Different worlds.

An email from someone who appears to be new to the site …

Enough already. What you are citing was a minority opinion. How minority? Try in contradiction to the assessment of every major intelligence agency, including the CIA, which was headed by Clinton appointee Tenet. This effort, where you take the opinion of a single analyst, based on a single source, and try to claim that this proves against all relevant disclosures of the predominate pre-war intelligence that the pre-war intelligence squares with apparent post-war relevations is a very shoddy type of revisionism. It depends on making the entire Clinton administration disappear. (Even Clarke and McCarthy remain of the view, to cite a single example, that the Sudan pharmaceutical plant was part of the Iraq WMD program. If I recall that was in 1998.) Democratic world view is that what was indisputably a bipartisan fact until at least 2002 when the question of actual war emerged, and what remained a predominate opinion even among the Clintonians, can be conjured away and voters like me, who used to vote Democrat, never bothered to read a newspaper in the interim. What it all amounts to is playing games with issues of national security.

Marx tells us that history happens first as tragedy, and then a second time as farce. But he leaves us entirely at sea when it comes to the seventh or eighth time. So, really, what are we to make of the news that James A. Baker is leading an elder-statesman fact finding mission to Iraq to “generate new ideas on Iraq.”

Perhaps we need Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence more than Eighteenth Brumaire because, haven’t we been through this movie before?

Didn’t we do this back in like 2003? Baker was going to kick everything into shape on Iraqi debt forgiveness. Not quite sure whatever became of that.

The Times bandies about the comparison between this Baker mission and Lyndon Johnson’s calling back of Dean Acheson as he, Johnson, began to seriously question and eventually abandon his policy in Vietnam. The Times concedes that the analogy is “far from perfect.” But that seems like rather an understatement.

Johnson eventually halted the bombing of North Vietnam and announced he wouldn’t run for reelection. In effect, he resigned the presidency, though he remained to serve the remaining ten months of his constitutional term of office. It’s probably the closest thing you’ll ever see in American politics to an admission of failure followed by an intentional act of political self-immolation.

Does anyone imagine anything even remotely like that in the offing?

The president is stuck on telling us that Don Rumsfeld has done a bang up job as defense secretary.

And even with the rising chorus of retired generals calling for Rumsfeld’s ouster, isn’t this just displacement? Don Rumsfeld works for the president. This is the president’s administration in more than just the obvious, literal sense. These are his policies. It’s his denial, his indifference to the failure of his policies and the incompetence of his subordinates. As David Remnick put it recently in The New Yorker, the man in the Oval Office “does not much believe in science or, for that matter, in any information that disturbs his prejudices, his fantasies, or his sleep.”

The president is accountable, not just in the sense that the president is by definition accountable, but because these failures are his failures. They stem from his weaknesses — his inability to summon the courage to make tough decisions, his addiction to sycophants, his penchant for denial.

We’d be fools to expect any change when the president lacks the guts to recognize his failures let alone try to fix them.

The post below is one of those shots of indictment and outrage mixed with a few literary detours. But somehow I feel the mood of the moment, the truth of the moment, is less outrage as it is surreality.

Consider this exchange between Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Laura Ingraham from a few days ago …

INGRAHAM: Are you confident that that estimate of a few days ago of being five years or perhaps even ten years away is realistic and accurate given the fact that in the past we’ve certainly underestimated nuclear capabilities?

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: No.

INGRAHAM: No which part?

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: No, I’m not confident.

INGRAHAM: Uh huh.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: I think it’s a very difficult target for our intelligence community. They work hard at it and they’re fine people, but it’s a difficult thing to do. Our visibility into their circumstance is imperfect. I would add that if one is asked the question how long would it take them to do certain things totally, alone, on an indigenous basis without assistance from other countries you’d get one answer. If you said to them, if you said what if they were able to get ballistic missiles from North Korea, as they have, and what if they were able to acquire fissile material from somebody? How long would it take? I think you’d get a somewhat different answer.

They work hard at it and they’re fine people.

I guess you might call that The Unbearable Arrogance of an Unmatchable Failure.

This is right out of 2002, the snide and contemptuous pats on the back to the fuddy-duddies in the intelligence agencies who lack the 20/20 masculinity and ass-kicking philosophy to see what needs to be done and do it.

I guess Rumsfeld didn’t catch the last three years or notice that we’re in the springtime of an unfolding national catastrophe due in large measure to the last time he chose to talk out of his behind with, it would seem, either no idea what he was talking about or a complete indifference to the truth of what he was discussing.

Like I said, bizarre.

Is anyone taking him seriously the second time?

Larry Johnson: “There is a fundamental moral and ethical difference between someone who leaks information in order to serve the public good and someone, like George Bush, who authorizes leaks only for the purpose of saving his sorry political ass.”

The race to succeed Duke Cunningham gets really, really ugly, courtesy of the National Republican Congressional Committee. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

We have a decent number of active duty Air Force readers. Can someone tell me if there’s anything to this?

Bush: “Every little bit helps.”

Bush on energy company tax breaks: for them before he was against them.

You can’t make this stuff up.

You’ll remember how Sen. Roberts (R-KS), Chairman of the Intel committee, broke up the senate investigation into the Iraq intel debacle into two ‘phases’ and in so doing managed to push the report about President Bush’s role in the bamboozlement out past the 2004 election.

Apparently it worked so well the first time he’s going to try it again.

According the to The Hill, Chairman Roberts now wants to take the part of the investigation he split off to get it past the 2004 election and further split up the split off part in to two new pieces. That should help him get it all past the 2006 election.

Got that?

Again, in 2004 Roberts splits the investigation in two, pushing the investigation of the administration’s complicity out past 2004, in order to protect President Bush, who instructs Roberts on what to do. He’s been sitting on this ‘part two’ phase ever since.

Now he wants to break up part two into two new parts — that should provide enough delay to kick it out past 2007. (Actually, The Hill article is a bit unclear about whether Roberts is now proposing two chunks or three. But who’s counting. Remember how the Dems shut down the senate last fall and forced the Roberts to move ahead with phase two? Guess that didn’t pan out.)

And the kicker? Ranking Member Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) won’t oppose Roberts’ new gambit.

He’s been a patsy for Roberts for so long time I guess it’s hard to change.

Sometimes I like passing on headlines because for all their randomness they seem to hint at some broader truth.

Here on the front page of the CNN website we have: “Terror Case Against Ice Cream Salesman Collapses.”