Who needs a free press? U.S. government wins the right to paw through the New York Times‘ phone records and see who their confidential sources are. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Ledeen’s quick and easy plan for victory and an end of the bloodshed in Iraq: overthrow the governments in Damascus and Tehran. Then everything will fall into place.
Presumably he’s still got Cheney’s ear.
Gingrich: Terror war requires “different set of rules” for free speech.
Actually, just looking forward to next year, as sad as it will be for the country, there may be a high entertainment value watching at least a slice of the cast of GOP presidential hopefuls battle for most hawkish on Iraq.
Call it the war-on-terror-maximalism mini-primary.
Okay, not that it’s a surprise. But let’s just stipulate for the record that the election results earlier this month didn’t mean jack to the president when it comes to Iraq. Here’s a story in the Times with the president not only blaming everyone but himself for the disaster he’s created in Iraq but specifically laying the whole thing on al Qaida.
Said the president: “Thereâs a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by Al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal[s].”
To the extent that we can read ‘al Qaida’ as a gloss for ‘people blowing things up’ this is no doubt true to a certain extent. But that’s sort of like the president saying not to blame the Katrina debacle on him when it was mainly the hurricane’s fault.
The Times piece does a pretty good job explaining how everyone in the military and intelligence circles now agrees that ‘al Qaida’ (whatever that means in Iraq exactly) is not the real issue in what’s happening. But to the president, it’s still us versus al Qaida. Possibly with outside support from Dr. Evil and KAOS. I really never thought this country could be run for a significant period of time by a president who seems captive of dingbat conspiracy theories and the strategic complexity of a children’s bedtime story.
The illusory couple-week post-election window of non-denial has closed.
More revelations forthcoming of RNC Chairman-to-be Mel Martinez’s ties to Jack Abramoff?
You may have read today’s AP story about how the government’s civil liberties oversight panel was “impressed” with the privacy protections built into the president’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Over at TPMmuckraker, Justin Rood has the rundown on why you should take that with a grain of salt.
Since I’ve only been listening to the liberal media I thought Iraq was on a slippery slope to hell. Turns out it’s on the course to renewal.