mind that was not completely closed to "rethinking" or "reconsidering" or "reflecting" on Iraq (or George W. Bush) could appreciate the magnitude of what the president did that January night. And as Scott more than proves, in today's Washington that kind of mind is all too rare.

Labels: Iraq, mcclellan, Petraeus, revisionist history

The following retort of Scott McClellan's book-bash of Bush is from Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to the president, who knew and worked along side Scott McClellan.

He [Scott McClellan] would have us believe that the Bush administration was, at bottom, massively and deeply deceitful and corrupt — but this has only dawned on Scott since he started writing his book, years after the fact. Let's just say that for these revelations to spring forth as if truth were like a time-released capsule, in which things magically get clearer with the passage of time (and the signing of book contracts), is, well, suspicious. And my former colleagues are absolutely right to point out that Scott not only never raised any objections contemporaneously, in meetings or with his superiors; in fact, he said almost nothing at all, at any time, about anything of consequence. ... Scott seems to be that rare bird who kept those concerns suppressed, if he had them at all. And now, years later, he finally feels liberated to make arguments he didn't appear to believe at the time.

Scott's broader claim that "in some small way" his hope is to "move us beyond the destructive partisan warfare of the past 15 years" and that he wants to "contribute to [a] national conversation" about making our politics higher and better is not terribly persuasive. The same can be said about his complaints about his disdain for "the Washington game." In fact, one of the oldest games in Washington is to turn against those in power who cared for you and gave you the greatest opportunity in your life to serve this nation — and to do so in a book, for which you received a hefty advance.
It's also been pointed out that one of McClellan's suppossed turning points was upon learning that he had been lied to by Karl Rove, who claimed he had nothing to do with the leak of Valerie Plame's name. Just one problem with that -- the man who admitted to leaking Plame's name was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove. How can one be betrayed by someone who didn't betray?

Labels: mcclellan, media bias, PlameGate, revisionist history

I'll say this for Scott McClellan, at last he learned how to communicate. He was, to my mind, one of the worst press secretaries in presidential history — at least in modern times, continually cowed by the press, never able to show any confidence, and making us all wince whenever he held a briefing.

His book, titled What Happened, seems to go after Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, the president and others. The main releases we read about are how the president bollixed the response to Katrina and how the White House made a political campaign of the Iraq war, using, as Scott puts it, "a propaganda campaign."

The first thing to ask about these kinds of books is "does it help history, does it shed light, does it add to the sum total of knowledge about a topic history or contemporary analysis can use to shed light on an administration?" OR, rather, "is this a self-aggrandizing after-the-fact justification to bolster one's own reputation and credibility?" especially after having done such a poor job in the first place.

I think we'll probably find this book is mostly of the latter category. The evidence I've seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn't do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.

As far as Katrina, I think we all know and can admit it was both a public policy and public relations disaster. We had a bad FEMA director, the president should not have flown over the disaster, or said Michael Brown was doing a good job. But it wasn't just the administration that didn't do so hot. I seem to recall state and local officials, those who had more access to the facts on the ground, those tasked with evacuation plans, those responsible for the city and state, were pretty unprepared as well. Heck, the mayor's family fled the state. Not the city, the state.

Finally, we'll learn more as those written about in his book speak out. I note Fran Townsend is already on record saying she recalls no meeting where Scott McClellan ever objected to what was being said or made his dissenting views known. And I'll just leave you with this — having not read the book and having no plans to do so: don't you think that when someone has an objection to what is being done, they owe it to the public and as a mark of duty to do something about it or say something about it at the time, rather than wait two years and save it for a book? Does that in and of itself not cut down some of the credibility.

The job of press secretary is not easy, but it can be done well, as Tony Snow and Dana Perino have shown. You want a Democratic example, I always thought Mike McCurry did a good job — and with good cheer in a tough time. But I'll say one other thing, too. I think this genre of book is losing its cachet, and people are getting a little tired of the game which goes something like this: Get a high-level job, make your name and reputation, do an average job at it, then write a book after you leave that helps nobody but bolsters your own reputation at the expense of those without book contracts. It's one of the uglier things in Washington, and as I say, I think its days will soon be over. People are tired of it.

-- Seth Leibsohn

Labels: mcclellan, media bias, revisionist history

Investors Business Daily has a quick retort of the factually-challenged HBO film, Recount, suggesting that Bush stole the 2000 election. What was it Joesph Goebbels said? "...when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Goebbels was attempting to criticize Churchill at that time, but the concept of the big lie -- that saturation and repetition of propaganda will revise memory of factual history -- has been elevated to pathetic heights vis-a-vis liberal romanticizing of the 2000 election.

In all its specific and unambiguous language, the [Florida state] law clearly stated in section 102.111: "If the county returns are not received by the Department of State by 5 p.m. of the seventh day following election, all missing counties shall be ignored, and the results shown by the returns on file shall be certified."

All the U.S. Supreme Court decided was to reaffirm that, according to the U.S. Constitution, the manner in which elections are conducted is up to each individual state and that the will of the people as expressed through the laws enacted by the popularly elected Florida legislature stood and could not be overturned by a Florida Supreme Court legislating from the bench.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says: "The principal issue in this case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn't even close. The vote was 7 to 2." It was Al Gore, he adds, "who made it a judicial question. It was he who brought it into the federal courts."

All the votes were counted, and recounted, and counted again. And not a single recount, either by local boards or major news organizations, found a way for Gore to win. A comprehensive review of 64,248 ballots in all 67 Florida counties by the Miami Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder, in partnership with USA Today, found that Bush's slender margin of 537 votes would have tripled to 1,665 votes even under the generous counting standards advocated by Gore.

Another review conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the request of CNN, the New York Times and other news organizations found that Bush still would have won Florida even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not ended the nonsense.

In 2000, the election boards of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties were all controlled by Democrats. The infamous butterfly ballot was designed by a Democrat. The attorney general of Florida at that time was Democrat Robert Butterworth.

Voters were instructed at the polling place: "After voting, check your ballot card to make sure your voting selections are clearly and cleanly punched and there are no chads left hanging on the back of the card."

The fact is, Gore himself requested recounts in only four counties where he thought he might gain votes, not lose them. Gore lost not because Florida was "stolen," but because he couldn't carry his home state of Tennessee, the people who knew him best.

Labels: Bush-Gore, Hollywood bias, media bias, revisionist history

I have to agree with Roger Simon: "As we all know, we don't choose our family, but Obama chose this racist demagogue as his pastor for decades. It's not funny." Simon was wondering if Obama will condemn Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of 20 years, for the outlandish statements ABC News published today.

[ABC News]An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
What an odd display of paranoia. Actually, strike that, it's exactly the kind of vitriol we've come to expect of the extreme left-wing. If the government wanted to really kill an entire segment of minorities it wouldn't waste its time with some complicated and ridiculous drugs to prisons to legislation scheme -- it would just round them up and kill them, as governments are doing right now in Sudan and North Korea, even as "reverends" such as Wright are notably silent.

It's because Rev. Wright is an American, unfortunately, that he can vocalize such dribble with impunity. It is because of America that two-thirds of our presidential candidates are minorities. How many Pakistanis will make it this far in even a UK prime minister candidacy? Let alone how many women will ever become "president" of Iran.

Rev. Wright's serving of irrationality gets worse:

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
Speaking of ignorance, if there's one place where the "everybody hates America" rule isn't true, it's Africa. And if the Palestinians are victims it's because of their enablers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, who long ago gave up fighting Israeli democracy directly in lieu of using Palestinians as their suicide bombing proxies.

On to the next slur: Never batted an eye over the bomb? I'd say the 418,000 American casualties batted an eye. I'd say the casualty estimates to the alternative of using nukes (invading Japan), between 250,000 to one million men, made Truman bat an eye.

And that wasn't hogwash, either. Indeed, just two months prior to the Hiroshima bombing the US suffered 58,000 casualties in the invasion of Okinawa, which was to be the last step prior to invasion of Japan's mainland. Combine that with 26,000 US casualties three months before, at Iwo Jima, and rational people understand just how bloody that invasion would have been. I guess Truman figured 418,000 was enough. And good thing for the Japanese people we did. Because we would have quintupled or more their dead.

In fact, I'm getting real sick and tired of uber-liberal revisions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "terrorism" or "war crimes."

The Allies warned Japan to surrender in The Potsdam Declaration, saying, "The inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland" was their alternative. The Japanese made their bed. Recall too that Japan continued air strikes on US war ships after the first bomb was dropped! Hardly the acts of "victims" wanting to surrender.

Meanwhile, terms like "Bushido code," "Death March to Bataan," "Rape of Nanking," or "Korean comfort women" never enter the vocabulary of the Wrights of the world when they discuss the demise of Imperial Japan.

That makes Rev. Wright either ignorant or a biased fool, or both.

The question is, what is Obama? Does he share this irrational logic?

Labels: 2008, antiwar loonies, Obama, revisionist history

This is a great satire of MoveOn.org's attempt to undermine and villify General David Petraeus. From Red State, they wonder, "What if MoveOn had been around 65 years ago?"

It's like I've said, had this current crop of capitulators been around during WWII we would have lost.

Labels: capitulation, democrats, Iraq, Petraeus, revisionist history

CIA Director of Public Affairs Statement on New Book
July 20, 2007

CIA Director of Public Affairs Mark Mansfield issued the following statement today:

We generally don't comment on books, but we have departed from that on occasion, and have decided to do so in connection with Rowan Scarborough's new book, "Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA."

CIA employees work very hard to protect their fellow citizens and to help keep America safe. They take great pride -- and take great risks -- in serving our country. They know that the intelligence they collect, analyze and deliver to policymakers, diplomats, law enforcement officers, and military commanders makes a difference, each and every day.

The premise of Mr. Scarborough's book -- that CIA employees are working to undermine our government -- is both ridiculous and offensive.
Verrrry Interesting.

By happenstance I ordered Scarborough's new Sabotage book last week and will read it all before I pass judgment on it -- I doubt if the CIA public affairs director could say the same.

Anyway, from my so-far limited understanding Scarborough's premise is not "that CIA employees are working to undermine our government," which is bait-and-switch spin from Mr. Mansfield, but rather that CIA employees let personal ideologies drive their decisions and projections.

It struck me as curious that the CIA would have a problem with Scarborough's book when so many other authors have basically stated the same of the CIA. For instance, former CIA operative Robert Baer wrote a book -- See No Evil* -- whose theme was that the CIA was run by career-obsessive, politically correct, soft and naive bureaucrats, and not persons concerned with spying and intelligence gathering.

The difference, of course, is that Baer and other authors were not conservatives. Scarborough is, and thus to CIA bureaucrats he is worthy of ad homonym attacks.

In other words, the CIA press release seems just further proof that Scarborough is actually on to something.

* If you don't know the movie Syriana (end credits) claims to be "based on the book See No Evil," which I had read in 2002. But watching Syriana I thought to myself, "I don't remember any of this from Baer's book!" So I read See No Evil again, just to see if I had forgotten. I can positively state that the book has less than 1 percent to do with Syriana. That is, the character's first name in the movie is indeed "Bob," and there is a crooked oil-man. However, in real life the oil-man was involved in a Clinton financial scandal -- and not with greedy neo-cons conducting illegal assassinations -- and Bob Baer intended See No Evil to be in part a mea culpa apology as to how he unintentionally got caught up in it.

Once again Hollywood fabricates history and promotes it as non-fiction.

Labels: Baer, CIA, revisionist history

Ivan Maisel at ESPN makes a ridiculous and partisan comparison in a column about troubled Arkansas football head coach Houston Nutt:

Nutt's detractors have put him in the impossible position of proving a negative -- he must have cheated on his wife because there is no proof that he did not.

It is a maneuver borrowed from national politics, Rovian in style and execution. Karl Rove, the chief political advisor to President George W. Bush, made his career on attacking an opponent's strength. In the 2004 presidential election, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth eviscerated Sen. John Kerry's stature as a war hero. Kerry's candidacy never recovered.

Rove had no visible affiliation with the Swift Boat Veterans, except that a tactic he made famous benefited his candidate.

Three years later, the tactic has been imported to Arkansas and used against Nutt.
Maisel's argument goes beyond simpleton and obsessive liberal logic that anything bad must be "Rovian" in nature.

His argument shows a clear disconnect from reality, but this is unsurprising. The Swift Boat Vets' beef with John Kerry -- which had nothing to do with Rove or Bush and everything to do with John Kerry's past behavior -- has been falsely repeated to a point of populist revision.

So, I decided Mr. Maisel needed an education and dropped him an Email back:

Mr. Maisel,

Talk about "the impossible position of proving a negative"!

John Kerry earned the wrath of the Swift Boat Vets not because of Karl Rove or George Bush, but because before Congress decades earlier he whitewashed every Vietnam veteran as a monster, repeating unproven hearsay that US soldiers "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam..."

Kerry never witnessed these acts. Nor did he a single time ever offer evidence of those acts. Nor did his compatriots. Rather he repeated hearsay from those with clear political agendas knowing full well it wasn't proven.

Thus, comparisons between Houston Nutt to John Kerry just don't jibe.

Karl Rove didn't "swift boat" John Kerry. Indeed, the Swift Boat vets didn't either. John Kerry's presidential ambitions were doomed when, as a stepping stone to enter politics, he shamelessly spread lies and attacked the character of his fellow soldiers before Congress on April 22, 1971.

Kerry made that bed. Now he gets to lie in it.
Poor poor John Kerry! Were only he not swift boated! Rubbish. Kerry can hide his past from a capitulating Northeast liberal base, but when one runs for president they are accountable for it.

It also shows you what a rotten politician is John Kerry. With a simple apology, and words to the effect that he was misled by antiwar activist agendas, that he came home angry and impressionable, etc., he could have better diffused the Swift Boat Vets before they gained momentum without alienating his antiwar supporters. He could have triangulated the criticism, and taken a relatively short hit.

Instead he first ignored the vets, and then attacked them, which only empowered them.

Labels: Kerry, media bias, revisionist history

Tenet is not the only one to assume a generalized amnesia about the recent past. One of the major myths (or, more accurately, conspiracy theories) about the Iraq War — that it was foisted upon an unsuspecting country by a small band of neoconservatives — also lives blissfully detached from history.

The decision to go to war was made by a war Cabinet consisting of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld. No one in that room could even remotely be considered a neoconservative. Nor could the most important non-American supporter of the war to this day — Tony Blair, father of new Labor.

The most powerful case for the war was made at the 2004 Republican convention by John McCain in a speech that was resolutely "realist." On the Democratic side, every presidential candidate running today who was in the Senate when the motion to authorize the use of force came up — Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd — voted yes.

Outside of government, the case for war was made not just by the neoconservative Weekly Standard, but — to select almost randomly — the traditionally conservative National Review, the liberal New Republic, and the center-right Economist. Of course, most neoconservatives supported the war, the case for which was also being made by journalists and scholars from every point on the political spectrum — from the leftist Christopher Hitchens to the liberal Tom Friedman to the centrist Fareed Zakaria to the center-right Michael Kelly to the Tory Andrew Sullivan. And the most influential tome on behalf of war was written not by any conservative, let alone neoconservative, but by Kenneth Pollack, Clinton's top Near East official on the National Security Council. The title: The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.
-- Charles Krauthammer

Labels: CIA, revisionist history, tenet

Writing in Slate, under a column titled "A Loser's History: George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace" - yowza, tell us what you really thing, right? - columnist Christopher Hitchens reminds his readers that George Tenet's "slam dunk" quote was hardly the only statement concerning Saddam Hussein's links to either WMD or support for terrorism. Indeed, Hitchens makes Tenet look rather silly and pathetic:

His ridiculous agency [the CIA], supposedly committed to "HUMINT" [human intelligence gathering] under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It's for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet's book warmly defends.

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:

Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.

As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: "We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program." It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president's office.

Labels: CIA, Iraq, revisionist history, tenet

Just released today, many are already finding a slew of bad errors in former CIA Director George Tenet's new book, At the Center of the Storm.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a second, more stunning error in Tenet's book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times,

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."

Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September
15. Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

According to Kakutani, Tenet concludes by paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan's comment: "Policymakers are entitled to their own opinions--but not to their own set of facts." How many other facts has George Tenet invented?
Additionally, one agrees with Bill Kristol's assessment on Fox News this weekend that Tenet is "a big baby."

This guy was the CIA director! Not so long ago it would have been unprecidented and unthinkable that the director of an agency charged with keeping national secrets would feel the self-absorbed need to release a "tell all."

Are we really in an era where persons in such high-power positions are so thin skinned they cannot cope with natural criticisms that come with such a job?

Labels: CIA, Iraq, revisionist history, tenet