Saturday, September 30, 2006
Catfight
Catfight! President Clinton gets combative with Mike Wallace, and Condi Rice strikes back by saying, contrary to Clinton’s remarks, "What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," and "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.”
This has gotten a lot of buzz on Youtube and the internet in general, unfortunately. It’s a tempest in a teacup. All the pundits taking sides and snickering and saying petty things about Wallace or Clinton remind me of 18th century French courtiers gossiping about how the king threw a plate at a servant or something.
Of course, there is some dispute over how important terrorism was to the administration before 9/11, and Clinton was right in saying that he was criticized by many prominent republicans who speculated that Clinton’s actions against al Qaeda were motivated by a desire to distract the country from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And Richard Clarke did leave a strategy to fight al Qaeda for the Bush Administration.
Reverend Sheldon, previously discussed on this blog, bothers me because he and others of ilk are enmeshed with the republican power structure from top to bottom, regularly meeting and speaking with the likes of Tony Snow and Sean Hannity.
Thank God. There’s been a lot of speculation about what the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq says. Mercifully, our president has decided to selectively declassify parts of it to end all the “speculation.” That should clear the whole thing up, with the president declassifying carefully selected parts of it. I’m sure his employees at the CIA have produced a sterling intelligence analysis that is in no way influenced by what their bosses want to hear.
John Bolton’s nomination to be the US ambassador to the UN is dead.
Here is some interesting accounting about the cost of rebuilding Iraq.
Swift Boat Veterans for Lies are campaigning hard to punish Jack Murtha for daring to suggest a withdrawal from Iraq and for daring to echo the opinions of his sources who told him the Haditha Incident looked like a senseless slaughter of unarmed civilians.
Alec Baldwin has a good article on the Huffington Post.
The torture issue isn’t going away, and many commentators have echoed my position, despite the continued defense of it by war criminals like John Yoo, who suddenly discovered new powers in the presidency once a republican occupied the office. This has been supported by a vast network of CIA prisons.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 2:39 PM 
