Discussing it with the people <$NoAd$>...
I will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency ... How this administration handled that day as well as the war on terror is worthy of discussion and I look forward to discussing that with the American people.
George W. Bush
March 6th, 2004
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks won't accept strict conditions set by the White House for the panel's interviews with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, commission members said Tuesday.The White House wants the interviews to be limited to one hour, with the questioners limited to the panel's chairman and vice chairman.
Detroit Free Press
March 3rd, 2004
When hypocrisy outruns mockery ...
--Josh Marshall
Lest we miss any opportunity to give the White House a hard time over Friday's disappointing employment report, let's not overlook this important detail.
None of those 21,000 new jobs came from the private sector. They were all the result of increased government sector hiring.
Bush 2004: Dirigisme in Times of Change!
--Josh Marshall
Atrios is spot on when he says that the headline of this New York Times article is ridiculous on its face.
The headline of the article discussing the fallout from yesterday's job report is: "Job Data Provides Ammunition for Two Sides in Presidential Race."
Ammunition for both sides? Gimme a break.
You can certainly debate the mixed signals coming out of the economy as a whole. But there's just no way in the world that job report (which reported a meager 21,000 jobs, almost all from the public sector) wasn't bad news for the White House.
How'd they come up with that headline?
Late Update: Oh the infamy! The shame!
A reader notes that the Washington Times headline was: "Job Slump Puts Bush in Bad Light" and Fox News runs the headline as "Jobs Report Doesn't Do Bush Any Favors."
So long trying for false balance that you just fall off the edge?
The shame! The Infamy! Oh the Humanity!
[ed.note: this post originally began "Atrios is dead right when he says..." But a number of readers who use the RSS feed wrote in noting their brief moment of panic when they saw the RSS headline "Atrios is dead." Thus the change.]
--Josh Marshall
The Post's Mike Allen seems to have gotten a bit more off the record on the 5th Amendment question than he did at the gaggle.
"White House officials," he writes at the end of his piece in tomorrow's paper, "said that neither Bush nor Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had forbidden aides called by the grand jury from invoking the Fifth Amendment."
The Times also has a less-detailed piece. But they do add that "lawyers [involved in the case] said that they believed, however, that the prosecutors were nearing a turning point when they would decide whether to charge anyone with a crime or drop the case."
Finally, Newsday, which broke the story yesterday about the subpoenas, adds a hint about what that weird addition of the guest list for Gerald Ford's birthday party might be about.
In two words, Andrea Mitchell, who may have been there with her husband Alan Greenspan.
Final point.
Lawyers note that having your lawyer send the message that you will take the fifth can often get you out of a grand jury appearance altogether or at least be the opening gambit in a negotiation with a prosecutor. So there's probably various levels of wiggle room on this one.
--Josh Marshall
Are we blocking an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza until after the November election?
This is the last graf in an article running on the Associated Press wire ...
Earlier this week, Dov Weisglass, a senior Sharon aide, discussed the proposed withdrawal with top U.S. officials. The Maariv daily said Friday that Weisglass was told the Bush administration would not like to see a withdrawal before the U.S. election because of concerns of growing instability in Gaza. However, Sharon adviser Assaf Shariv said Friday that no dates for a possible withdrawal were raised during the meetings with U.S. officials.
A couple points. I'm pretty sure <$Ad$>there's no English language edition of Maariv. So I'd really be curious to find out precisely what this article in Maariv said, not just this clipped reference.
Secondly, there are a host of legitimate issues about how this disengagement might take place -- not least of which is whether it's done unilaterally or through some sort of bilateral agreement. So there are various reasons we might want them to hold their horses. One might even speculate that the Israelis are using supposed US domestic political concerns as an excuse to delay action in Gaza.
But if the administration is pushing back turmoil in the Middle East to game the election, we should know more about that.
Late Update: This article in the Israeli daily Haaretz adds credence to the conclusion that that is precisely what's happening.
Here are two key grafs from the Haaretz article ...
Also Friday, security sources said that, bowing to White House pressure Israel intends to wait until after the U.S. presidential election in November before uprooting the Jewish settlements in Gaza.The security sources said Sharon recognized the Bush administration's concern that implementing his unilateral pullout plan during the U.S. campaign could cause political problems by fuelling instability in Palestinian areas.
This should get more attention in the American press.
--Josh Marshall
Questions about the Plame investigation from today's <$NoAd$>gaggle ...
QUESTION: Can you also confirm that Air Force One documents -- been handed over to a federal grand jury?McClellan: Well, I would just say that we are, at the direction of the President, cooperating fully with those who are leading the investigation. We are complying with every request, and we will continue to comply fully with the requests from those who are leading this investigation. No one wants to the bottom of it more than the President of the United States.
QUESTION: So they were handed over?
McClellan: Well, we did send -- the White House Counsel's Office did send a letter out to White House staff, urging everybody to comply fully with the request from the investigators, and that's exactly what we are doing. But, yes, at this point we're still in the process of complying fully with those requests. We have provided the Department of Justice investigators with much of the information and we're continuing to provide them with additional information and comply fully with the request for information.
QUESTION: -- these latest subpoenas that were reported today?
McClellan: I think that's the context in which Heidi was asking her question.
QUESTION: But you're answering more broadly. I'm looking for confirmation you got the subpoenas and that you responded to them.
McClellan: Yes, our Counsel's Office immediately sent a letter to White House staff, directing everyone to cooperate fully and comply with the request from those leading the investigation.
QUESTION: What was the date of that letter?
McClellan: I can double-check the specific date. It was -- you know, part of our complying fully with the request of the Department of Justice investigators was not making this document public, as well.
QUESTION: But this was not the broad directive from --
McClellan: It was the latter part of January. I didn't check the exact, specific date, but it was the latter part of January.
QUESTION: Was it in response to this set of subpoenas we're hearing about today?
McClellan: Was what in response --
QUESTION: The White House Counsel's directive.
McClellan: Yes. Yes.
QUESTION: Okay. Thank you.
McClellan: We immediately sent a letter out to White House staff, urging everyone to comply fully with the request.
QUESTION: Can you say how many subpoenas were received, Scott?
McClellan: Mark, I think you ought to direct those specific questions to those who are leading the investigation. Again, as I said, we're complying fully with their request, and that includes not making that letter that we sent to White House staff public.
QUESTION: Scott, does either the President or Secretary Card have a policy on whether it's acceptable for White House aides to take the Amendment when they're asked questions in this case?
McClellan: Well, keep in mind that by law, grand jury investigations are closed, and prosecutors and grand jurors cannot reveal anything about the proceedings. The President has made it very clear he wants everybody inside government and outside government to provide those who are leading the investigation with information that might help them get to the bottom of this. He's been very clear about this, but let me make clear that -- well, go ahead, Mike.
QUESTION: Go ahead.
McClellan: No, no. You were going to ask a question; go ahead.
QUESTION: Are you willing to say that White House aides who ask questions in this investigation should not take the 5th Amendment?
McClellan: Our policy, at the direction of the President, is that everybody should cooperate fully with those who are leading the investigation. That's our policy. I'm not going to speculate about grand jury proceedings. I have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination. I checked with White House Counsel's Office, and they have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination.
Jeff, go ahead.
QUESTION: Scott, it was a little difficult to hear the exchange that was going on, I want to make sure I understand what you've acknowledged responding to, subpoena-wise. You have responded to the subpoena for telephone records from Air Force One?
McClellan: Yes, we are complying fully with the request from the Department of Justice. I think you can ask them about the specific questions and issues -- the investigators, that is -- and, like I said, we prefer that you direct those questions to them, in our belief that that is helping them move the investigation forward.
QUESTION: Okay. One more thing on the jobs issue. You said the President --
McClellan: We are complying fully with that request, and we are continuing to comply with certain matters that have been requested. We're working very closely with the investigators on that.
--Josh Marshall
As I've noted in these pages before, I remain very conflicted about the politics of opting for gay marriage as opposed to civil unions. As I've also told you, my feelings and thoughts about this issue have moved a lot, even in the last few weeks.
But set aside for a moment what I think.
A group called Massequality is taking up the fight for gay marriage within the state of Massachusetts. Given the standing Massachusetts Supreme Court decision and the unlikelihood of a federal constitutional amendment actually getting enacted, that means that to make gay marriage a reality in the state (and not just a brief blip) supporters of gay marriage will have to prevent the state from amending its own constitution to overturn that court decision.
In Massachusetts, to amend the constitution the amendment needs to be approved in two consecutive joint legislative sessions and then voted on in a statewide referendum.
The state legislature will try to act on this for the first time on March 11th, i.e., next Thursday. Given what I just described above, the soonest the court ruling could be overturned is in 2006.
But if supporters of gay marriage can defeat that amendment in this session, they'll gain another two years before gay marriage can be banned in the state and likely go a long way to making it permanent.
That's what Massequality is trying to accomplish. March 11th is less than a week away. If you care about this issue, they need your support right now. Visit the site.
--Josh Marshall
Here's a somewhat (but somewhat is better than none!) optimistic take from CBS News on the Dems' chances of taking back the Senate this year. The author mentions Alaska, Colorado and Pennsylvania as states where the Dems could pick up Republican seats. Of course, the Dems also have a slew of vulnerable seats they'll need to hold to prevent themselves from falling even further behind.
--Josh Marshall
Here's today gaggle exchange on <$NoAd$>the 5th Amendment question ...
Question: Scott, does either the President or Secretary Card have a policy on whether it's acceptable for White House aides to take the Amendment when they're asked questions in this case?McCLELLAN: Well, keep in mind that by law, grand jury investigations are closed, and prosecutors and grand jurors cannot reveal anything about the proceedings. The President has made it very clear he wants everybody inside government and outside government to provide those who are leading the investigation with information that might help them get to the bottom of this. He's been very clear about this, but let me make clear that -- well, go ahead, Mike.
Question: Go ahead.
McCLELLAN: No, no. You were going to ask a question; go ahead.
Question: Are you willing to say that White House aides who ask questions in this investigation should not take the 5th Amendment?
McCLELLAN: Our policy, at the direction of the President, is that everybody should cooperate fully with those who are leading the investigation. That's our policy. I'm not going to speculate about grand jury proceedings. I have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination. I checked with White House Counsel's Office, and they have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination.
Many of those reporters in that room think Scott McClellan is a pretty decent guy -- certainly in comparison to his predecessor; reasonably candid in off-the-record situations, and so forth. And this was a tough question to answer. But I think we can infer pretty clearly that his boss is not willing to say that his aides shouldn't be taking the fifth when Patrick Fitzgerald's investigators come calling. And that puts his call for cooperation in a certain context.
A number of other Plame related questions were discussed today. We'll bring you those a little later this evening.
--Josh Marshall
Just to keep the record <$NoAd$>straight ...
"I am confident that this economic recovery will now be sustained and will produce loads of new jobs. Everything we know about economics indicates that the sort of economic growth expected for next year, 3.8 to 4 per cent, will translate into two million new jobs from the third quarter of this year to the third quarter of next year. That’s an average of about 200,000 new jobs a month ... What gives me confidence? Everything we know about economics and history. Consumption and housing remain strong. Now capital spending is clearly coming back and inventories are at astonishingly low levels. Jobs are always a lagging indicator which follows economic growth. I would stake my reputation on employment growth happening before Christmas. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that we are going to see a pick-up in employment in 2004."
"U.S. employers added a paltry 21,000 workers to their payrolls last month, according to a surprisingly weak government report that appears certain to weigh on President George W. Bush as he seeks re-election ...The report also showed job creation in December and January was weaker than previously thought, adding to the gloomy tone of the report. The department revised lower its count of jobs gains in January to 97,000 from 112,000 and for December to just 8,000 from 16,000."
"This Administration is not satisfied with today’s job creation numbers. Although our economy added jobs for the sixth straight month and the unemployment rate remains at a level below the average of the past three decades, the recent pace of job growth is not as strong as we'd like to see. This is particularly true given the recent rapid rate of economic growth.The critical issue as we move forward is what must be done to encourage job creation through continued economic growth. One thing we know for certain – raising taxes on millions of American families is not the answer. It is imperative that Congress act to make the tax cuts permanent."
Special thanks to TPM reader JS.
--Josh Marshall
Scott McClellan finally got asked the 5th amendment question this afternoon with respect to the Plame investigation.
He said that he had "no knowledge" of anyone taking the 5th.
He said he checked with the Counsel's office too; and their response was apparently the same, i.e., no knowledge.
I'm told part two of the question (i.e., whether President Bush's order of cooperation would be consistent with members of his staff taking the fifth) got asked in some form. And McClellan's response was simply to restate in general terms the president's "policy" that everyone should cooperate with the investigation.
We'll bring you more details later.
--Josh Marshall
A reader wrote in this morning noting CNN's report that US forces will "soon implement high-tech surveillance tactics in the region [where bin Laden is thought to be], enabling them to monitor the area 24 hours a day, seven days a week." He said this sounded like a pretty good idea since the 9-5 M/F approach hadn't panned out so far.
That's a cheeky line; but it does point to a valid question. Why now?
Now, one of the dangers of any sort of opinion commentary, and blogging in particular, is that you're constantly tempted to comment on or venture an opinion on a topic that you know something about, but yet not all the relevant details. And this is certainly one of those cases. But this sudden rush of new resources into the bin Laden hunt really does seem to cry out for some explanation about timing, doesn't it?
There does seem to be a certain post-winter seasonal logic to the ramping up of the effort. But then this is the third spring since 9/11, not the first.
Why didn't we throw all these resources into the search in early 2002 or early 2003?
We know that too few resources were put into the search for bin Laden in the months just after the fall of the Taliban. At a minimum it seems we left too much of the effort in the hands of local allies -- the Northern Alliance, tribal allies, the Pakistanis -- whose motivation to capture bin Laden wasn't as clear or strong as ours, though that is, to be fair, probably more clear in retrospect than it was at the time.
We also know that we were drawing forces out of Afghanistan over the course of 2002 to build up for our invasion of Iraq. And making a full-court press in the spring of 2003 likely would have been difficult while we were focusing so many resources on Iraq.
But that's an argument the administration is presumably wary of making since it would show, in the most direct way, that the rush to invasion in Iraq sidetracked our battle against al Qaida. The decision-making in 2002/2003 is arguably more problematic since, unlike what may have been the case a year earlier, the trade-offs in that decision should have been clear at the time.
One possible answer to the 'why now' question is that it's now possible because of the deal we just cut with Pakistan. But that begs the question of why that deal happened now as opposed to two years ago and what we had to give up to get it.
In any case, as I say, I don't want to presuppose the answer to this question. The timing may be tied to changes in the internal political situation in Pakistan or the deal we just cut over the A.Q. Khan nuclear network.
But I think we do have to ask this question. We've been after bin Laden for more than two and a half years. Why the rush of new ground forces and high-tech gizmos in the lead-up to the presidential election?
--Josh Marshall
Now that the Newsday article -- discussed below -- has provided a new hook for the Plame story, it's really time for some member of the White House press corps to pose the 5th amendment question to Scott McClellan.
The question has two parts.
First: Does the White House know whether any White House appointees or employees have invoked their fifth amendment rights in the Plame investigation?
Second: Is the president's order to his staff to cooperate with the investigation consistent with his aides or appointees invoking their fifth amendment rights while remaining on the White House payroll?
The first question probably won't generate much of an answer because he may well not know. And he could credibly say that he has no way or knowing what's going on in confidential interviews and grand jury sessions.
But the second question should clarify just how much cooperation the president is calling for.
--Josh Marshall
File this one under friggin' unbelievable.
You'll remember the much-touted mobile biological weapons labs which now seem never to have existed. The overwhelming consensus within the US Intelligence Community now seems to be that those trailers we found soon after the war ended were actually for making hydrogen for weather balloons.
That didn't stop Dick Cheney from claiming less than two months ago that they were in fact for making biological weapons. But, alas, I digress.
In any case, in all the investigations now underway, we're trying to retrace our steps and see how we went wrong on these trailors.
According to an article by Walter Pincus in tomorrow's Post, it turns out that the main source for the claim -- an Iraqi chemical engineer -- was never even interviewed by American intelligence officers.
In fact, we didn't even know his name. We relied entirely on a foreign intelligence agency -- in whose custody he then was and in which he apparently remains -- to vouch for his credibility.
Really, this goes beyond issues of credibility since we'd want to have our own people interview the guy to get an idea whether he even had any idea what he was talking about, let alone whether he was on the level.
The only other person who could support or confirm this guy's story was another defector, a Iraqi major supplied to the US by Chalabi's folks at the INC.
He, it turns out, had already been "red-flagged" by the DIA for having provided unreliable information about Iraq's mobile bioweapons program. But DIA analysts, it seems, hadn't circulated that judgment widely enough through the rest of the Intelligence Community.
Now we know the engineers name. And that's only made us more eager to have him sit down with our guys. Because it turns out that the engineer is related to a senior member of the INC.
Imagine that.
It's bad enough that Chalabi and the INC helped scam us into war. But the ultimate indignity they've subjected us to has to be forcing us to endure investigations of our own intelligence services that read like Monty Python scripts.
--Josh Marshall
Big Trouble? An article <$Ad$>in tomorrow's Newsday reports that the Plame grand jury has subpoenaed Air Force One's phone records for the week prior to July 14th, 2003, the day Robert Novak published his original column outing Plame as an undercover CIA operative.
That's the sizzle, certainly. And it's the headline of the piece.
More interesting, and I suspect ultimately more consequential, though, is the Newsday article's discussion of the subpoena's focus on something called the White House Iraq Group, something which -- as the article notes -- has only been discussed previously in an August 10th, 2003 article in the Washington Post.
The Post article describes the group thusly ...
The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
That's an interesting list of names. And, two of them, Hughes and Matalin, had already left the White House by last summer, when all the activities under investigation took place.
Now, another matter.
I've noted previously in TPM and on Thursday in my column in The Hill some key issues about the pressure the White House was facing in early October 2002 to come up with evidence about the alleged Iraqi nuclear threat and the timing of the appearance of the forged Niger uranium documents in Italy on October 7th.
This all gets rather deep into the arcana. But if you've already read either that post or that column, the Post article from August 10th provides some helpful context.
--Josh Marshall
As long as we're talking about Slate, Will Saletan has a very nice piece on the problem with President Bush on the site this evening. The gist of it is that President Bush is such a man of principle that he sticks to his principles even when the facts say they don't apply or when the facts show that applying those principles produced completely different results than he said they would.
A more devilish way to put this might be to say that President Bush and his team have given a new turn to John Maynard Keynes famous response when challenged for changing his opinions so often.
Quipped Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?"
For the Bush White House, when the facts change, you just change them back again. Why get distracted?
--Josh Marshall
A note from what I take to be a new and perhaps temporary TPM reader, Timothy N. ...
hey you lazy piece of liberal crap, get a job, and get out of the greatest country in the world, people like you ruin it. President Bush is one of the best presidents we've ever had if no the best. You dont like him , dont worry, we dont like you, leave and stop taking this beautiful country for granted!
Yet another hateful Democrat, I guess.
--Josh Marshall
A note I got tonight from a friend and bona-fide Gore insider ...
We took Nader too lightly in 00. We didn't challenge him. We didn't point out his sizable personal fortune, his complete lack of assistance on any environmental cause for decades, his sources of funding. Oh progressives do not make this mistake twice in your lifetime or Nader's.
Hear, hear.
I'm not certain I agree on this, though I certainly do at the level of sentiment. I still suspect that Nader will be such a relatively minor factor this fall that he's better left ignored. But who knows?
--Josh Marshall
I'm still marvelling at how tendentious and, in at least some cases, sloppy Slate's scorecard of Kerry's "waffles" is.
Kerry's been in the Senate for twenty years. He has shifted on issues. And he has, in recent years, shifted toward the center. A friend of mine who I respect as much as anyone in this business -- and who is a confirmed opponent of President Bush's -- expressed concern over just this point a few days ago, calling Kerry a "positioner" and basing that on experience dealing with him as a reporter.
But some of these "waffles" are really pretty weak. Let's start with one under the header "Social Security" ...
Kerry's Original PositionDuring the 1996 campaign, when I was a Globe reporter, Kerry told me the Social Security system should be overhauled. He said Congress should consider raising the retirement age and means-testing benefits and called it "wacky" that payroll taxes did not apply to income over $62,700. "I know it's all going to be unpopular," he said. "But this program has serious problems, and we have a generational responsibility to fix them."
Kerry's Revised Position
Kerry no longer wants to mess with Social Security. "John Kerry will never balance the budget on the backs of America's seniors," his Web site promises.
Let's take this apart.
Is Kerry saying that any consideration of means-testing or raising the retirement age is off the table? I'd say someone should ask him. <$Ad$>Because if he's now making a categorical statement ruling this out, that would be a shift in his position. And going into a presidential election he might not want to be entirely clear.
But all the author includes is a website bromide about not "balanc[ing] the budget on the back of America's seniors."
(Here's the page on the Kerry site where it says this. The full statement is: "John Kerry will never balance the budget on the backs of America’s seniors. Many politicians have supported major cuts that cause premium increases and cutbacks in benefits. John Kerry won’t.")
All the author is doing here is comparing a specific statement with a broad and essentially meaningless statement. He should have called up Kerry and tried to see if he still thinks those things should be on the table.
The rest of the before and after makes even less sense.
The author recounts how Kerry told him that it was "'wacky' that payroll taxes did not apply to income over $62,700." The author then says this contradicts the later website pledge about not balancing the federal budget "on the backs of America's seniors."
In this latter case the author may just be confused. I'm honestly not sure.
What Kerry is talking about here is raising or removing the cap on payroll taxes, which was then $62,700 and is now, I think, over $80,000, because of fixed yearly increases.
Getting rid of the cap is something usually put forward by people who don't want to touch benefits because this is a change on the support side rather than the pay-out side.
So, for instance, if you wanted to balance the federal budget and get Social Security in check without touching so much as a hair on Social Security's balding head, the most obvious thing to do would be to remove the payroll tax cap because that amounts to a payroll tax increase on upper income people to put more money into Social Security and thus avoid benefit cuts.
There are all sorts of policy-wonkish arguments for why this would probably be a good thing. But for the moment, suffice it to say, that the author simply seems to have confused a tax increase for upper income earners who pay into Social Security with a benefit cut for those who are recipients of the program.
Phrasing it that way, of course, assumes that we grant the author's seeming premise that the website bromide amounts to forswearing any benefit cuts to Social Security. It can hardly be an example of trying to "balance the budget on the backs of America's seniors" when it's actually a demonstrable example of trying to balance it on the backs of the young, the middle aged and the wealthy.
--Josh Marshall
A new Associated Press poll out today has President Bush's approval rating at 48%. He polls 46% versus 45% for John Kerry. But the real stunner is that Ralph Nader is pulling 6%.
My gut -- and a lot of other evidence -- still tells me that Nader will prove to be far less of a factor this year than he was in 2000. The scope of opposition to President Bush tells me that, as does the fact that I don't think Nader will even appear on the ballot in many states since he's not running on the Green party ticket.
Still, I find that 6% number pretty surprising, and a little worrisome.
--Josh Marshall
I said a couple days ago that a <$Ad$>briefing of sorts that I heard last week gave me the sense that the White House political operation was in serious denial about the state of their political fortunes.
My point wasn't that the president is heading to certain defeat. Far from it. With all the bad news the president has had so far in 2004 he's still barely running outside the margin of error against Kerry in most polls.
But when you're in denial about what might be manageable problems that can be the same as having problems which are in fact unmanageable.
As I wrote in the second post ever to appear on TPM, one of the most dangerous things you can do in politics is to fall for your own spin. And the Bush political operation, as I noted in that post from November 2000, has a history of doing just that.
In any case, Bob Novak has a column today which doesn't say the same thing as I've said above. But I think it's consistent with that read of where the White House is right now.
--Josh Marshall
If Slate is going to run a scorecard of "Kerry's waffles" -- many of which are painfully tendentious -- shouldn't they run a similar scorecard for the president?
In Slate's defense, they did run this excellent, must-read Fred Kaplan piece on the RNC's serial deceptions about Kerry's defense votes and the gullible, journalist goofs who gobble them up.
Still, a Bush flipflop scorecard is really in order, so long as Microsoft has the bandwidth to serve up a very long file.
--Josh Marshall
As we noted earlier, Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole was reported to have compared voting against President <$NoAd$>Bush this November with supporting Hitler during World War II. An Oklahoma news radio station also quoted him as saying that a Bush loss would be a bin Laden win.
We called the congressman's office this morning for comment and confirmation. And now they've sent us this press release responding to the published accounts.
We're publishing the press release in full ...
Congressman Cole Corrects Inaccurate Portrayal of CommentsWASHINGTON, D.C. - "The Yukon Review mischaracterized my remarks in the opening lead of their story published yesterday. However, they did accurately quote parts of my speech during the Canadian County Republican Convention held last Saturday."
"I do believe that if President Bush is not re-elected, the United States' enemies around the world will take comfort and strength in the fact that such a strong war time leader would be out of office. I never said and do not believe that a vote against President Bush is equivalent to a vote for Adolf Hitler. The patriotism of candidates and voters who oppose the President is not in question," Congressman Cole said.
During the Canadian County Convention, Congressman Cole did say the following:
"I promise you this, if George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election, it's that simple. It will be interpreted that way by enemies of the United States around the world."
"What do you think Hitler would have thought if Roosevelt would've lost the election in 1944? He would have thought American resolve was [weakening]."
"What would the confederacy have thought if Lincoln would have lost the election of 186[4]?"
"I stand by these statements and do believe that this November is again another important time in history, just like Lincoln's victory in 1864 and Roosevelt's victory in 1944. President Bush has proved that he will stand up to our enemies and I believe that is his most important job as Commander in Chief," Congressman Cole said.
Frankly, I think these comments are still pretty outrageous, even in Cole's version of them. But they're not quite as bad as the original reports. And we wanted to bring you Congressman Cole's response in full.
--Josh Marshall
What to make of this flood of news about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?
It is now being treated almost as a given that Zarqawi was behind the horrific wave of attacks that struck Baghdad and Karbala on Tuesday. Today, however, there is an unsubstantiated claim that Zarqawi was in fact killed during the war in early April. And on top of all this there's the report -- potentially explosive in a Washington context -- that the White House passed on several opportunities to take out Zarqawi and his group before the invasion because doing so would have weakened their case for going to war.
Let's take up the last point first.
According to this NBC News story, the Pentagon drew up plans to strike Zarqawi's outpost in the North several times. And each time those plans were rejected at the White House even though each appeared to hold a solid prospect of success and despite the fact the US was receiving increasing signs that Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam posed a serious terrorist threat.
Now, on his site today Andrew Sullivan writes: "I wonder how killing Zarqawi could have conceivably impeded our bid to topple Saddam."
Though Andrew and I often trade brickbats on our sites, that's not my intention in this case because I think he's giving this story just the seriousness it deserves. But I think there's a pretty obvious reason why eliminating Zarqawi could have slowed or impeded the drive for war.
To understand why, we've got to go back to the role Zarqawi and Ansar played in the administration's case for war.
As we've noted here many times, there was always a category difference between the White House's case on WMD and its case on Iraq's ties to al Qaida.
In brief, the first may have been debatable and exaggerated, but the second seldom rose above the level of ridiculousness. Yet to the extent that the White House had any argument about terrorist ties, Zarqawi and Ansar were at the center of it.
Let's remember what the argument was.
Ansar was a Sunni Islamist terrorist group operating from Iraqi Kurdistan which had ties of some sort and degree with al Qaida. Zarqawi, a Jordanian national and accomplished terrorist bad guy, had set up shop with Ansar and he too was affiliated with al Qaida -- though again the degree and closeness of the connection is a matter of some controversy . To add to the storyline, Zarqawi had apparently been to Baghdad for medical treatment.
So Zarqawi and Ansar were in Iraqi Kurdistan. Thus they were 'in Iraq'. And they were linked to al Qaida. So al Qaida was 'in Iraq'. That was the argument.
Now, there was a pretty big problem with this argument. Namely, the US and the UK had made Iraqi Kurdistan into a virtual Anglo-American protectorate through its no-fly zones which kept not only Iraqi air power but basically all of Saddam's forces out of the region. The Kurds themselves had already set up a de facto government, though the region where Ansar was operating from was one they didn't control.
In other words, saying Ansar was operating out of Iraq was deeply misleading in anything other than a narrowly geographical sense since Ansar was operating from area we had taken from Saddam's control. Saddam might as credibly -- perhaps more credibly -- have charged us with harboring Ansar as vice versa.
(A side note: various Iraq hawks have alleged that Saddam's secret police were in contact with or even controlling Ansar. And it's true that Saddam and Ansar had a common enemy: the pro-American Kurdish parties. But I've never seen any credible evidence to persuade me of such links.)
In any case, to review, using Ansar and Zarqawi as proof of a Saddam-al Qaida link had serious evidentiary and logical problems. But that didn't stop the White House from making it a centerpiece of their argument -- as Colin Powell did during his presentation at the UN.
In the immediate lead-up to the war there were various parts of the White House's argument for war that were becoming weaker by the day. That, after all, was what was happening with the inspectors themselves who were, in the weeks and months just before the war, generating lots of new evidence that threw many of the earlier suspicions of WMD into real doubt -- particularly on the nuclear front.
The reports we have now about the White House's refusal to move against Zarqawi are still incomplete. And I think we've got to keep open the possibility that there were military or diplomatic restraints we were operating under that are not yet clear.
But if the reports bear out, the White House's reasons for not moving against Zarqawi when we could have don't seem to require much explanation. If we got rid of Zarqawi and Ansar the much-trumpeted Iraq-al Qaida, already so profoundly tenuous, would have collapsed altogether. To put it bluntly, we needed Zarqawi and Ansar.
That would mean it was a political decision -- one intended to aid in convincing the American people of the necessity of war -- for which we are now paying a grave price.
Later, we'll discuss why I'm still not entirely convinced that Zarqawi is behind all these recent attacks.
--Josh Marshall
So now Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole is telling constituents that voting against President Bush this November is like supporting Hitler during World War II.
He also apparently told a Republican audience recently that "If George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election."
Presumably, we need to vote for President Bush because otherwise we'd be saddled with those hateful, hating, hating, hating Democrats who have no understanding of what civility in politics is all about.
The report about these statements comes from the website of news radio station in Oklahoma City (Newsradio 1000 KTOK). And they appear to be going from an article in a local newspaper, The Yukon Review.
This morning I called Congressman Cole's office in Washington to get some confirmation on these quotes and see if Cole stood by them.
The press aide I spoke to in Cole's office noted that KTOK's reference to Cole's Hitler comparison was in fact a "paraphrase" rather than a direct quote, and that the office was trying to find out more about precisely what the congressman had said.
--Josh Marshall
A new poll out from Pew: Kerry 48%, Bush 44% among registered voters. There's an extensive discussion of the internals from the poll here.
--Josh Marshall
Two weeks ago, I shared with you the<$Ad$> possibility that the long-brewing controversy over those pilfered Democratic Judiciary Committee staff memos could lead to an investigation of the White House Counsel's office. (The earlier post covers all the details of how this could come to pass.)
Now, last week four Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee (Durbin, Leahy, Kennedy and Schumer) wrote White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales with a series of detailed and pointed questions all of which focused on whether the White House had any knowledge of the pilfering or involvement in it and whether they had made use of those pilfered memos in any way.
One of the questions dealt with whether any outside groups had been the conduits for passing pilfered files to the Counsel's office ...
Did you or anyone who has served in your office or at the White House receive from C. Boyden Gray, Sean Rushton, Kay Daly, the Committee for Justice, the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary or any other intermediary any of the computer files of Democratic Senators or their staffs or information derived from those files?
Now, last week I called the Committee for Justice and asked Executive Director Sean Rushton whether he or anyone else at the Committee had known about the accessing of the Democratic staff memos prior to last November when the first published reports surfaced. He answered with a flat "no".
I also asked whether any of the memos had come into the Committee's possession prior to last November. And he again answered with a flat "no".
But yesterday Gonzales responded to the Democratic Senators' letter and he was far more equivocal when he spoke for the Counsel's Office and the White House staff. If it's not a classic example of a non-denial denial, it's definitely the well-chosen phrasing of someone who's far from ready to deny that his office was involved in the theft of these files.
The Boston Globe this morning reported Gonzales' response thusly ...
Gonzales, replying yesterday in a letter to Leahy, said he was aware of no "credible allegation" of White House involvement in the incident, so no investigation has been made. He said he "respectfully, but categorically, reject the statement in your letter" that administration actions contributed to the atmosphere around the files controversy.
But I think that doesn't do justice to the full measure of equivocation and obfuscation.
Here are the two paragraphs from Gonzales' letter in which he responds to the Senators' detailed questions about possible White House involvement ...
As I explained, I am not aware of any credible allegation of White House involvement in this matter. Consequently, there has been no White House investigation or effort to determine whether anyone at the White House was aware of or involved in these activities.As I also advised you, I have no personal knowledge that any such computer files or the documents they may have contained were provided to our office or to others at the White House. So far as I know, moreover, neither my staff nor others at the White House were aware of activity by the Judiciary Committee staff or other Senate employees such as they alleged in public reports on this matter.
I have no personal knowledge ... so far as i know ... rather less than unequivocal, isn't it?
Maybe this gets added to the list of investigations hanging over the White House's collective head.
--Josh Marshall
If you look at the TV ads the president just unveiled today, you quickly see a main -- probably the main -- theme of his reelection campaign: it's not my fault.
Yes, there are all sort of bad things going on. The economy's been rough. The deficit is deepening. Job growth is barely registering. There's all sorts of chaos on the international stage. But it's not my fault. When I got here there was a recession already, which I didn't have anything to do with. That was Clinton's fault. And the same with all the corporate scandals. And then Osama bin Laden got involved and that wasn't my fault either. And that Iraq thing didn't completely work out. But that's the CIA's fault. So if there's anything that's bad now it's not because of anything I did. It's because of 9/11. And if it's not because of 9/11 then it was already broken when I got here. So don't blame me.
Now, I think that does pretty much sum up what the president and the White House are telling the public. But it's important to draw back and recognize that up until this point that argument has largely worked. Now, however, I think people are beginning to question the argument.
By most objective measures, economic and international indicators of national well-being have been fair to bad for most of George Bush's term of office. But for much of that time we were in either the immediate aftermath of 9/11, building up to war, or in the aftermath of war.
If you were to plop down in late 1943, for instance, you could point to all sorts of negative signs -- rising deficits, crises abroad, etc. But Franklin Roosevelt would have said, quite plausibly, that we'd been attacked at Pearl Harbor, we were fighting a two front war across two oceans, and that things might well get worse before they got better.
Now, I don't think that's a remotely reasonably analogy. But it is the argument the Bush White House has been making for some two years. And it's had a lot of success with it. Everything that's bad has been framed as fall-out from 9/11 or our response to 9/11.
What we're seeing now is that these two things -- 9/11 and the current state of the country -- are coming unhinged in the public mind. If they stay unhinged, President Bush looks less like a 'war president' than a president who just won't take responsibility for anything that happens on his watch.
Thus the new ads, the message of which might fairly be summed up as "It's midnight in America. But if the Democrats were in, the sun might never come up!"
--Josh Marshall
Is it possible that Larry King has the worst election panel in the history of the universe?
I mean, imagine having the benefit of the variety of perspectives and ideological viewpoints represented by Larry, Bob Dole and Bob Woodward -- each repeating the mind-numbingly obvious with that extra little something.
Anyway, enough of that.
I flipped on the TV this evening around 9 PM and caught the bulk of John Kerry's speech, in effect, accepting the Democratic nomination.
I thought it was a very solid speech, principally because he took on issues like the gay marriage amendment head-on -- not on the president's terms, but on his own. The president is desperate, he argued, and because he can't run clearly on the economy or foreign policy he's opting to muck up the nation's founding political document for narrow and momentary political purposes.
Certainly, that message won't resonate with confirmed Bush supporters. But I believe it will resonate even with many who strongly oppose gay marriage. That's because it plays to what should, and I believe will, be a central theme of this election: that the Bush administration has been a for-the-moment and for-itself operation, burning through the resources of tomorrow and the hard-acquired inheritance of the past to service the political needs -- its political needs -- of the present.
One more thought about Kerry.
I've long been an admirer of John Kerry's. And let me explain one of the sources of that admiration, or one of the experiences that formed it.
In 1996 I was a graduate student in Rhode Island. And given the puny size of Rhode Island and the way the media markets work in the region, that basically meant I was in a Massachusetts media market for Kerry's reelection campaign that year against then-governor William Weld.
Now, Massachusetts is certainly a congenial state to run in for Democrats, especially in federal elections. But to understand the dynamics of that race it's crucial to understand that Kerry has never been an institution in Massachusetts politics and that Weld, at the time, was extraordinarily popular.
I don't have the exact stats in front of me. But he won reelection two years earlier, in 1994, by I believe something like 71% of the vote.
The Kerry-Weld race was supposed to be, and in many respects was, the fight of Kerry's political life. And going into it there was good reason to believe that Kerry would lose. But he kept in it and fought and fought and fought and eventually won the race. His persistence and tenacity were impressive.
By national standards, it was a pretty clean race. But it was extraordinarily hard-fought. And since then Kerry's always struck me as someone who was a fighter, someone who'd never give up, give in, let himself get hit without fighting back or flag in the home stretch.
That gives me some confidence about this race.
Another source of confidence I have stems from a briefing of sorts I heard last week summarizing the White House's outlook and strategy for the coming campaign. After hearing it, I came away thinking that they're in a serious state of denial about how this election is shaping up.
--Josh Marshall
Just a thought on these horrific coordinated bombings today in Iraq.
Americans have become numbed over the last eight months or so by the sheer regularity of the carnage from the various suicide bombing attacks in Iraq.
The Ashura attacks today have been major news in the United States. But they haven't driven various other stories from the headlines. And I think it's easy to understate their significance.
Just consider one crude measure.
We don't know yet the exact death toll from these attacks. And it may be some time before we do. But the New York Times has an estimate tonight placing the number of dead at 170.
Iraq has a population of just under 25 million. The United States is home to a tad over 290 million. In other words, there are well over ten times as many Americans as Iraqis.
So, to get a feel for the impact of these attacks on the country, the number of people who lost loved ones, know others who did, and so forth, multiply that death toll by 11 or 12 times in order to get a feel for the number in American terms.
A good ballpark point of comparison is what it would be like to have around 2000 people killed in one day in this country. And, of course, that's not that different from the 3000 who were killed here on September 11th.
--Josh Marshall
Out of the mouths of babes.
Or not so babes ...
If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and Edwards have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had.
That was Dick Cheney today <$Ad$>on how much worse things would have been if the Democrats had been in instead of Bush.
Now, where to start on this?
First of all Cheney seems to be caught in some sort of weird mental causality loop since what Kerry and Edwards support is a repeal of the 2001 Bush tax cuts (or most of them). So if their policies had been pursued over the last three years that means that the cuts simply never would have happpened at all, not that there would have been big tax increases.
More to the point, did Cheney really intend to say that without the President's policies "we would not have had the kind of job growth (i.e., negative job growth) that we've had."
Will someone ever straighten this guy out?
--Josh Marshall
Drats! So close, and yet so far.
I had some hope that we might break through half a million unique visitors on TPM in February. But we came up just short.
Unique visitors 496,527; unique visits 2,077,729; page views 2,832,707.
There's always next month.
(As always, a sincere thank you to all the site's readers.)
--Josh Marshall
Friends, I'm just checking my emails here late on Monday afternoon and I've noticed a number of them asking whether I'm okay and if anything is amiss since there've been no new posts for the last three days.
In brief, nothing is amiss.
At the moment, I'm hurtling down the Northeast corridor on an Amtrak train bound for DC and will be getting back to TPM world headquaters mid-evening.
It took me about thirty-five years to get around to it, but this weekend I went skiing for the first time in my life. Why I'd never done it before I'm not precisely sure, since I grew up in a part of Southern California where there were skiable mountains no more than a fifteen minute drive from my house. Maybe it was a family thing or that we just didn't have much money. But I'd just never given the idea too much thought until my girlfriend suggested it about a month or so ago.
In any case, before getting even my ski boots on the snow I had half sketched out in my head all manner of self-mocking riffs about spending the weekend falling down in place trying to stand on my skis, with some frustrated, hapless ski instructor trying to explain to me how it was all done.
But, improbably enough, I ended up being halfway decent at it and managed -- on my last run on the second day -- to go down the entire mountain without falling one time.
Now, having grown up in Southern California, it's a little hard to call this thing we were on a 'mountain' and, sure, the trails I made my way down on were the ones marked green for feeble beginners. But those are secondary details we really don't need to go into or concern ourselves with.
In any case, once I learned to control my rate of descent -- something which I heartily recommend to the president, by the way -- I found myself really liking it.
More later this evening on the turning tide on Capitol Hill, the latest intel revelations, and more.
--Josh Marshall
