104 Comments

1. Zhombre:

“I almost feel sorry for the media. Almost.” May I second that. The media has taken their First Amendment liberty and privilege and meretriciously turned in into the thinnest of screens for their own mendacity, biases, vanity and complacency. I look forward to the day when their whole edifice rots and falls to splinters.

Jul 23, 2008 - 1:57 pm 2. Terry Baker:

Perhaps Obama is a “cultural” candidate, not a truly political one. By cultural, I mean symbolic of a world view. By political, I mean a candidate with domestic and foreign policy opinions, goals.

Hilary was a political candidate; her views centered on policy, practical political matters that her constituency agreed with.

Obama seems to represent the other half of the left, that half that believes they’ve lost the political and economic arguments but own the culture, and want the culture to rule over politics and economics.

If there’s truth in this analysis it explains why the press doesn’t care about his platform. To them his cultural symbolism is his platform.

Jul 23, 2008 - 2:06 pm 3. sirius_sir:

I almost feel sorry for Obama. Already Iraq is being declared won. Which means BHO stands to come in for much questioning should under his watch it be lost.

Jul 23, 2008 - 2:41 pm 4. bob m:

I wonder, sirius_sir. God forbid that it will be lost, but the power of rationalization to a preconceived schema is hard to overcome. Many people of influence have too much invested for it to have been the fault of a faulty worldview –proved faulty enough times in the past to convince anyone who cares to examine the evidence! It will somehow have been the fault of the flawed policies of the Bush administration ™ (and indeed there are some).

Jul 23, 2008 - 2:51 pm 5. 907ie:

The media think they can control the election, but once again, they’ll find out they are wrong.

Jul 23, 2008 - 2:55 pm 6. 49erDweet:

<i?907ie, The media “again” thinks . . .
It was ever thus.

Jul 23, 2008 - 3:11 pm 7. JR Garner:

I think people will soon notice that Barack is really a twit, if they have not already done so.

Jul 23, 2008 - 3:57 pm 8. Doug:

Maybe he’ll prove the existence of Untertwits.
—
Watch the Trailer w/o CRINGING:
I DARE YOU!

Jul 23, 2008 - 4:19 pm 9. RWE:

Charles Krauthamer was just on TV pointing out how Obama has adopted a deny-deny-deny-add strategy, which features him not only claiming he supported things he did not but also involves his adding things to his earlier statements that he had never in fact said. The newest example is his statement that meeting with Iran would only be with preconditions; before he did not say there would be any such conditions.

And recently Obama said that he had already dealt with Iran harshly, “his” Senate Banking Committee having taken action against Iran’s accounts, an action he voted for. Trouble is, he is not even on the Senate Banking Committee, and he never voted for any such actions. As they observed on Fox News, if John McCain has made such a statement that would have been taken as evidence of deteriorating mental capabilities.

As Krauthamer brilliantly observed previously, Obama is “for” all sorts of actions in principle and against actually taking action. In addition, he has a record of voting one way in the Senate and then going back and asking that the record be amended to show that he meant to vote the other way. All of this is a couple of orders of magnitude worse than John Kerry’s “For it before I was against it.”

This is not just a guy who wants to have it both ways.

This is a guy who really thinks it is both ways. If he says so.

Jul 23, 2008 - 4:20 pm 10. hdgreene:

RWE, I think to hit Sen. Obama on his Senate Banking Committee misstatement is really unfair. He has not spent that much time in the Senate. Suppose you got a job, worked it for a few months, and then went on sick leave for three years. Are you going to remember every little thing you did there? Especially when it was a small part of your life to begin with — merely a means to other ends?

And more to the point, isn’t the Senate Banking Committee his? And yours? And mine? And every American’s Senate Banking Committee?

Jul 23, 2008 - 5:03 pm 11. Lifeofthemind:

If at his next press conference the sound goes off and the lights go up and men in white coats just take him away the Press would quietly file out and talk about how to fudge their expense accounts. They would forget who Obama was by the end of the week.

Jul 23, 2008 - 5:18 pm 12. NahnCee:

Does that also mean the Senate Banking Committee is Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s and Zimbabwe’s and belongs equally as much to any other country that we’ve ever imposed sanctions on?

Which must then mean that B. Hussein is working equally hard for all *those* countries and peoples as he is for mere Americans.

Right?

Jul 23, 2008 - 5:19 pm 13. The Obama Hype Movie « Wolf Pangloss:

[...] h/t: commenter Doug at Belmont Club [...]

Jul 23, 2008 - 5:45 pm 14. Roy Lofquist:

“Seventy six trombones led the big parade…”. It’s about time we had a sequel.

Jul 23, 2008 - 5:45 pm 15. Teresita:

Sirius_SIr: I almost feel sorry for Obama. Already Iraq is being declared won. Which means BHO stands to come in for much questioning should under his watch it be lost.

We lost 3000 innocent lives on Bush’s watch, and he managed to blame it on Clinton and Saddam, so why would Obama act any different? All he has to do is say the whole adventure in Iraq was a mistake from the gitgo. Besides, the Iraqis can take care of their own country. People all over the world have been taking care of their own country for thousands of years. The only thing we stand to lose is the proposed permanent superbases in Iraq from where the neocons planned to project military power into Syria and Iran and any other country in the neighborhood that frowns at Israel. That is what McCain is really thinking about when he says we should be there for a hundred years. A vote for Obama is a vote against being the World Cop.

Jul 23, 2008 - 5:46 pm 16. MarkJ:

Teresita,

“The only thing we stand to lose is the proposed permanent superbases in Iraq from where the neocons planned to project military power into Syria and Iran and any other country in the neighborhood that frowns at Israel.”

Oops, pardon me Teresita, but your Hakenkreuz is showing.

Jul 23, 2008 - 6:00 pm 17. NahnCee:

We lost 3000 innocent lives on Bush’s watch …

God, I’m getting so I hate Teresita for comments like this. I can’t decide if she’s naive, stupid or just born evil, but whichever, she’s a danger to both herself and to the rest of humanity. And in any case, she does NOT deserve a forum of any kind any place any time to spew hateful lies like this.

Jul 23, 2008 - 6:29 pm 18. Dave:

Last time I checked, Israel was on our side.
Now are we supposed to abandon Israel in spite of their being on our side or because they are on our side?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Jul 23, 2008 - 7:08 pm 19. Eggplant:

NahnCee,

I wonder how many American (and European) lives were
saved by going into Iraq? Our troops killed thousands
of Islamic fascists in Iraq. Given half a chance, each of those wannabe terrorists through suicide tactics or other methods would have happily murdered as many innocent American or European civilians as they could. Of course, we’ll never know how many people were saved. Allowing those innocent people to die was the “path not taken”.

Jul 23, 2008 - 7:11 pm 20. fred:

NahnCee,

I know it’s hard, because I’m just in the beginning phase of my resolution, but perhaps we should try to not take the bait. She’s obviously someone who has problems with the U.S. using its military to flatten state sponsors of terrorism. And she is also the sort of person who, under Sharia Law, would NOT be given the jizya option. She’d have to change a lot of things about herself, or pretend to anyway. All Leftists who eschew the religions of the Book get no protection: they must either publicly utter the Shehada or put their heads on the chopping block. 99.99% percent of them would opt for discretion being the better part of valor.

Did you all hear – and Teresita should be mindful of this, since she her ethnic background is from the Philippines – about the bishop in the Southern part of that country who was delivered a letter from the Muslims that he must agree to pay the jizya, or else?

http://www.catholicexplorer.com

“Philippine bishop reports receiving threat to convert to Islam”

And someone tell Teresita that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. Baathist Iraq was too. Plenty of documentary evidence.

I get tired of these people flinging around the “neocons” epithet. It’s a code word for “Jews” or for former Leftist traitors who left the Left (people like me).

Jul 23, 2008 - 7:18 pm 21. Lifeofthemind:

NahnCee,
Just Ignore. If people do the baiting stops. Over on Little Green Footballs Charles has been pruning the rank from the ranks. Here we deal with a smaller, dare I say more select?, group. Wretchard can see what goes on.

Jul 23, 2008 - 7:25 pm 22. Teresita:

Fred: She’s obviously someone who has problems with the U.S. using its military to flatten state sponsors of terrorism.

On the contrary, I was 100% behind the regime change in Afghanistan, and I support a surge to stablize that country against the renewed offensive by the Taliban. I voted for Bush in 2004. But after the attack on the Golden Mosque I realized we were smack in the middle of someone else’s g-damned internecine tussle just like in the Balkans and how the hell do you “win” that? In the Balkans we fought to break everyone up. In Iraq

Jul 23, 2008 - 7:31 pm 23. Teresita:

…(whoops)

…in Iraq we’re fighting to keep it all together, in theory. In practice they have ethnically cleansed each other and the reason things are calming down is that everyone who’s in the wrong sector, ethnically, is dead.

Jul 23, 2008 - 7:34 pm 24. sherlock:

If we lost 3000 lives “on Bush’s watch” on 9/11, and the fact that the entire inspiration, motivation, recruitment and planning ocurred during during the previous “watch” is irrelevant, then any President Barack Obama better be aware that after 9/10/09, he better suck it up, ’cause he and he alone is responsible for everything that happens to the USA after that date!

Jul 23, 2008 - 8:56 pm 25. Elroy Jetson:

The devil you know (McCain) or the devil without a clue (Obama).
I’ll take the devil you know. He says he wants to win wars (I believe him) and at least do some drilling for oil on the OCS.

Jul 23, 2008 - 9:15 pm 26. fred:

Terisita,

The attack on the Golden Mosque was done by al Qaeda to ignite violence between the Sunni and Shia in Iraq. It was done to try to bring down the Iraqi government at that time and to also increase pressure inside the United States to quit the fight.

This is why I think it is bad for our nation and its military to be put under the “thinking” caps of those who are not able to get inside the minds of the enemy.

There is no civil war inside of Iraq. There was an attempt to foment one, but it failed. It could have succeeded if we quit the country and left it as an Iranian client state.

We have the most brilliant military in the history of the world. And I say it is so because from the foundation of the United States it has shown these qualities that are essential for military success:

1. Adaptability

2. Tenacity

3. Aggessiveness

4. Unflappable in the face of adversity.

So, the enemy adapts, but we then do a better adaptation. It also helps to have American ingenuity to bring technology to bear on the battlespace. Notice that IED attacks have been trending downward for at least two years? There is a reason for that. It’s called JSTAR, and it uses unmanned drones to patrol the highways and byways of Iraq, night and day, watching for the enemy to plant bombs. It sees them, notes the location of the IED, and also follows (very important)where the insurgents/terrorists scatter to. It marks their hideouts and we have a mission to kill or capture them. And we send crews out to detonate the planted bombs.

The Left is just so uninformed about our capabilities, successes, and the real story behind what the jihadists, Baathist remnants (Fedayeen), and the Iranian al Quds force agents and their proxies were doing.

Jul 23, 2008 - 9:41 pm 27. JR Garner:

Really, it is not worth our time to attempt to communicate with a troll like Teresita.

I still say we are going to have something like a McGovern re-run for the Demonrats.

Jul 23, 2008 - 9:46 pm 28. krontekag:

RWE:
This is not just a guy who wants to have it both ways.

This is a guy who really thinks it is both ways. If he says so.

All true – however, it makes little difference, the media has made their Faustian pact, there can be no turning back now… Look for even more ridiculous examples of inconsistency to come, and complete unnaccountability for any of it.

Jul 23, 2008 - 10:38 pm 29. CPT. Charles:

Just as today’s actor gestures grandly before an empty ‘blue screen’, so it is with the press and Obama.

By surrendering their role as guardians of the ‘public interest’ [many of them got off that bus a long, long time back...], and abandoning intellectual honesty for ideology, they’ve become Obama’s blue screen [with the equivalent level of importance...].

Every inconsistency papered over, every unscripted utterance that reveals his shallowness…fabricated into a sound bite oozing with brilliance, every lie ignored, every deed and/or idea high jacked and relabeled as his own allows OHB unlimited grandiosity, with the same level of reality as Jack Driscoll facing down King Kong.

It remains to be seen if anyone of significance in the drive-by media will grow tired of being a piece of blue paper; I’m not counting on a sudden resurgence of self-respect amongst those jackals.

Remember…as long as that blue screen remains in place, the Emperor will be dressed in the very finest of clothes, just ask the moonbats…and the yokels who know nothing beyond the 6:30 news. Unfortunately for us, there is no shortage of very bad people out there who see that blue screen every bit as clearly as you or I.

God knows what the butchers bill will be if that marxist buffoon becomes C-in-C.

Jul 23, 2008 - 10:50 pm 30. dla:

OK, as we approach the general election people are going to look closer at Mr.Bojangles and are going to question “the old soft-shoe” routine.

There may even be the equivalent of a swift boat to go after Obama – he’s ripe for the picking.

But to his credit, Obama is doing a wonderfull job right now – when it doesn’t count.

Obama is handing McCain a lot of ammunition and McCain hasn’t really used it. So maybe McCain is worse than Obama – maybe?

Jul 23, 2008 - 11:46 pm 31. Eggplant:

dla said:

“Obama is handing McCain a lot of ammunition and McCain hasn’t really used it.”

B. Hussein hasn’t yet been nominated. Why hammer a stake through his heart if the Democrat leadership still has the option of replacing him with another candidate?

Jul 24, 2008 - 12:01 am 32. Doug:

(from a Fox News Interview, via Limbaugh)

DEZENHALL: Oh, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I think what’s really happening here is the media are motivated more than anything else right now by the sense that they are making history.

It’s more about them than it even is Obama, and everything that Obama does is framed in the context of being visionary, and I think that the desire to personally help make history, to say you were there when it happened, probably is even more of a motivator than political bias, which I do think is part of it.

RUSH: That’s an important point. He didn’t throw the political bias, the ideological simpatico out the window, but it’s an excellent point because these people, it almost is more about them than Obama.

He is the vehicle for them to be able to say they made history.
Not he made history, they did, because they got him elected. He continued with this.

DEZENHALL: It’s about narratives. In a Disney movie, the little blonde girl is not going to be the villain.
She is going to save the day.

And Obama really owns the Hollywood narrative right now. He is the one who has the more exciting story. It genuinely is a history-making event, regardless of what your political bias is.

And that really is what I mean by the media’s devotion to what the narrative is, what the exciting story is.

Jul 24, 2008 - 1:01 am 33. Zenster:

While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

What need does Barrack “Global Warmening” Obama have for our “world’s largest oil reserves” when there’s the crippling of America’s industrial might to be done?

… the press have already built him [Obama] up to the point where they need him more than he needs them.

Few better explanations for Obama’s media presence exist, if there are even any others that have the least applicability.

Once the expectation of an Obama victory exceeds a certain point an actual electoral defeat would cause psychological damage to the trust mechanisms of [the] political system …

If by that you mean: An Obama defeat would cause America’s liberal left to take one helluva massive shot straight in the shorts, then I’m all for it. Time’s a wasting!

Teresita: We lost 3000 innocent lives on Bush’s watch …

Would you please, oh please, take such drooling idiocy and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine? Your choice of anatomical cavity. The 9-11 atrocity was being planned well before Bush even took office.. I have NO LOVE for George Bush but such specious smearing of the one person with sufficient conviction to use America’s might in response to Islamic terrorism deserves some credit. Yes, Bush is a total multiculturalist moron but he still comprehends the need to poke Islam in its myopic eye. Clearly, you DO NOT.

Besides, the Iraqis can take care of their own country.

Just like they did under Saddam. Crikey, what totally microencephalic excrement.

People all over the world have been taking care of their own country for thousands of years.

Like Egypt, Iran, Sudan, China and most every other totalitarian hellhole on earth. And your point is?

A vote for Obama is a vote against being the World Cop.

A “World Cop” that won the Cold War. Perish the effing thought that the Soviet Union might have won as you seem to wish. Gah!

fred: She’d have to change a lot of things about herself, or pretend to anyway.

You’re too kind, fred. Idjits like Teresita would be found, clad in full burqa, nursing away at the nearest imam’s tumescent spigot.

Eggplant: B. Hussein hasn’t yet been nominated. Why hammer a stake through his heart if the Democrat leadership still has the option of replacing him with another candidate?

I’m hoping like all Hell this is Mc Cain’s strategy, because if it ain’t, he’s up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle. And so are we.

Jul 24, 2008 - 1:56 am 34. Panday:

Back to the original topic:

A Washington Post editorial says that what the public believes is true about Obama’s reception in Iraq isn’t. But does it matter?

My job brings me into court regularly. Quite often, because my colleagues and I are in the legal world, we will discuss the “legality” of certain actions based on previous court cases (stare decisis) and current law.

Lately I’ve been saying, “It doesn’t matter whether or not we think something is legal. What matters is what the jury thinks. You can have the most airtight legal arguments there are, and the law and previous decisions on your side. But unless you convince those 12 people who couldn’t get out of jury duty that you’re right, you lose and have to wait for an appeal.”

Jul 24, 2008 - 2:20 am 35. Joshua:

It’s like I commented here once before: An exposure advantage is a double-edged sword for any candidate for political office. For one, it exposes your shortcomings – and those of the company you keep – as surely as it does your strengths. And if your exposure advantage is dominant enough, the election ceases to be a two-way affair and becomes strictly a referendum on you.

The campaign for POTUS ‘08 is beginning to look a lot like one that will culminate in a national referendum on Obama, to which McCain is merely incidental. And if I’m McCain, I say or do nothing to change that – I just let Obama continue to spend his own campaign’s money and fritter away its own media face time doing my own dirty work for me.

Jul 24, 2008 - 5:21 am 36. SpeakEasy:

Teresita,
I suppose we should have minded our own business in WWII, huh? It would have all resolved itself right? I mean yeah, they were slaughtering the Jews but they were not American jews, right?

Wow. Clueless.

Jul 24, 2008 - 5:33 am 37. RWE:

You know, I just realized something.

I really can’t figure out why Obama is supposedly so concerned about the poor people of Afghanistan.

After all, can you think of anyone anywhere who is a better example of “people who cling to guns and religion?”

Jul 24, 2008 - 5:41 am 38. SpeakEasy:

Teresita,
So according to you, we should have minded our own business during WWII? It would have worked itself out right? I mean, yeah, they were slaughtering Jews but they were not American Jews, right?

Wow. Clueless.

Jul 24, 2008 - 6:02 am 39. Cobb:

A charismatic fraud takes control of the most powerful nation on Earth? It couldn’t possibly happen here.

Jul 24, 2008 - 6:30 am 40. Insufficiently Sensitive:

I don’t think the WaPo should be taken by surprise (nor should the “excellence in journalism” laddies) that the Obama phenomenon appears to be running away from them.

For the last six or eight years, the MSM has been diligently preparing the groundwork for just such a runaway. Their hatred of the Bush administration fueled some of the most savage, one-sided daily news coverage since yellow journalism, in their attempt to damage the administration and ensure the victory of whichever candidate was least like Bush. The US was always wrong, and it pampered Big Oil, and it didn’t listen to the cultured Europeans, and it tortured, tortured, tortured, tortured those cute little innocent furriners of the ‘resistance’. Almost as badly as said journalists tortured the concept of providing news to citizens in their zeal to bulldoze public opinion.

What a setup for a snake-oil salesman who comes promoting “change”, without saying anything more definite than that he embodies good, and opposes evil. And YOU know who’s evil, kiddies, so send your allowances to the website where all the disappearing gets done.

Jul 24, 2008 - 6:47 am 41. Teresita:

Elroy Jetson: He says he wants to win wars (I believe him) and at least do some drilling for oil on the OCS.

Americans are sick of war, and if McCain promises more wars he’s toast. And about drilling for oil, OPEC could neutralize any price drop from ANWR oil production by reducing its oil exports by an equal amount. Normally this would be a positive thing for energy independence, but the oil companies sell Alaskan crude to China or Japan or whoever.

Zenster: “You’re too kind, fred. Idjits like Teresita would be found, clad in full burqa, nursing away at the nearest imam’s tumescent spigot.”

Yeah, real classy blog comment section Wretchard has got here. Its one thing to post a dissenting view, but it’s quite another thing to take a dump in someone’s blogspace. Practically a mirror image of DailyCuss.

Jul 24, 2008 - 7:03 am 42. fred:

“You know, I just realized something.

I really can’t figure out why Obama is supposedly so concerned about the poor people of Afghanistan.

After all, can you think of anyone anywhere who is a better example of “people who cling to guns and religion?” ” by RWE

LOL! Oh, the irony…

Jul 24, 2008 - 7:34 am 43. Jay:

A charismatic fraud took control of Germany in the 30’s and another one took control earlier in Italy. But in both countries the “leader” had a force of mobilized fighters who learned war during WW1. Obama can take control if elected of the state apparatus but his legions are pacifists, most blacks, and lefties want to make “love but not war”.
Note how he fooled the Israelies. They have become more suicidal than our lefties.

Jul 24, 2008 - 8:02 am 44. DanM:

“You’re too kind, fred. Idjits like Teresita would be found, clad in full burqa, nursing away at the nearest imam’s tumescent spigot.”

Don’t know Teresita, that made me spew coffee, and I don’t normally “cotton to those kinda things”…

Surely you can hang with the guys, can’t you? That was pure man-humor (not to be confused with metro-man humor). Defend yourself, tell us how you would handle an Imam forcing your way of life. Fight? Submit? Or, would you support the people that are trying to stop it from ever getting here?

Jul 24, 2008 - 8:49 am 45. Teresita:

DanM: Defend yourself, tell us how you would handle an Imam forcing your way of life. Fight? Submit? Or, would you support the people that are trying to stop it from ever getting here?

For twenty-four years I have been one of the people trying to stop it from ever getting here, six of those years in uniform.

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:30 am 46. Alexis:

I think Senator Obama’s upcoming speech (in about thirty minutes, give or take a few) will ironically drive a sharper wedge between the United States and European states such as Germany.

It is likely that Senator Obama’s crowd will vastly outnumber the crowds for both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan combined. It is rather ironic how Germans have been rather prickly about not wanting to be told what to do by Americans while these same Germans have not exactly been shy about their opinions of Bush and Obama. (And remember, Reagan was as hated and reviled in Germany twenty years ago as Bush today.)

I don’t think German bossiness toward America will be as popular in the United States as it will be in Germany. Ob eine Millionen Besserwissers “Obama ist unser Mann” sagen, dieser wurde nicht notwendigerweise Herr Obama helfen. (If one million knowitalls say, “Obama is our man”, this wouldn’t necessarily help Mr. Obama.)

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:32 am 47. Reno Sepulveda:

Well a recent poll found that over 50% of Americans surveyed believed Obama was a Muslim who took his oath of office on the Koran. ‘tard nation cuts both ways.

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:39 am 48. DanM:

For twenty-four years… Then what happened? State Department?

As always, thanks for your service. But that buys you nothing with me. Ditto on the 6.

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:43 am 49. Morton Doodslag:

Teresita — I usually ignore your incendiary posts, but when you pretend your congenital smears at this site are simply “dissenting views”, I must object. At times your feign concern about the subversion of our society by Muslims, but more frequently your posts are so filled with rancor and hatred for the right, and so quick to blame the right for those monstrous actions perpetrated by Islamic terrorists, (the very people you claim you’re “trying to stop”), that one can only wonder at the soundness of your mentality.

Islam is waging a multi-pronged war on our society — clarity is needed. There is a fine line between criticism of policy (and God knows there’s PLENTY to criticize), and defamation.

From what I’ve noticed, you engage far more in defamation than criticism at this otherwise splendid site…

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:44 am 50. Roderick Reilly:

Obama is starting to remind me of Frank Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can, with Leo Di Caprio, Chris Walken, Tom Hanks — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale). Abagnale was the ultimate poseur, and Obama’s pattern, including his statements, mis-statements, evasions, what-have-you, seems to be following a similar pattern. He’s hoping that his fraud will carry him all the way to the White House, and he may yet succeed. After all, Abagnale became a “pilot,’ a “doctor,” and a “lawyer,” among other things.

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:49 am 51. fred:

Teresita,

I won’t disparage your service to our country. But it takes more than just we veterans to stop the Islamic totalitarians from driving wedges into our cultures and societies. It takes a people and their elected leaders to recognize the threat. And to understand how this enemy wages war against dar al Harb. You may not like GWB and his “neocons” and his Christian Right wingers, for whatever reasons you reserve to yourself, but at least he took the fight to the enemy. The point I have always tried to make, here and elsewhere, is the counterpoint to the Left’s fiction that Baathist Iraq was no threat to the West. It was. For me, the primary cassus belli was that it was a state sponsor of Islamic terrorism. From about 1993 onward the Baath Party and Saddam cloaked their invective in the language of Islamic jihad against the unbelievers. He helped Islamic terror groups, including all of those groups under the al Qaeda umbrella. Besides the unending violations of the Truce terms, this was the most compelling reason for President Bush to get rid of the monster.

These points have been made by others, ad nauseam. Why this does not make a convincing impression on you and those on your end of things I cannot fathom.

Anyway, yeah, I am perhaps some kind of “neocon,” since I left the Left back in ‘87. I may not be Jewish, but I sure am a traitor. I do favor a robust policy of being proactive and even pre-emptive against terrorist states and their proxy groups. The only thing these people understand is the mailed fist. Obonga’s sweet talking with them will never dissuade them from waging war in the way of Allah.

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:56 am 52. Michael:

“Americans are sick of war, and if McCain promises more wars he’s toast.”

Perhaps. Toast or not, sick or not, in the end there will still be war.

The war will end when and only when the Mullahs want the war to end. The only choice the Americans have is what they will accept as an outcome to the war.

Jul 24, 2008 - 10:15 am 53. Eggplant:

Jay said:

“A charismatic fraud took control of Germany in the 30’s and another one took control earlier in Italy. But in both countries the “leader” had a force of mobilized fighters who learned war during WW1. Obama can take control if elected of the state apparatus but his legions are pacifists, most blacks, and lefties want to make “love but not war”.”

However you’re overlooking that the German charismatic fraud was elected Chancellor in a fair election. The Weimar Government had previously been run by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The public desperation caused by the SPD’s incompetence was what caused the German people to elect Hitler as Chancellor.

It’s bad enough that B. Hussein, all by himself could hammer the US into the ground. However their are American neo-fascists (e.g. Pat Buchanan) waiting in the background who would be quite happy to take over after Hussein has done his worst (the pendulum theory). Consequently there will be two opportunities for the U.S. to commit suicide if we chose to follow Hussein.

Jul 24, 2008 - 10:44 am 54. DanM:

Eggplant,

I am looking for the quote, but did you here the Obama staffer say that “He will make the trains run on time”? I will find it and post a link…

The lack of historical knowledge baffles me.

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:05 am 55. Peterike:

Teresita: but the oil companies sell Alaskan crude to China or Japan or whoever.

Since 2000, by law Alaskan oil cannot be exported. Check before you speak, especially since most of your assumptions about everything are wrong.

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:41 am 56. Eggplant:

DanM asked:

“I am looking for the quote, but did you here the Obama staffer say that “He will make the trains run on time”? I will find it and post a link…”

I did not read that quote from Hussein’s staffer. Obviously that’s a famous quote associated with Mussolini. I find it difficult to believe that a Hussein staffer would say something that stupid.

I read somewhere that some official Hussein brochure has a picture of him with a halo. That would be incredibly stupid. However I did see a picture of a Hussein staff member with a Che Guevara poster over his desk. That pegged the Stupidity Meter in my humble opinion.

I’m hoping that McCain’s people are tabulating all of this and will hammer Hussein after the Democract Convention. I think Hussein’s campaign could implode like McGovern’s did in 1972 if McCain’s people pushed the right sequence of buttons at the right time. Of course, the big problem is the MSM. However the MSM was solidly behind McGovern before he imploded so the MSM’s support is no guarantee of victory.

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:41 am 57. Ben:

Teresita: “And about drilling for oil, OPEC could neutralize any price drop from ANWR oil production by reducing its oil exports by an equal amount. ”

IF that were to happen, you do realize of course that the result might be no change in price at the pump, but far more profit staying in the US rather than going to Saudi Arabia? That’s a bad thing?

Alaskan crude, BTW, was, but is no longer, sold to Japan.

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:41 am 58. Eggplant:

Peterike said:

“Since 2000, by law Alaskan oil cannot be exported. Check before you speak, especially since most of your assumptions about everything are wrong.”

Actually, I think Alaskan oil (like all petroleum) is fungible on the international market. I was informed that Alaskan crude oil is high in sulfur and too dirty to meet American air pollution standards. Consequently the Alaskan crude oil is exchanged for higher quality oil that is low in sulfur (light sweet crude oil). It’s my understanding that Alaskan crude typically ends up in Southeast Asia where the people there aren’t too concerned about breathing poisonous air.

I got this information from casual conversation and it could be incorrect.

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:50 am 59. Teresita:

Fred: You may not like GWB and his “neocons” and his Christian Right wingers, for whatever reasons you reserve to yourself, but at least he took the fight to the enemy.

Like I said before I voted for Bush, and I’m down for McCain in November, despite what Bobal said on the EB about me being for McCain on the EB and for Obama on the BC…that broke my heart. But I think the Iraq “War” was over in 2003, and it’s been an occupation ever since, and I don’t believe you can “win” an occupation. Time to wind it up.

DanM: For twenty-four years… Then what happened? State Department?

I don’t get it. State Department? God willing I will retire in 2024 at age 59 with 40 years of combined active duty/civilian service in the US Navy. Electronic repair. If you think of undersea warfare in a Godfather paradigm, I’m the girl who makes sure when Michael Corleone comes out of the bathroom to kill McCloskey and Sollozo he doesn’t just have his dick in his hand.

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:54 am 60. DanM:

Apologies to all.. That quote was NOT from an Obama staffer. It was from the DNC Chief of Staff for Howard Dean….

Apologies for spurious quote.

Jul 24, 2008 - 12:02 pm 61. DanM:

Teresita,

Again, thanks for your service.. That wasn’t my point and you haven’t addressed it. I’ll fade away now… (BTW, I was an ET (SS) RO if that makes any difference.)

Jul 24, 2008 - 12:09 pm 62. js:

Here is today’s *front page* news from the Chicago Sun Times. I can’t detect any media bias here. Nope….

Obamas’ family rules: No whining, make bed
July 24, 2008

BY WILL LESTER
WASHINGTON — The rules in the Obama household for Malia and Sasha are clear-cut:
• ”No whining, arguing or annoying teasing,” their mother, Michelle Obama, told People magazine.
• Make the bed. ”Doesn’t have to look good, just throw the sheet over it,” said the mother of 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha.
• Set your own alarm clock. ”They get themselves up, get their own clothes,” said their grandmother, Marian Robinson.
• And the allowance from Dad for doing chores is $1 a week. Barack Obama conceded, ”I’m out of town for weeks at a time, so Malia will say, ‘Hey you owe me for 10 weeks.’”
The Obamas are determined that his campaign not disrupt the childhood of their daughters, who would be two of the youngest White House residents in 30 years if Obama wins. Amy Carter was 9 when she moved into the White House in 1977.
While the candidate is on the road, the Obama girls keep a hectic schedule: soccer, dance and drama for Malia, gymnastics and tap for Sasha, piano and tennis for both. Michelle Obama hits the campaign trail two or three days a week — a role that has brought criticism from political opponents.
”When some folks were attacking Michelle, Malia just asked, ‘What was that all about?’ and we talked it through,” Barack Obama said, adding that it was fortunate that ‘’she’s completely confident about her mommy’s wonderfulness.”
”They have a wonderful life in Chicago,” he said. ”So I’m sure there’s a part of them that won’t be heartbroken if things don’t work out.”

Jul 24, 2008 - 12:15 pm 63. John Maszka:

Senator Obama is turning out to be a real disappointment and a very dangerous man. Moving the war on terror to Pakistan could have disastrous consequences on both the political stability in the region, and in the broader balance of power. Scholars such as Richard Betts accurately point out that beyond Iran or North Korea, “Pakistan may harbor the greatest potential danger of all.” With the current instability in Pakistan, Betts points to the danger that a pro-Taliban government would pose in a nuclear Pakistan. This is no minor point to be made. While the Shi’a in Iran are highly unlikely to proliferate WMD to their Sunni enemies, the Pakistanis harbor no such enmity toward Sunni terrorist organizations. Should a pro-Taliban or other similar type of government come to power in Pakistan, Al-Qaeda’s chances of gaining access to nuclear weapons would dramatically increase overnight.

There are, of course, two sides to every argument; and this argument is no exception. On the one hand, some insist that American forces are needed in order to maintain political stability and to prevent such a government from rising to power. On the other hand, there are those who believe that a deliberate attack against Pakistan’s state sovereignty will only further enrage its radical population, and serve to radicalize its moderates. I offer the following in support of this latter argument:

Pakistan has approximately 160 million people; better than half of the population of the entire Arab world. Pakistan also has some of the deepest underlying ethnic fissures in the region, which could lead to long-term disintegration of the state if exacerbated. Even with an impressive growth in GDP (second only to China in all of Asia), it could be decades before wide-spread poverty is alleviated and a stable middle class is established in Pakistan.

Furthermore, the absence of a deeply embedded democratic system in Pakistan presents perhaps the greatest danger to stability. In this country, upon which the facade of democracy has been thrust by outside forces and the current regime came to power by coup, the army fulfills the role of “referee within the political boxing ring.” However, this referee demonstrates a “strong personal interest in the outcome of many of the fights and a strong tendency to make up the rules as he goes along.” The Pakistani army “also has a long record of either joining in the fight on one side or the other, or clubbing both boxers to the ground and taking the prize himself” (Lieven, 2006:43).

Pakistan’s army is also unusually large. Thathiah Ravi (2006:119, 121) observes that the army has “outgrown its watchdog role to become the master of this nation state.” Ravi attributes America’s less than dependable alliance with Pakistan to the nature of its army. “Occasionally, it perceives the Pakistan Army as an inescapable ally and at other times as a threat to regional peace and [a] non-proliferation regime.” According to Ravi, India and Afghanistan blame the conflict in Kashmir and the Durand line on the Pakistan Army, accusing it of “inciting, abetting and encouraging terrorism from its soil.” Ravi also blames the “flagrant violations in nuclear proliferation by Pakistan, both as an originator and as a conduit for China and North Korea” on the Pakistan Army, because of its support for terrorists.

The point to be made is that the stability of Pakistan depends upon maintaining the delicate balance of power both within the state of Pakistan, and in the broader region. Pakistan is not an island, it has alliances and enemies. Moving American troops into Pakistan will no doubt not only serve to radicalize its population and fuel the popular call for Jihad, it could also spark a proxy war with China that could have long-lasting economic repercussions. Focusing on the more immediate impact American troops would have on the Pakistani population; let’s consider a few past encounters:

On January 13, 2006, the United States launched a missile strike on the village of Damadola, Pakistan. Rather than kill the targeted Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader, the strike instead slaughtered 17 locals. This only served to further weaken the Musharraf government and further destabilize the entire area. In a nuclear state like Pakistan, this was not only unfortunate, it was outright stupid.

On October 30, 2006, the Pakistani military, under pressure from the US, attacked a madrassah in the Northwest Frontier province in Pakistan. Immediately following the attack, local residents, convinced that the US military was behind the attack, burned American flags and effigies of President Bush, and shouted “Death to America!” Outraged over an attack on school children, the local residents viewed the attack as an assault against Islam.
On November 7, 2006, a suicide bomber retaliated. Further outrage ensued when President Bush extended his condolences to the families of the victims of the suicide attack, and President Musharraf did the same, adding that terrorism will be eliminated “with an iron hand.” The point to be driven home is that the attack on the madrassah was kept as quiet as possible, while the suicide bombing was publicized as a tragedy, and one more reason to maintain the war on terror.

Last year trouble escalated when the Pakistani government laid siege to the Red Mosque and more than 100 people were killed. “Even before his soldiers had overrun the Lal Masjid … the retaliations began.” Suicide attacks originating from both Afghan Taliban and Pakistani tribal militants targeted military convoys and a police recruiting center. Guerrilla attacks that demonstrated a shocking degree of organization and speed-not to mention strategic cunning revealed that they were orchestrated by none other than al-Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman Al-Zawahiri; a fact confirmed by Pakistani and Taliban officials. One such attack occurred on July 15, 2007, when a suicide bomber killed 24 Pakistani troops and injured some 30 others in the village of Daznaray (20 miles to the north of Miran Shah, in North Waziristan). Musharraf ordered thousands of troops into the region to attempt to restore order. But radical groups swore to retaliate against the government for its siege of the mosque and its cooperation with the United States.

A July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concludes that “al Qaeda is resurgent in Pakistan- and more centrally organized than it has been at any time since 9/11.” The NIE reports that al-Qaeda now enjoys sanctuary in Bajaur and North Waziristan, from which they operate “a complex command, control, training and recruitment base” with an “intact hierarchy of top leadership and operational lieutenants.”

In September 2006 Musharraf signed a peace deal with Pashtun tribal elders in North Waziristan. The deal gave pro-Taliban militants full control of security in the area. Al Qaeda provides funding, training and ideological inspiration, while Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Tribal leaders supply the manpower. These forces are so strong that last year Musharraf sent well over 100,000 trained Pakistani soldiers against them, but they were not able to prevail against them.

The question remains, what does America do when Pakistan no longer has a Musharraf to bridge the gap? While Musharraf claims that President Bush has assured him of Pakistan’s sovereignty, Senator Obama obviously has no intention of honoring such an assurance. As it is, the Pakistanis do just enough to avoid jeopardizing U.S. support. Musharraf, who is caught between Pakistan’s dependence on American aid and loyalty to the Pakistani people, denies being George Bush’s hand-puppet. Musharraf insists that he is “200 percent certain” that the United States will not unilaterally decide to attack terrorists on Pakistani soil. What happens when we begin to do just that?

Jul 24, 2008 - 12:30 pm 64. NahnCee:

Why on earth does anyone believe a word of what T says she’s done? Again, she’s proven herself to be born naive, stupid or evil so why would you think she’s served her country or even currently employed?

As for the tumescent spigot I’m seeming to remember that she’s also a big fan of lesbianism which means that any imam so inclined would be taking his spigot’s life in his hands to allow her anywhere within dynamite vest distance.

Although in reality, since she is *so* gullible and easily brainwashed, I think she’d make a fine brood mare hidden under a blue burka with a pack of Muslim spawn squalling miserably around her feet.

I shall now recede to my usual lady-like sniffiness, lift my nose in the air and attempt to continue to ignore the … (ahem, insert preferred bad word for females here).

Jul 24, 2008 - 12:49 pm 65. Teresita:

DanM: Again, thanks for your service.. That wasn’t my point and you haven’t addressed it. I’ll fade away now… (BTW, I was an ET (SS) RO if that makes any difference.)

Sorry DanM, I can only peek in here on breaks and I don’t have time today to address your point in depth. And Nahncee, if you actually hate someone you don’t know for posting a different opinion, be careful, because hate is a powerful poison of the psyche, and if you let it grow you’ll end up hating people you do know for speaking different opinions.

Jul 24, 2008 - 1:19 pm 66. Grimmy:

Terestita:

Hatred of those who live on their knees with their lips grafted permanently to the bung hole of enemy propagandists is one of the few universally accepted human reactions in all cultures at all points in human history.

Jul 24, 2008 - 1:22 pm 67. Bridget:

“You’re too kind, fred. Idjits like Teresita would be found, clad in full burqa, nursing away at the nearest imam’s tumescent spigot.”
Ad hominem attacks are the last resort of a losing argument.

“Don’t know Teresita, that made me spew coffee, and I don’t normally “cotton to those kinda things”…”
Do yourself a favor and rectify your momentary lapse of good sense.
Surely you can hang with the guys, can’t you? That was pure man-humor (not to be confused with metro-man humor).

And certainly not to be confused with civil and reasonable discourse.

Jul 24, 2008 - 1:25 pm 68. DanM:

As he temporarily fades back in..

Bridget – you are correct. It was neither civil or reasonable. Did you like the New Yorker cover?

Jul 24, 2008 - 1:41 pm 69. Bridget:

What really cracked me up about the New Yorker cover was the Obama campaign response.

Jul 24, 2008 - 2:19 pm 70. Alexis:

eggplant:

Official brochure? Go to Barack Obama’s official website!

The picture of Obama at the top has a halo.

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

There are also the Barack Obama wallpapers. Go to the following address.

http://www.barackobama.com/downloads/

Go to “For Your Computer”. Then go to “Desktop Backgrounds”. Look at each of the “Change We Can Believe In” wallpapers; they are there for downloading. Each of these has a halo for Barack Obama. Moreover, the “Blue and Red” version of the “Change We Can Believe In” wallpaper not only has a halo around Barack Obama’s head but also equates Barack Obama with the rising sun. The rising sun logo refers to him!

When I’m saying that Barack Obama is presenting himself in a manner that could be easily construed as exalting him as an incarnation of a sun deity, I am not joking!

Please note that you probably need to download all the evidence you can now, because the Obama campaign has been known to delete its propaganda when called on it. For example, since the “Vero Possumus” brouhaha, the “Obama Seal” and “Obama Unum” wallpapers have been taken down. These wallpapers show the Obama sun symbol superceding symbols of the United States of America, including an upside-down American flag. (For that matter, a version of the “Obama Seal” emblem was used as a background image for the entire Obama website until recently.)

Jul 24, 2008 - 2:30 pm 71. Alexis:

eggplant:

I really appreciate how you introduced me to an aspect of third century Roman history I had been unaware of, especially how a Baal worshipping cult overthrew the old Roman religion. (Although Elagabalus was unsuccessful, Emperor Aurelian succeeded half a century later.)

It had been difficult for me to understand how Christianity could conquer the Roman Empire all by itself, and how Christianity could be perceived as thoroughly Roman afterward. The answer is that it was a priest of Baal who raped a Vestal Virgin while he was Emperor. The old Roman religion was violated, and yet the religion of sun worship was a hated foreign violator. The obvious answer for an aggrieved Roman would be to look for an existing resistance movement against Baal worship, and that resistance movement already existed in Judaism and Christianity. And Christianity had the obvious advantage for a Roman patriot that he didn’t need to circumcise himself. (In such a context, it shouldn’t be surprising how the name “Lucifer” gained diabolical overtones.)

The Roman Empire didn’t fall in the fifth century, nor did it fall with the rise of Christianity. The Roman Empire fell in 218 to a viciously crafted religious coup d’etat. After 218, the Empire existed, but the empire ceased to be Roman. After 218, the Roman Empire and its state religion became a carcass to be fought over by adherents of other religions.

Is the antoninianus coming soon? Let’s do what we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Jul 24, 2008 - 2:39 pm 72. Zenster:

Teresita: Yeah, real classy blog comment section Wretchard has got here. Its one thing to post a dissenting view, but it’s quite another thing to take a dump in someone’s blogspace. Practically a mirror image of DailyCuss.

Rich! Yet it’s perfectly all right for you to try and blame Bush for the 9-11 atrocity’s 3,000 dead.

POT -> KETTLE -> BLACK

Your moral inversion is showing. You squawk about me taking “a dump in someone’s blogspace” even as I have watched you DERAIL thread after thread at this same site. If anyone’s taking “a dump”, it’s you. Capiche?

Furthermore, less than 1% of my comments are ever so derisive. You, on the other hand, routinely post disparaging comments and frequently do so using spurious or ill-founded accusations.

DanM: Surely you can hang with the guys, can’t you? That was pure man-humor (not to be confused with metro-man humor). Defend yourself, tell us how you would handle an Imam forcing your way of life. Fight? Submit? Or, would you support the people that are trying to stop it from ever getting here?

Send me the bill for your keyboard. And thank you for getting to the “meat of the matter”, so to speak. Teresita’s constant tear down of conservative politics simply doesn’t reconcile with her putative stand against Islam.

Any woman with an IQ bigger than her shoe size should know damn well that Islam means nothing but sexual slavery for this entire planet’s female population. Especially so for anyone who has served in this nation’s military. While I may obliged to thank you for your service, you do a tremendous disservice to Belmont Club with what is often little more than borderline trolling.

Teresita: For twenty-four years I have been one of the people trying to stop it from ever getting here, six of those years in uniform.

In light of your military service, how in tarnation are you capable of smearing America’s Commander in Chief with insinuations that he is somehow complicit in mass murder? Your accusation is a hair’s breadth away from those who screech, “America deserved 9-11!”

Morton Doodslag: From what I’ve noticed, you engage far more in defamation than criticism at this otherwise splendid site…

Thank you for placing my own comments in proper context.

Bridget: And certainly not to be confused with civil and reasonable discourse.

But smearing Bush with the 9-11 Atrocity’s 3,000 dead is? Correct your own lapse in fairness and I’ll consider adjusting my own comments. Remember, I truly dislike Bush, but I still refuse to countenance such dishonesty like Dan Rather’s blatant attempt to throw the 2004 Presidential campaign using patently falisified evidence.

Jul 24, 2008 - 3:01 pm 73. Jay:

Eggplant, The way that Hitler became Chancellor is complicated. The Nazi Party’s vote share went down in the last election before the Center Party left the coalition. Read the book by Knox on the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy. It is a Cambridge University Press book. Knox has some great quotes about charismatic leaders in the past.
We now only have two parties. But the center in Congress has collapsed and both the Rep and Dem leadership are stealing via the special bills to very narrow special interests. Our system could become unstable in a hurry, especially if BHO wins.

Jul 24, 2008 - 3:34 pm 74. DanM:

Zenster,

If I’m reading this correctly (may be getting a bit paranoid in my old age..), you are calling me on borderline trolling. Even if you are speaking of someone else – of me, you are correct. As with Teresita, I don’t often have time to spend in dialogue that makes this Blog what it is and I should refrain from diving in and muddying the waters with quick jabs with no substance in the discussion.

Teresita is one of the old-timer Belmont gnats (Where’s
Cedarford?) that gets under my skin.. Which, by the way, is why I like them around (Nahncee – sorry). They bring the blood pressure up at times, but rarely change their opinions. I fully believe that they BELIEVE what they say. Every once in a while Teresita throws in a sacrificial lamb that I and others rabidly attack.. I’m sure she gets some satisfaction in that…

What astonishes me is the utter contempt for logic and reason in some of their positions. How does self-loathing (personal or governmental) cripple a persons reason to the point of flagellation? It is almost a masochistic act of logic. (Now how did I get down this weird path…)

Jul 24, 2008 - 3:38 pm 75. Benj:

T. did not ” smear” Bush or accuse of him of murdering anyone – she simply said the truth – “3,000 innocent folks died on his watch” – Deal with it.

My pop wrote the following take-down of the 9/11 Commish in Harpers a back in 04 so I’m not the best judge of it – but I’m not alone in thinking it gets at the truth re Bush’s (relative) obliviousenss in the pre-9/11 era (which predicted his later blanknesses?). I sent this piece on to Mark Helprin – the conservative writer Wretch respects and whom he has linked too recently – Helprin allowed this piece was right on when it came to the Commish. But added on that the fix was in on behalf of BOTH parties as pols on both sides needed to cover their asses…PLEASE do not mix up the critique that follows with silly conspiratorialism re 9/11 that rules on wack left (and mad right). This piece simply (yet devastatingly) shows how the Commish went out of their way to avoid offering any judgements about Bush’s pre-9/11 conduct and/or his justifcations – though the truths of incompetence were squarely On The Record.

Whitewash as Public Service:
How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation
By Benjamin DeMott

No book in memory has stirred greater anticipatory frenzy than The 9/11 Commission Report—or more universal acclaim at its appearance in July. Before it was out, news and interview shows were welcoming the Commissioners whose labor had produced it. CNN ran film footage of copies tumbling off printer-plant conveyor belts. Stores reported overnight sellouts of their orders. Officialdom, Republicans and Democrats, spoke of the work as magisterial. David Brooks hailed its “moral aura” on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The President himself—at one time he not only had declined an invitation to answer the Commission’s questions but had opposed the Commission’s creation—praised the work as “very constructive,” and he and the Vice President commenced citing it in speeches; so did John Kerry. By mid-August, 630,000 copies, priced to move at $10, had been sold.

I shared the anticipation—looked forward to the work, badly wanted it, felt excited when I got it in my hands. After years of resistance, leaks, party scraps, feuds, advantage-grabbing, and junk punditry, this plump, red-white-and-blue paperback with the U.S. seal on the cover (567 pages, including a hundred-plus pages of footnotes) had to be the real thing. Some 2,500,000 pages of documents had been sifted, public testimony taken from 160 different witnesses, 1,200 knowledgeable persons interviewed in ten countries (including every top official from two U.S. administrations whose jobs involved intelligence, law enforcement, diplomacy, immigration, aviation, border control, congressional oversight, you name it). And after twenty long months working with a staff of close to eighty, the ten Commissioners of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—five Republicans, five Democrats, ex-senators, governors, cabinet secretaries, big-time lawyers—had all signed on.

On television during the nineteen days of hearings, several of which I watched for hours on end, the Commissioners came across as wised-up but with nothing dark inside to hide or atone for. Not cut from the same mold but genuine in separate ways. Philip Zelikow, the executive director, wasn’t a favorite, I admit; letter perfect and Sunday-school-scrubbed, he was a shade too natural a condescender. But the others . . . Bob Kerrey had earned with blood and limb the right to his Huck Finn “swears” and overplayed poses. Chair Thomas H. Kean’s seamed, cherubic face and smiling refusal ever to take offense sorted well with Vice Chair Lee H. Hamilton’s stern-Grandpa, hands-clasped stoniness. James R. Thompson and Fred F. Fielding often suspected headline greed in their Commission midst, but they had seen enough of it in their time to know how to pretend not to notice. Richard Ben-Veniste: wordy but dogged and blessedly bright. When Attorney General John Ashcroft commenced damning Jamie S. Gorelick—lady of constant expectation, splendid preparation, and fine eyes—I thought it silly for her colleagues, bipartisan gallants, to rally round as though she had bid for or needed protectors.11. The other members of the Commission: Slade Gorton, John F. Lehman, and Timothy J. Roemer.

But no matter. The report itself was now what counted—the book alone capable of fulfilling the hopes set upon it. The book was offered by W. W. Norton, last of the great American publishers, somehow still thriving without imitating the schlock houses that choke celebrities with multimillion-dollar advances and then choke retail outlets with taped sleaze (no window space for writers). I sat down with the book believing there was no way The 9/11 Commission Report could fail to produce answers.

This was the promise, after all: answers. Answers in return for serious attention. In the preface, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton claimed that the body of the text would “identify lessons learned” from the long stretch of study, interviews, debate, meditation. The implicit guarantee was that ahead lay a work of analysis addressed to an intelligent democratic citizenry—an inventory of possible causes of the tragedy followed by a reasoned-out, sober set of judgments about which of these causes were most plausible.

The promise was not kept. The plain, sad reality—I report this following four full days studying the work—is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation. Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission can’t discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises. It can’t tell the truth about what was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning points. The Commissioners’ immeasurably valuable access to the principals involved offered an extraordinary opportunity to amass material precious to future historians: commentary based on moment-to-moment reaction to major events. But the 567 pages, which purport to provide definitive interpretations of the reactions, are in fact useless to historians, because a seeming terror of bias transforms query after commissarial query—and silence after silence—into suggested new lines of self-justification for the interviewees. In the course of blaming everybody a little, the Commission blames nobody—blurs the reasons for the actions and hesitations of successive administrations, masks choices that, fearlessly defined, might actually have vitalized our public political discourse.

At the core of all these failures lies a deep wariness of earnest, well-informed public debate. And the wariness is rooted, clearly, in a conception of the nature of citizen virtue that (1) strips the critical instinct of its standing as essential equipment for the competent democratic mind, and (2) finds merit in the consumer credulity that relishes pop culture and shrugs off buyer-beware warnings. The ideal readers of The 9/11 Commission Report are those who resemble the Commission itself in believing that a strong inclination to trust the word of highly placed others is evidence of personal moral distinction. As the Report’s project becomes ever more visibly that of sanctifying equivocation and deference, the Commissioners retreat ever further from evaluating the behavior of which their interviews and research nonetheless allow brief glimpses—behavior on which fair judgments of character and intelligence could and should have been based. Issues of commitment and responsibility are time and again reconfigured as matters of opinion, or as puzzles of memory, or as pointlessly distracting “partisan” squabbles. See, here it is again, says the Commission’s undervoice. People differ, of course. But of course. And they believe with the utmost sincerity in their own account of events. And they are all honorable men and women. Little can be gained, therefore, by assessing, weighing, in the end pronouncing this position—this version—superior to that. Reader, given our shared probity and undoubted concern for the future of the Republic, let us think process and structure, forgoing Blame Games. Let us look to the future. We need to move on.

THE NOBODY TOLD ME SCAM

There’s little mystery about why the Commission is tongue-tied. It can’t call a liar a liar.

The most momentous subject before the 9/11 Commission was: What did President Bush know about the Al Qaeda threat to the United States, when did he know it, and if he knew little, why so? The Commission reports that on several occasions in the spring and summer of 2001 the President had “asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States.” The Commission further reports the President saying that “if his advisers had told him there was a [terrorist] cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it.” Facing his questioners in April 2004, the President said he had not been informed that terrorists were in this country.

Conceivably it was at or near the moment when Bush took this position that the members of the Commission who heard him grasped that casting useful light on the relation between official conduct and national unpreparedness would be impossible. The reason? The President’s claim was untrue. It was a lie, and the Commissioners realized they couldn’t allow it to be seen as a lie. Numberless officials had appeared before the whole body of the Commission or before its aides, had been sworn in, and had thereafter provided circumstantial detail about their attempts—beginning with pre-election campaign briefings in September, through November 2000, and continuing straight through the subsequent months—to educate Bush as candidate, then as president-elect, then as commander in chief, about the threat from terrorists on our shores. The news these officials brought was spelled out in pithy papers both short and long; the documentation supplied was in every respect impressive.22. The papers directed to Bush, including discussion of possible terrorist use of hijacked planes, ranged from National Security Council briefings (e.g., those of March 19, 2001, and May 17, 2001) and National Security Council memos (e.g., that of December 29, 2000) to email direct from Counterterrorism Security Group Chief Richard Clarke to Condoleezza Rice (on March 23, June 28, and June 30, 2001), as well as a blizzard of CIA Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs (SEIBs) bearing such titles as “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (June 30, 2001). The congressionally appointed U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, cochaired by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, presented its report to the White House in February 2001. The document contained “stark warnings about possible domestic terrorist attacks.” Bush did not meet with either of the cochairs. The officials who did manage to brief Bush in person on these matters included John McLaughlin, the CIA acting deputy director, Ben Bonk, the deputy chief of its Counterterrorist Center, and the outgoing president of the United States.

Nevertheless the chief executive, seated before the Commission, declared: Nobody told me. And challenging the chief executive as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost—the possible rending of the nation’s social and political fabric.

The interior mind of the 9/11 Commission is closed to intruders; only the arrogant would presume to “know” its inner response to this denial. But you cannot grasp the meaning of the Report without trying first to understand that response. And it’s no mistake to start by imagining the content of any ordinary person’s feelings who had been present at the denial and was well informed, prior to the meeting, on the relevant subjects. Incredulous embarrassment, surely. Pity. A glance turned protectively away, to the middle distance, from the witness. A dawning of helplessness in the face of the insuperable obstacles now blocking the path to clarification of responsibility and thorough analysis of the causes of the tragedy. We cannot know with any certainty what emotions or disappointments the Commission members actually felt, but the pertinent facts underlying their probable dismay lie far beyond dispute—far beyond off-the-rack accusations of prejudice and preconception. The record speaks. George W. Bush met reluctantly with the Commission, and on condition that the Vice President be permitted to accompany him, that the interview not be recorded, and that it take place in the Oval Office.33. A small group meeting with the country’s chief executive in a White House locale rich in historical associations and consequence can have intimidating power even for those who aren’t strangers to Authority’s purlieus. The present writer, holder of no public office and never admitted to the Oval Office, can remember a White House meeting with President Lyndon Johnson, held in 1968 in the Cabinet Room, to which a half dozen teachers with decent professional qualifications if no reclame brought pressing questions about the Vietnam War. The power of the place, not solely of the man’s presence, worked strongly on each of us; none of our pressing questions found voice. A significant portion of the Commission’s questions during the session, which occurred on April 29, 2004, dealt with what the President made of the Presidential Daily Brief, headed “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” that he received, in Crawford, Texas, on August 6, 2001, less than five weeks before the 9/11 disaster. (See page 40, where the relevant text is reprinted in its entirety.) In accordance with the agreement, the Report sets forth the President’s reflections in indirect discourse, as follows:

The President told us the August 6 report was historical in nature. President Bush said the article told him that al Qaeda was dangerous, which he said he had known since he had become President. The President said Bin Ladin had long been talking about his desire to attack America. He recalled some operational data on the FBI, and remembered thinking it was heartening that 70 investigations were under way. As best he could recollect, Rice had mentioned that the Yemenis’ surveillance of a federal building in New York had been looked into in May and June, but there was no actionable intelligence.
He did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. He said that if his advisers had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That never happened.

The depersonalizing steno-stream mode in which these remarks are reported represents them as proceeding fluidly from topic to topic, consecutive and reasoned, and rousing no impulse to interrupt. But open a space, line by line, sentence by sentence, for informed response (after months of earnest study, the Commissioners qualified at the very least as informed), and questions flow in—and with them a sense both of the urgent need for critique and of the barriers preventing that need from being met:

The President told us the August 6 report was historical in nature.
Each paragraph of the Bin Laden briefing is directed not at the past but at the present or the future. Talk of “bring[ing] the fighting to America,” or of “planning . . . to mount a terrorist strike”—together with the comment that “Bin Ladin . . . prepares operations years in advance” and that “Al-Qa’ida . . . maintains a support structure that could aid attacks”—focus on today and tomorrow. If the Commission means to serve fact, it will have to speak in its Report to correct the presidential error and to establish that the briefing clearly aimed to warn him of what lay ahead. But how can it speak to that end? In what language or tone can an attempt be made to apprise the country of a fateful error by the leader pledged “faithfully” to protect us—a leader still evidently incapable even of recognizing the error?

President Bush said the article told him that al Qaeda was dangerous, which he said he had known since he had become President. The President said Bin Ladin had long been talking about his desire to attack America. He recalled some operational data on the FBI, and remembered thinking it was heartening that 70 investigations were under way.
The Commissioners’ absolute imperative here and now is to proceed cautiously. Their obligation as citizens charged with telling the truth to their fellow citizens is to compare and contrast what the President is saying with what the Commission already knows. The Commissioners must not silence their questions. As self-respecting leaders aware of the trust their vouchers will bear, they must affirm their own habits of self-doubt, their willingness to check their memory, their readiness to concede that they could have misheard or misconstrued. But they must not self-censor appropriate questions, must insist on candor, must not accept words for deeds. What then were the main assertions?

The President said that the briefing paper told him “al Qaeda was dangerous,” that he had known this since he became president and known too that “Bin Ladin had long been talking about his desire to attack America,” and that he was heartened by news of “70 investigations” under way.

The Commissioners have heard that Bush received more than forty briefings naming Al Qaeda as a danger. They have learned from authoritative inquiries conducted in 2002 that nothing remotely resembling seventy investigations had been launched by the FBI. They are well informed about the surprisingly relaxed presidential response to the danger—a danger of which Bush claimed full cognizance. They know this response consisted of two letters to the recently installed leader of a foreign country and the voicing of irritation to aides about his thwarted yearning to “take the fight to” the insect life called terrorists. The letters the President signed were addressed to the president of Pakistan, were drafted for him by the State Department, and dealt with “a number of matters,” including a request for “support in dealing with terrorism.” The President expressed himself to National Security Adviser Rice in March or April of 2001 as “‘tired of swatting at flies’” and, on the same occasion, declared that he wanted “to play offense. . . . [wanted] to take the fight to the terrorists.” In May 2001 the President announced that the Vice President would head a task force to review “general problems of national preparedness,” including management of any domestic attacks by WMD.

Nothing happened. No task-force review had begun by 9/11. Musharraf’s response to the letters was negative. No flies were swatted. The Commission knows, in other words, that no “action” was taken for the purpose of protecting the American citizenry from the fresh dangers fully described to the President over the immediately preceding months. It knows, in addition, that before 9/11, and in the frantic days afterward, departmental secretaries and undersecretaries were pressing—inexplicably but unrelentingly—for the bombing of Iraq, in meetings with, and in briefings written for, the President. And it knows that Bush himself was seeking justification, from his counterterrorism chief, for an attack on Saddam.

If the Commission means to serve fact, it simply cannot avoid addressing in this Report the gap between avowed presidential awareness of domestic terrorist danger and actual presidential impassivity. It will have to draw on its own resources for insight into whether the President assessed Bin Laden as a toothless blustering braggart, whether he shared Attorney General Ashcroft’s reported view that warnings about Al Qaeda were tiresome and needless, whether he now understood that he most assuredly should have asked questions about the “heartening” seventy investigations, and—most excruciating—whether the President as they questioned him had yet come to realize that the hijackings, the collapse of the Towers, the enormous toll at the Pentagon and elsewhere, might have been prevented had more dutiful, responsible attention been paid to the urgent exhortations from the experts in his service.

[The President] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. He said that if his advisers had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That never happened.
The President asserts that no adviser told him about a cell and, further, that on several occasions in spring and summer 2001 he “asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States.” The August 6 briefing paper states without ambiguity that a cell—people behaving as members of a cell—existed at that time. The record clearly establishes that George W. Bush was told repeatedly, from September 2000 onward, of precisely such threats. The Commission knew that experts—terrorism specialists who worked around the clock (often taking three meals a day at their desks)—had composed hair-burning tirades, had dared at length to “scream” unavailingly for attention, and had finally begged in despair to be relieved of posts rendered utterly meaningless by their superiors’ unresponsiveness.

In September 2000, before the election, John McLaughlin, then acting deputy director of the CIA, camped at Bush’s ranch in Texas with a CIA team bringing the harrowing message. Ben Bonk, deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, was among the experts who told Bush that Americans would die in terrorist acts led or inspired by Bin Laden during the next four years. Authoritatively assembled material was submitted to the Bush/Cheney transition team spelling out the fact that “al Qaeda had ‘sleeper cells’ in more than 40 countries, including the United States.” An attachment to this paper, submitted in January 2001, focused on “al Qaeda’s presence in the United States.” When James Pavitt, CIA deputy director for operations, briefed the president-elect at Blair House, he described Bin Laden as “one of the gravest threats to the country.” Bill Clinton told Bush in a two-hour session on national security: “‘I think you will find that by far your biggest threat is Bin Ladin and the al Qaeda.’” Clinton spoke as one who had lived through a rain of jihadist bombs—the Black Hawk Down incident, the African embassies, the Cole, the Millennium Threat, among them. Bush later said that he “felt sure President Clinton had mentioned terrorism, but did not remember much being said about al Qaeda.” All this is in the Report for anyone to see.

Given the evidence, the Commissioners who meant to serve fact—meant truly to foster the future security of this country—would have had to confront, through words and acts, the gap between the President’s absurd, nobody-told-me assertions and the plain record before them of repeated attempts to draw his attention away from Iraq to the threat that closed the very street on which he and his family lived. They would have been forced to raise the question, to themselves and to their audience, of whether this level of ignorance and obliviousness, this much incontrovertible proof of neglect and indifference, could be passed over in silence by men and women of patriotic good conscience. They would have been forced to admit to themselves that they knew what they knew.

And what about the other problem—the problem of self-reference? Put bluntly, what about themselves? People do not take up posts on such a Commission as this, in middle or late life, with the expectation of being abused and condemned as party hacks, too mean and narrow to rise above local loyalties. Hope whispers in the Commissioner’s ear that a statesman’s status can be achieved—a generous, large-souled identity deserving historical mention.

And therefore the previous questions return in a different key. Can the status of statesman be won if the Commissioners assert themselves as dead-serious, fact-finding interrogators? Can the Commissioners speak even to one another, privately, about their need to confront executive malfeasance without becoming, after months of painfully disciplined self-bracing against partisan self-indulgence, provokers of partisan fury? Would they not inevitably dwindle into yet another collection of squabbling defectives dealing in sly insinuations and rightfully dismissed as “merely political”? And is it, finally, impermissible, after twenty months of hard labor, to think not only of protecting the Republic and the President but to think at last of themselves?

With that question, perhaps, came clarity: better to silence disquiet, dissatisfaction, disbelief, than to voice them. The interest neither of nation nor of career would be advanced by rancorous quarrels about lies and cover-ups. The overriding need was to move on.

WE ARE ALL GUILTY

Both the mission and terms of the Report were dictated by this clarity and this need. The Commission’s evasions, silences, and suppressions of doubt during the ninety-minute Bush-Cheney session led directly to an array of other suspicion-stirring evasions and silences. The necessity thereafter was to construct a Report whose parts would move together toward two tightly interconnected goals: (1) sweeping questions of presidential character off the table and (2) presenting the Commission’s equivocation as the result not of cowardice but of rational recognition of the power of the contingent, imponderable, and impersonal in human life. What the Commissioners had to supply amounted to an alibi, both for the President and for themselves.

Debate will center in time, among scholars, on whether the Report’s public success derived from exceptionally clever narrative management or from the intense monitoring of each of its sentences in order to cleanse the Report of any partisan utility whatsoever. My view is that the aura now surrounding the document and the public servants who produced it derives from growing incomprehension, in contemporary America, of the essential human cause—the progressive curve of human development—that democracy is meant to forward.

But what matters is that the situation the Commissioners faced following the Bush-Cheney interview required, and was met with, a strategy that generated plausible grounds for not spelling out questions, not seeking answers. Only if such grounds were visible could the Commission protect itself from the charge that for no cause it was treating dismissively those who, face-to-face with their superiors, did spell out questions, did seek answers. Only if such grounds were established could the Report ward off complaints that it had wrongly failed to confront not only the original untrue assertion (nobody told me) but virtually every other presidential assertion or action or inaction that warranted objection.

Those objectionable assertions and behavior succeed one another, in number, throughout the Report, and a few are quite familiar, but nevertheless they bear reminder here:

The President explains that it was in order to “project strength and calm” that he remained for five to seven minutes in a children’s classroom after being told that the nation was under attack. The Report passes over this mindless explanation without cavil.

Details in the President’s, Vice President’s, and other accounts of the framing and delivery of the “presidential” order to shoot down the hijacked airlines inspire severe doubt that the order came from Bush himself, rather than from an official—Vice President Cheney—with no military authority. The Commission’s fudging summary declines to discuss relevant issues of alertness and awareness of constitutional obligations.

When, because an insider has managed to put into print noticed criticism of the Bush performance, the Commission has no alternative except to acknowledge the existence of a critical perspective, it marginalizes and deprecates the critic. Richard Clarke’s charge that Bush attempted to “intimidate” him into finding a link between Saddam and the 9/11 catastrophe, for instance, is placed not in the body of the text but in a footnote located seven pages from the end of the book. Readers learn in the body of the text that Clarke’s portfolio was contemptuously referred to as “drugs and thugs”; his fierce, pre-9/11 attempts to force attention on Al Qaeda rather than on Iraq are labeled “jeremiads.”

When the Commission must cope with material that conceivably will give rise to renewed accusations that Bush and his administration are mere agents of corporate greed, it speaks as though corporate policy is shaped solely by missionary desire to perfect services in accord with public demand. The bottom-line fixations of commercial airlines and security services—corporate entities that bear awful responsibility for the tragedy—go unmentioned. Concern for efficient transport is ceaselessly trumpeted.

When the sheer quantity of fully articulated messages of alarm warning Bush of imminent, possibly “calamitous,” domestic terror attacks edges the Commission toward acknowledging its inability to locate Bush’s articulated responses, it presents presidential fits of pique (“tired of swatting at flies”) as “policy directives.”

And so it goes—an array of doublespeak renamings, ill-accounted-for deprecations, evasions, silences, all demanding some kind of justification. The Report meets this demand with a shrewdly conceived and sustained equity-of-blame argument that becomes the fulcrum of the entire document and has a single principle at its center: any blame that might be apportioned to the behavior of the sitting administration is easily counterbalanced by the behavior of preceding authorities—and by historical “fact” as interpreted in accordance with current presidential and commissarial need.

Skewed history is indeed the key element in the operation of the Report’s argument. In these pages history is in part an excessively circumstantial rehearsal of failed attempts by the United States, over the decades, to conduct effective initiatives against terrorist plots. (Remember Robert MacFarlane, national security adviser when hostages were taken in Iran; remember Carter’s “Desert One”; remember Clinton’s Somalia disaster.) The question implicit is clear: How can anyone who obeys the injunction to remember the past fault this sitting administration when so many others have failed so miserably? History in the Report is partly a record of refusals by previous authorities to support efforts to strengthen the CIA. (If Bush is guilty of inattentiveness to CIA briefing papers, Clinton is guilty of refusing to back legislation strengthening the CIA.)

History is also partly a minutely examined series of so-called “missed opportunities” during the Clinton years—chances, that is, to take out Al Qaeda, assassinate Bin Laden, receive an imprisoned Bin Laden as a gift from Sudan, bomb his training sites, conduct “rolling attacks” on his Afghan bases, destroy his weapons-building capacity (a nerve-gas factory in Sudan), wipe out his networks. The Commission acknowledges the constraints on Clinton, including the wag-the-dog accusation ultimately levied that by sending cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan he was seeking to change the subject from Monica Lewinsky. Further constraints run the gamut from a dearth of solid intelligence about Bin Laden’s whereabouts to sane anxiety about collateral casualties to the certainty that, absent clear proof (lacking in the period specified) of Al Qaeda‒inflicted casualties on U.S. citizens, the Muslim world would damn such action as unprovoked and savagely invasive.

Yet the Report weighs these constraints lightly, making space for numerous remarks attacking Clinton for failure to act, including a harsh judgment, by the racist Lt. Gen. William Boykin, that “‘opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding.’” And the Commission nowhere spells out for the reader the pertinent facts that exploitable opportunities simply did not exist in the Clinton years, though the White House searched indefatigably to find one, and that speaking or writing as though the opposite were true, as though opportunities abounded, contributes nothing to clarity, only clears yet another stage on which the Commission can develop and improvise on its equity-of-blame theme. Clinton’s prudent hesitation to strike Bin Laden, in other words, becomes the moral equivalent of Bush’s lack of concern, even post-9/11, about Bin Laden.

By far the most striking Commission improvisation on this theme occurs in the treatment of the USS Cole episode. The bombing of the ship took place on October 12, 2000 (seventeen crew members were killed). The Bush-Gore election occurred on November 7, 2000. The Report observes dryly that “there was a notable absence of serious discussion of the al Qaeda threat” during the campaign. It’s entirely obvious that a lame-duck counterattack could not be launched with the Florida debacle in midcourse; less obvious is that no definitive evidence had yet come to light tying the bombing to Al Qaeda/Bin Laden. Intricately prepared for and justified, the major plank of the Commission’s argument that responsibility for the 9/11 disaster can’t be laid at any one door is that the “failure” of President Clinton to respond to the bombing encouraged Bin Laden to go forward with his attack on America—which is to say, the “failure” itself qualifies as a hidden or secret cause of the attack.

And this becomes the heart of the Commission’s case for equivalency between Clinton’s and Bush’s “concern” about the Al Qaeda danger. Time and again the Commission speaks of the inaction of the two presidents as though no consequential differences existed in the reasons for the inaction: “After 9/11, President Bush announced that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole. Before 9/11, neither president took any action. Bin Ladin’s inference may well have been that attacks, at least at the level of the Cole, were risk free.” More than once, the Report insists on the significant (in fact, purely fanciful) sameness in the dilemmas of the two administrations: “Since the Clinton administration had not responded militarily, what was the Bush administration to do?”

In reality, voices within the Bush White House answered loudly that plenty could and should be done. As the threat level rose, so did the shrillness and rage of those bent on dramatizing, to the President, the fearful mistake of ignoring the threats and concentrating on battle plans for the conquest of Iraq. At the peak of his own fear and desperation, on September 4, 2001, the government’s terrorism chief wrote what the Commission conceded to be a fiercely “impassioned personal note” to Condoleezza Rice. In enraged italics, Richard Clarke complains that “‘we continue to allow the existence of large scale al Qida bases where we know people are being trained to kill Americans.’” But there proves to be no audience. The Commission offers at this moment a sly guess about why, in the form of an explanation of Clarke’s fury: the man suffers from sour grapes. “After nine years on the NSC staff and more than three years as the president’s national coordinator, he has often failed to persuade these agencies to adopt his views, or to persuade his superiors to set an agenda of the sort he wanted or that the whole government could support.” Presidents Bush and Clinton stand together, by implication, in this resistance.

Here as elsewhere the Commission cannot allow to stand, unquestioned, words that directly indict George W. Bush for obliviousness, thereby upsetting its carefully balanced blame-canceling mechanism. There can be no documented guilt here, no history focused on inquiry into the distinction between the quality and intensity of one administration’s concern and the current of indifference marking the other’s. The narrative line carries the simple dictum: blame must be equally apportioned, and no comparative lessons about conduct are to be drawn. Only then can everyone involved, not excluding the Commissioners themselves, be purged and purified. Well before the end, the dictum about equality of blame reduces the Commissioners to mere long-winded sermonizers against judgment. Their Report seems ever more plainly bent not on achieving fresh knowledge but on dramatizing balance. It thereby becomes aimless, out of touch with the purpose of serious inquiry, resembling an eighteen-wheeler paying endless visits to weigh stations but never delivering a load, or a rigged pinball game whose overdelicate sensors can’t record scores, can only parrot TILT.

TELL ME A STORY

By the end of my reading I was sufficiently familiar with the Report’s undervoice to know exactly what it wanted from me. The ultimate command to the reader is utterly unambiguous: you must not give in to fury and outrage as you read The 9/11 Commission Report. Rise up: this is the implicit exhortation. Aspire to forbearance. Ask some height of yourself. Tell the usual Tempters (suspicion, blame, impulse to judge) to bugger off. You, too, Reader, can join the ranks of the blameless.

If the Commissioners’ summons to moral elevation had been founded in respect for the unspeakable pain of victims and survivors, heeding it might be a smaller problem. But sympathy isn’t what drives the Commission’s summons, and the equanimity the Commission promotes is no light bringer. This document—already elevated to iconic status—qualifies, as I said at the start, as a weapon in a major domestic conflict: the war on incisive, sometimes rudely disruptive critical thought—thought that distinguishes the democratic citizen from the idolatrous fool, the sucker, the clueless consumer, the ad person’s delight.

The hostility to critical thought is evident, of course, in the remarkable vehemence of the Commission’s assault on the blaming sensibility—its multifariousness, its canniness, the powerful synchrony between it and the nation’s ever increasing hunger for the upbeat and the positive. But almost equally telling is the decision not to treat the audience as citizens with minds to be challenged but—regularly—as children with a taste for fairy tales.

The Commission’s book comes on, bewilderingly, as a pop entertainment, observing the conventions of old-time nonfiction narrative, tucking into out-of-the-way corners passages that approach complex or abstract matters. Chapters open with standard ominous-menace hooks (dread is nigh and no one suspects): “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.” Chapters end with nightmare curtain lines: “If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and Americans to liberate the holy places ‘is considered a crime,’ [Bin Laden] said, ‘let history be a witness that I am a criminal.’” Children’s book talkdown is leaned on to allay anxiety that some dry-as-dust, demanding lecture, bereft of entertainment value, on a quick-doze topic such as government organization, is in the offing: “We mention many personalities in this report. As in any study of the U.S. government, some of the most important characters are institutions. We will introduce various agencies, and how they adapted to a new kind of terrorism.” Hide-and-seek games are also played, particularly with presidential comments, which are scattered throughout like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs.

And there’s a constant flashing of cowboy quotations. Scooter Libby telling how fast the tough Vice President makes a momentous decision (“‘in about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing’”). Control-tower talk (“‘[I]f they’re there then we’ll run on them. . . . These guys are smart’”). At some moments every voice seems mired in fighter-jockese, blending stoic understatement à la The Right Stuff with go-for-it machismo echoing Sunday night TV flicks (“‘I don’t care how many windows you break,’” he said. “‘Damn it. . . . Okay. Push them back’”).

The pop ambience helps explain the huge sales. It encourages relaxation, discourages the student posture—the ambition to learn, understand, find solid ground for judgments. (This will be gripping, Reader, not taxing. Enjoy.) The invitation to lighten up in itself evokes non-judgmentalism, not lesson learning, as the key to having a nice day.

The Commission, in sum, offers peace through exculpation, evasion, and entertainment—and in doing so dangerously reenergizes a national relish for fantasy. Given a chance to brace the electorate with incontrovertible evidence that the search for leadership must be a search for flexible intelligence, endlessly curious and rapid, devouring in its appetite for the whole body of knowledge bearing on fateful choices, the Commission speaks out for loose-limbed feel-good geniality and artful dodging. Its vote for harmony is perfectly comprehensible, but as the costs of the vote are weighed, the imperative of protest against it stands forth as immensely more comprehensible—and just. “In all the general concerns,” James Fenimore Cooper wrote long ago, in 1838, “the publick has a right to be treated with candor. Without this manly and republican quality . . . [American] institutions are converted into stupendous fraud.” Faced with The 9/11 Commission Report, this country’s true need now is to shout Shame!

Jul 24, 2008 - 3:57 pm 76. Doug:

Six Thousand, Three Hundred, and Thirty Three Words.
Could be a World Wide Web Record.

Jul 24, 2008 - 4:17 pm 77. Doug:

Correction: 6,633 words.
Better yet.

Jul 24, 2008 - 4:19 pm 78. NahnCee:

Two words each per dead American. Are you convinced of anything new, Doug?

Jul 24, 2008 - 4:22 pm 79. fred:

For the record, I don’t dislike Teresita and I intend to remain civil towards her, even if sometimes she lets fly a thought that I don’t agree with and gets under my skin. Furthermore, I respect ALL veterans (except for the ones like John Kerry). You have to be a veteran (and I am, all my humble three year enlistment and DD214 as a Sp4) in order to understand how we feel about this fraternity(including the gals). I don’t like veterans like John Kerry. And that’s because of what he did when he came home (after having gamed the system)and how his political friends went to bat for him to get his less than honorable discharge from the Navy upgraded, with his decorations/citations restored. That man gets under my skin in a bad way. Hell, I find Obama more likable than I do John Kerry (but not by much).

C-fudd is another matter. He should have been born decades before his time, and over in Germany or Poland to boot, so that he would have been an oven attendant at Treblinka.

Jul 24, 2008 - 4:38 pm 80. Peter Grynch:

We do not have a free press in America, we have a for-profit press in America.

A small but important difference.

Jul 24, 2008 - 4:53 pm 81. Eggplant:

Alexis said:

“I really appreciate how you introduced me to an aspect of third century Roman history I had been unaware of, especially how a Baal worshipping cult overthrew the old Roman religion. (Although Elagabalus was unsuccessful, Emperor Aurelian succeeded half a century later.)…”

My perspective on Ancient Rome is mainly as a coin collector. When one collects ancient Roman coins, one becomes aware of emperors who produced cheap coins.

Have you ever heard of Gordian the Third? He wasn’t an important emperor. However if you go to a coin show, you’ll usually find lots of cheap coins that were struck during his reign.

I’ve tried to limit myself to the 12 Caesars. Once in a while I’ll see something that is irresistibly cheap struck under a later emperor and I’ll buy it, e.g. I have a couple ugly bronze coins that were struck under Constantine. Truth to tell, I’m a philhellene and prefer Greek coins over Roman (but they’re so damned expensive!). Also denarii of the Roman Republic tend to be more interesting (though uglier) than coins of the Roman Empire.

Alexis raised the point about religion during the Roman Empire. The official state Roman religion pretty much became meaningless after Cladius. The silliness of declaring a dead emperor “Divus” destroyed what little shred of credibility remained in the old religion. As an aside, you can tell if an emperor was declared a god if you see the word “Divus” on a coin with the emperor’s portrait, e.g. Divus Augustus.

People are programmed almost at a DNA level to need religion. I suspect this need comes from the awareness of our own mortality along with a very basic instinct that rejects this ugly truth. I also suspect that many insane people lost their minds because they realized at a very fundamental level the truth of their own mortality (all “sane” people at some level are in denial about their own mortality).

Because the old religion had become a pathetic joke, the Roman people were desperate to find believable alternatives. Consequently, there were many religions that the Romans flirted with, e.g.

The cult of Isis and Osiris
The cult of Dionysius (Bacchus)
Mithraism
Sun worship
Gnosticism
Christianity
etc.

The Romans became fully aware of Judaism after they conquered the Selucid Kingdom (the early Selucid kings produced some very nice coins and I own a few). I believe the Romans were very impressed by the Jews and their religion. Unfortunately for the Romans, Judaism was a “Jews only thing” in ancient times. Also the requirement of circumcision was considered by the Romans a horrific form of mutilation. Christianity in its earliest form was merely a Jewish cult that included all of the standard Jewish restriction, e.g. circumcision, honoring the Sabbath, dietary restrictions, etc. These standard Jewish restrictions made the earliest forms of Christianity inaccessible to the ancient Romans. Then Paul of Tarsus came along and reinvented Christianity. Paul removed the standard Jewish restrictions and made this new form of Judaism accessible to anyone who wanted to convert. Of course the removal of the Jewish religious restrictions transformed Christianity from a Jewish cult to a completely separate religion thus making Christianity even more accessible to non-Jews.

–different topic–

Doug said:

“Six Thousand, Three Hundred, and Thirty Three Words.”

and a funny thing, I didn’t read one of them…

Jul 24, 2008 - 5:29 pm 82. Teresita:

Benj:T. did not ” smear” Bush or accuse of him of murdering anyone – she simply said the truth – “3,000 innocent folks died on his watch” – Deal with it.

Thank you Benj.

fred: For the record, I don’t dislike Teresita and I intend to remain civil towards her, even if sometimes she lets fly a thought that I don’t agree with and gets under my skin.

I dislike the things some people post, but I would never be moved to say, “God, I’m getting so I hate _____ for comments like this.” A battery with all the charges is balance is dead. A blog with all the viewpoints in accord would be just as dead.

DanM: Surely you can hang with the guys, can’t you? That was pure man-humor (not to be confused with metro-man humor).

I’ve been posting on the Elephant Bar for a couple years, it’s pretty estrogen-challenged over there. It’s not working out so good, but I’m going to tough it out.

Defend yourself, tell us how you would handle an Imam forcing your way of life. Fight? Submit?

A picture says a thousand words.

Jul 24, 2008 - 5:35 pm 83. fred:

Returning to the topic of the thread, can anyone tell me that a man who has barely served two years in the United States Senate, not served on any Intelligence Committee, and not served on a Foreign Relations Committee can claim he has foreign policy gravitas because he goes overseas to perform puff pieces before adoring anti-Americans. Also – and please mark this in all seriousness – HE WOULD NEVER RECEIVE A SECURITY CLEARANCE if he was less than a U.S. Senator, given his complete breeding among Communists, education from Marxists, associations with Prof. Rashid Khalidi, and associations with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. If he would never receive a security clearance, why should he be a serious candidate for Commander in Chief of the United States of America? I mean, come on folks, get serious. Have people taken leave of their senses?

Jul 24, 2008 - 5:52 pm 84. Doug:

Fred,
Limbaugh keeps mentioning 141 days in the Senate:
I haven’t checked that out yet, guess it might be the number of working days he was present.
—

It was a real letdown to learn about politicians wrt secrets when our son got his top secret clearance w/access to comparmented info:

Pelosi, Obama, Reid, Durbin, Clinton, etc…
Just not right.
Were quite a few stories about Clinton showing little regard for such protocols, God knows what we don’t know about these clowns. (and worse)
—
Groups of compartmented information
SAPs are subdivided into three further groups [1].

There is no public reference to whether SCI is divided in the same manner, but news reports reflecting that only the “Big 8″ members of Congress are briefed on certain intelligence activities, it may be assumed that similar rules apply for SCI. The groups are

Acknowledged:
appears as a line item as “classified project” or the equivalent in the US budget, although details of its content are not revealed. The budget element will associate the SAP with an organization or major command, such as the Navy or Strategic Command

Unacknowledged:
no reference in the published budget; its funding is hidden in another entry, often called the “black budget”.

The appropriate Congressional committees, however, are briefed on the nature of the SAP and approve it.

Waived:
no mention in the budget, and briefed only to the “Big 8″ members of

Congress:

Speaker of the House, House Minority Leader, Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Chairman and Ranking Minority Members of the appropriate committees.

—
C.I.A. Chief Says Legislator Disclosed Secrets – New York Times

Robert M. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence, has accused the chairman of the House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs of disclosing sensitive intelligence information and has ordered an inquiry to determine whether sources and intelligence-gathering methods have been jeopardized.

In a letter dated July 24 and made public on Thursday, Mr. Gates criticized Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat and one of the most severe critics of the Administration’s policy toward Iraq before the invasion of Kuwait, for including information from “a top-secret, compartmented and particularly sensitive document” dated Sept. 4, 1989. Report on Arms Purchases

Jul 24, 2008 - 6:16 pm 85. Teresita:

Fred: HE WOULD NEVER RECEIVE A SECURITY CLEARANCE if he was less than a U.S. Senator

I remember somebody who had to get a rather high security clearance to go to CTT “A” school, she had to show the Navy a real US birth certificate to get it, not one cranked out on MS Paint. I think that alone would be the deal breaker for BHO getting a clearance.

Jul 24, 2008 - 6:19 pm 86. mark_b:

Teresita, DanM I spent my time on a Nimitz Class Carrier as MM.(NNPS 8502)

Just walked away from job at civilian nuke.

Teresita, I understand that you may view the right, especially us neocons as the enemy. Could be justifiable.

Sharia is also your enemy.

One of these foes will be all bitchy about your lifestyle. The other would kill you.

Jul 24, 2008 - 6:47 pm 87. Doug:

How have you missed the many times the BO Certificate Story was shown to be untrue at EB, Teresita?
…or is that just artistic license?
—
Found this while looking up someone else:
Organizing « Miscellaneous Projects
—
A large part of Barry’s efforts as an organizer involved “ACORN,” known for being number One in getting unqualified, illegal subjects to the ballot box, the better to “organize” the rest of us.

Jul 24, 2008 - 6:56 pm 88. fred:

I do not stand in judgment of Teresita’s lifestyle. I have had gay friends and acquaintances and never had a problem with them. One of my best friends, a cousin of mine, is gay, and he was the best man at my wedding 20 years ago end of this August. I take an agnostic view of it, since what science and scientific research I’ve read about it suggests that overwhelmingly this is an issue of identity, not a “lifestyle choice.” Something strange happens in utero in combination with perhaps what a virus does. And so, because as an intelligent Catholic and schooled in the Jesuit tradition of listening to what God might be saying through creation I can only conclude that there are variances in the created order which somehow serve God’s mysterious purposes. Mind you, my view is not the majority opinion and I certainly do not speak for the Church. I speak for myself and my own conscience in these matters.

Islam is a completely retrograde, savage, dualistic death cult. What it does to gay people, and to women, and to children – aside from what it does to us kafirs – is repulsive, reprehensible, and reprobate.

Jul 24, 2008 - 7:01 pm 89. cedarford:

C-fudd is another matter. He should have been born decades before his time, and over in Germany or Poland to boot, so that he would have been an oven attendant at Treblinka.

I dont have those views. But if I did or saw others it would be comforting to know that views can change based on facts or perceptions that foreign countries can change to become useful allies vs. Albatrosses.
Fred, unfortunately, is committed to being stupid forever.
Which at least partially absolves him for being a mindless ball-licker of Zionists whose interests diverge much of the time from America’s.

Another sad example of Fred’s stupidity is his belief that no one should be President who has not come from the State Department or been ensconced 20+ years in the Senate and showed up on committees dealing with foreign issues or spent at least 10 million of taxpayer money on extensive junkets/VIP shopping sprees in foreign lands.
Otherwise, poor Fred believes that “lack foreign policy gravitas”.

No Governors like FDR or Reagan, but people who meet Fred’s “minimum international gravitas” like Bush I, L Paul Bremer, lifetime inside the Beltway foreign affairs committee denizens & Senators like Biden, Kerry, Kennedy, Schumer, Lautenberg, Feinstein, and McCain.

Right, Fred.

Jul 24, 2008 - 7:07 pm 90. Bridget:

“But smearing Bush with the 9-11 Atrocity’s 3,000 dead is? Correct your own lapse in fairness and I’ll consider adjusting my own comments.”

Zenster, first of all, I didn’t view her post so much as a smearing of Bush with responsibility for 9-11 as a reflection on the politics of the very popular DC sport of Monday morning finger-pointing.

But be that as it may, this:

“the 9-11 atrocity was being planned well before Bush even took office.. I have NO LOVE for George Bush but such specious smearing of the one person with sufficient conviction to use America’s might in response to Islamic terrorism deserves some credit. Yes, Bush is a total multiculturalist moron but he still comprehends the need to poke Islam in its myopic eye.”

was just fine. (Although as a Bush supporter myself, I do take issue with you calling him a multculturalist moron) Multiculturalist???? 

For a man who professes to be concerned about the sexual slavery of women under Islam, you are mighty quick to denigrate one by targeting her with hostile sexual innuendo.

Jul 24, 2008 - 7:39 pm 91. Zenster:

DanM: Zenster,

If I’m reading this correctly (may be getting a bit paranoid in my old age..), you are calling me on borderline trolling.

Absolutely not. That comment was directed strictly at Teresita.

What astonishes me is the utter contempt for logic and reason in some of their positions. How does self-loathing (personal or governmental) cripple a persons reason to the point of flagellation? It is almost a masochistic act of logic.

Myself as well.

Benj: “3,000 innocent folks died on his watch” – Deal with it.

I have, and Teresita’s doing so does impute some sort of responsibility or complicity, regardless of what you go on and on and on about.

Doug: 6,633 words.

You beat me to it. I was cutting and pasting over to Word for the final count when I saw your trailing post.

It takes a certain type of chronic narcissism to believe that people need or want to read THIRTEEN PAGES of poorly punctuated spewing.

As it is, Teresita has yet to define what her exact intent was by making such a troll-worthy comment. Either she clarifies in no uncertain terms what her true meaning was or she can own having bashed Bush (who has much to be legitimately bashed for), in a wholly unjust fashion.

fred: If he would never receive a security clearance, why should he be a serious candidate for Commander in Chief of the United States of America?

Only the democratic party’s brand of magical thinking is capable of ignoring such a glaring discrepancy.

mark_b: One of these foes will be all bitchy about your lifestyle. The other would kill you.

Spot on. Islam remains an issue where there is NO MIDDLE GROUND>

The qur’an is a handbook for genocide.

Shari’a law is one massive violation of human rights.

Islam is an ongoing crime against humanity.

Nobody I’ve asked has ever been able identify EVEN ONE SINGLE REDEEMING FEATURE OF ISLAM.

fred: I do not stand in judgment of Teresita’s lifestyle.

I’ve yet to see anyone here at Belmont Club do so. As yet, I cannot see where it would be at all pertinent.

Jul 24, 2008 - 8:01 pm 92. Zenster:

Bridget: I didn’t view her post so much as a smearing of Bush with responsibility for 9-11 as a reflection on the politics of the very popular DC sport of Monday morning finger-pointing.

Why the finger-pointing? That is well-known as an act of blame. How is Bush to blame for the 9-11 Atrocity? Rest assured that many different government agencies failed the American people in spectacular fashion with respect to 9-11. I just fail to see how Bush is supposed to be tarred for that institutional shortcoming after only several months in office.

Although as a Bush supporter myself, I do take issue with you calling him a multculturalist moron

So long as Bush extols Islam as the Religion of Peace and does exactly nothing to control immigration of our Islamic enemies into America, I can only see him as being in the same camp as those who play the game of cultural relativism. Bush’s uncomfortably close and conflicting ties to the House of Saud are damning enough as it stands.

I’ll ask that you please note how Teresita has yet to explain her unwarranted slam against Bush. I’d think you would take equal or greater offense at that than at my own multiculturalist comment.

Jul 24, 2008 - 8:11 pm 93. Zenster:

Bridget: For a man who professes to be concerned about the sexual slavery of women under Islam, you are mighty quick to denigrate one by targeting her with hostile sexual innuendo.

A worthy observation and one that I addressed in my previous post about how there is no middle ground regarding Islam.

Why all this neo-con bashing when the democratic party is actively undermining America’s efforts to thwart Islamic terrorism? Yes, the republicans possess their own special shortcomings, but at least they have no significant problem with smiting Islam’s neck as it so dearly needs.

Jul 24, 2008 - 8:17 pm 94. Wadeusaf:

Benj,

Criticisms of the 911 Commission abound on both the right and on the left side of the aisle. The difficulty with your father’s perspective is that the questions posed to the president and the answers sought by the commission had to focus on the lack of intelligence to act on, available to the President.

The report on Al Quada as briefed by NSC Director Rice, contained no actionable intelligence. The question I have is ‘why?’ I think the commission attempted to answer that. Your fathers’ curiosity led him in a different direction.

Jul 24, 2008 - 9:16 pm 95. Doug:

Richard Clarke, Michael Schuere, and John O’neill knew plenty about where and what bin Laden and Al Queda were up to.
Despite Clarke running around screaming just that, neither the Clinton nor Bush Admins were interested in distracting themselves from whatever they thought more important.
—
Not too hard to confirm that scenario with a quick read of Clark’s memo to National Security Advisior, Dr Condi Rice written in January 2001.
—
Washington, D.C., February 10, 2005 – The National Security Archive today posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable, Washington, D.C., February 10, 2005 – The National Security Archive today posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable, January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice
- the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration.

The document was central to debates in the 9/11 hearings over the Bush administration’s policies and actions on terrorism before September 11, 2001. Clarke’s memo requests an immediate meeting of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee to discuss broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite Clarke’s request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001.

The January 25, 2001, memo, recently released to the National Security Archive by the National Security Council, bears a declassification stamp of April 7, 2004, one day prior to Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004. Responding to claims that she ignored the al-Qaeda threat before September 11,

Rice stated in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed,

“No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.”

Jul 24, 2008 - 10:09 pm 96. Doug:

Tenet tries to shift the blame. Don’t buy it.
Michael F. Scheuer,

Our CIC has proven over and over to be a man who smoothes over and covers up failures in his administration, instead of addressing them.

“In “State of Denial,” Woodward paints a heroic portrait of the CIA chief warning national security adviser Condoleezza Rice of pending al-Qaeda strikes during the summer of 2001, only to have his warnings ignored.

Tenet was indeed worried during the so-called summer of threat, but one wonders why he did not summon the political courage earlier to accuse Rice of negligence, most notably during his testimony under oath before the 9/11 commission.

“I was talking to the national security adviser and the president and the vice president every day,” Tenet told the commission during a nationally televised hearing on March 24, 2004.

“I certainly didn’t get a sense that anybody was not paying attention to what I was doing and what I was briefing and what my concerns were and what we were trying to do.”

Now a “frustrated” Tenet writes that he held an urgent meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, to try to get “the full attention of the administration” and “finally get us on track.” He can’t have it both ways.”
—
A cynic might wonder why both Tenant and Normie Mineta received the Medal of Freedom.

Jul 24, 2008 - 10:13 pm 97. Teresita:

Mark_b:Teresita, DanM I spent my time on a Nimitz Class Carrier as MM.(NNPS 8502)

Awesome. When I was in the Navy in the 1980s women were not allowed to serve on carriers or the warships which supported them. We were allowed to serve on certain slow-ass supply ships which did not steam with the battlegroup (not the fast combat support ships like the Sacramento class). The USS Puget Sound (or as we called it, USS Pubic Mound, a sapphic love boat if there ever was) comes to mind.

Just walked away from job at civilian nuke.

I hope there will be a renaissance of nuclear power, but it sure as hell won’t happen under B.O.

Teresita, I understand that you may view the right, especially us neocons as the enemy. Could be justifiable. Sharia is also your enemy. One of these foes will be all bitchy about your lifestyle. The other would kill you.

I am of the right. Maybe center-right. Always have been. I can’t stand the Kos kids. I’m an ex-Ayn Randroid, tempered by exposure to Taoism which is all about letting things reach their own equilibrium. So I’m not into centrally planned government. I believe in locking down the borders so we don’t get infiltrated by Islamist assholes. I favor Israel over the Pallies but not the the point of having our entire foreign policy focused around that conflict. I don’t believe in pre-emptive wars to carry out the Bush doctrine. I don’t like shelling out billions to maintain a constellation of bases across the globe. So maybe I’m a Pat Buchanan lesbian, if you can imagine such a thing. But mostly, I’m not scared by dummies in turbans making threats from caves, and I my vote doesn’t revolve solely around security issues. A much bigger problem is inflation, which will eat your 401K like a termite and leave you living hand-to-mouth when you planned to retire in style.

Jul 24, 2008 - 10:36 pm 98. Doug:

I like to think I would have been FOR pre-emption, based on Clarke’s memo linked above.
Presented 9 months prior to 9-11.
(except in CondiWorld)

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:18 pm 99. Gary Rosen:

“I dont have those views.”

C-fudd weasels again. What happened to your “likeability”, F-boy?

Jul 24, 2008 - 11:54 pm 100. Wadeusaf:

Doug,

President George Bush’s first day in office was January 25th, with delays in confirming persons to head the various branches of Government involved including DoD and State, there was no working group of Principles to even look at the stuff until late February.

The memo while dated January 25th lacks actionable detail, but has proposals for meeting a threat and indicates two policies left for the incoming president to determine. At the time Saddam was shooting at our pilots in the no fly zone. And CIA had, as we now know, little to no contact with the Northern Alliance or Southern Afghanistan tribes. Even if they had relations with the NA, it would have taken the CIA and analyst-ists months to determine what policy they wanted the Bush administration to follow. As was the case post 9/11, so much more so was the case prior to 9/11.

I imagine the two policy papers, one from 1998 and the other from December of 2000, both no doubt had the hall mark of President Clinton style, and would have to be revised, and revisited before putting any policy forward.

Jul 25, 2008 - 12:15 am 101. Wadeusaf:

President George Bush’s first day in office was January 22nd, not the 25th.

Jul 25, 2008 - 12:18 am 102. Zenster:

For anyone who wants some astonishing facts behind the 9-11 Atrocity, I can only recommend Peter Lance’s “Triple Cross – 9-11“. Evidently, Paul Thompson’s “Complete 9/11 Timeline” does a good job as well. I can assure you that a close reading of Lance’s “Triple Cross” will leave you with your blood boiling.

Jul 25, 2008 - 12:45 am 103. Doug:

How could this statement be justified?

““No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.”“

Jul 25, 2008 - 12:54 am 104. Doug:

…the memo IS addressed to Condi, and deals almost exclusively with “Al-Qida”

Jul 25, 2008 - 12:56 am

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