NOBODY HERE BUT US OBJECTIVE JOURNALISTS:
Hugh Hewitt picks up on 1971 Kansas City
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Why is it that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War
meetings that John Kerry did attend are not as interesting
to elite media as the rumors that George W. Bush skipped
some of his Air National Guard meetings?
Powerline and Captain's Quarter's comment on the
implications of Kerry's paticipation in the very
controversial gathering in which assasination was raisied.
The elite media turns its collective face away from this
story with the same discipline with which it pursued the
unfounded charges from McAuliffe et al on Bush
being "AWOL." Wouldn't it be great if Russert or anyone in
the Beltway cadre had the guts to bring up this VVAW
gathering to toothy Terry the next time the Manchurian
Chairman came out of the rabbit hole?
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Posted at 8:30 PM, Pacific
I receieved some e-mails this evening from a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who has redeployed to Iraq and is now a month into his duty there. He's a reservist, making his second trip to Iraq, and again left behind a thriving ministry and a wife and three young children, but saluted and went where he was called. It is hard and dangerous duty, even as the Marines work to bring freedom to a long oppressed land.
This officer has a support system and great stability from his faith and family. But a lot of the young Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen deployed there and throughout the world do not. I have been discussing www.soldiersangels.com on my program over the past few weeks. These fine people run a website that vets volunteers and matches them with military overseas so that these folks on the front line get letters and packages from civilians at home. Please consider joining up. It isn't hard or time consuming and the cost is the postage and the packages you send. They do have to talk with you to verify that you are who you say you are and won't endanger the troops they serve.
There are thousands of Americans protecting and defending tonight, and I hope other bloggers will take up the task of publicizing Soldiers Angels. The troops would certainly thank you.
Posted at 5:00 PM, Pacific:
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THE ALBRIGHT DECEPTION
Senator Gorton, on why nothing was done after 1998 to try and stop bin Laden: "While many other potential covert or cruise missile kinds of responses were considered, all ran up against an objection that the intelligence wasn't actionable, that you didn't know what, ah, that there was no appropriate target, or that there'd be collateral damage, so every such suggestion was, you know, frustrated and came to naught before 9/11, is that not correct?
Albright : "I have no way of judging what happened inside the Bush Adminsitration from January to Septemeber..."
Senator Gorton: "But you do know nothing happened?"
Albright: "Well I do know that, but I also, um, do know that many of the, ah, um, policy issues that we had developed were not followed up, and I have to say with great sadness, ah, to watch an incoming Administration kind of take apart a lot of the policies that we did have, whether it had to do with North Korea or the Balkans, was difficult. So I think, ah, ah, I think you have to ask people that were in the Bush Adminsitration as to how they saw things on this particular issue, but I do think, ah, in all fairness, that 9/11 was a cataclysmic event ah, that changed things and that they must have had similar reactions. But clearly there are many issues and many questions now about how they were responding ah, to the terrorist threat and how seriously they took it. You are going to have some other witnesses here, ah, who will be more capable of responding to that question than I because I know nothing beyond what I read."
This is repugnant in the depth of its deception and
sophistry. Asked tough questions, Albright shifted the
subject from what the Clinton Administration didn't do and
then to the Bush Administration abandonment of Clinton's
North Korean and Balkan policies (thank goodness we gave
up on the benefits of being hornswaggled by Kim Jong Il)
to leave the impression, implicit only, that the Bush
Administration abandoned anti-al Qaeda initiaitives as
well. Iniatives like not trying to take him out when the
drone spotted him in the fall? This is a hearing for the
historians to mull over, and when they do, it will not go
well for Madame Secretary.
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Posted at 4:00 PM, Pacific
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Today's testimony by Madeline Albright was among the most preposterous such appearance by an American official who formerly held high office in the executive that I can recall. It was so transparently self-serving, so obviously an attempt to dodge the culpability for having been part of the Clinton-Gore-Berger-Clarke-Daschle-Biden-Gephardt team that failed, and failed, and failed to act to stop bin Laden's growing fury and capabilities, that it will persuade no one who is serious about the subject matter.
But the Clinton apologists, the Gore operatives and the Kerry wannabe advisers will try and spin this deceit into something approaching an argument. Watch for its early drafts at TalkingPoitnsMemo and American Prospect.
As you read this stuff, keep in mind the CNN video that has Ben-Veniste so upset. And hope that someone asks Ms. Albright or any of her colleagues: "To the best of your ability, and realizing it is a hypothetical, please tell us if you think Al Gore, had he been elected, would have prevented the 9/11 attacks, and if so, how?" Of course he couldn't have. Those attacks were operational long before January 20, 2001. The opportunity to stop them came and went sometime in the mid to late '90s, when the Clinton gang couldn't be bothered to try anything with al Qaeda that didn't begin and end with an indictment and a subpoena. For eight years it was talk, talk, talk; posture, posture, posture; campaign, campaign, campaign. And the plans were hatched and matured. Period.
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Posted at 3:45 PM, Pacific
Shortly after Secretary Rumsfeld finished testifying before the 9/11 Commission this afternoon, he was questioned by Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste. Ben-Veniste threw a small fit over a television story he had seen featuring the Predator drone. ben-Veniste strenuously objected that the drone's existence was supposed to be so secret that it couldn't even be mentioned in public. he called himself "astounded."
This was such a non-sequitor given the lines of questioning Rumsfeld had received from former Senators Kerry and Gorton. Why the heartburn by Ben-Veniste over a drone videotape?
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First, understand that Ben-Veniste is a Democratic partisan of the first rank. My curiosity sprang from his reputation combined with his odd outburst. So I went hunting for the story and found it at CNN: "Drone may have spotted bin Laden in 2000."
No wonder a demcoratic partisan is exercised. The entire attack being orchestrated by the Clinton-Gore-Albright-Clarke-Berger team and the Kerry cheerleading section depends upon the argument that Bush was warned and that Bush could have done something to stop 9/11. Many are saying that the Bush team dropped the ball.
A videotape of bin Laden from the fall of 2000 presents huge problems for this argument. The most obvious one: What is it that Bush could have done that Clinton didn't do when Clinton's team knew where bin Laden was?
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Posted at 10:10 AM, Pacific
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In the morning’s first post, I suggested that Richard Clarke’s attacks on the Bush Administration for failing to combat terrorism effectively in the Administration’s first 8 months were similar to the idea of Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary attacking Churchill for the fall of France in 1940.
Little did I know that hours later, Bill Clinton’s Lord Halifax, Madeline Albright, did in fact attack Bush not only for failing to wage war on terrorism in the first 8 months of his Administration, but also for repudiating the Clinton Administration’s policies on North Korea.
Albright’s testimony is beyond satire and beyond outrage. She and the Administration she represented abroad are thoroughly and transparently discredited. The only adjectives that are applicable are sad and irrelevant. That John Kerry seeks the restoration to power of those aligned with Albright is the only issue that will matter in November, and it is the single issue that guarantees Kerry’s defeat.
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Posted at 7:10 AM, Pacific
The White House and Bush-Cheney campaign counter-attacks yesterday on the Kerry stand-in Richard Clarke were thorough, and despite skepticism of their effectiveness among entrenched Bush critics in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, devastating. Clarke's credibility is in tatters, and the key facts of his being demoted within the White House and passed over for the deputy's slot at Homeland Security are now well and widely-known. The fact that Clarke is best pals with Kerry foreign policy guru Rand Beers has also penetrated deep into the media's psyche. The New York Times pressed Clarke on this disclosure, and he responded that he had been friends with Beers for 25 years "and I'm not going to run away from him just because he's John Kerry's national security adviser."
I also hope that the media continues to circulate Clarke's account of a meeting on September 12, 2001 in which the president repeatedly pushed him to look into the Al Qaeda-Saddam connection. Clarke says that at the time he tried to divert the president's attention from this possibility but that the president wouldn't be diverted. The White House cannot confirm the conversation occurred, but I think they ought to embrace the Clarke account and reply: "Even if it did happen, we think it proves the contrast between Bush and Clinton and Bush and Kerry. This president demands that the careerists rethink their conventional wisdom and turn over every rock. The complacency of the Clinton years and the U.N.-speak of the Kerry campaign cannot replace real presidential leadership. Clarke didn't like to be pushed. Bush pushes. We think the American people like a president who is demanding his staff keep asking the hard questions."
The political fall-out of Clarke's charges is being touted as bad for Bush by some sideline coaches. The Los Angeles Times' quotes Princeton historian Fred Greenstein as believing that "Bush is running on his strength as a war leader, so this hits him where it hurts," and that "if Kerry remains to be defined, Bush is capable of being redefined." Others chime in along the same line, and Clarke's central argument "that the result [of the war in Iraq] has been a lost opportunity on a magnitude greater than most people realize," has traction with the same people who opposed the war all along.
But what about voters? Clarke returns the focus to the the fact that we are at war; that al Qaeda grew to huge proportions under the benign neglect of the Clinton-Kerry law enforcement model; that not only is Saddam in chains as a result of the Iraq war, Libya --a potential nuclear power and admitted WMD producer and possessor-- is now disarmed; and that the terrorists know that America will pursue them not as they were pursued after the African embassy bombings or the Cole, but relentlessly and not with subpoenas but with every lethal weapon in the arsenal.
That's a fine focus for the campaign to have for the next few months, as Kerry attempts to overcome the admiration of Hugo Chavez and his ilk abroad and the MoveOn.org crowd at home. Kerry is now firmly positioned in the Rand Beers-Richard Clarke corner of talk-talk-talk, meet-meet-meet and never do anything about the bad guys unless it involves political upside and the announcement of an indictment. Election 2004 will be a referendum on the war and its conduct, not its coming, though preparedness is an issue that only helps the Bush re-election drive.
Americans are sports fans. Bush took over a franchise in January 2001 that was ill-prepared in every respect for the challenges ahead. The UCLA Bruins' basketball team didn't make the NCAAs or even the NIT this year. Are the fans blaming new coach Ben Howland or old coach Steve Lavin? If some Lavin buddy shoots off his mouth in a bar that Howland's a lousy coach, does he get a hearing? If he's loud enough he gets attention, but not respect and certainly no converts.
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Clarke et al can scream from now until November that 9/11 was Bush's fault and that he was a superman who could have stopped the war before it began and won the war had he only been given the tools. It is fantasy-land stuff, as though Lord Halifax had criticized Churchill in 1940 for failing to prevent the fall of France. Such a charge would have diminished the Chamberlin ally Halifax, not Churchill, and Clarke's carping only reminds people of one of the many problems Bush inherited in 2001 --a career staff riddled with desk generals and paper shuffling seminar leaders.
The left seems happy that Clarke has stirred this pot, and are forgetting the shot of Hillary holding the New York Post headlined "Bush Knew" in the United States Senate. The voters outside the fever swamp hate this crap, and are so post-modern that the "sell the book" blockbuster allegations made on corporate cousin "60 Minutes" bounce off the president like pebble's thrown at a battleship.
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Kerry, meanwhile, is scraping the bottom of his bank account to send out a puny $2 million ad buy trying to divert attention from the Bush campaign's other volley of yesterday, adding up Kerry's campaign promises of a trillion bucks in new spending. The ads tout --again-- Kerry's Vietnam service and "his concerns about children's needs." This will work about as well as the "foreign leaders" gambit, and is almost eerily off-key given Kerry's enormous blunders of the past two weeks and the issues absorbing the country's attention today. Kerry's rapid-response team is neither rapid nor responsive, and posting angry notes on the campaign web site about Kerry-endorser and would-be dictator Hugo Chavez won't reverse the growing impression that Kerry's operation only seemed well-run when matched again the self-destructive Dean and the incredibly light Edwards.
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One last story with November implications: To have any sort of shot in November, Kerry would need the unified and enthusiastic support of the African-American community. Kerry's absurd statement that he hoped to be the "second black president" has already circulated widely and not to his benefit among black voters, and now comes another indication that a major issue in this voting bloc is not one that Kerry wants to discuss --gay marriage. The two dozen black pastors noted in this AP story as pushing the Georgia legislature to act against gay marriage are representative of the leadership of the black church nationally. Kerry's vote against the Defense of Marriage Act and his back-flips on every question in this area haven't gone unnoticed in is key demographic. Ads about his "concerns about children's needs" won't get anywhere with these pastors and their counter-parts across the country. |
