Alert the Media! MSM tilts to the LEFT!

The liberal MSM, goaded by hysteric yammer-monkeys like Barbara Boxer and thankfully-dismissed mediocrity Tom Daschle, are starting to sputter about impeachment.

Their intellectual mentor Barbra has been talking about this for months, and the impressionable Boxer has finally ceded to her Streisand-driven mentality and called for Bush’s impeachment.

But some scholars aren’t so sure that Bush’s limited program is illegal. The Washingon Post has a column by Charles Krauthammer which includes the following:

George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr (one critic calls him the man who "literally wrote the book on government seizure of electronic evidence") finds "pretty decent arguments" on both sides, but his own conclusion is that Bush's actions were "probably constitutional."

Cass Sunstein, a self-described liberal and author of a widely-used textbook on Constitutional Law as well as University of Chicago Law Professor, gives the following thoughtful analysis on Hugh Hewitt's radio show:

HH: Do you consider the quality of the media coverage here to be good, bad, or in between?
CS: Pretty bad, and I think the reason is we're seeing a kind of libertarian panic a little bit, where what seems at first glance...this might be proved wrong...but where what seems at first glance a pretty modest program is being described as a kind of universal wiretapping, and also being described as depending on a wild claim of presidential authority, which the president, to his credit, has not made any such wild claim. The claims are actually fairly modest, and not unconventional. So the problem with what we've seen from the media is treating this as much more peculiar, and much larger than it actually is. As I recall, by the way, I was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, and they did say that in at least one person's view, the authorization to use military force probably was adequate here.

On being asked by Hewitt if the media are being purposefully ill-informed, the liberal Sunstein replies by giving a very generous tilt toward the wild-eyed Jonathan Alter types:

You know what I think it is? It's kind of an echo of Watergate. So when the word wiretapping comes out, a lot of people get really nervous and think this is a rerun of Watergate. I also think there are two different ideas going on here. One is skepticism on the part of many members of the media about judgments by President Bush that threaten, in their view, civil liberties. So it's like they see President Bush and civil liberties, and they get a little more reflexively skeptical than maybe the individual issue warrants. So there's that. Plus, there's, I think, a kind of bipartisan...in the American culture, including the media, streak that is very nervous about intruding on telephone calls and e-mails. And that, in many ways, is healthy. But it can create a misunderstanding of a particular situation.
Hewitt steps in with a stronger take on the situation:

Hewitt responds:

The libertarian panic that you referred to, I actually believe that that probably did prompt a lot of the original egregiously wrong analysis. But now I'm beginning to be concerned that the media is intentionally ignoring the very strong arguments defending what the president did. Do you believe that's taking place?

Sunstein replies with typically liberal waffling, but finally owns up that this may be another media spasm:

....I think the tide is turning a little bit in terms of the legal analysis. If it turns out that this goes on for months, and facts don't come out that are worse than the facts we now have, then it looks...then it will look like a continuing panic, which would be worse than what we've seen just in a couple of days.

The media is ignoring some salient background material. As I have pointed out in previous blogs, the House/Senate Joint Inquiry of 2002 did issue a "Finding 12" that:

In the summer of 2001, when the Intelligence Community was bracing for an imminent Al-Qa’ida attack, difficulties with FBI applications for Foreign Intelligence Act surveillance and the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected Al-Qa’ida representatives in the United States. The effect of these difficulties was compounded by the perception that spread among FBI personnel at Headquarters and the field offices that the FISA process was lengthy and fraught with peril. [xvii][emphasis mine]

So far the Joint Inquiry has been brushed aside, the media has been sidestepping the Bush defense and it appears that the UCLA study recently published on the media that both electronic and print outlets are left-of-center are correct.

But the media also is saying nothing about the crime of the leak to James Risen. While the media hounds are baying after leakers in the Plame affair, there is utter silence over who broke the law concerning the FISA affair.

This is not a surprise, and goes back to the old hard-left motto: "No Fault On The Left." The MSM spontaneously blurts leftward when consciously-timed illegal leaks like the NYT printed are released. It is a crime when a leak like the Plame affair happens to affect the left. But it is “patriotic” for bolshie types like Jonathan Alter to leak when it helps the right.

Sunstein, who was hired by the Carter Department of Justice, has an old-fashioned respect for the law. As he tells Hugh Hewitt about leaking:

It was implicit. I mean, no one, when I was there, so far as I know, would even spend a second thinking of leaking classified material. That was the most obvious thing in the world. It was a moral requirement, not a…[legal one]….when we were there, we wouldn't leak. It was a moral requirement. It wasn't we were afraid of crime, it was we wouldn't do something that was wrong.

Back in the day, liberals had moral requirements that superseded even the law to obey the law and not do harm to American interests.

Now, Democrats believe it is "patriotic" to break the law, but only if it harms the Bush Administration.

LAT Selectively Cites Joint Inquiry

The LAT had an article yesterday quoting anonymous senior counter terrorism officials that

"a 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns — not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence-gathering guidelines."[emphasis mine]

The bold sentence above in the LAT piece is simply not true, or at best misleading. In the Joint Inquiry, a systemic finding 12 reads as follows:

Finding 12: In the summer of 2001, when the Intelligence Community was bracing for an imminent Al-Qa’ida attack, difficulties with FBI applications for Foreign Intelligence Act surveillance and the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected Al-Qa’ida representatives in the United States. The effect of these difficulties was compounded by the perception that spread among FBI personnel at Headquarters and the field offices that the FISA process was lengthy and fraught with peril. [xvii]

So the LAT is dowdifying the
REPORT OF THE JOINT INQUIRY INTO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF 9/11 by the House Permanent Select and Senate Select Intelligence Committees by cherry-picking the parts that the paper believes will support its case that Bush had no reasons to circumvent the clunky FISA process that the FBI considered "lengthy and fraught with peril." [xvii]

The anonymous "senior counterterrorism official" made his accusations, and then scurried into his bolt-hole:

Like other current and former officials, the senior counter-terrorism official would only speak on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the intercepts and the controversy that has engulfed the secret program since its disclosure last week.

The LAT piece also says

NSA officials declined to comment Tuesday; a spokeswoman for Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden — the former NSA chief who now is the No. 2 official in the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence — said she could not discuss the issue.

This week, Hayden said that the program to eavesdrop without obtaining FISA warrants was necessary to respond to fast-moving terrorist threats, and that getting a FISA warrant was inefficient and slow.

The LAT indulges in its normal flimflammery, first quoting anonymous sources who make accusations, often using classified material and therefore breaking the law.

Then the LAT ostentatiously cites close-mouthed NSA and DNI spokespeople who do follow the law and do not comment on the leaked materials.

At least General Hayden and John McLaughlin, recently acting DCI, have supported President Bush in defending American national security.

National security does not seem to be a high priority for the process-freaks in the judiciary, press, and Democratic Party, who hyperventilate about civil liberties while no evidence has emerged that Nixon-style wiretaps and eavesdropping for political reasons has occurred.

Another media tempest exalting process over real security concerns.

A media tempest which Newsweek rabble rouser Howard Fineman opines

"will dominate and define the year 2006 — and, I predict, make it the angriest, most divisive season of political theater since the days of Richard Nixon."

Fineman's wish, of course, is father to his thought, and like his angry hard-left Newsweek colleague Jonathan Alter, is plumping for more wholesale political donnybrooks where:

We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by each party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our security.

Irresponsible journalistic hacks like Alter and Fineman would prefer a civil war to domestic tranquility if it would boost their readership and TV profiles.

Judge Richard A. Posner ex cathedra?

Judge Richard A. Posner, the brilliant chief judge of the Seventh Court of Appeals in Chicago is a Renaissance man whose polymath skills, libertarian views and hopelessly eclectic personal passions have kept him from being considered for the Supreme Court His blog is must reading for the high-IQ geeks who believe the University of Chicago is the most fertile seedbed for growing American world-class intellects.

Today the esteemed jurist jumps into the fray over protecting national security in the Washington Post, a paper whose recent moderation reflects a somewhat mature equilibrium not yet achieved by the agenda-driven NYT.

Here are some of the choicest bits:

The goal of national security intelligence is to prevent a terrorist attack, not just punish the attacker after it occurs, and the information that enables the detection of an impending attack may be scattered around the world in tiny bits. A much wider, finer-meshed net must be cast than when investigating a specific crime.

This is obvious to most, but overlooked by many paranoid fantasists of the left who believe the black helicopters are on the way.

[Computerized sifting of data], far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.
The data that make the cut are those that contain clues to possible threats to national security. The only valid ground for forbidding human inspection of such data is fear that they might be used to blackmail or otherwise intimidate the administration's political enemies. That danger is more remote than at any previous period of U.S. history. Because of increased political partisanship, advances in communications technology and more numerous and competitive media, American government has become a sieve. No secrets concerning matters that would interest the public can be kept for long. And the public would be far more interested to learn that public officials were using private information about American citizens for base political ends than to learn that we have been rough with terrorist suspects -- a matter that was quickly exposed despite efforts at concealment.

This is eminently sensible. So what is the problem with massive intercepts if employing them were only for countering terrorism? The Wall between the FBI domestically and the CIA overseas.

Most other nations, such as Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Israel, many with longer histories of fighting terrorism than the United States, have a domestic intelligence agency that is separate from its national police force, its counterpart to the FBI. We do not. We also have no official with sole and comprehensive responsibility for domestic intelligence. It is no surprise that gaps in domestic intelligence are being filled by ad hoc initiatives.

Indeed, as Finding 12 of the REPORT OF THE JOINT INQUIRY INTO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF 9/11 by the House Permanent Select and Senate Select Intelligence Ctes. cites that the FBI is concerned that

the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected Al-Qa’ida representatives in the United States. The effect of these difficulties was compounded by the perception that spread among FBI personnel at Headquarters and the field offices that the FISA process was lengthy and fraught with peril. [emphasis mine] [xvii]

But Judge Posner wonders if the FBI can keep its focus because

it is primarily a criminal investigation agency that has been struggling, so far with limited success, to transform itself. It is having trouble keeping its eye on the ball; an FBI official is quoted as having told the Senate that environmental and animal rights militants pose the biggest terrorist threats in the United States. If only that were so.

But the crux of the problem was outlined in Bill Arkin's article in yesterday’s WaPoblog where the domestic gaps Judge Posner describes in his piece today are delineated:

Certainly the most serious NSA failure was the Joint Inquiry's discovery that one of the future 9/11 hijackers "communicated with a known terrorist facility in the Middle East while he was living in the United States." Yet the intelligence community did not identify the domestic origin of those communications prior to 9/11. The reason, the Joint Inquiry found, was a "gap … between NSA’s coverage of foreign communications and the FBI’s coverage of domestic communications …neither agency focused on the importance of identifying and then ensuring coverage of communications between the United States and suspected terrorist-associated facilities abroad …"

Prior to 9/11, the Joint Inquiry report says, NSA "adopted a policy that avoided intercepting the communications between individuals in the United States and foreign countries." It was NSA policy "not to target terrorists in the United States, even though it could have obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order authorizing such collection."

NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden (now the Deputy Director of National Intelligence) testified to the Joint Inquiry "that NSA did not want to be perceived as targeting individuals in the United States and believed that the FBI was instead responsible for conducting such surveillance."

Judge Posner is correct. We do need to either tear down the walls between the intelligence agencies or institute a new domestic intelligence agency such as the Europeans and Israelis have.

Richardson on Drudgereport

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson gets a Drudgereport links-drubbing. As a piece from a New Mexico paper describes it, Bill has been accused by his female lieutenant governor of often pinching and poking and squeezing her to the extent that she now tries not to sit next to him at functions.

BORING PERSONAL ANECDOTES

Bill Richardson knew [and claimed to be rejected when he asked for a date with] my wife Marilyn when they were both undergraduate students at Tufts in Medford, Mass. My wife went on to work as a Legislative Assistant for a Democratic Senator and they stayed in touch socially. Bill was married and I soon married Marilyn, and we ended up throwing a fund-raiser for Bill at our DC home while he was running for re-election as a N.M. Congressman.

Anyone who knows Bill knows he is a hail-fellow-well-met guy. He’s a very disarming, arms over the shoulder buddy-buddy type of fellow. He has few personal or political enemies. The Lt. Gov. has since withdrawn her remarks.

That evening at our house, he buttonholed me for a minute and as we sipped Scotches, he described a meeting that day with Ted Turner about CNN and shared the confidence that Ted was so drunk he began gatoring on the floor of Richardson’s office. He was full of inside gossip on the political wackiness on both sides of the aisle.

Subsequently, when I was editor of a daily oil newspaper, Bill would often give me a lot of inside info on the Hill and about the industry from a very well-placed and astute perspective. He even put a couple of my articles in the Congressional Record.

Bill, simply put, has an amazing gift to bring out the almost always the best of those he meets. Clinton prized his ability to negotiate with hard cases so much that Bill made a tour of some of the awfulest places on earth, specializing on North Korea, just because Bill’s compassionate empathy fooled his negotiating adversaries into thinking they could gull this bleeding heart.

Not so. Again and again, Bill demonstrates that he serves as a useful emollient in keeping the abrasive edges of diplomatic fault-lines from locking.

His knowledge of energy politics and problems makes him a rare bird on the Democratic team, who often view energy as below their exalted mission to be the socializing nanny to the chattering classes and the backstairs burger flippers in whose direction they throw a program or two.

With credentials in energy and defense, Bill should get a look-see as a VP candidate in 2008. The fact that he is half-Hispanic [his mother lives in Mexico City] and considers illegal immigration the largest problem facing the USA [he told me over 20 years ago] makes him much more interesting than the Beltway-Boston Left Coast liberals jockeying for the VP position in 2008.

Bill has already got a book out, so his machinery begins to be assembled for a bid for national office.

WSJ on the Dems

James Taranto has a best of the Web sum-up on the WSJ editorial blog where he does a summary analysis of the Democrats' quandary. Here are some excerpts:

RealClearPolitics has a brilliant analysis of the dilemma that the Democrats confront:

Not recognizing the political ground had shifted beneath their feet, Democrats continued to press forward with their offensive against the President. They've now foolishly climbed out on a limb that Rove and Bush have the real potential to chop off. One would think that after the political miscalculations the Democrats made during the 2002 and 2004 campaigns they would not make the same mistake a third time, but it is beginning to look a lot like Charlie Brown and the football again.
First, the Democrats still do not grasp that foreign affairs and national security issues are their vulnerabilities, not their strengths. All of the drumbeat about Iraq, spying, and torture that the left thinks is so damaging to the White House are actually positives for the President and Republicans. Apparently, Democrats still have not fully grasped that the public has profound and long-standing concerns about their ability to defend the nation. As long as national security related issues are front page news, the Democrats are operating at a structural political disadvantage. Perhaps the intensity of their left wing base and the overwhelmingly liberal press corps produces a disorientation among Democratic politicians and prevents a more realistic analysis of where the country's true pulse lies on these issues.
With their publicly defeatist language, John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean reinforce these "soft on security" stereotypes, a weakness that more sober-minded Democrats have been trying to mitigate since the late 60's and 70's. . . .
One of the major problems working against Democrats is many on their side appear to be rooting for failure in Iraq and publicly ridicule the idea that we actually might win. When this impression is put in context of the debate over eavesdropping or the Patriot Act, Democrats run the significant risk of being perceived to be more concerned with the enemy's rights than protecting ordinary Americans. This is a loser for Democrats.

Hilary Clinton and Steny Hoyer are clever enough to recognize this, but the rest of the thundering herd resemble Wile E. Coyote endlessly repeating the same mistake.

John Hindraker goes to town on the Dems and the Wile E. Coyote. And a Powerline reader describes the RoadRunner creator Chuck Jones:

Chuck defined Wile in the words of George Santayana who said: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." Assuming that the Dems' aims are to regain control of the House, the Senate and the White House and based upon their seemingly fevered attempts to discredit President Bush by mis-representing the success of the war, advocating for our withdrawal/surrender, and purposefully undermining our efforts/abilities to wage war on an enemy unlike any we have faced before, I think it's fair to say that the Democrats clearly meet Santayana's definition of a fanatic. And since it is Santayana's definition of a fanatic with which Wile's own creator described him, I would conclude that your comparison of our luckless, over-zealous and too-clever-by-half coyote to the leaders of the Democratic party, is not only correct but painfully (for the Dems), astute.

Hinderaker adds: "Remember how Wile viewed even his misadventures as evidence of his superior intellect?" He reproduces a picture of the not-so-wily Wile E. holding a sign identifying himself as a GENIUS. It reminds us of a DemocraticUnderground post we quoted in 2003:

I would dare to assume that most of us here are in the upper 1%-20% of the population intelligence-wise. We must come to the realization that the majority of the population is in the lower 80% to 99% percent of the bell-curve. WE are not the norm. The Republicans understand that the average American is not very bright. They cater and pander to the masses. The Democratic Party tries to appeal to the population about "issues" that these people just don't understand.

"As we noted then, these guys think it an impressive act of cognition to "come to the realization" that the majority of Americans are below the 80th percentile. We like the way that rolls out: Wile (D.) Coyote, Super Genius!"

Combined arrogance and stupidity are two of the strongest components of the fun-house mirror Dem view of the world!

Hitchens on Iraq

Back in the day, I used to buy Christopher drinks and got glazed-eyes as he would wax eloquent on the evils of Reaganism and conspiracies on how V.P. Bush [later #41] arranged to have the Americans in Teheran kept hostage until Reagan was elected and inaugurated. These theories were spiced with his almost rabid anti-Zionism---he once told me over a table at the Iron Gate Restaurant on N St., N.W. that he had no equal as an anti-Semite.

It was the liquor talking, and since he found out in the nineties about his Jewish ancestry, he has spectacularly recanted. Now he is a staunch supporter of Number 41's efforts in Iraq to establish a democratic state. Here are some excerpts from a recent interview:

Hitchens explains that his new status as an articulate advocate of the second Gulf War is essentially the product of personal evolution – beginning with the deep shock he felt over the 1989 "fatwa" issued against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses."
Hitchens saw the fatwa, or marked-for-death, on the head of Rushdie as a dangerous example of "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face."
Following Desert Storm in 1991, Hitchens linked up with Kurdish freedom fighters and saw first hand the towns where the chemical weapons had been used and the uncovering of mass graves.
With the Kurds, he noticed a photo of former President George H.W. Bush taped onto the windshields of their vehicles. He was told by the Kurds with him that but for George H.W. Bush and Operation Desert Storm, they and their families would have been dead.
Hitchens came to see the U.S. intervention in Iraq as inevitable – and a good thing.
"It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia."

On Bush's fumbling and feckless attempts to promote his vision:

Partly because of the debilitating inter-agency fratricide between State, Defense and CIA, the administration has never been able to speak with any coherence about such critical matters as WMDs and the connection between Saddamism and Islamism.
The damage done by this failure is now irreparable. Clearly, the Iraqi democracy theme is more appealing, but that case makes itself without any administration "spin." Meanwhile, it is a rare week that does not bring news of some appalling blunder or misjudgment: most recently the planting of "good news" in the Iraqi press and the misuse of the NSA.

On Defeatism by the left and sister-cities:

The frigid neutrality of the soft-left human rights, ecological and feminist "community" has meantime been eclipsed by something even more contemptible: the open alignment of Ramsey Clark, doyen of the "anti-war" forces, with the past policies of the Saddam Hussein regime. His apologia for the crimes of which Baathism stands accused is an unmitigated disgrace, as is the silence of his political allies on the point.
As for precedent, even during the debate on whether or not to intervene in Bosnia, cities like New York did "adopt" Sarajevo. The connection between the current indifference and an open or covert wish to see a Coalition defeat in Iraq is one of the most horrible things I have ever witnessed.

On the ups and downs of Ahmed Chalabi:

Even if every informer supplied by the INC had been a conscious agent of disinformation (and nobody has ever even suggested as much), it is self-evidently impossible that such a small operation could have hijacked the intelligence services of so many countries.
The CIA has tried to use Dr. Chalabi as a scapegoat for its own incompetence, corruption and defeatism, and has found a depressing number of liberal and "left" allies in this brazen attempt to change the subject. Its attempted frame-up of Chalabi in Baghdad itself has been a resounding failure, while he himself (at some cost in political re-branding) has become an admired and useful politician in his own country.
I think his past ability to work with Kurds, Communists, Shi'a and other disparate forces gives him an advantage, despite the risk that proteanism can be confused with opportunism.

JOINT INQUIRY FINDING 12

I wonder if any of the media watchdogs howling at the moon about the smooth and efficient FISA process will go back to December 20, 2002---exactly three years ago today---to examine some of the 800-odd pages of the
REPORT OF THE JOINT INQUIRY INTO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF 9/11 by the House Permanent Select and Senate Select Intelligence Ctes.


Among the systemic weaknesses that hindered the Intelligence Community’s counter terrorism effortsbefore September 11th are:

Finding 12: In the summer of 2001, when the Intelligence Community was bracing for an imminent Al-Qa’ida attack, difficulties with FBI applications for Foreign Intelligence Act surveillance and the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected Al-Qa’ida representatives in the United States. The effect of these difficulties was compounded by the perception that spread among FBI personnel at Headquarters and the field offices that the FISA process was lengthy and fraught with peril. [xvii]

If not addressed, these weaknesses will continue to undercut U.S. counter terrorist efforts. [xvi]

All emphasis mine.

Here is the raw link if mine doesn't operate.

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/24jul20031400/www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/fullreport_errata.pdf

Some interesting reading, I imagine.

Porter Goss chaired the House Cte and Nancy Pelosi was Vice Chair. Wonder if she bothered to read it. Or if she remembers it at all.

Back to School in New Orleans?

CNN celebrated the re-opening of the first public school in New Orleans on November 28th. In a throw-away line, the secular cable operation says "some private schools opened in October."

Point of fact: my daughter attends an Episcopal school which takes boarders. Several girls from Catholic parochial schools showed up in Boca a week after the hurricane and boarded for three weeks, then returned to NO when their school opened the last week of September.

What this says about the local public education system in New Orleans, already a huge problem, is predictable.

CNN's assertion in saying that "some private schools opened in October" may be true, but at least one Catholic parochial school re-opened in September. Sloppy reporting, as we are accustomed to from this operation.

And for CNN to not put some sort of a spotlight on how rapidly private schools were able to re-open appears to be just another sign of secular, or perhaps pro-public sector, bias.

Snoopgate? Desperation?

I have my own take on revelations about Bush’s authorization to extend the mandate of NSA wire and electronic eavesdropping.

For instance, I wonder why the FISA judicial warrant proviso was so onerous that the FBI could not make after-the-fact requests as are provided for in the law. Surely, three days is enough to get authorization after a wiretap is applied to someone communicating with an Al-Qaeda suspect overseas. Or is it a bureaucratic headache?

Also, Bush is a bit disingenuous when he avers that revealing the enlarged mandate is similar to publishing the fact that Osama bin Laden’s cellphone network was compromised. I’m sure that the subversive types sending and receiving messages overseas from bad guys overseas are aware that they may be overheard. And that won’t stop a culture that produces suicide bombers from taking that risk.

That said, there’s a lot of off-the-wall sawdust coming out in the press that reveals the wackiness of the far-left MSM press. In particular, NEWSWEEK magazine somewhat unhinged commentator Jonathan Alterman asserts that

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

Alterman employs the word “desperation” for a third time later in his hastily written and poorly-thought through screed.

What Alterman calls desperation might actually be a desire by the President to justify a secret program which he believed was helping keep terrorists from another attack on U.S soil. Or anger that classified leaks expose sensitive intelligence sources and methods.

Psychologists call what Alter and other far-left commentators do when they employ emotional language like desperate [bad] or passionate [good to lefties] as “projection.”

Projection applies when one’s own psychological make-up and emotions are presumed to be present in another person with whom one is dealing, or in this case, writing about.

On the few times I have seen Alterman on TV, he appears very emotionally involved in his presentation, not to the point of hysteria like some histrionic female senators and House Minority Leader from California, but on the edge of losing his equilibrium.

As he does further on in this column when he calls for articles of impeachment, comparing Bush’s actions with those of Nixon.

It should be apparent to every balanced observer that Nixon misused his authority for domestic political gain, not as Bush has allegedly done to protect the US from dangerous foreign terrorists.

Alterman’s feverish commentary is obviously hot off the presses, and written for a deadline, and I would hope that he would realize that impeachment for extending national security safeguards could rebound right back at his own Democratic constituency, which has a very low level of confidence concerning national security affairs.

But the hyperbolic inside-the-Beltway-Boston-corridor obsessiveness with process does not play well in the saner parts of the country. The success of the Iraqi elections is reality; classified leaks by "patriots" are kerfufflery.

Investigations by Congress may be warranted, but this is another tempest in a teapot that tends to make all parties involved look a little foolish.

UPDATE

Just watched Alter and over-the-hill mugwump David Gergen on Hardball. Alter was less strident than his article, which the obsequious obsolescent Gergen praised, avoiding the silly comparison with Nixon, though truffle-snuffer Gergen had to mention his own undistinguished service in the Nixon Administration---as the white house liberal/gerbil to test for allergic reactions!


Michelle Malkin and especially RealClear Politics put the sophomoric ueberliberal Alter in his left-of-the-road niche.

Alert the Media: Media bias leans left!

Mangan's Miscellany links to a UCLA Study that took three years to compile that the privately-owned American media leans to the left at about an ADA rating of 62.8 percent. For those lucky enuf to have escaped living inside the Beltway-Boston Corridor and the Left Coast, this is hardly news.

Surprisingly, the public PBS and NPR are rated less liberal than the private media, although not by much [61%].

The biggest surprise is that the most liberal of all media outlets is the WSJ, with CBS Evening News, the NYT and LAT all close behind at 2,3,4.

The only two out of the twenty major outlets who scored right of center were Fox News Brit Hume and the Washington Times, although Brit Hume's was almost dead-center near the ADA 50 yard line.

Another surprise, the Drudgereport scores left of center, which will not shut the sputum-flecked, obscenity-spewing mouths of some of the most egregiously leftist blogs from calling Matt Drudge a rightwingnut out of touch with America.

Indeed, in the electronic media, the five most centrist news outlets are PBS Lehrer, CNN Aaron Brown [RIP along with Bob Novak as CNN lurches to the left under Jon Klein], Hume's Fox News, the Drudgereport and ABC's GoodMorningAmerica.

I predict that now that Andrew Heyward and Dan Rather have been guillotined, the Committee of Public Safety at CBS might drift rightward away from the most liberal of the electronic outlets.

Whowoulddathunk the Wall Street Journal as the most liberal of the broadsheet rags? No surprise about the Wash Times, but the WaPo is in the middle of the pack compared to the NYT and LAT [who will inch rightward as some of the Robert Scheer types are commanded to leave].

The study will appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The University of Missouri was a major participant in the study, led by UCLA, and elaborate precautions---including funding safeguards---were taken to ensure an objective overview.

I'd be surprised to see any of the major media outlets carry this study, outside of perhaps Fox and the Wash Times.

I've been having trouble with links, so hope this summary helps.

Bush Lied: Iraqis dyed-----THEIR FINGERS!

Just one of the many truths the best export Canada ever gave us writes in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Emigre from Canadian leftist wackiness [he now lives in New Hampshire] Mark Steyn has a piece that classically puts the Democrats’ War Against the War on Terror into the correct, er, right perspective!

Hope this link works, because all I can do is put a maraschino cherry on top of this Sun-Times Sunday Sundae.

LINK DID NOT WORK. READ AND ENJOY A CREDIBLE VERSION OF THE IRAQI ELECTIONS.

Well, that old Iraqi quagmire just keeps getting worse and worse, if only for the Democratic Party. What was the straw they were clutching at back in January? Oh, yeah, sure, gazillions of Kurds and Shiites might have gone to the polls, but where were the Sunni? As some of us said at the time, the Sunni'll come out tomorrow. And so they did. On Thursday, they voted in record numbers, leaving Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats frantically scrambling for another disaffected Iraqi minority group they could use as proof that the whole crazy neocon war-for-oil scam was a bust.



Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any disaffected Iraqi minority groups left. Oh, wait, there's Ahmed at 37 Sword of the Infidel Slayer Gardens in Ramadi. Apparently, he's still rejecting the new constitution. Maybe, if we're lucky, he's got a brother who's mildly irked. Whoops, sorry, they just went off to vote, too.

Heigh-ho. The Iraq election's over, the media did their best to ignore it, and, judging from the rippling torsos I saw every time I switched on the TV, the press seem to reckon that that gay cowboy movie was the big geopolitical event of the last week, if not of all time. Yes, yes, I know: They're not, technically, cowboys, they're gay shepherds, but even Hollywood isn't crazy enough to think it can sell gay shepherds to the world. And the point is, even if I was in the mood for a story about two rugged insecure men who find themselves strangely attracted to each other in a dark transgressive relationship that breaks all the rules, who needs Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger when you've got Howard Dean and Abu Musad al-Zarqawi? Yee-haw! And, if that sounds unfair, pick almost any recent statement by a big-time Dem cowboy and tell me how exactly it would differ from the pep talks Zarqawi gives his dwindling band of head-hackers -- Dean arguing that America can't win in Iraq, Barbara Boxer demanding the troops begin withdrawing on Dec. 15, John Kerry accusing American soldiers of terrorizing Iraqi women and children, Jack Murtha declaring that the U.S. Army is utterly broken. Pepper 'em with a handful of "Praise be to Allahs" and any one of those statements could have been uttered by Zarqawi.

The Democratic Party have contrived to get themselves into a situation where bad news from Iraq is good for them and good news from Iraq is bad for them. And as there's a lot more good news than bad these days, that puts them, politically, in a tough spot -- even with a fawning media that, faced with Kerry and Murtha talking what in any objective sense is drivel, decline to call for the men with white coats but instead nod solemnly and wonder whether Bush is living "in a bubble."

One day Iraq will be a G7 member hosting the Olympics in the world's No. 1 luxury vacation resort of Fallujah, and the Defeaticrat Party will still be running around screaming it's a quagmire. It's not just that Iraq is going better than expected, but that it's a huge success that's being very deftly managed: The timeframe imposed on the democratic process turns out to have worked very well -- the transfer of sovereignty, the vote on a constitutional assembly, the ratification of the constitution, the vote for a legislature -- and, with the benefit of hindsight, it now looks like an ingeniously constructed way to bring the various parties on board in the right order: first the Kurds, then the Shia, now the Sunni. That doesn't leave many folks over on the other side except Zarqawi and Dean. What do the two have in common? They're both foreigners, neither of whom have the slightest interest in the Iraqi people.

And no, I'm not questioning their patriotism. Honestly, who can be bothered questioning anything so footling as Howard Dean's patriotism? If you're a Democratic patriot and you're outraged by my linking your party to the "insurgents," take it up with your leaders: They're the ones who've over-invested the party in American failure. And instead of being angry at me you should be ashamed of them. Your party is regarded as unserious on national security because it got it wrong last time round, when Kerry spent the last half of the Cold War siding with every loser on the planet -- opposing the liberation of Grenada, supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And at least that little Sandinista guy looked awful cute in his fatigues, like a novelty houseboy Teresa picked up on vacation. It's hard to believe a bunch of crazy mullahs and suicide bombers are going to do much for the lefty T-shirt business.

George Clooney, the matinee idol, made an interesting point the other day. He said that "liberal" had become a dirty word and he'd like to change that. Fair enough. So I hope he won't mind if I make a suggestion. The best way to reclaim "liberal" for the angels is to get on the right side of history -- the side the Iraqi people are on. The word "liberal" has no meaning if those who wear the label refuse to celebrate the birth of a new democracy after 40 years of tyranny. Yet, if you wandered the Internet on Thursday, you came across far too many "liberals" who watched the election, shrugged and went straight back to Valerie Plame, WMD, Bush lied.

Bush lied, people dyed. Their fingers. That's what this is about: Millions of Kurds, Shia and Sunnis beaming as they emerge from polling stations and hold up their purple fingers after the freest, fairest election ever held in the Arab world. "Liberal" in the American sense is a dirty word because it's come to stand for a shriveled parochial obsolescent irrelevance, of which ''Good Night, and Good Luck,'' Clooney's dreary little retread of the McCarthy years, is merely the latest example. (Clooney says he wants more journalists to "speak truth to power," which is why I'm insulting his movie.)

The Anglo-American political tradition is the most successful in the world in part because of the concept of "loyal opposition." Yes, the party out of office opposes the party in office and hopes to supplant it, but not at the expense of the broader political culture. A party that winds up cheerleading for a deranged loser death cult is the very definition of pointless self-defeating sour oppositionism. So, as Zarqawi flails, Dean and Murtha and Kerry flail ever more pathetically, too. Just wait till the WMD turn up.

? Mark Steyn, 2005

Pelosi and Emanuel: Follow the Leader?

Entitled “Pelosi Hails Democrats' Diverse War Stances,” Dan Balz has an entertaining WaPo article describing Pelosi’s new Democratic position on exit strategies for Iraq. The gist of the piece: there is no position.

This fits with her leadership strategy: there is no strategy.

Across the board, Pelosi has been wrongfooted and wrongheaded on major policy positions. But after Murtha turned tail in November, her bolt to the vanguard of cut-and-run Dems was followed by immediate repudiation by Steny Hoyer, the Minority Whip and her number two [and a much more highly respected politico than the Minority Leader].

As he writes, Balz seems to warm to the task of making Pelosi look silly. After Hoyer and all other Democratic leaders in the House declined to follow Commander-in-Chief Pelosi, Balz says:

Pelosi said Democrats will produce an issue agenda for the 2006 elections but it will not include a position on Iraq. There is consensus within the party that President Bush has mismanaged the war and that a new course is needed, but House Democrats should be free to take individual positions, she sad.

A consensus, but no position. Except of course the mantra of diversity. Whew! And there’s more:

She said her support for Murtha was not intended to forge a Democratic position on the war, adding that she blocked an effort by some of her colleagues to put the Democrats on record backing Murtha.

Her comments ruling out a caucus position appeared to put Pelosi at odds with some other party officials. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean recently said Democrats were beginning to coalesce around a strategy that would pull out all troops over the next two years. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said on the day Murtha offered his plan, "As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we'll have a position."

Emanuel was one of Clinton’s most astute strategists and his remark on “the right time” is pregnant with irony and contradicts Pelosi's statement proclaiming diversity in 2006. Timing does not seem to be Pelosi’s strongest suit. Nor does leadership.

Pelosi said she had not consulted with Dean or Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) before taking her position. Her action angered some Democrats, who believed it left the party vulnerable to criticism from the Republicans, but cheered the party's antiwar activists who want party leaders to challenge Bush more vigorously on the war.

Perhaps the fact that Pelosi represents San Francisco’s left-most district causes her naturally to go after the whacko activists.

But Balz slips in his best shot for Pelosi’s claim of numerous unenumerated victories, naming only Bush's failed attempt to modify Social Security.

"Not only did we take him down on that, but we took down a lot of his credibility as being somebody who cared about 'people like me,' " she said.

Pelosi is one of the richest Democratic members of Congress, owning a large chain of restaurants that do not employ unionized workers, and a Napa Valley vineyard and spa complex catering to a very wealthy clientele.

Populist Pelosi says “People like me” as she pays minimum wages to non-union employees of her numerous family enterprises.

Don’t look for the Dems to take over the House under her “leadership.”

ANTI-BUSH NYT gets TRIFECTA!

The New York Times considers itself Horatio at the Bridge when it comes to protecting the civil liberties of American citizens, so when a story about a year ago started to be pieced together by national security reporter James Risen, you'd think the Grey Lady would hasten to inform Amcits of their imperilled rights.

When the NYT finally broke the story, they did so the day after the successful Iraqi election, depriving much of the good-news momentum Bush had generated. Bush seemed to be turning a corner, then back into process-legalistic-paranoid left wingnut crosshairs.

They did so shortly before the Patriot Act was voted on by the Senate, and the Senate promptly voted down the extension of the Act, which was expected to pass despite a threat of a filibuster by Sen. Russ Fein gold {D-Wis}.

Finally, the NYT printed the story shortly before Risen’s book on the subject is due to come out.

Ann Kornblut of the Times told Chris Mathews on MSNBC’s Hardball that the NYT doesn’t plan the timing of a story to diminish or enhance other stories, not even one so predictable as an election vote planned months ago to the day.

Even Mathews, a reliably left-of-center host of a program notable for not admiring Bush, was skeptical.

After reading Ken Auletta’s flaying of NYT Publisher “Pinch” Sulzberger in The New Yorker, I’m skeptical too.

George Will hits pay dirt on ANWR!

Just as I heard for the umpteenth time that a vote approving drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was being held up by procedural matters [20 House Republicans are holding it up on this particular occasion], the thought occurred to me that energy may not be the largest problem facing America today.

The problem may be a failing system of government, and George Will gets close to the problem of just what is really behind the insane antics of Senators Kerry, Boxer, and other creatures of the far left fringe of the Democratic Party. What these dishonest ideologues are so frantically opposed to is really not a big deal, as Will marshals out facts to counter the passionate emotionalism of ANWR’s opponents.

His philosophical point is that, behind the bucolic and pristine “rugged individualist” theatrics that environmentalists trot out on ANWR lies a more radical purposeful agenda. But Will says it best:

But for many opponents of drilling in the refuge, the debate is only secondarily about energy and the environment. Rather, it is a disguised debate about elemental political matters.
For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society's politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.
The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society's balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.
People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources.
Therefore, one of the collectivists' tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern -- the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.

Okay, maybe Ol’Philosopher George may be pushing it a bit on “producing scarcities,” but the wacky dialectic of the Left as pushed by frauds like Kerry certainly gets close to entirely counterintuitive. The entire Left Coast lives in an alternate universe on energy sourcing, and the mantra of “pristine ANWR” certainly fits into their total denial of reality. Kerry's slice of the East Coast is hardly saner.

Like Roe vs. Wade, ANWR has become a symbol, the most powerful motivator to the process-obsessed Leftist mind. The fact that Roe vs. Wade is bad law, as the current Economist points out, is misted over by “penumbras emanating” from what the Founding Fathers intended. ANWR is even more insane than Justice Douglas’ infamous jabberwocky.

But doctrine to the hysteric “impassioned” shadow-Presidium keeps their eyes on the skies. Practical, down-to-earth, day-to-day concerns are beneath these mystics’ attention, as their knowledge is derived as some sort of infused contemplation from a Cartesian source based on mind-over-matter symbolism. Or whatever.

Better let George finish up,

ANWR has become sacramental for environmentalists who speak about it the way Wordsworth wrote about the Lake Country.
Few opponents of energy development in what they call "pristine" ANWR have visited it. Those who have and who think it is "pristine" must have visited during the 56 days a year when it is without sunlight. They missed the roads, stores, houses, military installations, airstrip and school. They did not miss seeing the trees in area 1002. There are no trees.
Opponents worry that the caribou will be disconsolate about, and their reproduction disrupted by, this intrusion by man. The same was said 30 years ago by opponents of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which brings heated oil south from Prudhoe Bay. Since the oil began flowing, the caribou have increased from 5,000 to 31,000. Perhaps the pipeline's heat makes them amorous.
Ice roads and helicopter pads, which will melt each spring, will minimize man's footprint, which will be on a 2,000-acre plot about one-fifth the size of Dulles Airport. Nevertheless, opponents say the environmental cost is too high for what the ineffable John Kerry calls "a few drops of oil." Some drops. The estimated 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil -- such estimates frequently underestimate actual yields -- could supply all the oil needs of Kerry's Massachusetts for 75 years.

Now this is a practical response to a real problem.

Iraq Elections tip of the Iceberg?

Recent elections in Lebanon, Egypt, even local polls in Saudi Arabia are evidence beyond the glaringly obvious success today in Iraq that the ancient Ummat il-Arabiya is being deeply stirred by President Bush’s fortuitous and accidental conversion to democratic nation-building due to his miscalculations in Iraq.

To see Joe Biden doing salaams to today’s events in Iraq demonstrates that at least one skillful political weathervane is hedging his bets. I’ll bet Reid, Pelosi, Dean, and perhaps Murtha are biting their tongues over the rapid and unexpected Sunni rush to the ballot boxes. What if Bush pulls it off?

Fouad Ajami notes recently after a trip to the region that “the Middle East is Bush Country.” The infrastructure of civil society in the various Middle East autocracies is based on a military model, with little or no room for independent activity. Even economic transactions bear the crushing weight of mindless bureaucratic inertia. But the subjects of these bureaucratic houses of cards are yearning to become citizens of a westernized polity, Ajami believes.

Or are they?

I believe they are, but I also suspect that free democratic elections in many countries may turn out to be a one-time event, bringing a religious party to power whose main plank becomes adhesion to the sharia.

The sharia does not support opposing parties, or even a secular view of the world.

As a political officer in Saudi Arabia, I recall the overwhelming conservatism of the ruling elites, all the more crushing because the Saudi townsfolk and the Bedu were even more conservative than the unelected officials comprising the government.

In Saudi Arabia, for instance, when they inaugurated female education in the fifties, Minister of Education Prince Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz and his deputy Prince Sultan had to paint over the windows of school buses carrying girls to school, lest the parents stone the buses!

In Saudi, some speculate that Osama bin Laden might win a country-wide election were he allowed on the ballot!

However, not every state in the region has inhabitants as hidebound as the Kingdom. The problem in Saudi Arabia is perhaps country-specific, as the ruling Royals allowed the Ulema to control lower education in a decision in the seventies which allowed the Royal Family a free hand in other areas, but produced a generation of pious faineants.

Egypt may be the most enigmatic contender for democracy among all Arab countries, with a sophisticated religious party, the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, prevented from attaining real representation by a repressive military and police apparatus. The intelligence police are so numerous in Cairo that they employ ten thousand automobiles, which they wanted to propel by Amoco natural gas in a large fleet conversion while I worked at Amoco. And that was a decade ago, so you can bet that more cars and mukhabarraat are patrolling the Cairo streets.

The recent police brutality at polling places in Cairo marred the earlier relatively fair stages of selecting a parliament. Mubarak’s goons are always at the ready and behind them looms the all-powerful [against its own people] Egyptian military establishment.

With even the BBC hailing the Iraq elections [as well as Air America?!?], it appears that the yay-sayers and beleaguered George Bush will have a few weeks surcease from the nanny-press.

And maybe even another bump in the polls?

But the Middle East is an elephant’s graveyard of hopes and aspirations, and even the celebrating Iraqi voters today are calling for strong leadership, which often translates rapidly into a strongman.

Let’s put Saddam away for good, at least in Iraq.

Sen. Proxmire RIP

Sen. William Proxmire died today of Alzheimer's Disease at the age of 90. Proxmire was first elected to the Senate while I was in High School in Milwaukee and I can remember my father railing that Proxmire was a carpetbagger, having been a Law Professor at Northwestern Law School in Evanston, Ill.

Nonetheless, his family had Wisconsin roots, having earned a fortune during the 19th century logging boom in northern Wisc.

WARNING: TWO BORING PERSONAL ANECDOTES

After entering the State Dept in 1969, I went to meet the two Senators from my home state and I remember vividly my meeting with Proxmire as he had recently undergone much publicized hair transplants which appeared single file like cornrows marching across his bald forepate. Proxmire himself showed polite interest in my assignment.

His staff afterward recommended I send them a sample of my writing which just a couple of weeks ago going through my papers I found in an envelope returned to me with a cover letter from his chief of staff.

After I left the State Department, I married a Legislative Assistant to a Democratic Senator. Proxmire's female LA was a good friend of my wife and works until this day for Sen. Herbert Kohl. [Before marrying an LA from Sen. Sarbanes, I dated an LA of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, recently passed away]

At any rate, I found myself using Proxmire's own personal office on the Hill doing projects for the Democratic Party while the Senator was out of town or on foreign travel. His staff's nickname for the Senator was "The Dummy." They explained that he was a bit too easy to manipulate.

With Wisconsin's effective Russ Feingold cranking up for a Presidential race in 2008, it is easy to forget the days of the doldrums of Wisconsin Senatorial representation.
Nil de mortuis nisi bono so I should end on a high note. Proxmire may not have been an effective legislator, but he fought, in his maverick fashion, a highly publicized campaign against government waste called THE GOLDEN FLEECE AWARD given each month to an especially preposterous example of legislative pork. He also made much of not spending any money except a pittance on his re-election campaigns.

Nowadays, his brand of eccentric individualism would be laughed at as hopelessly corny. With porkomaniac Ted Stevens of Alaska as President pro Tem of the Senate, he might not even be allowed to bestow his awards for presumptive peculation were he around to do so.

Rice supplants Rumsfeld on RECONSTRUCTION

The Financial Times says that Bush has decided that the State Department would lead all US post-conflict reconstruction, a move that supersedes the controversial decision to give that task to the Pentagon in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

Back then, State Department experts who had planned for the post-war period were pushed aside by Pentagon officials, including defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who strongly resisted the notion of nation-building.

The appointment of L. Paul Bremer and Bremer’s subsequent disastrous tenure as head of the Coalition Authority has become canonical writ on how not to staff and run a complex nation-building operation. But the ludicrous extent of the Pentagon’s wrongheadedness across the board has made its amateur misdeeds the stuff of legend that would be hilarious were it not so arrogant and tragic.

As Scott McConnell writes in a review of George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate:

It is one thing to relate how Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon made no plans for post-invasion contingencies, even as it succeeded in blocking knowledgeable military and State Department officials from the postwar planning process. Or to describe how Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith—entrusted by Rumsfeld to prepare for the post-invasion—appointed his former law partner Michael Mobbs, a man with no relevant experience, to head civil administration in postwar Baghdad, and this personality—after clearing the matter with Scooter Libby —awarded Halliburton a $7 billion no-bid contract.

But it is even better to learn that Mobbs first showed up in the region “looking as if he were dressed for West Palm Beach” and, when he was unable to reach any decisions about civil administration, abandoned Baghdad to hang out in the Kurdish area with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi exiles.

The good news is that Mr Bush’s speeches this past week have each included an usually candid admission of the difficulties the US has faced in Iraq. On Wednesday he reiterated in particularly blunt terms that “it is true that much of the [pre-war] intelligence turned out to be wrong”.

A former senior official involved in what he called the “chaos” of post-war reconstruction efforts in Iraq said yesterday’s announcement also affirmed the growing power and influence of Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state.



It will be a while before the shake-out from such a switch in responsibility for reconstruction takes place, if the Administration is truly serious about nation-building, something that Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld never were.

The elevation of Rice, even symbolically, by the President’s new directive has the effect of an implied slap on the wrists of Rumsfeld and his political protector Cheney.

Cheney has always been in the vanguard of policy-making in this Administration. Whether Cheney will continue his energetic lobbying efforts on the Hill concerning controversial topics such as the use of torture remains to be seen.

The time may have arrived when Cheney and his escort Rumsfeld may have to get off their high horses and defer to Rice and the State Department in carrying out foreign policy.

Froomkin fans freak out

Buzzmachine hosts a one-sided discussion praising Froomkin’s Bush-bashing as "telling the truth" and "factual analysis." But again and again, Froomkin leaves out the part about the glass being half-full.

E.g., Froomkin today mentions that a poll [USA Today?] of Iraqis has two-thirds against continued US “occupation.” Duh…. What sane person would not resent a foreign army in their country?

But what Froomkin neglects to mention is that the same poll says that over seventy percent of Iraqis think things are getting better.

That doesn’t fit Froomkin’s Bush-bashing script.

Liberals leave out any positive “good” news and accentuate any negative “bad” news. It’s called agitprop and is an old liberal hard-left practice. Works every time in demoralizing the home front unless positive spinners follow the media/academia nihilists who say the glass is half empty and point out the balanced side.

That's why Post Political Editor John Harris is suggesting a conservative blogger to provide "balance."

But Harris' sensible proposal unleashed a torrent of liberal hard-left invective making the point that Froomkin is "telling the truth" and how can you have another version of the truth?

True to their totalitarian forebears, the liberal commentariat wants no opposition to their agitprop. Harris is being flamed in the comments section of the Washington Post Blog by the liberal remnants of the far left tonight for advocating balance and for putting Froomkin in the "Opinion" section where he belongs.

Streisand-like threats to cancel subscriptions and admonitions that the sky is falling are the stock-in-trade of these bitter-enders.

Just to end on a less jarring note, Froomkin's piece tonight lays off the heavy artillery he usually employs when Bush gives a public speech. Froomkin actually damned Bush with faint praise for taking questions.


Read Thomas Sowell in RealClearPolitics or Prof Socolow in, surprise!, today’s Globe. The Boston Globe somewhat surprisingly has a very deep and thoughtful piece which gives a broader perspective than I have in the paragraphs above. Michael Socolow of Maine University points out that

"too many journalists practice reporting informed by a pessimistic cynicism. This corrosive attitude is damaging the news industry; newspaper circulation and TV news viewership continue to decline."

Saudi donates $20 million to Georgetown and Harvard

Saudi financier Waleed bin Talal bin Abd al-Aziz has given a donation of $20 million to Harvard and Georgetown.

WARNING: Boring personal anecdote intervenes:

I have a special interest in Waleed because back in the '70s a young British diplomat and I drove to Meda'in Salih in western Saudi, where a sister Nabatean city to Petra in Jordan is located. On our way in Range Rovers across a trackless desert, we ran into a young Saudi prince who had a water truck and his own personal soccer team along with him. All were in a number of large tents. The prince spoke good English and said he was a son of Prince Talal, who was the smartest son of Abd al-Aziz [Talal was named Minister of Defense of the Kingdom at the ripe old age of nineteen!]. This young prince was about twenty and spoke English so much better than any other prince of the blood I ever met, he may have been Waleed. In any event, he seemed to have inherited his father's brains, although Talal was banished from the Royal Family after running off to Egypt to be a fan of Nasser.

The blogosphere reaction to the largesse of the richest Prince runs the usual gamut of Saudi-bashing, but Prince Waleed is noted by an article in the Boston Globe to be making "donations to back the development of American studies centers at universities in Cairo and Beirut."

Not mentioned by the NYT or WaPo articles, Waleed's sponsoring of American studies in the Middle East can be described as an act of bravery. Given the implacable hostility of the Al-Qaeda terrorists and the rigid stance of the Wahhabists in his own native Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis the United States, Prince Waleed may find himself a target of America-hating crazies in his own country or elsewhere on his travels.

At least he puts his money where his mouth is concerning ittifahum beyn il-baladayn

Oh, and one footnote. My wife is of Greek extraction and knows George Tenet and his background very well. She assures me that George is Greek and not ethnically Albanian.

Australia versus France

Australia is the most recent country affected by an inherent inability for recent Middle East immigrants to fit into the new environment around them. As an Oz letter to the blogger linked above notes, a lot of different immigrant groups from East Asia and elsewhere have been welcomed in Australia over the last couple of decades and have managed to blend into the political and social life of the country. But the mostly Lebanese Muslim recent arrivals have formed gangs, done drive-by shootings, and make rape of Anglo/Celtic females their political statement.

Another blogger on this subject, Mangan's Miscellany has a number of blogs on the Sydney riots, and quotes Laurence Auster thusly:

So it’s better for this to start now, while our side is still the overwhelming majority, rather than later, when we will be much weaker. Always remember that the key to the mass non-Western immigration over the past 50 years has been the Western people’s passive acceptance of it—and of the liberal regime that made openness to the Other our god. If at any point in this miserable process of self-undoing we had exercised our rights as a people and stood up and said, loud and clear, “We don’t want you here,” the immigrants would not have come. Though the white rioters in Sydney are only young rowdy men, they are the first significantly sized Western group to have done that.

Yes, the above may be extreme, but the Australian populace reacted differently to the provocations than the French populace did during their own recent bit of anarchy, even though the constabulary and gendarmerie proved equally feckless and afraid to act.

After the Muslim outrages, the Australians organized themselves independently, via cellphones and text messages that could not be intercepted by the police [who were demonstrating their overlawyered training by supporting the Mid-Eastern thugs], and evidently wreaked some havoc back in the home neighborhoods of the Lebanese beach raiders.

The French, to no one's surprise, cowered in their dwellings with their esprit du clocher and whimpered that they were frightened and waited for the police to defend them from the arsonists and other rioters.

Having lived in France, I often was reminded of the wisdom of Wellington's epithet that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Even back in Napoleon's day, a sense of self-organization when cut off from authority was lacking in the French. The time I spent in France had two occasions when I was provoked by French youths, but saw them flee when I responded by counterattacking them.

I was told by long-time ex-pats living in France that French youths preferred to manifest their aggression by verbal and rhetorical ambuscades rather than physical threats. I lived in London for several months in 1990 and saw that the Anglo/Celtic Brits are much more thuggish and physical, and Rule Britannia for all that!

This reliance on negotiation and motivating opponents not to infringe on one's rights is all well and good in a Cartesian la-la land. But it did not work during the Phony War of 1939-40 when the French sat in their Maginot fortresses believing they were defending their country.

I believe that the French have a much larger number of Muslims and Africans living in-country than they have acknowledged. When I was Vice Consul in Lyon back in the seventies, the Prefect of the Rhone Prefecture told me there were half-a-million North African Arabs [and Berbers] in the Rhone Pref. Multiply that by 30 years and there could be 12 million Muslims and Africans overall in France today and that would be 20% of the population. And to make the whole situation more strange, the French do not have accurate census data on the number of Muslim and African immigrants!

Jean-Marie Le Pen was the second largest vote-getter in the last presidential elections after besting Jospin, the Socialist candidate to get to the final tranche, where he was trounced by Chirac. My guess is that Le Pen may not win in 2007, but he will get a resounding cri de coeur from the French electorate.

Media at War

Thomas Sowell has a short editorial commentary today in RealClearPolitics which echoes something a Fox Commentator slung at Democratic Consultant Bob Beckel this afternoon. Julia Huddy, I believe, tweaked Bob for ignoring insurgents’ mistakes and losses.

The mainstream media has a sure-fire formula for rubbing the Bush Administration‘s face in the dirt and encouraging America’s enemies both at the same time.

Simply report extensively on every American casualty and Iraqi government mishap and ignore insurgent losses completely. Lord Haw-Haw employs the Exempt Media and their “passionate” stooges to put every shortcoming and eff-up the US makes under a microscope.

The insurgents and Al-Qaeda cruise effortlessly above this MSM obsession with bad news. And Tokyo Rose has a column in the NYT as she tries to hawk a book on why men are not necessary. The “Q” word is employed as often as possible by the Liberal Death Star and its satellites, WaPo and LAT.

Just last night I picked up a coffee table book named The Edwardians, hoping to find surcease from today’s cares by browsing through a long-gone era. But the book was written by noted Labour Party advocate J.B. Priestley and I read several pages on the Boer War that could be lifted from yesterday’s headlines.

King Edward was forced by the unpopularity of the Boer War to forego any trips abroad for almost two years, except to friendly confines like Portugal and Italy. Riots broke out in Birmingham and a man was killed outside a speech venue for the far-left agitator Lloyd George. [Can you imagine the martyrdom symbols carried by the moonbats were a demonstrator to be killed protesting the Iraq War?]

Vietnam was even more fraught with internal discord on the home front, and as Sowell notes, huge losses in the Civil War and WWII make today’s casualties miniscule in comparison.

Sowell points out the plangent interrogation of Rumsfeld, a man I do not admire, by PBS chief presentor, Jim Lehrer.

The Boston Globe somewhat surprisingly has a very deep and thoughtful piece which gives a broader perspective than I have in the paragraphs above. Michael Socolow of Maine University points out that

"too many journalists practice reporting informed by a pessimistic cynicism. This corrosive attitude is damaging the news industry; newspaper circulation and TV news viewership continue to decline."

The media will end up paying a price much more severe than declining subscriptions and viewership if the whack-job antiwar crazies continue to get the support of the MSM.

I predict a great interruption in the whine-intensity as the fumbling Bush game-plan reaches the next milestone tomorrow with the democratic polls in Iraq. That is an uplifting spectacle even Bush-haters can’t hide.

But unless Osama or Zarqawi are apprehended, the MSM will steadily and ceaselessly drum retreat and point out US faults. It’s the only way these nay-sayers can project their "corrosive cynicism" on the political stage. And these MSM outlets, like Hollyweird, will suffer losses in revenues to match their already precipitous decline in status.

Dogs yap at Woodward's heels

The second-string B-List reporters continue to harass Bob Woodward for regarding the Plame “Affair” for what it is, a trumped-up tempest-in-a-teapot, until events conspired to require him to go public on the simple fact that he knew Plame was Wilson’s wife and formerly a covert CIA agent.

The latest bow-wow journalist to attack Woodward is LATimes grifter Howard Fineman who called the WaPo a “court stenographer.”

Of course, Woodward is getting history at first draft from a privileged position, which drives the ink-stained squad bananas [although with them it is only a short putt!] and blinds them to the real service that he performed with Plan of Attack and other books hot off the Camp David working group meetings.

If Woodward were not there, no one would be there for the Fourth Estate, certainly not a certified liberal like Fineman, recording Tenet’s famous “slam dunk” assertion on WMD.

But the major problem hacks like David Broder and Fineman have with Woodward lies in his conservative views, rooted in strong Midwestern values, that he brings to his projects. Views which reporters at the Exempt Media must hide if they wish to retain their inkpots full in outlets like the NYT, WaPo, and LAT. Even a relatively balanced POV like the Moderate Voice overlooks the heart of the matter.

The key to the whole affair is that Woodward knows Plamegate is a scam, and he had the liberty first to get the intelligence on Plame and then make the judgment that this is another snipe hunt designed to sell papers and hurt Bush.

He is a man of integrity and is being pilloried by the ink-stained streetwalkers for standing by his own convictions.

He doesn’t have to play the phony Beltway games they do and the B-List reporters hate him for it.

NYT on conservative blogs

The pathetic couple of paragraphs the exempt media Liberal Death Star printed over the weekend displays the utter and absolute cluelessness inside the NYT bubble. Michael Crowley’s flatulent assertion that “liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders” is contrasted with “Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates.” This might be true with qualifiers, to a certain extent. Conservatives certainly do tend to have better written blogs, at least from my limited perusal, while liberals tend to hysteric invective which makes the next sentence in this hack’s foreshortened screed, namely that “[conservatives] are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters…” directly contrary to fact.

The hyper-manic invective of DailyKos and Eschaton, for example, reflects their readership, whose vocabulary, outside of obscenities and scatological references[!], is devoid of descriptive and nuanced analysis. Raw emotions and accusations of being paid for blogging are normal from the left any time they are contradicted. And President Bush summons insane screeching from the maniac left.

Crowley may have one point. Drudge and Limbaugh between them have a gigantic audience, and both plug into conservatives like Michelle Malkin and others who are also being picked up by Fox TV. Complaints that this gives the conservatives an advantage derive from the NYT’s clueless ignorance about the MSM being somewhat left-of-center, and CNN is to the left of the MSM, now that Anderson Cooper has stolen Aaron Brown’s balanced point-of-view and hijacked it leftwards.

But my favorite blogger remains the libertarian polymath Richard Posner, whose attitude from cats to acts of God remains centered on self-development. God bless the University of Chicago!

Syria and the Middle East

Gibran Tueni, editor of An-Nahar newspaper and MP in the Lebanese Parliament, has been murdered and that makes two dead Lebanese journalist-politicians in three months after the similar killing of Samir Qassir. In October, a blog called al-Hiwar had questioned whether the Lebanese custom of news editors and publishers entering politics was problematic, and this is fresh evidence that the practice may be unhealthy in assassin-prone Beirut.

Gibran Tueni’s father, Ghassan, was a government minister, ambassador, and MP all while he ran An-Nahar as a bully pulpit for his frequently half-baked ideas. But the murderous situation in Lebanon, squeezed between Israel to the south and Syria to the north and east and of course inside this tiny country with Hezbollah, makes politics a sport played with live ammunition.

Syria is a country literally out of control, except by the amorphous mukhabarrat, the five intelligence agencies operating semi-autonomously outside direct supervision of all but close Assad family members. The Syrian military serves as the default ruler when the Baathist apparatus does not work.

Syria, like Iraq, is a relic of the Ottoman times when the Turks fostered minorities like the Iraqi Sunni or Syrian Alawites to provide their officer class in the Arab wilayets. The Alawites, who have great respect for the fourth caliph ’Ali, have an affiliation with the Shi’ites and are therefore natural sponsors and protectors of the militant Hezbollah Shi‘ites, who dominate South Lebanon where a Shia majority populate the countryside. And this makes Syria a natural soul-companion with Iran, although the secular Syrian Baathists and the Islamic Republic differ widely on the role of religion in the state.

Indeed, the recent Administration’s intoning about a “caliphate” established by Al-Qaeda “from Indonesia to Spain” becomes highly suspect when viewed against the backdrop of Shia prominence in Iran, Iraq, south Lebanon, parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

However, the neo-con dream of overthrowing the Alawite 12% of the population running Syria would become a nightmare if the Al-Qaeda Sunnis gained a prominent hand in a post-Assad Syria. Al-Qaeda which historically has been Sunni would welcome a Syria without the Alawites in charge. And caliphates in the past several hundred years have all been Sunni.

The Bush Administration has inadvertently advanced the cause of Shi’ite governance with its Iraq invasion, and thus strengthened Iran’s hold, already strong in south Lebanon, over another area in the region. This unintended consequence stems from the basic clumsy ignorance of the neo-cons of the entire region and their stumping for some causes they perceive as pro-Israeli that all but the most deranged Israelis decline to support.

Israel dislikes Syria, but has been able to work with the Syrians in the past. A post-Alawite Syria would mean another drastic turn of the kaleidoscope in the Middle East. Mutterings in DC concerning a new regime there should be thought through, in order to avoid another insurgency.

The prospect of a Sunni caliphate is so minimal that the mere mention of it demonstrates the provincial and uninformed point of view of a US administration that refused and continues to refuse to listen to experts within the US government, like the CIA and State Department, who might disagree with aspects of its goals and means to attain them.

Hopefully, armchair generalissimo Cheney and his rump-CIA will not now tout for any more adventures in the Middle East.

Let the UN take care of Syria---“a bon chat, bon rat.”

Eugene McCarthy, an odd Odyssey

My first sight of Sen. Eugene McCarthy was in 1967 when he visited the University of Michigan in a short exploratory tour of campuses to put his toe in the political waters testing anti-war sentiment. I was very impressed and became selected head of the Students for McCarthy at the U. of Mich. We raised $20,000 to send several busloads of students to the Wisconsin Primary where Gene won. On a bus on the way back, during a stop in Battle Creek Mich, the TV announced LBJ’s decision not to run that Fall. It was one of the happiest moments of this man’s life.

Subsequently, I was invited to join McCarthy’s National Staff and worked in the Indiana, Nebraska, California and New York Democratic primaries, as well as the Chicago Convention that summer. I had been invited to the RFK victory celebration at the Commodore[?], but stayed at the Beverly Hilton Hotel where Bobby’s assassination was announced amid general pandemonium.

I had a chance during the California primary to meet Gene and to spend a day with his daughter Mary, who I read today died in 1990. I drove Mary to several “Meet the Candidate’s Daughter” events and have the memory of an intelligent, socially superior young woman.

I first had second thoughts about Gene during the Chicago Convention, when the “Prague Spring” was brutally suppressed by the USSR and McCarthy enigmatically called this disaster “unimportant.” There was a certain aloofness about him which disdained involvement in the mundane pettiness that comprises daily life for the hoi polloi. His reported ability to recite Yeat’s long poem Wanderings of Oisin, pronounced Usheen, I believe, at the end of a long cocktail party was uncanny, as most memories begin to fade with a drink or two. I believe that poetry, and W. B. Yeats in particular, was his personal passion.

Later, in the '80s I ran into him in a dry-cleaning establishment in DC, where I handed him his plane ticket, which, absent-minded professor fashion, had fallen out of his suit-pocket. He was friendly, but as always, had an air of wanting to be somewhere else.

Fundamentally, McCarthy had much of the Benedictine monk in his nature. I lived in Minnesota for several years and once visited St. John’s College, a beautiful school that appears to have sprung out of the Middle Ages full-blown onto the Northern prairie. I believe that his quirky nature springs from the Minnesota climate, where so many populist/philosophers have sprung up.

Subsequently, I worked in several Democratic campaigns, including a Senate race in New York and Fritz Mondale’s 1984 presidential race. I have since become a conservative independent, and retain much of Gene McCarthy’s dislike of BOTH political parties, though I am still fascinated by the overall process of bi-party governance, flawed though it may be.

But, in 1968 after New Hampshire there was a true grass-roots “movement” that made it seem wonderful to be part of a national process, ill-fated though it eventually became, as a country shrugged off the repulsive LBJ only to end up with a repulsive RMN.

What a long strange trip it’s been!

Ex-Democrat muses at Dean and Pelosi and Reid

An excellent diagnosis by Bull Moose describes the perennial impulse of the Democrats to desert a large tent in search of a bolt-hole where they can all feel comfy in their righteousness.

Hillary Clinton has moved to the center and Joe Lieberman has followed her. Both are ready for Prime Time nationally and could attract the all-important independent centrist votes that the Dems absolutely require to win the Presidency in 2008.

However, the Dems have now snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in five of the last seven national elections [and the media-boosted Perot weirdness in '92 got Clinton a win he probably didn't deserve]. But does this woeful record of second-rate politics instill a sense of sobriety in the Dem party leadership?

Nope.

I left the Dems when I finally figured out that the leftist fringe of the party wields inordinate weight in primaries, dooming the mid-term elections and the quadrennial national ticket to perpetual losing status.

Pelosi and Dean represent constituencies way far to the left of national Dems and Reid doesn't possess leadership qualities worthy of the position of Minority Leader [luckily for the Dems, the Republican Majority Leader also lacks those qualities].

There has to be some sort of perestroika movement among the Dem leadership. It appears that the cultural nihilists like Pelosi and Dean have inordinate influence in the party due to the SF and Vermont bases where they cut their political teeth.

Reid is a pro-Life maverick who must ride herd on hard-left lifers who have made peace, evidently, with the Dems permanent minority status, all the while baying at the moon about the Iraq War and culture-war where they believe they might get advantage.

In short, the Dems have maverick lefties trying to herd the country leftward during a time of prosperity.

But Bush's comeback demonstrates that the economy, stupid, and lower gas prices trump any soaring toward the moon by twilight flocks of bats.

Hiatus in blogging explained

A fellow blogger who has served as inspiration and mentor to a degree has e-mailed me asking if I have given up on my blog. I am grateful he has called my attention to my prolonged absence, but my 16 year-old daughter has been in the hospital for the last five days with a very severe case of infectious mononucleosis and I have been at her bedside in the West Boca Medical Center Pediatric Intensive Care Unit for several hours a day. After the first couple of days, I myself began to become ill and the night before last slept 15 hours straight. Now the fellows in my poker group which plays Wednesday nights have all come down with bronchitis and it looks like I'm fighting the same strain.

My daughter's throat has been so constricted that she can barely talk. She has seen four EarNoseThroat Docs and they all say she has one of the most severe cases they have seen in quite a while. Mono has a sort of joke-reputation, but Niki looks like she will be in hospital for another week the way things look.

My wife, myself, and her boy friend have been at her bedside spelling each other in shifts and she is being fed intravenously. She has a very sweet nature and has a good attitude, but doesn't want to do much except sleep.

To cap it all off, my wife's parents on Cape Cod have lost their electricity and heat in the huge storm that creamed the NorthEast and are now in Yarmouth Wixon Middle School gym. They could afford a hotel, but prefer the experience of meeting new friends and are enjoying the free food [both are children of the Depression in their mid-80s].

I'm in my mid-60s and a little long in the tooth, I guess, for the daily brouhaha writing on current issues entails, so perhaps I will insert a few rambling pieces about the Classics [I studied Latin and Greek for many years and still read a bit]. My other interests are mythology, psychometrics, international relations, the Middle East, and French literature.

However, I had an open-heart operation several years back as well as two total knee procedures in 2003, so some of my former vim and vigor has deteriorated into energy peaks and troughs. Currently my daughter's illness has me in a trough-dynamic.

But I'll be back.

Hillary plays to the center

In marked contrast to Sen. John Kerry's tone deaf remarks on CBS to Bob Shieffer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton deftly appears to be resisting the urge to play to the activist left that inflated the Dean bubble in 2004 and continues to excoriate Bush as unmitigated political evil. In a piece in this week's Newsweek entitled "The Beltway and the Blogosphere," Howard Fineman dramatizes the split in the Democratic Party as a mini-civil war with centrist Dems like Clinton and even Kerry in his sober moments being viewed as "Vichy-type collaborators" with a Bush administration metaphorically seen as a Nazi occupation.

Those doing the comparison are hyper-left bloggers like Daily Kos and Eschaton, whose verbal pyrotechnics often go from scatological to obscene while describing both the Bush Republicans and those timorous enough to cooperate with the elected administration.

Fineman's thesis overlooks the fact that the far extremes of the left and right on the blogosphere often have a lot of readers, but many of these page-views are by angry lefties and righties not disposed to devote time and money to mainstream political processes.

No mainstream political party will be ready any time soon, I'll wager, will alter its positions or platforms radically to accommodate the growing, but protean, headless monster called the blogosphere. There is, I think, just too much white noise on the fringes to accomplish more than occasional coups de pouce like the Rather unseating or the Cindy Sheehan meteor.

But the important thing about blogs is that they are now being read by the MSM elders and rainmakers. Young Brian Williams of NBC-TV has his own blog which is lavishly praised today by Howard Kurtz in today's WaPo. If Kurtz lays on the slavish adulation, you know Brian has now achieved deification in the MSM pantheon.

The bloggers have partially answered the ancient question "quis custodiet custodes?" with the answer that the media custodians are joining their own peanut gallery. The unelected media guardians may not yet have the most pivotal role, but their noise on the sidelines is being amplified by the amazing growth of the blogosphere.

Sharon-Peres push Kadima forward

Peres Joins Sharon in Kadima

Just days after Ariel Sharon upended the Israeli political scene by deserting the Likud Party which he established, a major aftershock occurred when Shimon Peres, until recently the head of the Labor Party, joined Sharon in his new Kadima Party. So the two opposing party chiefs now meet in the middle.

The New York Times runs a piece cautiously pro-Kadima as polls taken after the political tsunami indicate that Labor and Likud are distant followers of the new center party. Likud has been virtually demolished, with only 10 seats after elections were they held today and Labor comes in second, but still far behind the Kadima coalition.

Sharon continues to be a primal force in Israeli politics, and Peres the perennial bridesmaid who just can’t win the PM job by election.

CAUTION: BORING PERSONAL ANECDOTE

I personally was invited by Peres to a meeting in a secluded Dead Sea location when he was Foreign Minister 10 years ago and I was an Amoco entry-strategy special emissary with full cooperation from both the Israeli Government, then headed by Rabin, and the US government. As Amoco was the first US major oil company to put a toe into Israeli geography, I got high-level access across the board.

Peres is a man of extraordinary energy and intellectual vigor, who drank two bottles of [excellent] Israeli wine and a whole plate of marzipan while we did a tour d’horizon of the entire Middle East and Israeli needs in particular.

The next day, the Oil and Police Minister, a fellow named Chacal who was born in Baghdad, so I was told, sent a thick transcript of the conversation between Peres and myself to me [it was in Hebrew] with the admonition by the messenger not to schedule meetings with Israeli government officials without going through the Oil Ministry!

END OF PERSONAL ANECDOTE

Just as De Gaulle was the only Frenchman able to extricate France from Algeria, so Sharon may be the only person to yank Israel from the umbilical to the West Bank settlements. Judging from some bloggers on the far-right fringes there is a chance that the fence will be the permanent border of the West Bank as an autonomous Palestinian state.

While the rump Likud will scream betrayal, the Sharon-Peres Kadima appears up to the task of negotiating more like the recent Condolezza Rice contribution on the Gaza border, looking forward to a relationship with a responsible Palestine. Unless Hamas kicks over the entire process, this could be a landmark on the road toward sanity in the region.

Pelosi antes up

Jonathon Weisman at the Washington Post has a very interesting article on how Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi “aggressively endorsed a proposal by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, leaving only a much smaller rapid-reaction force in the region.”

Weisman uses strong language such as “aggressively,” “threw a wrench into a carefully calibrated Democratic theme,” ”highlighted the Democratic fissures on war policy,“ and spotlighted House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s very high profile dissent from Pelosi immediately after her statement. I knew Weisman while I carried a Capitol Hill press card and he himself is a liberal Dem who makes no effort to hide his convictions.

Pelosi’s announcement follows a statement, under-reported in the MSM, by Sen. Lieberman strongly supporting the Administration’s war policy. And yesterday, Sen. John Kerry hijacked a press conference Harry Reid had scheduled for Sen. Reed of Rhode Island to push a half-baked Bush-lite policy on Iraq, splitting hairs and characteristically trying to find a center of the centrist Democratic party position.

What’s going on with the Democrats? Weisman quotes an anonymous Democratic pollster that "the frustrations of the activist wing of the Democratic Party have boiled over."

But does Pelosi feel a need to guard her left flank? Why did she make what even a sympathetic reporter like Weisman insinuates was either hasty or ill-timed?

Hillary Clinton remains a committed centrist, taking flak for doing so by hyper-splenetic agitprop types on the far left, like Hollyweird spokesboy Tim Robbins who appeared on Air America’s aptly named “Morning Sedition” show to save Sen. Clinton for her position on Iraq.

Back in the day, I worked as a Democratic Party consultant and campaign organizer. I remember way back in 1968 working in Los Angeles for Gene McCarthy trying to stitch the Alan Cranston wing of the party regulars back together with the old-time New Dealers from the East Coast. The Cranston people were late-comers in turning against the Vietnam War and regarded as insufficiently dogmatic on leftist doctrine. In 1984, I worked for Mondale doing much the same thing from his Wisconsin Ave HQ.

Some things never change.

Pelosi‘s appearance last night on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show demonstrated [to me, anyway] that Nancy may not [or never] be ready for Prime Time in the political majors. She has a public persona that, were she a Republican, would earn her a lot of snide remarks. She has a presentation style that does not respond well to the give-and-take of a discussion, even with a sympathetic interlocutor like Stewart. Nancy sometimes seems ready to lose her temper, and maybe even her reason, when discussions veer away from her positions or when she faces abrupt opposition.

This is the place to point out that Hillary’s equipoise and balanced temperament serve as a stark contrast to Pelosi’s quick-response mode. While Hillary does not allow herself to be buffaloed, Pelosi has DNC Chairman Dean’s penchant for being quick to take umbrage and for biting off-the-cuff remarks. Perhaps these sound-bites appease the Angry Left, but they do not promote policy nor attract independents or moderate Democrats.

Although I'm an independent who leans right, I obviously think that Hillary is a first-rate politico who carefully protects her credibility. The chief way she does so is to avoid the internecine strife which ceaselessly tears at the fabric of the Democratic Party. The Angry Left has nowhere else to go if they actually wish to conquer the Republican behemoth. Unless their nihilism actually reaches suicidal levels, in the which case all bets are off.

Pelosi cannot seriously entertain aspirations for national office, so it appears her ill-timed announcement yesterday may actually help cement Hillary’s grip on the large bloc of moderate Democrats and Independents who are dissatisfied with the war, but like Sen. Lieberman and [it sorta sounds like] Sen. Kerry, wish to continue supporting the Bush Administration until at least early next year.