Altercation

• April 9, 2004 | 6:25 PM ET

"So now the president's war of choice has led to an occupation with no good options."  I'm happy to see my friend Harold Meyerson has this nightmare in Iraq covered.

A round up of a few thoughts about literary culture these days. Not mine, but other peoples:

Anne Applebaum had some interesting things to say about the hostility of popular culture to high culture in Wednesday's Post.  I can't argue with the decision of the PEN Committee to give their prize this year to Updike, for his collection of early stories on merit, but the guy needs neither the recognition nor the cash.  And it was always my impression that PEN was about recognizing new talent and introducing it to the world.  For that reason I would have given it to a different nominee, the vivacious and exciting Ms. ZZ Packer.

Sven Birkerts has some interesting things to say about the state of criticism here.

And speaking of low culture, I'm not sure gangsta-rap is worth whatever trade-off our society has made to enjoy it.  Nick Crowe argues, "That the gangster urge has become the most popular expression of discontent among black communities is unquestionable.  Its endless appetite for self-gratification, its self-destructive and inward nature contribute nothing to
the community."

And while we're on the topic of literature, don't forget Believer, which never fails to make me feel a little bit better about the state of writers and writing whenever I pick it up, and there's this lovely new feature on the McSweeney's called Short essays on favorite songs, inspired by Nick Hornby's songbook."  This one's "The church of Johnny Cash," but check out whichever ones interest you.

Too bad Anne Fadiman lost her job at The American Scholar.  I thought she breathed new life into it.

Finally, there's a new book on Bruce, here.
  
Alter-review:  If you don't know anybody who is smart and knowledgeable enough to review six boxes of Depeche Mode matter, you don't know Sal:

Six boxes of singles, remixes, outtakes, b-sides and rarities is a lot to digest by any artist. In the case of British Electro-Pop pioneers Depeche Mode, it may seem like a bigger task due to the repetition of tracks. I mean, do we need six different versions of ten different songs? Well...maybe not "need," but this is quite a treasure trove for fans, die hard or casual.

The early singles from 1981-1984 can't help but sound a bit dated. With no instruments other than a synthesizer, DM released some of the catchiest singles of the time. "Just Can't Get Enough" and "Dreaming Of Me" are hook-laden pop songs that, thanks to the early 80's production, sound like the soundtrack to an episode of The Jetsons, or more accurately "Liquid Sky." But as the band evolved, by adding guitar and in rare cases, real drums, their sound got stronger and by the late 80's, they released one of the best albums of the decade, "Violator," featuring the hits "Personal Jesus," and "Enjoy The Silence."  What these box sets offer are various mixes of all these hits, each suited for a different mood. And if you have the time and patience, you'll find that many are quite good.

As with any b-sides, you're going to find some gems, as well as some throwaways. But, for completists, these sets are meticulously put together and leave nothing behind. If I had to recommend a place to start, I would say Volumes 3 & 4. (Here and here.)  These have
some of Martin Gore's strongest material, which makes it all the more exciting to listen to the various versions. This brand of electronic pop is not for everyone, but if there is one band who does it justice, it's Depeche Mode.

Sal Nunziato
April 2004

My Nation column, like my Wednesday Altercation, seems to have disappeared.  I am also missing a “Think Again” column this week.  Thank goodness it’s Slacker Friday.  Here are the boys.

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton, MA
Eric --
And Happy Birthday to Herself.  May she grow up in a world devoid of prevaricating National Security Advisors.

And, may I say, that the idea of John McCain as John Kerry's running mate is nuttier than Annie Coulter off on a Hajj.  I know -- and like a great deal -- both of these guys, but John McCain isn't anybody's vice-anything.  Off the reservation?  With McCain, there is no damn reservation, the man's been Ghost Dancing across the Dakotas since about 1992, and God love him for it.  I might see him going for a co-presidency deal -- c.f. Gerry Ford's abortive fling with Dutch back at the '80 convention, which now looks sensible only in that it might've kept BOTH Bushes out of the White House -- but Kerry would be completely bananas to offer it to him. How in God's name do you run at the top of a ticket for Co-President?

The truly great thing about these 9/11 hearings remains the towering moral witness of the 9/11 widows -- and shame on Bob (Coiffure By Vespasian Of The Appian Way) Kerrey for shushing them.  They are doing more than standing up for their loved ones, and that surely would have been enough.  They are glorious in their casual disdain for the "Intelligence Community."  They are blissfully unimpressed by the Great Men who presume to tell them what the Great Men decide they should know.  They leave the pundits gaping at their heedless disregard for the Governing Class.  Almost alone, they have insisted that information be brought to light that will enable us to judge our leaders and hold them to account, and that's what this whole silly experiment was supposed to be about -- the "most dreaded kind of knowledge," according to that impossible old blatherskite, John Adams.  God save these wonderful women.  They are being citizens -- in the most complete sense possible -- for the rest of us.

Name: Stupid
Hometown: Chicago
Hey Eric, it's Stupid to hate Donald Rumsfeld.  I've had my first moments of doubt about the Iraq war.  Yes, I still think the sanctions were an intolerable status quo and nothing short of removing Saddam could have ended them.  I also believe there is merit to the real reason for this war: the neocon's theory that the Middle East is hopeless and only the creation of a
pro-west, relatively wealthy democracy can change it.  Of course there's the little thing about hiding that with deception about WMD's and the war's costs.  Regardless, everything was contingent on --winning-- the war.  I still think we will, but now I have doubts and I put most of the blame on Rumsfeld. 

If there was one thing that EVERYBODY other than Dubya's genuflectors agreed upon, it was that you needed much more manpower than Rumsfeld allocated.  We sacrificed immeasurable good will at the start of the occupation just to (dis)prove Rumsfeld's "war on the cheap" theories.  In 1979 Chicago voted out the machine's handpicked mayor just because he couldn’t plow the snow for a week -- imagine what we'd do with months of no electricity or running water and rampant looting! 

But for all the recent awfulness, two things should be kept in mind.  First, the war happened, and failure now in Iraq will not only hurt security, it will be used by isolationists to keep us out of future interventions, including humanitarian ones.  Don't tell me the anti-war left hasn't found itself caught in this trap already.  Another thing is that however inadvertently, Dubya's unilateralism in Iraq saved the United Nations from itself.  Compare the situation before (the farce of the U.N.'s "safe havens" in Bosnia, Saddam's explosion of the inspectors from Iraq without consequence) to the current U.N.'s inspection of Iran's nuclear program, which has shown some backbone. 

Now there's a WMD concern for you.  I also think nations like France and Germany are now itching to show that in the proper setting they will help rebuild Iraq.

Correspondents' Corner:

[Editor's note: As Eric mentions above, Wednesday's Altercation entry never made it to the site.  This was not for lack of effort on Eric's part.  The following mails were submitted for inclusion in Wednesday's entry.  Since the links and content are still relevant (if a bit dated, in the case of Mr. Sirota), we've decided to go ahead with publishing them.]

Name: David Sirota      
Center for American Progress
Eric,
Here are two absolutely CRITICAL points to watch for when Condoleezza Rice testifies before the 9/11 Commission on Thursday.  As of Wednesday, Rice and the White House still appear insistent on spreading these two clear lies:

CLAIM #1:
"In four hours of private discussions with the commission in January, Ms. Rice was asked about statements she made in 2001 and 2002 that 'we could not have imagined' that terrorists would use aircraft as weapons by piloting them into buildings. She told the commission that she regretted those comments."
- NY Times, 4/6/04
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/politics/07PANE.html

FACT:
Even after telling the 9/11 Commission in January of 2004 she regretted her 2002 denials, Rice proceeded to tell the exact same lie just three months later in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed. In the piece, she again falsely claimed "we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles."  

CLAIM #2:
"Rice told the commission in the private session that she should have said, 'I could not have imagined," according to one official familiar with the testimony, making it clear that some in the intelligence community knew about those threats but that she did not. 'Information about possible use of airplanes as missiles to destroy buildings was not briefed to her prior to that statement in May 2002,' Mr. McCormack said."
- NY Times, 4/6/04
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/politics/07PANE.html

FACT: Even if Rice missed all 12 previous intelligence reports noting "that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons," it is impossible for Rice to claim she had no knowledge of such a plot, considering she accompanied the President to the 2001 G-8 Summit in Genoa, where she and the Administration were explicitly warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner" into the summit.
- LA Times, 9/27/01; NY Times, 4/4/04
Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story
  
Name: Robert Young
Hometown: Waltham, MA
Eric, that song, "double dutch, that's them dancing" is on the second album.  I know everybody gets to fail (except presidents & generals) but you gotta worry about someone whose first record was the best of its decade and each following was a decline.  She's a smart-as-all-hell woman, so what's happening?  Along with, as the Boston Phoenix put it, being "the world's most doable soccer mom."  She's sure all that, but I want another good record, since I know I'll never get her.
  
Name: Jef Hall
Hometown: Oshkosh, WI
To match your posts of streaming radio & bluegrass: WDVX cannot be overlooked.  Great internet radio.
  
Name: JoAnn Schwartz
Hometown: Detroit
For those looking for great free-form radio -- as well as outstanding programs devoted to jazz, blues, folk and bluegrass -- I'd have to recomend WDETFM.org.

Supports 4 different types of streaming for great local radio.  WDET will receive a "Distinguished Achievement Award" at this year's Detroit Music Awards for its "long commitment to local music and musicians."
  
Name: Eric White
Hometown: Madison, WI
Oh, I'm sure you're already sick of the "my radio station is best" mail, but really, kcrw.org is head and shoulders above them all.  The "Morning Becomes Eclictic" archive alone makes it the winner.

Name: Steve Stein
Hometown: Acton MA
Nice call on the final 4 by Charlie Pierce!  (I hope he'll be humble instead of insufferable... hmmm, could go either way.)

• April 8, 2004 | 3:30 PM ET

WHAT'S A WHITE HOUSE FOR?

I love the smell of sworn testimony in the morning.... early in the morning, as in 0600 hours (what does the 0 stand for? O my God it's early).... oh, wait, there's supposed to be a ban on references to America's unhappy involvement with the federated principalities of Annam, Cochin China, and Tonkin. Anwyay, regular Eric is coming into Los Angeles this morning, flying on a big airliner, so it's Eric Rauchway watching television for you. Here in the big media market where 6 in 10 of my neighbors disapprove of the president's job performance because, they say, he has trouble telling the truth, his National Security Adviser, sometime-Californian Condoleezza Rice, is testifying before the 9/11 commission starting at 6 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time when even decadent espresso-sipping hot-tubbers have to get ready for work. Don't they want us to watch her tell the truth?

Enough fooling around. The full testimony is HERE and Center for American Progress goes line by line HERE if you like that sort of thing.

Here's the bottom line: Rice said something in passing that rather sums up the situation: "There are plans and plans and plans. And the problem is, unless those plans are engaged by the civilian leadership... those plans simply sit." So: Why didn't the civilian leadership, AKA the White House, engage?

Rice wants you to think there was a "structural problem," that there were "legal impediments," that there were "systemic" reasons that made it profoundly difficult if not impossible to make plans to prevent the 9/11/01 attacks -- particularly, she mentions repeatedly, that FBI and CIA couldn't share intelligence. In her view, creating the Department of Homeland Security and passing the Patriot Act have gone a long way to fixing the problem, but that without a "catastrophic" event like 9/11/01, no administration could have even thought through, let alone implemented, these plans.

Which maybe sounds reasonable enough until Bob Kerrey opens his mouth, and says "one of the first things that I learned when I came into this town was the FBI and the CIA don't talk. I mean, I don't need a catastrophic event to know that the CIA and the FBI don't do a very good job of communicating." This reflects more than partisan disagreement: between Kerrey and Rice there's a profound difference of opinion as to what White Houses should do.

Rice believes that the White House should organize the executive bureaucracy so it receives adequate briefings from underlings and can then delegate authority back to appropriate underlings to take action.

Kerrey believes that the White House should recognize that it cannot move bureaucracies around because they're political institutions and the president and his advisors should actively stay on top of things, seeking information where it can be found, and forging connections between bureaucracies isolated by law and habit. Ordinarily you don't get to reorganize the whole shebang, because, you know, the framers designed the Constitution to resist executive re-organization, so the president absolutely must act as a diplomat in his own government. And doing your job means you can't wait for a catastrophe to allow you to thwart that design, but rather to work within it.

So: Rice would clearly like the sound-bite of the day to be, there was "no silver bullet" (she says it three times) to prevent 9/11. What this means, Rice says, is that "there was no single thing [we could have done].... The inability to connect the dots was really structural." She means two things by this: one, there were "legal impediments" that prevented the more aggressive use of intelligence and intelligence-gathering; she also means that if there was a structural problem no one person -- not even President Bush -- could have done anything about it. Besides, the underlings were not telling the White House what they should have heard: "There was no threat-reporting of any substance," she says; "there was nothing actionable in this [memorandum]"; "there was no recommendation that we do something about this."

This conspicuously careful language raises a question. Dr. Rice and I have one experience in common: responsibility for teaching undergraduates. I know that at Stanford, where Rice was Provost, they teach students not to begin sentences with "there was," because it makes for poor communication -- it allows you to assert something about the existence or non-existence of an action but it makes it unclear who did what, where and when. The National Security Adviser is not using this impenetrable locution by accident. What is she being vague about?

It's very hard to say, but I'm sure watchers of the administration can guess.

And if you can't guess, John Lehman (a Republican commissioner) makes it clear with a series of questions that begin "were you aware" of this or that, prompting Rice in each case to say she was not aware, or became aware only after 9/11/01. And she, and the administration, had only "233 days," a figure which if she'd mentioned it once might have elicited sympathy, but in coming repeatedly and compulsively it began to sound like an excuse. Which brings up the Kerrey question again: Should they have been aware? Whose job was it to make them aware?

Further, the White House is still keeping the 8/6 presidential briefing document classified although the 9/11 commission had "access" to it. So Rice can carefully say, "There was nothing in this memo that suggested that an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C., there was nothing about time, or place, when or where" causing Richard Ben-Veniste testily to interrupt, "We agree there were no specifics," but, as Ben-Veniste sarcastically said, "There was nothing reassuring [in the briefing], was there?" Ben-Veniste also got Rice to say that the title of the briefing was indeed, "Osama Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," as rumored. All this dancing about suggests there was more in the briefing than Rice would like to admit and more that might have been done in response.

NO SWATTING OR CLAPPING ALLOWED, PLEASE

Kerrey picked up on this question of what had been done by mentioning the president's much-quoted "I'm tired of swatting flies" line, which he wanted to "disabuse" Rice of further using: "What fly had he swatted?" Kerrey asked. Rice wanted to give context to the question, and Kerrey came back: "No, no, he hadn't swatted.... We only swatted a fly once on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterwards. How the hell could he be tired?"

The major presence off-camera was the audience, which applauded vigorously now and then; I counted two applause lines for Rice, both zingers at Kerrey -- when she mentioned that Kerrey had said the response to the Cole should include an attack on Saddam Hussein, and when Kerrey accidentally called her "Dr. Clarke" and she responded, "I don't think I look like Dick Clarke." The rest of the applause lines almost certainly came from 9/11 widows: they clapped when Ben-Veniste asked Rice to stop rambling and answer a question because he only had a limited amount of time, and when Kerrey likewise said "Please don't filibuster me, it's not fair." The substantive moments that got audience applause were Ben-Veniste saying, "We would be happy to have it [the 8/6 briefing] declassified in full at this time," and Jamie Gorelick saying, "If someone had really gone out to the [FBI] agents" then Colleen Rowley would have seized the opportunity to "break through barriers" -- and one other, which I'll mention below.

WHAT ABOUT IRAQ?

There was one issue that came up in proposed QUESTIONS FOR RICE (more HERE) that did not come up much this morning: was the war on Iraq an appropriate move in the counter-terrorism fight? Rice mentioned that Saddam will no longer be able to use WMD on his own people, but didn't press the Iraq/Al-Qaeda link so important to Vice President Cheney, among others.

Bob Kerrey did bring it up as (as he said) a supporter of the war: "I'm terribly worried that [the Iraq war is] going to do a number of things and they're all bad..." upon which the audience began clapping, prompting Kerrey to say, "no please do not do that, please do not applaud." And they probably shouldn't have; Kerrey wasn't point-scoring but pointing out that the specter of civil war in Iraq and of increased opportunities for Al Qaeda to recruit are now quite apparent even to those who hoped the administration had the right ideas and a good plan.

Pat Buchanan says of Iraq, "Failure is now an option," a chilling possibility indeed.

• April 6, 2004 | 12:03 PM ET

Prize Journalism:  The prize for investigative journalism went to Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss and Joe Mahr of The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, for a series on atrocities committed by Tiger Force, an Army elite volunteer unit, during the Vietnam War.  Read the Tiger Force series, underplayed all across the national media, save the incredible reporters who discovered it.  (I am quite surprised that Bart Gellman of the Washington Post did not win for his relentless WMD coverage, but I’ve not really followed Anthony Shadid’s coverage well enough to determine whether he was a better choice.)

From Today’s Papers: “The WP off-leads, and the NYT reefers, word that a year-old deal providing AIDS drugs at discounted rates has been expanded from 16 to more than 100 countries, which could ultimately offer 3 million people antiretroviral therapy by 2005.  Absent from the list of donors is the United States, which "has its own plan to help AIDS patients in poor countries." 

The plan seems to be to talk about it a lot whenever conservative evangelicals are around but then forget all about it when it comes time to authorize the funds.  Here’s the Post report.

And thanks again, Ralph. But hey, don't go away mad.

For the second night seder:  “These are not rational times.”  A Passover Prayer for a Challenge of Biblical Size.

On single names:  There are some people I like because--though I could easily make arguments against them, and no doubt their motives may be questionable (unlike say, mine)-- they are just forces of nature and you’re either for or agin’.  A sure sign of such people is that they go by only one name, like Madonna, whose music I could mostly live without, but I like her audacity in independent-mindedness.  Plus, she made a good choice with Clark.

Arianna who’s made enough mistakes in her previous political life to last her many lifetimes, has somehow emerged on the other side as a powerful populist (if sometimes hard to understand) voice for the powerless and put-upon in American politics.  She’s got a new book out called “Fanatics and Fools."  Guess who it’s about?

And then there’s “Tina," who I used to think destroyed The New Yorker, but I now think saved it.  (Do you really think Sy Newhouse would have allowed Remnick to put out such a serious magazine with his millions if Tina hadn’t injected the glitz that made it fun to lose millions?  I know it makes money now, but the transition to making money required losing a lot of money any way you looked at it.  And while Tina’s magazine cost a ton, she obviously gave Newhouse enough of what he wanted from his prized property to keep the investment level high enough to allow Remnick to improve the model that was, by the end of Shawn’s tenure, no longer sustainable. 

And she gave us some great journalism along the way.  I’m thinking in particular of Mark Danner’s investigation of the Massacre at El Mozote, upon which I am relying right now in writing the Central America section of When Presidents Lie.  [Remember when our presidents used to like terrorists?  It wasn’t so long ago.]  Anyway, I can’t see that piece being published anywhere else, except perhaps The Atlantic, which nobody was reading back then.  All of this is quite arguable of course, which is what makes it interesting if not exactly important, except the terrorist part.)

In any case, all of the above is a ridiculously long-winded way of getting to the point, which is that Tina is the author of this magnificent, force-of-nature sentence: “Who, in the end, can relate to the date-rape complications of a zillionaire basketball giant, the financial finaglings of a domestic dominatrix-tycoon, or the alleged pedophilia of a loony recording legend who makes his face like Joan Crawford and maintains a zoo?”  You go, girl.

Alter-reviews:  If you’re just starting out—or filling in—your bluegrass collection, Rounder is releasing some nicely annotated, cleaned up editions, plus a sampler, entitled “Bluegrass Express,” with you know, songs about trains. 

There’s an expanded edition of Doc and Merle Watson’s wonderful “Pickin’ the Blues” with eight additional tracks and a Del McCoury, “High, Lonesome and Blue,” which will be out a week later.  Columbia's Legacy has issued a 1956 recording of the Stanley Brothers nicely recorded at a small radio station in Bristol, VA and they’ve also given Earl Scruggs the “Essential” treatment in honor of his 80th birthday. 

Rounder is here and Legacy is here. 

And speaking of birthdays, somebody I know is six years old today.  She doesn’t know it but she’d like to exploit this opportunity, while she has your attention, to ask you to contribute to combating AIDS in Africa or here for children far less fortunate than herself.

Correspondents’ Corner:

Name: Dan
Hometown: Greer, SC
Boy, being right and being able to say "I told you so" is little consolation as we witness the multiple deaths of our men and women in Iraq.  The surreal nature of the war is getting to me.  I have a close friend at work, a hard working, good guy, who is a Christian fundamentalist.  His daughter's fiance is in Iraq and was recenly in Fallujah.  I see the disaster that is this war and he sees us as having done a good thing in toppling Saddam and wants us to finish our mission and get out.  I ask him what the mission is, and it's just too long of a story.  Good people on both sides of an issue, speaking at each other but unable to connect.  Except that I sense even among the hardcore Bush supporters a wearying of the war.  Whatever mission it was, or whether its been accomplished, people are tiring of the anti-Americanism that is so obvious to all but the rosy scenario neo-cons. 

Kerry has as much chance to carry SC in November as I do of being Pope, and the grimly determined Bush supporters hang on with savage determination.  At the bottom of it, it's still a cultural war.  Nam stays with us, the hippies/leftists against the neo-con/hardhats.  The barricades are being manned, with not the war on Iraq as the rallying cry, but rather, Janet Jackson's breast.  Men and women die daily for ill conceived policies, this does not bother my friends, but the cultural war and naughtiness on television does, and there you have it.  Me talking at my friend and him talking at me.  But, God speed to his daughter's fiance.  Nobody deserves the torment we are inflicting on ourselves.

Name: Dave Reid
Hometown: Seattle
In response to the person plugging the WXRT streaming audio, the best streaming radio station these days is KEXP.org.  Commercial free, with a wide selection of music, and it supports 3 different formats of streaming, not an AOL plug-in.

• April 5, 2004 | 1:12 PM ET

We Told You So, continued:

What we said before the war, in no particular order

1. The invasion of Iraq will cause, not prevent, terrorism.
2. The Bush administration was not to be trusted when it warned of the WMD threat.
3. Going in without the U.N. is worse than not going in at all.
4. They were asleep at the switch pre-9/11 and have been trying to cover this up ever since.
5. And they manipulated 9/11 as a pretext for a long-planned invasion of Iraq.
6. Any occupation by a foreign power, particularly one as incompetently planned as this one, will likely create more enemies than friends and put the U.S. in a situation similar at times to Vietnam, and at other times, similar to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon; both were disasters.
7. An invasion of Iraq will draw resources and attention away from the genuine perpetrators of the attack on us, and allow them to regroup for further attacks.
8. Bonus: Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” will increase anti-Semitism worldwide.

We Told You So, I:  “The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has accelerated the spread of Osama bin Laden's anti-Americanism among once local Islamic militant movements, increasing danger to the United States as the al Qaeda network is becoming less able to mount attacks, according to senior intelligence officials at the CIA and State Department."  [Link]

We Told You So, II:  "Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded Friday evidence he presented to the United Nations that two trailers in Iraq were used for weapons of mass destruction may have been wrong.”  Powell:  “It appears not to be the case that it was that solid.” [Link]

We Told You So, III:  “The Bush administration is scrambling to develop a new Iraq exit strategy with help from the United Nations over the next two to three weeks, but the array of political and security challenges is now so daunting that U.S. officials also quietly acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition may end up in an even worse position if the latest effort fails.” [Link] 

We Told You So, IV:  “The broad outline of Clarke's criticism has been corroborated by a number of other former officials, congressional and commission investigators, and by Bush's admission in the 2003 Bob Woodward book "Bush at War" that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred.” [Link] (And plenty more.)

We Told You So, V:  “President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.” [Link]

We Told You So, VI:  “By unleashing mass demonstrations and attacks in Baghdad and southern Iraq on Sunday, a young, militant cleric has realized the greatest fear of the U.S.-led administration since the occupation of Iraq began a year ago: a Shiite Muslim uprising.” [Link]

We Told You So, VII:  “A new report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of last week’s international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan, stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a “terrorist breeding ground” unless there is a significant increase in development aid.” [Link]

Bonus We Told You So, VII:  “The percentage of Americans who say Jews were responsible for Christ's death is rising, particularly among blacks and young people, according to a nationwide poll taken since the release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ." [Link]

Speaking of anti-Semites, we received this from The Forward: Fox Newsman Exaggerated Fundraising Efforts

"The self-described enemy of political spin, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, appears to have been overstating his charitable efforts on behalf of Israel. During a March 10 appearance on the Don Imus radio show, O'Reilly said, ‘I did a benefit in L.A. four weeks ago where we raised millions of dollars for Israel.’ O'Reilly and his publicist told Business Week media editor Tom Lowry that the benefit he "chaired" in Los Angeles had raised $40 million for Israel. But a few inquiries into the event in question raise questions about the account given by O'Reilly, who routinely refers to his television show as the ‘no spin zone.’ It turns out that O'Reilly was the paid keynote speaker, not the volunteer chair, of a February dinner that raised $3 million for the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles."

And speaking of Jews, Hag Samaich, here’s my friend M.J. with a Passover essay called “Dayenu Means ‘Enough’.”

And hey, you heard it here first: Look for a spitball in the first pitch of the Reds/Cubs game….

Alter-review:  I saw the “cool, tall, vulnerable and luscious” Liz Phair on Saturday night at Roseland.  Since I called her last album one of the biggest disappointments of 2003, and nothing in the concert led me to rethink that view (but I do very much love her first three albums, and everyone is entitled to take artistic chances and fail), here are a few nice things I can say about the show: Phair’s come a long way since she played the place 10 years ago - she seems to have mostly overcome the paralyzing stage fright.  She grew increasingly more comfortable on stage as the show progressed, to the point that she actually looked like she was almost enjoying herself by the end of the show.  The encores were actually great.  She did an acoustic version of “Suspicious Minds,” which is in the running to be in the top five of my favorite all time songs, and that led into that great song on, I forget which album, but has the chorus: “When the double dutch, that's them dancing..."  She certainly had them dancing…

Correspondents’ Corner:

Name: Jim
Hometown: Ann Arbor, MI
Dear Eric,
I'd just like to take exception with Stupid's characterization of Nick Kristof's thinking as "sharp."

Actually, to take just one example, he is a purveyor of Friedman-style (Milton and/or Tom, take your pick) "free-market," "free-trade," uncritical pro-globalization economics that has helped to immiserate much of the third world in the last 25 years.  At least it has not done much to raise those countries out of poverty.

He also has a pathological tendency to split the difference between left and right, which I believe you yourself commented on some months ago with respect to his egregious playdown of the Plame affair, where he characterized Democrats who want to get to the bottom of that ugly story as "exaggerating" the importance of the story and the damage that may have been done.

To be fair and balanced, though, I agree with Stupid that Kristof is right on the money about Sudan.

So, when do we invade?  I'm anxiously waiting to hear Tom Friedman weigh in on the vital need for an American expeditionary force to the Sudan.  Human rights violations?  Direct links to Osama bin Laden?  They even had potential WMD program-related activities (until Clinton blew up the pharma factory).  Let's go!

Name: Andrew Milner
Eric:
Even by George Will's standards, this paean to the guy he's reporting to (as part of baseball's blue-ribbon economic panel) is a new sycophantic low.

Speaking of baseball, David Brooks will be discomfited to learn that the Peace A Pizza company, '60s peace sign logo and all, has the pizza concession at the Phillies' new (and beautiful) home, Citizens Bank Park...

Name: Grant Millin
CICT - The Committee to Investigate U.S. Rep. Charles H. Taylor (R,NC-11)
Dear Doctor A:
Thank you for visiting us here in the backwoods of America during the Rolling Thunder action last year.  We remain screwed because of U.S. Rep. Charles H. Taylor (R, NC-11).  I hope you can help.

I would like to get some news going on InvestigateTaylor.com, the Website on U.S. Rep. Charles H. Taylor... who has purchased a Russian bank:

Bank to help WNC businesses export goods to Russia
By: Flynn, Michael
Posted: Feb. 13, 2004 11:06 p.m.

Bank launches trade initiative with Russia counterpart
Posted on Sat, Feb. 14, 2004
Associated Press

Russian trade may jolt WNC economy
By: Newsome, Angie
Posted: Feb. 18, 2004 10:59 p.m.

The deal involves Blue Ridge Savings (which has numerous bank fraud and money laundering charges against it, going back to mid-90’s Office of Thrift Supervision concerns, to a case of bank fraud involving Taylor’s former campaign manger, Charles “Chig” Cagle; in addition to the former bank President and GOP wheels in Western North Carolina), Taylor’s holding company and BRS owner, Financial Guaranty Corporation (majority stock owned by Taylor and his wife Elizabeth), the Small Business Administration, and a bank alternatively known as The Bank of Ivanovo of Central Russia, a.k.a. “Commercial Bank Ivanovo”. 

U.S. Rep. Jim DeMint, SC, is also involved in this private-public foreign “trade” policy developed by Republican lawmakers.

This story, and the story of InvestigateTaylor.com and the 1,650 constituents of Taylor who sent petitions to Congress calling on investigations on Taylor (U.S. Courts and Fed law enforcement sandbag... possibly because Taylor is a senior Appropriations Committee Member), needs to break out of Roll Call, the NC media markets, and hit the majors.

I hope you can help us here in Western North Carolina, because we are up the creek without a paddle right now.  Neither the Democrat Party, nor its more moneyed members, supports this effort.

• April 2, 2004 | 11:51 AM ET

What Democratic Accountability?  Stolen from Slate’s Today's Papers:

"The LAT teases on Page One word that House Republicans effectively killed a congressional inquiry into administration officials' keeping estimates of the prescription drug bill's cost from Congress.  The Republicans declined to challenge the White House's refusal to allow two officials likely involved to testify.  A White House spokesman explained that there were 'separation of power' issues, the same argument they used with Condi, until they backed down.  Health and Human Services has launched its own internal investigation, which is continuing.  The WP runs wire copy inside on the kibosh and the NYT seems to skip it altogether.”

Actually, take a look at the entire TP today.  It’s the Medicare story writ large.  The Bush Administration is hiding Clinton administration documents from the 9/11 Commission.  Why is that?  Could it be because they fear the documents will bear out Richard Clarke’s charges against them?  And why did they appoint a right-wing partisan extremist to investigate whether they lied about the WMD threat?  Why did they reveal the identity of a CIA agent to discredit a truth-teller about their phony WMD threats? 

Why do they feel they can “smear with impunity?”  Is it because the likes of Wolf Blitzer mindlessly pass along these smears on allegedly liberal CNN?  Is it because they can threaten to fire a civil servant for telling the truth to Congress on a matter involving a $150 billion deception and get away with it, because the Washington Post runs wire copy inside and the NYT skips it altogether?  I could go on, but it depresses me, given that I’ve sort of published two books on this topic in the past year or so.  Plus it’s Slacker Friday.

Anyway, none of that stuff matters.  Al Gore “invented” the Internet, “discovered” Love Canal, lied about “Love Story,” and John Kerry is a flip-flopper.  Depend on it.

The horrific murders in Falluja raises the issue of whether mercenaries are being hired to fight our wars.  There’s a provocative series of posts on that question here.

Interesting that it was a Spanish newspaper that demonstrated the nerve to publish the most graphic photos.

But don’t worry, the Department of Homeland Security is “protecting the American public from British novelists."

MSNBC.com: We kick ass  (Hey Rick, the Scarborough offer holds, though the catering bill is gonna go up if you don’t act quickly.)

We want McCain! Your country needs you, sir.  Quick, somebody start a movement.  Let's get a million Internet signatures.  Eli? Wes?  Whaddya say?

Also this: Yet another liberal media catch.  Tricky, I know, but trust us.

Slacker Friday

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton, MA
Greetings from San Antonio, the most underrated city in America.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think I may be on my way to Hell for pointng out that there's certainly a scriptural consistency for having "The Passion Of The Christ" replaced at the top of the box office lists by "Dawn Of The Dead."

Bush Pioneers, please pay attention. I would pay substantial dough for a seat to watch C-Plus Augustus and his faithful robot companion, Defibrillor, do their dance in front of the 9/11 commission.  I mean it, Marc Racicot.  Cash money.  Of course, I'll only pay if the two of them promise to do the staples of their act.  For example, they simply have to do the bit where C-Plus talks geopolitics while the other guy drinks a glass of water.  Personally, I think there's been a lack of this kind of thing in showbiz since Wayland and Madame hung 'em up.

And, should anyone ask, it's UConn 81, Georgia Tech 66 on Monday night.

Name: Stupid
Hometown: Chicago
Eric, it's Stupid to stop avoiding the subject of Iraq (I've laid-off for weeks).  But first something more important.  Nicholas Kristof has been pleading for the world to do something, --anything--, to stop the mini-genocide (is that an oxymoron?) in Sudan.  "[R]ight now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes 1,000 people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan's Army is even bombing the survivors. 
Kristof is not a sheep about Sudan: in 1992 he questioned the effectiveness of U.S. Christian groups' efforts to buy slaves out of slavery.

I've just spent 10 minutes googling Kristof's columns trying to find anyone who has taken up the challenge.  No dice.  Compare that to the NCAA basketball graduation rate story last week.  You'd think someone would either challenge Dubya with his Iraq human rights rhetoric or challenge the U.N. with its "anti-Dubya unilateralism" rhetoric.

I frequently wonder how Kristof feels: he has one of the most visible platforms in the world and his superb journalism and sharp thinking are ignored (unless he writes about an anthrax
Suspect X.).

P.S. Mark it down (I know, I'm a bit long this week, but I couldn’t cut genocide for baseball!)  [Ed: No sweat, bud.  That’s why my computer comes with a delete button.]  NL: Atlanta, St. Louis, Los Angeles (Houston wild card).  AL: Yankees, White Sox, Angels (Red Sox wild card).

Name: Shelley
Hometown: Westchester, IL
I just wanted everyone to know that WXRT, quite possibly the best rock station in the country, is now streaming their audio.  I know we Chicagoans tend to be a little boastful, but this really is good radio.

• April 1, 2004 | 4:45 PM ET

Bush asked for this

Those awful pictures from Falluja are a necessary part of Americans’ education and must be shown to them just as frequently as the deliberate deceptions the media so gullibly passed along when the president was misleading us into war.  As horrific and inhuman as these actions may be, Bush asked for this.  He invaded another country in near complete ignorance of its history and traditions, in defiance of world opinion, and on the basis of dishonest and trumped-up arguments.  What’s more, he and Cheney ensured the failure of the post-war plans by refusing even to consult with experts who knew something about the region, even those in our own government.  The result has been an unending series of easily predictable catastrophes that are worsening by the day.  Knowing the ways of the all-powerful Karl Rove, I predict he will instruct Bush to cut and run before Election Day.  The question is, Will Cheney second the motion?  Will the media allow them to get away with it?

And we are no safer.  You got that right...

And what can be the possible explanation for Bush’s need to testify alongside Cheney to the 9/11 commission, in private and without any documentation of the event save one note-taker? Does he need a babysitter?  Bush has opposed the commission’s work from day one, seeking to prevent its formation, starving it for resources, refusing to give it the time it needs to complete its work, allowing his national security adviser to claim executive privilege.  And he is unwilling to testify unless Cheney is there to help him answer the tough questions.  What kind of a man is this who is unwilling to answer for his actions with regard to the most significant moment of his presidency?  Josh Marshall has more here.

Inside Condi’s brain on 9/11:  “Al-Qaida? What’s that? We’re worried about an attack from outer space.  (If only that annoying Dick Clarke would just shut up about all those scary attacks he’s always worrying about. He’s no fun at all.  And yeah, that John O’Neill sure was a nut about al-Qaida as well.  I’m so glad he quit and went off to New York.)"

And speaking of Frontline, don’t miss this incredible report on Rwanda, the single moral lowpoint of the Clinton administration. What greater indictment can be found than the fact that this avoidable genocide went largely ignored by a media that later found the president’s penis so fascinating?

Washington Post/CNN Reporter, Husband of Republican Consultant, Turns On Radio, Discovers “Liberal,” is Shocked, Amazed, Confused”

The Note describes him thusly: “Howie Kurtz basically spent the day listening for the word ‘penis.’"

Reasons to resent Murdoch, #987

Reasons not to trust Wolf Blitzer, #321

Good journalism defined here and congrats once again to the Toledo Blade for creaming (and embarrassing) the big boys and to our friend, the incredible David Cay Johnston.

Bad journalism here.  Well, actually, the bad journalism was a “60 Minutes” report on Judge Pickering. The article above is the new “Think Again” column explaining why, by Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron.  The “Think Again” archives, once again, are here. Check ‘em out.

It’s certainly possible that TNR’s Noam Scheiber is right that “the real question here is why this otherwise thin anti-Brooks piece is resonating so much, particularly with liberals and other journalists.” Here.  Thing is, however, there’s not a shred of evidence in the piece to suggest that it’s true.  Scheiber’s entire piece is built on a contention that nowhere does he bother to support and to make it worse, he’s critiquing an extremely well-supported article, (which doesn’t mean it’s not wrong-headed.)

I don’t mean to pick on Scheiber personally.  I’ve noticed his work to be largely worthwhile in the past.  But this is the thing about TNR, Slate and the entire Kinsleyeque contrarian culture of “smart” journalism.  They don’t bother with evidence.  They just kinda feel something and because they’re so smart, that makes it so.  Kinsley really is this smart, and it works for him.  But hardly anybody else is, yours truly included.  Blogging tends to take this problem into the stratosphere of antimatter-unreality but journalistically-sponsored blogging ought to be more careful.  It usually isn’t.

Jon Stewart Quote of the Day I: (to Richard Clarke): “Were any of the changes [the White House requested in your book] say, ‘change the name Osama bin-Laden to Saddam Hussein?”

Jon Stewart Quote of the Day II:  “You know there’s a 24-hour news network and what they were saying [about you] was remarkably similar to what they the White House was saying and I was thinking, ‘Isn’t that interesting?’”

Alter-reviews:
I saw one of the world’s great lounge singers last night.  The lounge was a little large; the theater at Madison Square Garden.  And the band could have been a little louder.  But the musicianship was impeccable and the song selection, terrific: “That’s Life”; “It’s All in the Game,” “Hoochie-Coochie Man,” “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?”: all delivered in the same growling, semi-staccato, horn driven style that combined R&B and Irish lullabies.  He closed with a tribute to an old-time rock 'n' roller with: “Brown-eyed Girl,” and “Gloria.” It would have worked terrifically in a sleepy Vegas roadhouse, but at the Garden, well, it felt a little distant.

When you go see Van Morrison, you are always taking a chance.  Sometimes the man gets transported to the outer reaches; sometimes he stays earthbound.  Last night his feet never left the floor.  It was quite pleasant, not unlike the jazzy album he released last year on Blue Note, “What's Wrong With This Picture?".  I like that album a lot.  Not everybody does, though.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Ben Fiedler
Hometown: Seminole Florida
Clarke's worries about terrorists crashing aircraft at the Atlanta Olympics have been on the public record for more than two years.  From the "Age of Sacred Terror" by Simon & Benjamin (easily one of the best books on terrorism) on page 249:

Five years before Muhammad Atta boarded American Airlines Flight 11 in Boston, Dick Clarke was worried about an airplane carrying out a suicide attack on the stadium or releasing a chemical or a biological weapon.  He asked the Justice and Defense Departments if anyone under any conditions had the authority to shoot down civilian aircraft.  The answer was an unequivocal no.  In response, Clarke created an almost complete 'air cap' around the stadium.  The FAA agreed to declare the airspace off-limits to all nonofficial aircraft.  FBI agents fanned out to every airstrip within a two-hundred mile radius and asked airfield operators to report suspicious activity during the games.

Name: Barry Ritholtz
Hometown: The Big Picture
Hey Doc,
A follow up to yesterday re: Condi. The WSJ puts to rest Condi's ridiculous claim that "nobody could have predicted" that these people would use airplanes as weapons.  The reporter, who apparently did actual research, comes up with an exhaustive list of examples where the government both knew of the airliner threat -- and took specific steps to successfully thwart the attack.

Speaking of "Out of the Loop:"

Scot Paltrow is the terrific reporter who writes for that left wing rag, the Wall Street Journal. You may recall he had a terrific piece last Monday, Government Accounts of 9/11 Reveal Gaps, Inconsistencies. 

Today, he puts the nail in the coffin of Condi Rice's claims that terrorist use of commercial aircraft was unforeseeable:

In the aftermath of those attacks, Bush administration officials have said they received no intelligence warning of such a tactic. "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in a May 2002 news briefing.
Yet on several occasions starting in the mid-1990s, U.S. intelligence agencies had passed on information concerning such a possibility, including early plans by al Qaeda officials to use passenger jets as kamikaze weapons, according to records and current and former government officials.

Paltrow includes a listing of the many warnings the White House recieved.  He begins with the strategy Richard Clarke worked on (and discusses in his book) to prevent Kamikaze Aircraft from being used at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.  These were applied to several other situations:

As a consequence, a strategy for protecting airspace over special events was drawn up by the National Security Council staff for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, in response to concerns about possible Iranian-backed terrorism. It included closing airspace over events to civilian air traffic, placing armed Air National Guard fighter jets on alert at a nearby base and launching on patrol a small air force belonging to the U.S. Customs Service, including jets, Black Hawk helicopters and a special radar-equipped plane. The customs service had the aircraft to interdict drug smuggling.

The plan was also used for:

• Mr. Clinton's second inauguration in 1997
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 50th anniversary celebration in Washington in 1999
• Republican and Democratic conventions in 2000
• Bush inauguration in 2001

This is according to both former White House officials and Mr. Clarke's book.  Paltrow goes on to note:

The plan's use for designated "National Security Special Events" was made official in a classified portion of a "presidential decision directive" that Mr. Clinton signed in 1998. Use of the plan at these events wasn't publicized, and officials were forbidden to talk about it.
In his book, "Against All Enemies," Mr. Clarke describes the security planning for the Atlanta Olympics, and mentions later efforts to get the same measures applied permanently to Washington. Also, John A. Flaherty, chief of staff to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, confirmed that before Sept. 11, the Bush administration was involved in planning airspace protection that was provided for the 2002 winter Olympics in Utah.
The possibility of terrorists using hijacked jets against major U.S. buildings had been raised in a public federal-government report in 1999 on terrorist threats facing the U.S. Prepared by the federal-research division of the Library of Congress, it warned: "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House." The report, referring to an al Qaeda leader captured in 1995, added that "Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters." Bush administration officials have said publicly that they weren't aware of the report before Sept. 11.

And if that's not quite enough, Paltrow goes on to exhaustive the list of examples of the prior warnings the White House recieved:

Warning Signs A look at some intelligence reports in the 1990s that warned of terrorist attacks with airliners:

• 1994 Eiffel Tower threat: "Algerian Armed Islamic Group terrorists hijacked an Air France flight...and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower."
• 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up American jets over the Pacific: "An accomplice of Ramzi Yousef told police in the Philippines [and the FBI] that a variant of the plot involved flying a plane on a suicide mission into CIA headquarters."
• 1996 Iranian plot to crash Japanese jet in Israel: "A passenger would board the plane in the Far East, commandeer the aircraft, order it to fly over Tel Aviv, and crash the plane into the city."
• 1998 Alleged plan by al Qaeda-linked terrorists to crash plane into World Trade Center: "...A group, since linked to al-Qa'ida, planned to fly an explosives-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center."
• 1998 Alleged Osama bin Laden plot to crash plane into a U.S. airport: "...Bin Ladin's next operation might involve flying an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. airport..."
• 1999 Federal Research Division Report on terrorism: "Suicide bomber(s)... could crash-land an aircraft...into the Pentagon...or the White House."

Sources: 1999: Federal Research Division Report; 1998, 1996, 1994: Congressional Joint Inquiry on intelligence relating to Sept. 11, issued July 2003; ''The Age of Sacred Terror'' by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, published October 2002.

Kinda makes you wonder who was really out of the loop.

Source:
Kamikaze Terrorism Wasn't a New Idea
White House Statements Aside, Protective Steps Date Back Through Clinton Administration
SCOT J. PALTROW, Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2004; Page A4

Name: Dan
Hometown: Greer, S.C.
Eric,
I have come up with the obvious solution to the mess that we have wrought in Iraq.  Now, Rumsfeld has a prior relationship with Saddam, so let's capitalize on that in order to bring stability to Iraq.  Simply make a deal with Saddam, who should be more than happy to cut a deal, so that we outsource the governing of Iraq to him for the purpose of killing everybody that took up arms against our troops, as long as he keeps the oil pumping and so long as he contributes a tidy sum annually to the war on terrorism.  It is so neat, so neo-conservative in its logic, I am surprised I didn't think of it earlier.

• March 31, 2004 | 12:32 PM ET

Speaking of viruses, what’s that one called where, um, you think you’re the only person in the world who sees the truth and everybody else is wrong?

"And the more I got of these," Mr. Nader said, "the more I realized that we are confronting a virus, a liberal virus.  And the characteristic of a virus is when it takes hold of the individual, it's the same virus, individual letters all written in uncannily the same sequence.  Here's another characteristic of the virus: Not one I can recall ever said, 'What are your arguments for running?'"  Let’s hope Nader’s narcissism is not communicable.  As Jon Stewart notes of Nader’s contention that he will draw more from Bush’s ranks than Kerry’s, “Conservatives for Nader.. Not a large group. About the same size as 'Retarded Death Row Texans for Bush."

And we notice, with a nod to Barry R., that one group of people Ralph does seem to be resonating with are loyal Republicans, who, something tells me, do not plan to vote for him in November but like what he does for Bush's chances.

The Dallas Morning News, here, reports that "Nearly 10 percent of the Nader contributors who have given him at least $250 each have a history of supporting the Republican president, national GOP candidates or the party, according to computer-assisted review of financial records by The Dallas Morning News."

Barry adds, "Amusingly, Nader has 'won Ben Stein's money.'  Stein is a television personality and outspoken advocate for the Republican Party, who has 'contributed $500 to Nader and $1,000 to Mr. Bush this year.  Records indicate that over the last decade, Mr. Stein has given exclusively to the GOP.'  Stein made TV ads for Mr. Bush in the 2000 election, but they never aired."

(via The Joe Hill Dispatch)

Speaking of Jon Stewart, did you know you could read the Daily show, annotated with footnotes, no really, here. 

Your Tax Dollars—at work to elect George Bush:  "The Treasury tapped civil servants to calculate the cost of Sen. John Kerry's tax plan and then posted the analysis on the Treasury Web site.  A federal law bars career government officials from working on political campaigns."  (WSJ)

Quote of the Day, from the best “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode of the season:

COLBY: We had very little rations, no snacks.
SOLLY: Snacks, what are you talking snacks? We didn't eat, sometimes for a week, for a month....
COLBY: Have you even seen the show?
SOLLY: Did you ever see our show? It was called the Holocaust!

Related: Interesting essay here.

Air America starts here at noon.  At the party last night, I walked in behind Michael Stipe and Mike Mills but the big thrill for me was when Mr. and Mrs. Atrios came up and said hello.  He is surprisingly normal looking for an evil genius, but I will let him come out in public in his own good time.

In order to take a silly and ultimately meaningless swipe at Richard Clarke, failed academic George F. Will writes, "'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' published in 1852, quickly sold 300,000 copies -- equivalent to 3 million today -- and remains the only book to become an American history-shaping political event.”  Um, could someone send this smartass pundit a copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” which sold the equivalent of thirty million (!) copies in 1776 and enjoyed a far more significant impact on history than “Tom”—which is to take nothing away from the latter.  (Just as saying Clarke’s book is no “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not saying much either.  Will’s books are no “George and Martha.”

Speaking of Brubeck... Brubeck Festival 2004: April 1-8

Brubeck Festival 2004 will open with the words of one Nobel Prize winner, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and conclude with the words of another, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., set to the music of Dave Brubeck in Brubeck's cantata "The Gates of Justice."
Presented by University of the Pacific and the Brubeck Institute from April 1-8, Brubeck Festival 2004 will observe the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and recognize Dave and Iola Brubeck for their lifetime commitment to social justice and human rights. Events will be offered in all three cities where University of the Pacific is located - Stockton, Sacramento and San Francisco.
“The elemental message of 'The Gates of Justice' is Dr. King's statement, ‘If we don't live together as brothers, we will die together as fools,'” says Dave Brubeck. “All you have to do is look around to realize that this message is just as relevant today as it was when the cantata was commissioned by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1969.”

Correspondents’ Corner:

Name: Barry Ritholtz
Hometown: The Big Picture
Hey Eric,
The White House's exasperation with Richard Clarke stems from a simple problem: Condi is not particularly skilled at prevaricating.  It was a disastrous strategic decision to go after him so aggressively.  A simple "We Disagree/Best of Luck in the Future" would have served them much better.  But once they decided to attack, Condi was the wrong dog to lead the pack.

Hey, we admire a good liar as much as the next guy.  But of all the distorting, misleading prevaricators in the White House today, Condi is the least capable, least convincing, least likely to get away with a real humdinger.  She's simply not that good at it.

On 60 Minutes, she looked uncomfortable.  Her answers seemed "legalistic" or at times, simply evasive.  What make her lies so much worse is that she keeps insisting on repeating things which are verifiably false.  It's harder to accept falsehoods from a person when they keep rubbing your nose in statements which are demonstrably untrue.

Her most glaring falsehood is the insupportable notion that no one had any idea that commercial planes would be used as part of the attack.  Condi has said this repeatedly, and it has been shown to be false in several ways:

All the way back on July 26, 2001, CBS reported that Attorney General John Ashcroft, on the advice of his FBI security detail, stopped flying on Commercial Aircraft.  Previously, he had flown commercial, as did his predecessor, Janet Reno.

An edict to the AG that he NOT FLY COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT is solid evidence that the FBI knew that aircraft were a potential target.  Given all the terrorist "chatter" which intelligence agencies have said existed in June and July of 2001, its clear that there was plenty of notice about commercial aircraft.  (Not that "we" heard anything about it at the time.)

San Francisco Gate columnist Harley Sorensen reported the same on June 3, 2002.  This is simply old news, still available on the Web.  It took me all of 30 seconds to find factual details on Condi's silly dissembling and refute it.  It has to make you wonder why she would tell so obvious a lie -- one that is so easily and verifiably false.  Only an extremely poor liar would do that; a Freudian would say she want to get caught.  I have no idea what her motivation is, other than pointing out she is not a skilled prevaricator.

The NYTimes noted today that in an August 6, 2001, President Bush was told that Al Qaeda might seek to hijack aircraft.  The 9/11 Commission  has found that U.S. intelligence agencies had some warning of terrorists using airplabes as missiles.

That's before we even get to Richard Clarke's testimony about 1996 Atlanta Olympics security detail.  He's commented that the security detail had fixed on ways to prevent aircraft from being flown into the Olympic stadium, creating a no fly zone, using helicopters, etc.
There are witnesses named to this discussion.  If Clarke is not telling the truth, then that should be easily provable.  Get the Special Agent in charge of the Atlanta FBI Office in 1996, or Cathal Flynn, a retired Navy SEAL who ran FAA security.  They are witnesses to this discussion, according to Clarke's book.

If there's a moral to this story, its this: John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan -- accomplished liars, both -- accepted responsibility when things went terribly wrong.  They didn't hide the truth, but accepted it, even embraced it.  JFK took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Reagan shouldered the blame personally for the 233 Marines who died when terrorists attacked their barracks in Beirut.

For these acts of political responsibility and human decency, their approval ratings went up. There's a lesson in this for the present administration -- and perhaps for the next one as well.

UPDATE:
The White House has decided to let Condi testify.

Two views:
On how terrorism was treated before Sept. 11:  
Clarke:  "The Bush administration saw terrorism policy as important but not urgent, prior to 9/11."
-- From testimony for 9/11 Commission hearing, March 24, 2004

Rice:  "I would like very much to know what more could have been done given that it was an urgent problem."
-- 60 Minutes, March 28

On whether Bush pressured Clarke to find an Iraqi link to Sept. 11:
Clarke:  "I said, 'Mr. President, we've done this before... there's no connection.'  He came back at me and said, 'Iraq, Saddam; find out if there's a connection.'  And in a very intimidating way." 
-- 60 Minutes, March 21

Rice:  "I have never seen the president say anything to people in an intimidating way to try to get a particular answer out of them."
-- 60 Minutes, March 28

On whether Rice had demoted Clarke:  
Clarke:  "Rice decided that the position [Clarke held] of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism would also be downgraded."
-- In his book, "Against All Enemies"

Rice:  "He wasn't demoted.  We had a different organizational structure.  Dick was still the national coordinator.  He was still doing all of the things he had been doing."
-- March 24 press briefing

Source: WSJ:  Rice to testify publicly on attacks

Name: Dave Johnson
Hometown: Seeing the Forest
Don't forget John O'Neill, FBI's Deputy Director, who quit in frustration because he couldn't pursue bin Laden, and was killed at the WTC.  

Name: Pat Healy
Hometown: Vallejo, CA
Eric,
I know the Janet Jackson kerfluffle is a trifle old at this point, but the great Richard Thompson has a song about it that addresses the issue in an important, yet underreported, fashion.

• March 30, 2004 | 12:32 PM ET

Attention Must be Paid:  E.J. Dionne touches on an interesting point about the Richard Clarke food-fight that continues to grip the Bush Administration.  On the one hand, the ferocity of the argument is odd.  Clarke is not really revealing anything we did not already know.  So far, I’ve not heard anything—absent insidery detail—that I did not include in my chapter on the subject in The Book on Bush, including for instance, the fact that Cheney’s alleged commission on terrorism never once met.  This is not news.  I read it in The Washington Post, I believe, which is why I knew it.  Anyone who examines the facts honestly cannot help but conclude that the Bush administration never took terrorism seriously before 9/11, and that they ignored the admonitions of the Clinton administration to do so.  Condoleezza Rice is particularly culpable in this regard, but so are they all.

What Clarke has done, however, is forced both the media and the nation to pay attention.  His credibility and masterful performance have made the story of the Bush administration’s awful response impossible to ignore.  When conservatives and some mainstream journalists wrote of the alleged ferocity of liberals who are said to “hate Bush” they were doing so in ignorance of the administration’s true record of mendacity, ferocity and incompetence. This is the record that Clarke reveals in all of its tawdriness, and the administration rightly fears that unless he is destroyed—by whatever means necessary—much of the country will come to see their record just as those of us who have examined it carefully already do. 

They have subverted the “War on Terrorism” with their obsession with Iraq and all but ignored homeland security. The next time we are attacked, we will be all the more vulnerable to catastrophe owing to their sorry record and refusal to take responsibility for their actions.  Clarke is laying the groundwork for the media—and the country—to finally examine that record with a clear eye.  Like John Diullio, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Paul O’Neill, Anthony Zinni, Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and David Kay, his credibility—and character—must be destroyed.

Next problem for Bush:  Lloyd Grove seems to think  Bob Woodward wants his reputation back.

Ironic Quote of the Day:  “Civil rights activist Robert Novak….”
-Jon Stewart, last night, and yes, he was kidding.

Quote of the Day II:  "But in my experience, dud theories die only to be replaced by new and even dumber ones."

Has any journalist discredited himself more thoroughly than my old friend Hitchens?  First he decides, Horowitz-like, that virtually everything he said in the past was wrong.  His former friends and heroes, Chomsky, Vidal and Cockburn are now crackpots for saying much of what he used to say.  (I agree with that, by the way, and used to tell Christopher as much every chance I got.)  Now that virtually everything he has said in the service of the Bush administration has also been discredited, what’s left?  I guess, um, nonsense, which for some reason, Slate seems to mistake for contrarian wisdom. 

"The current reigning favorite is that fighting al-Qaida in Iraq is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida."  Um, Christopher, comrade, those of us who supported the effort to eradicate al-Qaida from the start never thought it was such a hot idea to pull troops and special forces out of Afghanistan to put them into Iraq, which was not causing us any trouble, and did not even possess the means to do so.

"When Leon Wieseltier was once asked to describe TNR, he famously replied, 'It's kind of a Jewish Commentary.'"  Can’t Little Roy get anything right?  The line belongs to Frank Mankiewicz, and is properly credited by Calvin Trillin, who first popularized it.

Get your fair and balanced news, right here. 

In the meantime, Knight-Ridder hates America.

Alter-reviews:  It’s a good week for jazz piano.  Blue Note has just released Bill Charlap’s “Somewhere,” a piano-driven tribute to Leonard Bernstein, Charlap is close to being the most admired pianist in jazz today, in part for his exquisite skill and in part for his flawless taste in both material and arrangements.  This record builds on that reputation and should expand it. 

Also out this week, in celebration of Dave Brubeck’s half-century on Columbia Records, is a box set of all of five of his “Time” records cleaned up and re-mastered.  If all you know about Brubeck is “Time Out,” then the rest of these, “Time Further Out,” and the long out-of print, “Countdown: Time in Outer Space,” “Time Changes,” and “Time In,” will be a necessary part of your jazz education as they have been of mine.  The box, and I imagine, eventually, the individual CDs, will be available shortly from Columbia Legacy.  And if you don’t know “Time Out,” well, there’s really no excuse for that.  Get thee to a CD store.

Correspondents’ Corner:

Name: Carol
Hometown: Kettering OH
Eric,
You ask, "Democrats fail to make an issue of this practice for fear of …  WHAT?"

The wish by a party to garner as many votes as possible is no doubt leavened by an utter lack of concern about the welfare of felons and their families, shared by everyone in this country who hasn't got a felon in his or her immediate family. How else to explain why, for example, MCI can gouge felons' families for over 1 dollar a minute on a thirty minute phone call that is interrupted three times by a recorded voice reminding both parties that the call originates from a correctional institution?  This is a humiliating and, for many, prohibitively expensive way to keep in touch with an imprisoned loved one. Yet nobody gives a damn about it.

If the Democrats wanted to make an issue of former felons' voting rights, they would simply run up against the hostility directed at  "those people" by the majority of the population.  For crying out loud, even the article you link to dwells at great length on the crimes which were committed by the former felons appealing to Governor Bush to have their voting rights restored -these people are characterized in no other way than as scum.

• March 29, 2004 | 11:45 AM ET

Random Thoughts on a Monday morning*

Compassionate Conservatism, Defined: “While Mr. Bush promised in his 2003 State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over five years on AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, his budget requests have fallen far short of that goal.  For the most recent donation to the Global Fund, he requested only $200 million, although Congress authorized $550 million.”  More here.

Bush owes Florida “victory” to illegally disenfranchised felons.  Democrats fail to make an issue of this practice for fear of … WHAT?  “In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons.  …Critics say that President Bush would have lost in 2000 if disenfranchised felons had been allowed to vote.” More here and here.

Chalabi, Black, and Sharon.  Are all neocon heroes crooks?

You thought the administration’s sources on bioweapons were thin?  You didn’t know the half of it.  More here. 

And by the way, this is par for the course for the heroic Colin Powell. 

And oh yeah, while they’re starting wars about phony threats, they’re not bothering to protect us from the real ones, something even Judith Miller can’t figure out how to spin for them.

The New York Times is a liberal conspiracy, huh?  Well, they sure fooled me.  On Saturday I picked up my paper to see an Arts and Ideas review by Commentary Editor Gary Rosen, who pushes the Norman Podhoretz keys embedded in all the magazine’s keyboards.  Oh look, he complains, the authors are taking “an alarmist mode familiar to readers of The New York Review of Books," and their unwillingness to endorse the Neocon jihadist view of the world, “suggests not just a failure of political imagination but a lack of confidence in the West itself."  (Podhoretz even made this lunatic claim in 1982 in support of Sharon's criminal negligence in allowing, and to some degree encouraging, the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla.)  More here.

I didn’t read this review but I do think that Commentary editors might wish to rethink their thesis that the Times represents the cutting edge of SDS/Weatherman ideological thinking….

Stop the Presses:  I got this in a press release from Time:

“KAREN HUGHES THINKS MORE HIGHLY OF PRESIDENT BUSH TODAY THAN SHE DID WHEN SHE FIRST WENT TO WORK FOR HIM, HUGHES TELLS TIME
‘And That’s Pretty Incredible,’ She Says” 

Actually no, what would be incredible would be if one of these people told the truth, for once. (Story here.)

And this:

“CONDOLEEZZA RICE IS GETTING ‘A BUM RAP,’ CHENEY TELLS TIME
On Clinton Administration’s Handling of Terrorism: ‘There Was a Sense [In the Bush Adminstration] That They Hadn’t Handled It Very Well’
On Richard Clarke: ‘I Don’t Hold Him in High Regard’”

See above. (Story here.)

The funny thing about this silly Page Six story about the “now legendary” Dennis Miller show is that, aside from its headline, it is more accurate than the Observer was.  But that’s not saying much.  I am not a “TV Pundit” as the headline claims.  Moreover this “lathered up lefty” specifically told the Page Six reporter, in an e-mail, that I did not think the Observer “had it in for me.”  I explained that I simply thought they had extremely low standards for accuracy for some of those reporters and my path happened to have crossed with two of them.  I don’t think they sit around saying, “How can we get that Alterman guy again this week?”  Thankfully, I do not rate nearly high on the gossip meter for that.  (And it must have been one hell of a slow “news” Sunday for Page Six.)  The paper’s editor, Peter Kaplan, tries to do the classy thing, without admitting that his reporters need courses in remedial journalism. 

Meanwhile, just to show you how full of it Page Six is—even on a conscientious day—after I heard from Kaplan on the phone on Friday, I e-mailed the reporter, Chris Wilson, back and said if he was planning an item on the thing, he should call me.  (I originally misunderstood his message to mean that his feelings were hurt over my referring to the “Page Sixish-crap” in the Observer.)  I’m still waiting.

And Speaking of Mr. Miller, he gets today’s special triple edition of “Quotes of the Day:”

"I don't have the vaguest pretension to journalistic ethics. I'm a comedian."

On GWB:  "I'm going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends."

On having Arnold as his first guest and having his consultant work as a producer:  "I'm sorry if it's violated anybody's bul**hit sense of journalistic ethics."

(These turned up in a newsletter I received from FAIR.)

Alter-reviews:  Here is Sal on the new Fleetwood Mac re-releases from Rhino:

FLEETWOOD MAC, whose three biggest-selling albums (1975's self-titled album, 1977's "Rumours," and 1979's "Tusk") have all been reissued with great new remastering, expanded packaging with new liner notes and rare photos, and lots and lots of bonus tracks.  Both "Rumours" and "Tusk" are two CD sets, featuring an entire disc's worth of demos, rough tracks, and unreleased material.  While not an easy listen, they shed new light on the creative process and how these albums came to assume their final form.  The self-titled record, on a single disc, tacks on six bonus tracks, two of them previously unreleased.  What makes these reissues so appealing is the outstanding sound quality of the new remastering, specifically on the self-titled CD.  Mick Fleetwood's cymbals on "Over My Head" could slice through bread. (Not sure what that means, actually.)

Eric adds: Sal is right. The sound quality on these is actually terrific.  I did an A/B thing with the box set to see which version to keep and the new versions jumped out of the speakers.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Dave Sikula
Hometown: Pacifica, CA
Dear Eric,
Assuming Stupid is right in his concern about graduation rates for college athletes, the solution he proposes seems too complex to me.  My proposal is that each school gets x number of scholarships for each sport.  Every time a player graduates, the school is allowed to reissue that scholarship.  If a player doesn't graduate, the scholarship expires.

Seems clean and simple to me.  But then, I also think that ballots should have boxes that get x'd by a pen for later counting.  Sure, the media don't get -instant- results, but we do get an accurate record of how many people voted for whom.
____________________

*Brought to you through the magic of dial-up because TimeWarner cable, which used to be much better than Verizon DSL, has really started to suck….

• March 26, 2004 | 10:56 AM ET

Slacker Friday

A photo is worth how many words?  Here is a picture that the Times captions: “Iraqi youths celebrated Thursday after an American military vehicle was set on fire after a shootout between United States forces and guerrillas in the town of Falluja.”  No “rose-petals.”  No WMD.  No relationship to terrorists.  No security.  Just endless chaos, hostility, death, and dollars wasted.  What else, really, do you need to know about this catastrophically misguided adventure and the men and women who misled the nation to justify it?

I’ve got a new Nation column here.  It’s called “Widows and Orphans First" and it’s about another attack on those who question the administration’s use and abuse of 9/11.  In this case it’s an organization of victims’ families.

The great Garry Wills on The Passion.

And Geneva Overholzer catches Howie “Conflict of Interest” Kurtz exceptionally conflicted, even by Howie-standards, here (third item) he is violating the basic rules of decent journalism in allowing an anonymous source to slam someone without revealing his or her identity.  Oh wait.  He’s slamming the former Executive Editor of The New York Times.  Then it’s ok….

I saw Television for the first time last night.  Allmans again tonight, thanks to an Altercation reader.  (They are very similar bands in some ways.)  I’m seeing Van again next week.  Would like to catch Brad Mehldau or John Eddie or Toots and the Maytals this weekend but I've got a life to live.  This is the greatest music town on earth (especially if you’re stuck in the seventies).

On to Slacker Friday:

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton, MA
Eric --
C-Plus Augustus told a joke the other night about not being able to find the WMD's.  Please, somebody, get the tape and splice in some footage from Iraq, and run the damn thing as a commercial every day between now and November.  Between this and Nino Scalia's corporate quackery, you have the distilled essence of the Avignon Presidency -- we can say (do) anything we want, whenever we want, with whoever we want, and to whomever we want, because we are the people who have been anointed -- Thanks for that, Matthews.  You tool. -- by God and by the luckiest of the lucky sperm.  These people care as much about democracy as they do about accountability, which is why they haven't yet noticed how the world changed on them this week.  From now on, there are the people who took the oath and the people who didn't. Hands on the Bible, people, or we have nothing to discuss.

As to the raucous heckling from the wonks in the peanut gallery last week, all I can say is that a compelling political biography has to be about a compelling political figure, and anybody who'd trade the stories of the Kingfish, J.M. Curley or old George Corley for those of Whitaker Chambers, or Walter Lippmann, or William Randolph Rosebud has no heart and certainly no soul.  And Caro?  Hell, folks, the guy's book isn't even FINISHED yet!

Name: Stupid
Hometown: Chicago
Hey Eric, it's Stupid to be tardy (let alone to step on Pierce's turf).  I run our office NCAA March Madness pool and I wanted to write about the unbelievably low graduation rates for most of the schools in the tournament, particularly for African-Americans.  The numbers are staggering.  Some schools didn’t graduate any African-American players and less than a fifth of their players overall.  But I put it off for a week and now Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe among others beat me to it. You can look up individual schools here.

I read a few of these stories and found one glaring omission: Bobby Knight.  The violent, racist, misogynistic monster we know and hate, is also legendary for graduating most of his players.  It makes you wonder who the real abuser of these athletes is?  The coaches who recruit high school athletes have full knowledge they will use these kids for four to five years and leave them with nothing.  The kids would be infinitely better off with Knight, neck choking and all.

In the past some have argued that tightening eligibility rules was racist because it would disproportionately deny opportunities to African-Americans.  It’s a valid point, but the goal should be results, not opportunities.  Say Bobby Knight only recruits students with a good chance to graduate anyway and as a result has fewer African-American players, (I have no idea - at Indiana he had an entire state that was nuts for basketball...), at the end of the day they still all have degrees.  My suggestion is to focus more on the coaches than on the entering students.  Set a minimum graduation rate per sport.  If a school falls below that number, they lose athletic scholarships (they must go to the general scholarship pool).  If they fall below that number for three years, they go on probation (no postseason play).  Any school serious about the student-athletes can recruit whomever they want as long as they are willing to develop their minds as well as their bodies.

Name: Barry L. Ritholtz
Hometown: The Big Picture
Doctor A,
With all the focus on Richard Clarke's 60 Minutes interview/September 11 Committee testimony, an interesting story has slipped by the national news media almost unnoticed:  It seems a poll of Cuban American voters in Florida are weakening in their support for the Prez.

This is the second ethnic voting bloc in a swing state -- Arab Americans being the first -- that has begun shifting their alliances based upon the incumbent's track record:

From: Cuban Voters in Florida Wavering in Support for President

We had previously discussed that Arab American voters, supporters of Bush in 2000, were abandoning  the President in key swing states.  A parallel situation has been  developing among Cuban-American voters in Florida according to a recent survey of 1,807 Cuban-Americans conducted Jan. 30 through March 16 by Florida International University in partnership with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and NBC 6, and included registered voters and non-voters. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points:

"A recent poll of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, only 58.4 percent of registered voters said they would definitely or probably vote for Bush in November. About one-quarter said they were undecided, with the rest saying they probably would not or definitely would not vote to re-elect the president . . ."

Miami Herald columnist Michael Putney observes:

"Recent polls say that President Bush is in trouble with Cuban-American voters. The polls are interesting but fairly meaningless: The Cuban vote is Bush's to lose. My gut feeling is that this November, as in 2000, Bush will get most of it. The only question is: Will he get 80 percent, as he did four years ago, or about 60 percent, as a new poll indicates? The difference could swing the election in Florida."

Consider that Florida has over 400,000 Cuban-American voters. If Putney is correct -- if the President takes "only" 60% of the Cuban American vote, versus the 80% four of years ago -- that represents a potential swing of 80,000 votes.

There's a second poll by TV channel Univision. "The survey shows that more than one-third of South Florida Hispanic voters -- a group consisting primarily of GOP-leaning Cuban Americans -- disapproves of the job the president has done ''promoting democracy and regime change'' in Fidel Castro's Cuba."

When I tell you this race gets more interesting by the day, I am not fooling around . . .

Sources:
Cubans’ support for Bush declines, South Florida poll shows
By Rafael Lorente
Sun-Sentinel March 21 2004

Cuban-American vote is Bush's to lose
Michael Putney
Miami Herald, Mar. 24, 2004

Some South Florida Hispanics unhappy with Cuba policy
Peter Wallsten
Miami Herald, March 02, 2004

Related:
Elian swings Cuban voters back to GOP
After backing Clinton, Cuban-American voters are ready to punish Democrats for the Gonzalez situation
David Adams
St. Petersburg Times, November 5, 2000

Name: Jerome Clark
Hometown: Canby, Minnesota
My wife and I dropped everything and devoted our full attention to Dick Clarke's riveting testimony before the 9/11 commission.  As many have by now observed, he did a magnificent job.

It was especially amusing to me to witness the temper tantrum to which former Illinois Republican Gov. Jim Thompson gave vent, after Clarke explained to him that he was just following the President's -- his boss' -- orders when he put the best possible public face on the administration's terror-attack readiness while serving under Bush.  Thompson got all huffy -- my wife remarked that he appeared on the verge of a stroke -- and in effect called making your boss look good an unheard-of political crime which was all the proof one needs of Clarke's depraved character.

As it happens, my brother was a senior staff member to Thompson when he was governor.  At one point, when interviewed by a reporter, he spoke the blunt truth: that a proposed Thompson action wouldn't work and was essentially a political stunt.  Thompson went ballistic and, while acknowledging that what my brother had said was perfectly true, screamed red-faced at him for (if memory serves) close to an hour.  My brother nearly got fired for being honest.

The moral of the story: as usual, one set of rules for Republicans, another for the rest of us.

Name: David
Hometown: Houston
Eric - Don't forget Scott Ritter.  Remember, he is the lone "idiot" that stood up and told Americans they would find no WMDs in Iraq.  He had the nerve to suggest that *gasp* inspections might be working.  But, we were told how disgruntled he was and how he wasn't "in the loop" and how his criticisms were un-American.  Deja vu.

Name: John
Hometown: Houston, TX
Maybe it's just an Air Force problem.  Or maybe Eileen Bennett is wrong.  But here in this one Army post I asked about 50 of my coworkers about Iraq.  I'm not high enough in rank for most of them to feel intimidated into giving the "answer I want" so I'm confident in the strength of what I found.

There are people who don't want to go to Iraq because it's dangerous, they'll be away from their family, etc.  But I cannot find one, ONE, who is against it.  Of course maybe the Army is just made of some tougher stuff, or understands policy better than our flight-suited cousins.

• March 25, 2004 | 2:27 PM ET

Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Max Cleland, Paul O’Neill, General Zinni, and Dick Clarke are all unpatriotic liars and weenies right?  Has to be true; otherwise, this administration is both incompetent and dishonest.  And that’s not possible.  I mean, on the one hand we have people who have given their entire careers to serving the American people and in many cases, paid dearly for it.  On the other, we have a guy who didn’t bother to show up for his cushy National Guard service during a war he supported, spent most of his first forty years drinking and carousing, and having been made wealthy by his father’s associates, fell into the job of president where he (undeniably) misled his country into a war based on falsified evidence.  Gee that’s a hard one.  No wonder Ron Brownstein thinks the Clarke testimony might be a turning point. 

The Clinton administration is obviously not blameless in failing to pursue Al Qaida as it might have but let’s keep in mind that a) the Republicans were impeaching him for lying about sex, and b) when he did try to take action, these same accusers were accusing him of “wagging the dog.”  Interesting that Iraq hawks like Christopher Hitchens were then taking the Chomsky line that this attempt to attack al-Qaida was a politically-motivated crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, Richard Clarke "warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al Qaeda network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed yesterday." 

"Evidence compiled by the commission suggests that before Sept. 11, the Bush team failed to put into place a comprehensive game plan of its own against the bin Laden network," here.

And in Sid Blumenthal's Salon.com column, here, he writes,

“Clarke was not the only national security professional who spanned both the Clinton and Bush administrations.  Gen. Donald Kerrick served as deputy national security advisor under Clinton and remained on the NSC for several months into the new Bush administration.  Kerrick wrote his replacement, Stephen Hadley, a two-page memo. "It was classified," Kerrick told me. "I said they needed to pay attention to al-Qaida and counterterrorism. I said we were going to be struck again. We didn't know where or when.  They never once asked me a question nor did I see them having a serious discussion about it.  They didn't feel it was an imminent threat the way the Clinton administration did.  Hadley did not respond to my memo.  I know he had it.  I agree with Dick that they saw those problems through an Iraqi prism.  But the evidence wasn't there."

Condi Rice argues that Bush took the Al Qaida threat seriously?  I don't think so.  More here.

Leaving Clarke aside, you just can’t believe anything, and I do mean anything, (and I really do mean anything), this administration says.

Chris Mooney did a fine job on media miscoverage of stem cell research for my Think Again column here.  Once again, the archives are here and you can sign up for the Progress Report here.

This is not the most important thing in the world, but Bill O’Reilly sure is a dope.  I imagine it’s on purpose, because I can’t believe he is dumb enough to be seriously outraged about what he termed a “private meeting” between John Kerry and a group of invited journalists at Al Franken’s last December.  Maybe it’s just the pins from Al’s voodoo doll, but O’Reilly has been going nuts—his producer called me for info—about the fact that a bunch of us met with Kerry to ask him questions. 

O'Reilly thinks it is impossible that President Bush would ever do such a thing and he would be raked over the coals if he ever did.  Oh please.  Bush does it all the time, except unlike Kerry, he lacks the courage to do so on the record.  Remember when he called in a bunch of suck-up columnists for a briefing just before Iraq and demanded that they all refer to him as a “senior White House official?” 

Take a look at Michael Kelly’s Washington Post column from the following day; pure, unedited propaganda.  And heaven forbid Bush ever took the kind of tough questions that Kerry took that day—once again—entirely on the record.  His presidency would be over.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Howard
Hometown: Seattle, WA
Actually, I don't think the Bush administration uses the term "revisionist history" incoherently. In their minds, whatever they say constitutes historical truth; ergo, any questioning of said "historical truth" becomes, in their minds, "revisionist history."

This is narcissism, hubris and idiocy all rolled into one, but it does have a coherence....

• March 24, 2004 | 1:30 PM ET

David Sirota of the Progress Report picked up on the fact that Scott McClellan yesterday went in front of the cameras and tried to deliberately mislead the entire White House press corps.  In this interchange, McClellan categorically denied that the President signed a directive in October of 2001 ordering the Pentagon to prepare plans for an Iraq invasion immediately after 9/11.  What he did not say was that:

According to the 1/12/03 Washington Post (which quotes senior Administration officials) "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2½-page document marked 'TOP SECRET'" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by 9/4/02 CBS News report that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." 

Sirota directs us to articles here and here as well as the McClellan transcript from yesterday.

We note once again for the record, the incoherent use of the term “revisionist history.”

Q He's right that in October -- in October of 2001, when the President signed this directive, the President was directing the Pentagon to prepare plans for the invasion of Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's why I said, that's part -- that's part of his revisionist history.

Q That's not true?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's part of his revisionist history, that's what I'm saying --

Q Are you saying it's not true?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, that's right. I am.

Q You are saying that it's not true?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's part of -- that's just his revisionist history to make suggestions like that.  He knows that at that point that our focus was on going -- was on Afghanistan and removing the Taliban and taking away the safe haven for al Qaeda.

Meanwhile,  The Daily Mis-Lead catches the following development: Despite what he and his gay supporters have claimed in the past, the president now supports the firing of gay government workers simply because they are gay.  Bush has insisted that homosexuals "ought to have the same rights" (1) as all other people, but according to the Federal Times, the president's appointee at the Office of Special Counsel ruled that federal employees will now "have no recourse if they are fired or demoted simply for being gay." (2) To carry out the directive, the White House has begun removing information from government websites about sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace. (3)

Sources:
1.    Debates, 10/11/2000.
2.    "OSC to study whether bias law covers gays", Federal Times, 03/15/2004.
3.    "Gay Rights Information Taken Off Site", Washington Post, 02/18/2004.

Quotes of the day:
"Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times White House correspondent, on criticism that reporters were too easy on Bush on the eve of the Iraq war:

'I think we were very deferential because ... it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there.  Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war.  There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.'"

I really don’t know what to add to that, except it would nice if Times editors would take a position on whether its reporters should refrain from questioning the president because “it’s scary.”

Poor Eric Boehlert.  The guy works so hard, and when he drove in from deepest Jersey on Saturday night, we couldn’t find tickets on the street outside the Beacon for under $175 each, and gave up. He was too busy being the world’s greatest unsung journalist to try again last night and so he missed a set that opened with my three favorite ABB songs in a row: “One Way Out,” “Ain’t Waistin’ Time No More” and “Statesboro Blues.” The closer was a very strong “Whipping Post,” and Warren didn’t sound too terrible when he sang “Into the Mystic.” It was great, particularly young Derek’s playing, but I still miss Dickie.

Alter almost-reviews: I’ve picked up three books on the Holocaust recently that provide a corrective not only to Mel Gibson’s deluded dad, but also the crazy hoopla over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners a few years back, which is the lalst time people were paying attention.

They are:

• Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution, published jointly by the University of Nebraska and Yad Vashem
• Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich (Penquin)
• And slightly more tangentially, Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (Knopf)

Browning provided the primary corrective to Goldhagen way back when and in my view, displays a great deal more care and discipline with his source material.  Evans’ work is volume one of what looks to be the most comprehensive history of these awful events yet written. And I remember being mightily impressed with Paxton’s history of Vichy France when I read it in college and this book seems to tie together decades of scholarship and synthesis.

Correspondents’ Corner (The first one is from me):

The New York Observer does another hatchet job on me, this one in relation to Dennis Miller. It’s here.  Because they refused to print my reply to the last one, after having acknowledged its reception, I’ve printed it below.

To the Editor
New York Observer
March 24, 2004
OK, I’m an idiot.  For the second time in a year, I’ve made the mistake of talking to a New York Observer “reporter.”  First, George Gurley, Ann Coulter’s handmaiden in joking about the terrorist murder of every reporter, editor and janitor at The New York Times, lied to your readers in a bitchy hatchet-job, and you failed to publish my letter setting the record straight despite your editor in chief having acknowledged its reception.  Now someone name Joe Hagan tells the story of my appearance on Dennis Miller show hardly less smarmily and dishonestly.  If the few paragraphs I wrote about the Miller episode on my Altercation Weblog can fairly be considered “ruthlessly flogging” it, then Joe Hagan is A.J. Liebling, and The New York Observer is Harold Ross’s New Yorker.  As Mr. Hagan--whom I have never met--cannot help but note, Miller invited me on the show, ambushed me, and I responded with restraint.  I later accepted his apology without incident.  I wrote a few short paragraphs about this bizarre incident on my MSNBC Weblog, “Altercation,” linked to someone else’s posting of video of it, and printed only e-mails that were critical of me—as opposed to the four hundred or so I received in support.  I contacted no reporters and issued no statements.  Hagan called me and I politely responded to his questions.  And the result is this pathetic Page-Sixish crap.  I know why Rupert Murdoch’s “reporters” do this kind of thing, but really, what can be the Observer’s excuse?  Is this really what you people want to do with your lives?
Eric Alterman

Name: Paul Thompson
Dear Eric,
Thanks for the kudos to my 9/11 timeline in your most recent missive.

For people who are interested in knowing even more details about what Bush did on 9/11, you might want to point folks to this extensive essay:

An Interesting Day: Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11

And there's this related essay:

The Failure to Defend the Skies on 9/11

I wrote both of the above to help others make sense of all the very complicated information on these topics. Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Name: Eileen Bennett
Hometown: Madison, WI
I enjoyed Chris Wallace's letter.  I am a member of the Air National Guard (25 years in the military.)  I recently attended an Air Force Tech School with another Guardmember (30 years) and 3 first-term active-duty Airmen.  All 5 of us are opposed to this war.  The airmen related that there is widespread opposition to the war among active duty Air Force.  So, don't believe everything you read.  (Ha! Ha!)

Name: Peter Ames Carlin
Hometown: Portland, Or.
Just a quick note on the Jackson Browne conversation from last week: The real dividing line in his career is the one running through David Lindley.  With Lindley on slide, fiddle, etc. JB's tunes had a whole other dimension of feeling, texture and sonic quirkiness.  Without Lindley (post "Hold Out") his records sound increasingly slick and generic.  Even the fiery political tunes of the '80s come with a denatured electronic sheen that make JB's civics lectures all the more grating, no matter how much you agree with him.  Then listen to his cover of Lowell George's "I've Been the One" from '99, re-teamed with Lindley on slide.  Lovely.

Name: Terry
Hometown: Los Angeles
Eric,
Sorry to hear you're getting grief from Jackson Browne's publicist.  Jackson himself is a kind and generous soul.  Ten years or so ago my family received a Christmas card from him.  Of course, we sent one to him by return post.  A few days later a tin of the most delicious ginger cookies arrived, compliments of Mr. Browne.  We have exchanged cards, and sometimes received cookies, every year since.  We've never met or spoken to him, but Christmas at our house isn't Christmas without him.  Strange, but true.

Conundrum:

Name: Rick Merrill
Hometown: Los Angeles
Eric:
It's funny how you only choose to print poorly spelled and poorly reasoned emails against your left wing drivel, as if no intelligent, educated person could possibly disagree with you.  Selectively posting opposing emails in a way to make your opposition look stupid is intellectually dishonest, and you know it.

And another:

Name: scott
Hometown: plant city, FL
Really big of you to print only the most idioitic rants from the right.

To address your, and mind-numbed robots who like what you have to say (all three dozen of them)Bush never said "imminent threat." He said, "...before Hussein becomes an imminent threat."

And are we talking about the same Clark who praised Bush for his actions following 911? The same Clark who let dozens of terrorist deeds occur during the Clinton Error?

I know you aint got the balls to print this, pal.

• March 23, 2004 | 12:35 PM ET

Today is another of those days where I’m kind of superfluous, owing to the quality of the mail below.  In the meantime, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have useful perspectives on the White House’s campaign to destroy the character of Richard Clarke, its longest serving public official and most experienced counterterrorism expert. A great many of the charges made by Clarke can also be found in The Book on Bush, but of course, Clarke’s perspective adds invaluable information and an insider perspective.

Odds and Ends:  Bob Bateman touts efforts like this one to win hearts and minds.

The Jack Kelley case offers more and more arguments against affirmative action for white guy Evangelical Christians.

And another reader reminds me that the CCR webserver goes down a lot, but you can find another link to its incredible 9/11 timeline here. Or for all of them, here.

And there's a nice Arthur Miller essay here.

On a personal/political note,  except for a talk I’m giving  in the rare book room at the Strand Book Store, at 826 Broadway on Thursday at 7:00, (before seeing Television at Irving Plaza), I’m pretty much done with promotional stuff for The Book on Bush.  It was a rather weird experience.

The book got almost no attention in the media; the only significant review was the one published in The Washington Post, who gave it to Reagan/Bush/Fox News operative, James Pinkerton. Still, with next to no media attention, the book entered the Times extended best-seller list and stayed there four weeks.  I’ve never before published a book that was so thoroughly ignored in the media, nor one that started out as a best-seller.  Go figure.

In the meantime, I spoke in seven cities and without exception, every one of them was more fun than my talks of year ago when I was touring for What Liberal Media?  That tour took place just before Bush invaded Iraq.  It happened before the other liberal books began crowding one another on the best-seller list, before the creation of the Center for American Progress, before the Dean campaign took the lessons learned by Moveon.org and gave the rest of the party its instructions, before we had so many excellent blogs, before Air America demonstrated it was for real, before, in short, liberals felt they had a way to fight back.

OK, so I was only in blue states and the bluest sections of blue states, but I’m telling you, these guys may find a way to take this election too, but this time, there’s going to be another side fighting back. And fighting back just feels better, even if the mainstream media don’t like it.

Quote of the Day: "Now, being a little competitive, I noticed that while the E Street Band and I were sweating our asses off for hours, just to put some fannies in the seats, that obviously due to what must have been some strong homoerotic undercurrent in our music, we were drawing rooms full of men.  And not that great-looking men, either.  Meanwhile, Jackson was drawing more women than an Indigo Girls show!" 
-Bruce Springsteen at the RRHOF, here.

Alter-review:

When Altercation talks… When the last Dylan bootleg series was released, we talked Altercation amigo Sean Wilentz into giving us an exclusive review.  Somebody at Sony had a similar idea nearly two years later and now Sean’s written the notes for “Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall—The Bootleg Series Volume 6,” a concert Sean attended when he was 13.  (Dylan was 23.)  In addition to its unusually erudite essay—just about the best I can remember reading on Dylan since Pete Hamill’s liner notes for “Blood on the Tracks”-- it’s got some lovely duets with not-so surprise guest Joan Baez.  Anyway, there it is, back when Zimmy was so much older...  There’s plenty more about the CD here and it appears Sean is leading a panel that will be broadcast on WFMU.

Correspondence Corner:

(I decided to hold off on the angry e-mails I received from Jackson’s press guy, because I’m not sure it’s fair to cause Jackson, an artist whose work I revere, any tsuris during such a happy time for him just because he’s got a nasty fellow doing his press.

Name: Gene Duarte
Hometown: Olalla, Wa.
This is a response to Mr. Panu's letter, published in your column of March 22, 2004.
Mr. Panu: I have a son who is in Iraq, a well adjusted, bright kid who is one of the loves of my life. We did not go over to Iraq to ensure their happiness, nor did we spend upwards (MUCH upwards) of $87 billion dollars to build schools.  We spent that money because the Misleader and his Administration had indicated that there was an "imminent" threat posed to the U.S. by Iraq's WMD.  No "WMD theory," actual WMD's.  A thousand happy Iraqis are NOT worth my son's life.  Nor are they worth the life of those who have died in this crime perpetuated by this Administration.

Name: Chris Wallace
Hometown: West Des Moines, Iowa
Dear Dr. A,
First off, let me say that, in the beginning when I first started to read your blog, I flat out hated you.  Over and over again, it was Gore got cheated this, Gore got shafted that.  Now, however, even as that Supreme Court decision will be etched in our memories for quite some time, I've come to take a second, more open minded look over the last two years on your writings.  I still find you very opinionated, but also very informed while backing up what you say with other sources and research.  In a world where fabrications are somehow fact, I hold your methods in great respect.

Now, that said...I find it extremely disheartening (and also somewhat darkly humorous) that the attack dog e-mails from stark conservatives look like nothing more than nonsensical drivel, most notably the two you shared with us from yesterday's edition.

Specifically, to the "fact" that Bush had the "BALLS to FREE A NATION", I can only say the following:

• No WMD.  Funny how we would have looked much more credible to the world if ol' Colin would have pulled evidence, a la Adlai Stevenson on Cuba.
• No terrorist connections found.  I once had a lady ask my opinion if Saddam might have terrorist connections.  I said I didn't think so, simply because it didn't fit a logical (even for a madman) profile for a despot looking to hold an iron fist on his country.  Did we honestly think he'd be stupid enough to give any U.S. president an excuse to finish the job left over from 1991?
• Daily occurrences of terrorist attacks on our troops that make Hamas' attacks on Israelis look pale in comparison, or at least the numbers that we hear about.
• "We're not in the business of Nation Building."  Remember that little phrase, Mr. Bush?

So, yes, you may now count me among the commie liberals living in this nation.  And I don't know about anyone else, but I'll admit it here and now:

I care enough to remove Bush.  It's the best thing this country can do for itself before we tear ourselves apart.

Keep up the great work, Dr.

Have a great day,
-Chris...Navy vet, Desert Storm vet and proud free-thinker

Name: Richard Harvey
Hometown: Austin
Let me get this right...According to the Bush White House: Former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke is wrong, former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill is wrong, former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay is wrong, Executive Chairman of the UN Monitoring/Verification and Inspection Commission Dr. Hans Blix is wrong, the CIA is wrong, the FBI is wrong, the librul media is wrong, blogville is wrong, protesting a pre-emptive unprovoked war is wrong, hunting bin Laden 24/7 with everything our military forces have is wrong (unless it's an election year), John Kerry is wrong, John McCain was wrong down in S. Carolina, Howard Dean is wrong, Max Cleland is wrong, Valerie Plame is wrong, thinking we should all pay a little more income tax when our country is engaged in a war on terrorism is wrong, a solvent government is wrong, taking as much time as necessary to fairly recount votes in a close election is wrong, and for having relied upon any of the aforementioned individuals for advice relating to their field of expertise - the White House was wrong.

Name: Arik Elman
Hometown: Jerusalem
Eric, the question "How many more innocent Israelis and Palestinians will be killed" now that Ahmad Yassin has been dealt with is a frivolous one.  Dearly beloved (at least by enlightened Europeans) sheikh lived to kill Jews, as simple as that, no "ifs", no "buts."  He encouraged, blessed and promoted unprovoked and unlimited attacks on Jews, regardless of what kind of retribution they might bring and what collateral damage it may do to a Palestinian life and property.  He wrecked even the naive hope of Oslo.  Since the days of Jozef Goebbels and Julius Schtreicher he was the greatest inciter for the murder of Jews that ever lived.  He wasn't any kind of "moderating influence," far from it.  Killing him can't make matters worse - if anything, his apparent immunity gave additional nerve to his movement, and if today they are shaken to the core, so much the better.

Yassin and his movement aren't the threat to be contained, or a possible partner for compromise.  From Jewish-Israeli point of view they are the virus, which cannot be dealt with except by elimination.  Left unchecked, they spread, replacing the nationalistic mindset of Palestinian majority with a Jihadist one, making the conflict unsolvable and untractable.  Yassin's death should have come sooner, but maybe even now it would serve the greater purpose of splintering the Islamic movement.

Oh, and could you please ask Mr. Straw on my behalf: How is an unprovoked invasion of a foreign country well within the international law, but a liquidation of a known bloody terrorist isn't?  Straw's attack on Israel reminded me of the old joke about this kid who watches his parents making love and grumbles to himself: "And to think that THOSE PEOPLE give me a hard time for PICKING MY NOSE!!!" :)

Name: Jon Gardner
Hometown: Silver Spring, Maryland
Liberal NPR?

I was listening on a road trip Saturday morning, and I heard the following:

1. Daniel Schorr declaring the Spanish elections a "victory" for al Quaeda. Daniel Schorr!!!!
2. On the news-quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" I heard the following:
1. Jokes about John Kerry and botox
2. Jokes about John Kerry and the next thing he would regret saying
3. Jokes about Al Gore and the Internet

I never heard anything bad about C-Plus Augustus.  Can we all agree that indicates that the old line about liberal NPR is no longer operative?

Name: Edward Panu
Hometown: Atlanta
Eric,
You must marvel at your own ignorance these days, because anuthing you hear that even little to do with in a negative way, you are all over it and with great delight. Again, if you really do reseach( like any great journalist should do ) you'd be laughing at these kind of stories, especially after what this administration has done to ALQuada( as opposed to the previous one led by your heavenly father Clinton). Ask yourself, Do you really think American people are that dumb, or that hate filled like yourself????? Well, keep marveling at your ignorance, and one of these days you will actually leran something.\

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