Peter Galbraith: “In his State of the Union address, President Bush told his Iraq critics, ‘Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy.’ His comments are understandable. Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush’s shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.”

A pretty crisp and concise description of a man who has been an utter failure as a leader, in almost every respect unimaginable. Hubris, ignorance, inability to lead or make hard decisions. The list is as bleak as it is long.

The Cunningham staffer who wouldn’t be part of Duke’s crimes. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Ignorance of the law is no defense. How about ignorance about what you did?

In the department of ‘you can’t make this stuff up’: Scooter Libby, lawyer, foreign policy hand, author and Dick Cheney’s personal one-man heat shield, has hired a memory loss expert to assist in his defense.

Harvard psychology professor Daniel L. Schacter is the guy who got the call.

Maybe Scooter can consult one of Schacter’s books, The Seven Sins of Memory.

The Democrats want to run as the party of reform? Then they can’t afford days like today.

Today, the Senate Rules Committee voted on two different reform proposals. One was the Democrats’ Honest Leadership and Open Government Act; the other was an earmark and lobbying reform bill by Sen. Lott (R-MS). The Democrats’ bill went down on party lines, 10-8. Lott’s bill passed unanimously. In other words, in one short committee meeting, the Republicans completely co-opted the issue.

Meanwhile, Sen. Obama (D-IL), who’s supposed to be the point man on this, introduced a measure three weeks ago that would create a Congressional Ethics Enforcement Commission, an exterior agency that would handle ethics investigations and then make recommendations to the ethics committees. Sounds like a pretty sound idea, right? Especially given the shambles that the ethics committees are in right now, you would think.

Well, Sen. Obama (D-IL) sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter February 10th (read the letter here). The response? As today’s Hill reports, it’s been…underwhelming. As of yesterday, he had one co-sponsor, Sen. Reid (D-NV). Today, according to Sen. Obama’s office, he added Sen. Kerry (D-MA). So that’s two – not very impressive support. Why? As The Hill puts it: “lawmakers appear to view the medicine as too strong.”

The Washington Post ran a story yesterday suggesting that the IRS bowed to political pressure by investigating a Texas public interest group that crossed swords with Tom DeLay. The investigation came at the request of DeLay’s crony, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX), who himself was put up to making the request by a lawyer tied to DeLay’s fundraising schemes.

But we think there’s more to the story. In fact, there are indications that established rules to prevent political abuse of the IRS may not have been followed.

According to IRS rules, a request like Johnson’s must be reviewed by a three-member panel set up to ensure that investigations are conducted for fair, nonpartisan purposes. But there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that such a review ever took place.

Under the rules, the committee must keep a record of each of its decisions. As the Post reported yesterday, Texans for Public Justice Director Craig L. McDonald asked for all documents relating to his group’s case. McDonald shared those documents with us — and they contain no record the IRS committee had reviewed Johnson’s letter or referred it for investigation.

In its reply to McDonald, the IRS said it had held back three pages, citing a law which allows them to withhold information if it “would seriously impair Federal tax administration.” But the agency would not say what those three pages were.

We followed up with IRS spokesman Eric Smith. But we didn’t get any further than McDonald.

Smith would not explain what had been withheld, or make a member of the IRS disclosure office available. (Reached independently, IRS disclosure officer Valerie Barta, whose name pops up in McDonald’s IRS documents, told us she was prohibited from discussing the matter.)

We asked Smith whether a review had taken place. He would not answer directly, but said the review panel is “the process that we use for all cases.” We again asked him to confirm it was used for Johnson’s request; Smith said he was prohibited from discussing specific cases.

Is the IRS withholding evidence of what the review panel decided? Or is the evidence missing because the mandated review never took place? One way or another, why isn’t any evidence of this review or reference to it included into the documents released to TPJ?

Remember, this isn’t just any audit. It’s one the IRS was put up to by a political ally of Tom DeLay for the pretty clear purpose of cracking down on an organization that was creating problems for the then-Majority Leader.

We can’t see any reason why the IRS won’t say whether they followed their own rules in this case. And if they did, why can’t they provide some evidence or documentation about what the review panel decided?

Sen. Burns (R-MT) mixes it up a bit, says President Bush has skull of “solid granite”.

Strobel and Landay at Knight-Ridder: “U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports. Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions – not foreign terrorists – and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.”

Wait, White House ignored warnings from Intel pros, lied to the public about the warnings and then paid the price? I’ve been in this movie before.

Actually, I guess, we all pay the price.

This is a post to let you know that I exercised some self-control and didn’t do the post about how Gateway Computers has made a covert pact with Satan to sell substandard computer hardware and back it up with service so bad it is guaranteed to push even a relatively well-balanced individual to the brink of insanity. Just wanted to let you know that.

If you’re a regular reader of this site you’ve probably been noticing an increasing frequency of posts with that little “TPMmuckraker.com Advance Copy” icon stuck in the text. And, if you look closely at those posts, you’ll see that my name doesn’t appear in the signature at the bottom.

So let me explain what that’s all about.

Back in November — which seems like a very long time ago — I told you that I wanted to “launch a new blog dedicated to chronicling, explaining and reporting on the interconnected web of public corruption scandals bubbling up out of the reigning Washington political machine.”

We did a fundraiser and got contributions for the project from almost 3000 TPM Readers. And now we’re about ready to get started. As promised, we hired two full-time reporter-bloggers for TPMmuckraker.com, one based out of our new office in New York and another based in Washington, DC.

Paul Kiel you’ve already gotten to know through the Daily Muck column he’s been writing every morning over at TPMCafe. Paul has worked at Harpers and written for L Magazine. And he had some key experience working as a paralegal at a law firm specializing in white collar defense work. So that comes in handy for him as he’s making his way through an indictment or sentencing memorandum. Paul had good experience for the job and he came well recommended. But I hired him mainly because the letter he wrote applying for the job and then some sample posts I had him write made me think he got how this works — digging for muck, looking for that delicious Duke Cunningham-worthy detail. And I haven’t been disappointed.

Then just two days ago, our second full-time reporter-blogger came on the job. Justin Rood, formerly of Congressional Quarterly and Government Executive magazine, will be reporting for TPMmuckraker.com from Washington, the veritable den of iniquity itself. I met Justin a few years back when I still lived in DC. And we’ve corresponded off and on since then, particularly about his interest in so-called collaborative or open-source journalism (the sort of stuff we did with the DeLay Rule or the Social Security fight last year). Even with the generous support of TPM Readers, we still had to put this operation together on a pretty modest budget. So we didn’t have a lot of money to throw around. And we needed to make every hire count. With all that in mind, I hired Justin because I wanted one of those reporters who just works the phone and finds the sources and scours the documents until he runs the story to ground.

So, that’s our team. Justin and Paul. I’ll be general editor in the background, with Kate Cambor as Managing Editor.

We plan to get underway next week. The Daily Muck and these Advance Copy posts we’re doing here will all be rolled into the new site, along with our Document Collection, a collection of bios of all the major scandals players and a bunch else. We won’t be launching with any fanfare or announcement or glitz. If all goes according to plan, we’ll just start rounding up the corruption news of the day and breaking stories.

Now, one other point I’d like to make. I had the idea to start this new site for a few different reasons. One was that I’d like to have a site like this that I could read. Another was that I’ve been increasingly interested in blogs as a hybrid form of journalism.

But the most immediate reason is this: Most of the stuff I come up with on TPM starts with readers — tips, insights that shed new light on already reported stories, pointers to articles, scuttlebutt that a little reporting can turn into hard news. I’ve discussed this before on the site. But the stream of emails we get into the site everyday is a resource of simply inestimable value — something journalists with conventional publications just don’t have access to. But as the site has grown, the volume of tips and leads has grown. But my ability to run them down has remained pretty static. So lots of good leads and stories just go unpursued.

But I figured that with a couple hungry reporters who could devote themselves to doing this full-time and a few interns to help them, we could bust open a lot more stories, make more trouble and just have a lot more fun. So that’s what we’re going to try to do.

From you, here’s what we need. Keep the tips coming. It’s as easy as clicking the comments link and shooting us a quick email. They all get read. Are you up on the hill? Tell us the scuttlebutt you’re hearing. Keep us posted. Have a lead for a story? Want to discreetly pass it on? Let us know. Have documents? We want documents. See a story that needs more attention? Drop us a line and we’ll get right on it.

They’ve got muck; we’ve got rakes.

Duke Cunningham even more corrupt than we thought. Prosecutors go back to the bottomless Duke corruption well. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.