Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
4 December 2006, a Monday
For some reason, I'm early this year. I keep typing 2007 already. I wonder what that means? Doesn't it usually take until February before we can get the new number right? I guess I'm just read to be done with 2006, it's been a tough year in many respects.
Things are tough all over, I guess, this is the worst the NYT could manage for its lead item today:
Five years after the fall of the Taliban, the police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, a U.S. report found.
Okay, Rudy, there's your campaign assignment. What's that you say? You are still trying to get indicted Democrats to leave their seats in congress? Hey, man, they're innocent, haven't you heard that the Republicans were the party of corruption? That guy went to school in Seattle, did not have to learn regla English and thought 'cold cash' meant put it in your freezer, din't have to learn about no planning ahead for what to do when the police come...
Chávez Wins Easily in Venezuela, Showing Wide Support
Maybe. Didn't Saddam always get between 99-100% of the vote, back in his day?
Early ‘Maybe’ From Obama Jolts ’08 Field
Senator Barack Obama’s move has created complications for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats.
Listen, Hillary hasn't even said for sure that she intends to run...
Annan Adds His Voice to a Growing Chorus That Is Calling the Situation in Iraq a ‘Civil War’
I just had a horrible thought. After he leaves office, he and Bill Clinton and Carter can travel around the world as a trio, giving free advice.
Adviser Says Bush Plans to Review Panel’s Report and Make ‘Significant Changes’ on Iraq
That will be a good trick, because according to the leaks so far the Panel didn't really recommend anything that might be called a significant change.
The Washington Post finds something different of immense front-page concern this morning:
Episcopal Churches May Split From U.S. Body
Decision to affiliate instead with a controversial Nigerian archbishop could lead to a bitter court battle and the loss of $25 million in property.
What do they care? See, they got this letter from this Nigerian who told them about the $6 billion the government had misplaced, or lost, or some such reasonable story, and if only they would send him their banking information he would cut them in on half of it...
Ah, here's a classic WaPo news item, they're trying to decide if they can derail the Gates nomination by bringing up an old claim that he manipulated intelligence for political purposes in a previous existence. This was what caught my eye, though:
A Wichita native who had spent a summer working as a grain inspector, Gates evidently itched to leave that life. He signed up with a CIA recruiter in 1965 because, he wrote in his memoirs, "I thought I could get a free trip to the capital." With CIA backing, he then jumped feet first into the Cold War as an Air Force intelligence officer at a Minuteman missile wing, where he recalls being "the only person in our unit who could pronounce the names of our targets."
In 1980, Gates became the national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union, although he did not visit the country until nine years later.
He went to that 'country' right after he got the phone number for Europe from Kissinger.
Then there's this item from the same, ah, news source, under the prominent headline Rendition Failed In Norway.
Two months after he helped kidnap a Muslim cleric in Italy, records show, an undercover CIA officer boarded a flight to Norway on another secret mission. Two other U.S. spies followed a few weeks later and checked into the same hotel.
Apparently they worked in the same secret section Valerie Plame did.
The spies left Norway by the end of the summer, according to records of their travels compiled by European investigators. If the CIA was planning to abduct Krekar, like other Islamic radicals it had secretly apprehended in Europe after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, those plans were quietly abandoned.
But it would not be the first or last time that the U.S. government had sought to push Krekar out of Norway. For more than a decade, the Kurdish cleric had enjoyed protection in the Nordic country as a political refugee, even as he frequently slipped back into his homeland in northern Iraq to lead an armed separatist movement called Ansar al-Islam, which has carried out attacks on civilians and U.S. troops.
It's just plain unfair the way we treat those innocent people. If, that is, as the account notes, IF they planned to abduct him.
In which case, their plans were foiled again, as Snively Whiplash used to lament.
Here's how you present a fair-and-balanced account, as Howard Kurtz reports:
"In the first couple of weeks, we might have focused more on features than hard news, and we're adjusting that," says CBS News President Sean McManus. "We've also learned that to break the mold too much might be an interesting creative process, but it wouldn't serve the viewer tuning in at 6:30 to find out what's happening."
Rome Hartman, executive producer of the "CBS Evening News," says a myth has taken root in the press. "The story line that got peddled -- and believe me, it got peddled -- that we were off the news, or softer than the other guys, is basically bogus," he says.
You take two guys, spinning in opposite directions...
Couric, who interviewed O.J. Simpson in 2000 and 2004, also broke with the pack in declining to cover Simpson's book deal and Fox television special for a hypothetical discussion about the two murders he maintains he did not commit.
That stance -- Couric introduced the commentary by telling viewers the Simpson saga wasn't worth their time -- was reminiscent of CBS's Dan Rather refusing, in the summer of 2001, to join the media frenzy over missing congressional intern Chandra Levy.
But he would have if someone had told him she had Bush's National Guard records with her when she disappeared.
She is aggravated by some of the pundit potshots about the broadcast's news quotient. "I just think we got an unfair rap, and unfortunately it was perpetrated by people who didn't take the time to watch the show," Couric says.
Unfortunately, since I have no alternative news program to select from, I took the time to watch. I can stand only the first ten minutes or so, which is when her "news" segment ends and cutie Katie takes over with her touchy-feely sections.
Couric's longest interview, which drew the most flak within CBS, was a discussion with Michael J. Fox. She spoke to the actor after Rush Limbaugh accused him of exaggerating his Parkinson's symptoms during commercials for Democratic candidates who support stem-cell research. Some CBS staffers were upset that she devoted nine minutes, or nearly half the newscast, to the subject. Couric made sure to disclose that she has contributed to Fox's foundation, and that her father suffers from Parkinson's.
I suppose it's too much to ask of Kurtz, reporting on another sloppy media star, to be too accurate, himself, but that isn't exactly what Rush Limbaugh "accused" him of doing, is it? Makes a better dig at hateful old Rush, though, I have to admit.
No, Rush asked Fox the question that Couric also avoided: did he deliberately not take his medications before filming the commercial?
Nor is it an unfair question, because Fox has previously admitted to deliberately failing to take his medications before he appeared in front of Congress to testify about Parkinson's.
Nor does Fox have an unfair response: he deliberately did not take them in order for Congress to get a better idea of what the symptoms of untreated Parkinson's looked like, to better emphasize the seriousness of the disease.
Good answers, good questions...but Katie missed them and Howard Kurtz distorts them.
So did the two of them do those things deliberately, figuring you'd never know the difference, or are they merely sloppy reporters who don't know the difference?
Slate's Tim Noah says:
"Overthrowing Saddam Hussein wasn't the Iraqis' idea; it was ours. Americans expected Iraqis to be grateful for ridding them of a bloodthirsty dictator, and for a brief time, they were. But it somehow doesn't compute that Iraqis, following the same logic, now blame the United States for the civil war we unleashed . . .
I used to think that Americans did not learn from history, now I know that we just don't pay any attention to it. The Iraqis attempted on several occasions to overthrow Saddam, maybe Noah was still in the cradle or else in journalism school (the difference being?) when those events took place, but hasn't he even read why Saddam is on trial in courts composed of his own Iraqi people?
In what I consider to be one of his most-disgraceful acts, Daddy Bush even gave the Kurds and the Shiites the go-ahead. They figured Bush was behind them, and he was, so far behind that it required his son to actually come to their aid a dozen years later.
And isn't it interesting how when it was all one-sided, the Sunnis being the only ones doing the slaughtering of their fellow countrymen, this did not constitute a civil war? Why not? Well, because the Shiites did not have the wherewithal to fight back.
Everybody has learned by now that the Sunnis and the Shiites are religious sects which cross national boundary lines, even the dumbest among us have learned that much. Some of us even know they have been killing each other over a religious argument that goes back virtually to the beginning.
So how come when they happen to live in Iraq it suddenly becomes a civil war?
"This is not a civilized people. No one's actually saying this out loud--yet--but it's widely implied. Iraq is ungovernable, this reasoning goes, because Iraqis turn out to be backward and pathologically unable to get along with one another. What's remarkable is that the people hinting at this are the same ones who, before the invasion, criticized skeptics who fretted about post-Saddam instability for failing to recognize that Iraq had a stable middle and professional class and that these stout burghers would keep the country running smoothly after Saddam got the boot. Well, which is it? Is Iraq a bourgeois nation, or a barbaric one? It can't be both. More likely, it's neither."
"It may feel good for Americans to say that postwar Iraq is a failed society because of the Iraqis themselves. Ingratitude is a common lament of embittered visionaries, because it's usually too painful to blame oneself."
Having slept through the decades of Saddam's misrule, the author thus has no idea what that many years under the regime of a bloody despot can do to a society...more than half of the people in Iraq never knew another life, ruler, or society.
Now we're disappointed in them because after all of these eons we have spent helping them, all they have managed to do is write and approve a constitution (the European Union is still trying, the Brits never did), held a couple of hugely-attended elections, in numbers that would put a civilized people (say the French, or even the Americans) to shame, the peace is being deliberately and systematically destroyed by a small number of foreigners setting off car bombs (the sectarian violence is a separate issue which applies to Islam as a whole, not the entity that is the state of Iraq.
Today's residents of Iraq have undergone one of the greatest transformations in history in an incredibly short time...and yet we're complaining because they aren't as perfect a society as, well, how shall I put it, AS WE ARE!
Okay, perhaps that was unfair, everybody knows that Americans are uncouth cowboys, especially our Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush The Younger... I should have said that it's a shame that Iraq is not yet as civilized as Old Europe.
("...in France, the Interior Ministry has announced that Muslims are waging an undeclared 'intifada' against police, with attacks injuring an average of 14 officers a day." Even though these Muslims are French citizens, this is not called a civil war.)
Salon's Walter Shapiro is quoted by Kurtz:
"Hard though it may be to type these words, Bush is right. Barring the kind of light-up-the-sky miracle that inspires the creation of a major new religion, there will be nothing graceful about the route home from the rout in Iraq. No regional conference nor redeployment strategy is likely to be any more effective than Hadley's dreams of transforming Maliki into a competent leader. (There was something inherently comic about a Bush administration memo complaining that a foreign leader is the captive of 'a small circle' of advisors who are 'coloring his actions and his interpretations of reality.')
Hard though it may be for me to type these words, that's a pretty funny line.
More from Kurtz himself:
I thought it was a neat little scoop when the New York Times learned that Hillary Clinton was consulting state Democratic leaders about a 2008 run, but Arianna Huffington is underwhelmed:
"If newspapers cease to exist, it will be because of articles like this."
"Each graph is more ridiculous and redundant than the last, and, as I read it, I found myself having the same thoughts as when I hear a Bush press conference: Is this for real? Does he really think we're that stupid? Is there no adult supervision?"
"Yes, we all know Hillary has been 'seriously considering a presidential run.' Did Healy really think she amassed a nearly $50 million campaign war chest because she was afraid of former Yonkers mayor John Spencer?"
If it's such a lame story, why is the whole media world picking it up?
Uh, Howard,...didn't you just underline her point?
In case I forgot to include this earlier, Justin Rood at TPM Muckraker is quoted by Kurtz and I'm repeating it here for my Democrat friends who are so pleased at overthrowing the Republican party of corruption:
"Two senior Democrats have seen their leadership ambitions deep-sixed because of their murky ethics histories. Here's a third Democrat heading for a powerful post whom folks may want to keep an eye on.
"Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) is under investigation by the FBI. And he's set to assume a top post which would put him in control of the FBI's budget. Neat trick, eh?
"The FBI's probing Mollohan for possible violations of the law arising from his sprawling network of favors and money which connects him to good friends via questionable charities, alarmingly successful real estate ventures, and hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarked funds.
"The investigation appears to be active and ongoing. We're told that the Feds continue to gather information on the guy. Yet the Democrats look poised to make Mollohan the chairman of the panel which controls the purse strings for the entire Justice Department -- including the FBI."
I don't quite know what to say about this quote, taken from a Washington Times item about the possibility of a serial killer who may recently have killed as many as seven prostitutes in New Jersey:
Bunny, a prostitute in her early 20s who also works on Pacific Avenue, said she has temporarily left that business and switched to peddling drugs.
Temporarily.
An interesting Washington Times Op-Ed on Islam and violence, but I have to point out one correction:
While Western liberals often insist that foreign occupation is at the root of Islamic violence, they conveniently ignore the fact that when the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, and the World Trade Center was on two separate bloody occasions, no such occupation was taking place.
Ah, but there was. If you are going to write about the roots of Islamic violence then you need to recognize that they consider that any lands that are theirs, and by that they include all of the lands of the earlier caliphate, including much of Europe, are occupied now by foreigners. They cannot be satisfied as long as this remains the case...it's not about Iraq.
Repeat after me: Iraq is not the war, Iraq is only a battleground in the war. One of many.
Sooner or later we have to recognize that this is their attitude and they don't intend to change it.
This idea is so unpalatable for most Americans that they simply refuse to acknowledge it.
It almost seems to me like this letter from Senators Rockefeller and Snowe to Exxon/Mobil has to be a joke, I keep looking at my calendar to see if it is April. They are upset with the corporation because it funds a number of "climate change denial" organizations, and 1st Amendment or no 1st Amendment, they need to stop. Because, well, because they're being too effective. I read this and nearly choked:
Climate change denial has been so effective because the "denial community" has mischaracterized the necessarily guarded language of serious scientific dialogue as vagueness and uncertainty.
And here they've been telling me that when scientists say things, that makes them FACTS. In fact, who was it who recently wrote and said that this scientific FACT was so certain and so widely agreed upon by agreeable scientists that disagreeable types shouldn't even be allowed to speak up any more? No, not Jacques Chirac to the uppity Eastern European nations, that was a different matter.
But why must "serious scientific dialogue" of necessity contain guarded language if the reason is not PRECISELY some degree of vagueness and uncertainty?
When scientists, reputable ones without simultaneously promoting a political agenda or trying to garner funding for their own line of research, speak out plainly and firmly. They'll tell you in so many words that E=mc2 and the acceleration due to the force of gravity is proportional to the produce of the masses divided by the square of the distance separating them.
When their language becomes guarded, senators, you can bet on one thing: the scientist isn't positive and he doesn't want to wind up with egg on his face if some other scientist proves him wrong.
How much nicer if he could prevent those other scientists from even speaking up?
...while the group of outliers funded by ExxonMobil has had some success in the court of public opinion, it has failed miserably in confusing, much less convincing, the legitimate scientific community. Rather, what has emerged and continues to withstand the carefully crafted denial strategy is an insurmountable scientific consensus on both the problem and causation of climate change. Instead of the narrow and inward-looking universe of the deniers, the legitimate scientific community has developed its views on climate change through rigorous peer-reviewed research and writing across all climate-related disciplines and in virtually every country on the globe.
Uh, I know you two are senators, and therefore used to saying things that mean something other than what they seem...but, and pardon me if I'm wrong, aren't you actually saying here that the work of Exxon/Mobil, however misquided, has had only "some" success in the court of public opinion but has been a remarkable success in getting the scientists together and on the same page?
Shouldn't you be thanking Exxon/Mobil for that instead of castigating them? I mean, the fools are working against themselves, why slow them down?
I've said it before and I'll say it again...I have to, every time people like these two do their part for creating global warming by opening their mouths.
Real scientists, geologists like my good friend Bill Mero, will tell you that it is warmer now than it used to be in the past. He's far more knowledgeable on this subject than I am, but he'll tell you that their used to be mile-thick glaciers in the Ohio Valley, and the Great Lakes fill depressions in the earth's crust that were caused by the almost-unimaginable weight of this ice.
All of that ice is not there now, so clearly things have warmed up since that time. Give or take a cold winter or two, that probably was around 20,000 years ago when the heat-wave started. A bit before Exxon/Mobil started doing business.
And even further back in time than that the record shows quite a number of periods when the ice sheets advanced, separated by intervening periods when they retreated, like they are doing now. Senator Rockefeller, whose family fortune I believe comes from the petroleum business and if he thinks Exxon should cough up their profits to fight global warming then he should be stripped of his completely...anyhow, his cave-men ancestors weren't even around to start digging in the earth's crust for the damn stuff.
So the question scientists and the, ah, DENIERS, are debating is not that global warming has taken place, which is pretty obvious to all, but (1) whether it is still taking place today, and (2) what part, if any, man has played in it.
I'm staking my place in Great Scientisthood by arguing that we are now at the reversal point between ice ages, actually the end of global warming and the start of global cooling. No, I'm not saying that just because I read it in Newsweek a few decades ago, I'm saying it because my scientific studies have proved it to be the case. Of course, I must necessarily speak in guarded language, you realize, because that's the way we climate scientists are.
No, really, just consider what we know for actual scientific fact. One: there have been previous ice ages separated by periods of global warming. Two: man was not present during any of the previous ones, and arrived on the scene after the current one was well under way. Three: man is, therefore, not the causative factor.
Here's what we do NOT know scientifically as facts. One: what causes the ice ages to come and go? Even dullards have noticed that the planet gets colder the further one gets away from the equator and towards the poles, generally speaking (elevation is clearly a modifying factor), and that is due to...well, guess what, the source of ALL of our global warming, the sun.
Two: what part do "greenhouse" gasses play in the warming and cooling cycles? If they do, in fact, play a significant role, if they are truly the causative factor, then where did they come from before man arrived on the world stage and where did they go when things cooled off again?
Three: even if we can't answer those questions, how MUCH is man actually affecting the climate by emitting greenhouse gasses when the rest of the planet is naturally emitting prodigious quantities on its own? You saw some of my volcano pictures the other day, but that was just for drama. Our little pimple of a volcano steams continuously, 24/7. How many cars would be required to be its equivalent?
Human bodies operate at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit...how much global warming is due to the fact that there are now billions of us before the natural forces of evolution created Adam and Eve?
No, wait...I still have to account for all of those previous periods of warming and cooling, before A&E. Let's see if we can pare this down a bit...what actually WAS there? Um...the earth., of course...the universe...the sun...
Ah, here are the Wall St Journal editors, and they are far more sarcastic than I was!
This is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but we didn't know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media around by the nose, too. Congratulations.
Let's compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country. We'll grant that's a fair intellectual fight. But if the Senators are so afraid that a handful of policy wonks at a single small think-tank are in danger of winning this debate, they must not have much confidence in the merits of their own case.
The letter is so over-the-top that we also wonder if Mr. Rockefeller in particular has even read it. (He and Ms. Snowe didn't return our call.) The Senator hails from coal-producing West Virginia, where people know something about carbon emissions. Come to think of it, Mr. Rockefeller owes his own vast wealth to something other than non-carbon energy. But perhaps it's easier to be carbon free when your fortune comes from a trust fund.
The letter is of a piece with what has become a campaign of intimidation against any global warming dissent. Not only is everyone supposed to concede that the planet has been warming--as it has--but we are all supposed to salute and agree that human beings are the definitive cause, that the magnitude of the warming will be disastrous and its effects catastrophic, that such problems as AIDS and poverty are less urgent, and that economic planners must therefore impose vast new regulatory burdens on everyone around the world. Exxon is being targeted in this letter and other ways because it is one of the few companies that still thinks some debate on these questions is valuable.
Every dogma has its day, and we've lived long enough to see more than one "consensus" blown apart within a few years of "everyone knowing" it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.
My B.S. and M.S. are in what are referred to as the "hard" sciences (and not simply because they were difficult, although they were) so I feel myself to be enough of a scientist to speak with some authority as well as experience, and I guarantee you that the scientific literature is chock full of things which "science" KNEW to be true but later discovered differently.
Imagine if this letter had been sent by someone in the Bush Administration trying to enforce the opposite conclusion? The left would be howling about "censorship." That's exactly what did happen earlier this year after James Hansen, the NASA scientist and global warming evangelist, complained that a lowly 24-year-old press aide had tried to limit his media access. The entire episode was preposterous because Mr. Hansen is one of the most publicized scientists in the world, but the press aide was nonetheless sacked.
This is the most incredible part of it to me, also the fact that some 'scientists' appear to be in agreement with the "stop the debate" side of the argument. In fact, that's probably the clearest way I know to identify someone who isn't really a scientist but only pretending to be one.
Costa Rica time. If you move to the tropics expecting it to be hot and sunny all the time, forget it. Somewhat to my dismay (although Carol likes it) the weather today has been cool, wet and windy. I've closed all of my upstairs windows and doors and even put on socks! My inside, protected thermometer says 72, but it's cooler than that as far as my body is concerned. I'm on the verge of putting on long pants...
I know, I know...some of you reading this would trade me in a heartbeat.
One bad thing here is that these people love shooting off fireworks during the holiday season and a bunch of the neighborhood boys have obtained some firecrackers from somewhere, so at almost any time during the day and evening you will hear a loud bang! Poco in particular does not like them, although he doesn't get nearly as frightened as Buddy did. Poco wants to climb into my lap and be held, the moose, About the time I get him settled down somebody sets off another one somewhere. Little boys...aren't they delightful? Including my new one, I'm afraid, who is giving us all of the signs of being a handful. (Carol is probably laughing as she reads this...all the signs?)
Tony had quite an unsettled early life and we're working to overcome that, but some of the, um, experts have warned us that it might not be that easy. I'm wary of experts in the field of child behavior, I always thought Dr Spoke was a fraud, but on the other hand I can see some of the events happening that they caution us about. Well, I don't think anybody ever told us this was going to be easy...
John Hinderaker at Power Line makes a very good point, and I agree with his general thesis:
Liberal Democrats and media figures have tried to create a sense of panic about Iraq: the country is a disaster, the war has been lost, all we can do is find an "exit strategy" and get out. But what is there in that course for President Bush? Politically, the worst has happened: the Democrats have ridden anti-Iraq war hysteria to control of Congress. But they won't dare cut off appropriations for the war. As for Bush, he doesn't have to run again, and the situation in Congress won't change for the remainder of his term. So why not do what he thinks is right? So far, Bush has never wavered in his commitment to victory; why should he falter now?
I'm sure some critics of the war are sincere in believing that it represents a mistaken policy and that the country would be better served to withdraw. In many instances, though, I think what liberals really fear is that Bush's Iraq policy will yet prove successful. By stampeding the country into withdrawal, they can guarantee failure, and blame it on Bush. But there is one problem with that plan: the person the liberals really need to stampede is the President, and he just might decide to hold firm. If, five years from now, Iraq is a stable, functioning democracy, the President's critics will look very silly indeed.
They are scared to death that Iraq will stabilize before the 2008 elections, making Bush look good. They have risked everything on his being wrong, even their common sense, even what used to be the great pride of liberalism that we were the world's beacon of freedom, things they knew and cherished in Kennedy's time but have decided to abandon simply because Bush started championing those ideas.
John quotes from Michael Barone what I consider to be another very fine point:
While George W. Bush's many critics and detractors portray him as facing the same dilemma as Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, Bush himself seems determined to proceed the way Harry Truman did in Korea -- or, as some might put it, as Winston Churchill did after Dunkirk.
This, I think, is their other big frustration. Bush won't collapse like Johnson did.
Paul at Power Line on a Columbia professor's claim that Bush is the worst president ever:
Foner's only other argument is that Bush has attempted to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date back to the Magna Carta. But neither the Magna Carta nor any other legal document grants the rights in question to foreign terrorists. Foner has no expertise in the law as far as I know. If he did, and if his hatred of Bush didn't continue to blind him, he would understand that the issues he refers to are novel legal ones, often with no clear answer. They are being worked out by the legal system. The rule of law is safe, and certainly safer than when it was when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus or when Franklin Roosevelt imprisoned Amercans of Japanese origin without legal process. Foner rates Lincoln and FDR as among the three indisputably great presidents in our history.
Paul is too kind to point out to the learned professor that the Magna Carta did not grant any legal rights to the "people" in the first place.
Also this:
Oh so predictably, the Washington Post tries to use Donald Rumsfeld's classified memo on Iraq as a weapon against the Bush administration. And, just as predictably, the use of the memo for that purpose signals Rumsfeld transformation from chief villian to respectable analyst.
That tickled me, too. Now all of a sudden Rummy was right and Bush is wrong for not listening to him!