"Troops out," and then what?

Further thoughts on the CNN-YouTube Democratic debate:

As I mentioned in passing several days ago, the '08 Democratic presidential hopefuls have generally failed thus far to tell Americans how they would responsibly manage the difficult logistics of a massive withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Perhaps, in the wooing of liberal primary voters, it's sufficient to simply say "troops out" by a date certain. (Bill Richardson, during the YouTube debate: "I believe we should bring all the troops home by the end of this year, in six months, with no residual forces -- no residual forces.") But ultimately, in the wooing of swing-voting independents, it will be necessary for Democrats to ensure that their national security credentials are in order - by making it clear that they're thinking long term about how to best secure the region in the wake of a major U.S. military drawdown.

The YouTube debate on Monday night was another missed opportunity. At one point, a citizen questioner asked the big question: "Don’t you think if we pulled out now, that would open it up for Iran and Syria, God knows who -- Russia -- how do we pull out now? And isn’t it our responsibility to get these people up on their feet? I mean, do you leave a newborn baby to take care of himself? How do we pull out now?"

Barack Obama responded not by talking about 2007 and beyond, but by harkening back to 2002 (when he opposed the war before it began). Then he offered a nice sound bite - "I think we can be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in" - without offering any details. Then he condemned the Iraqi parliament for going on vacation in August. Then he said that a troop pullout should be accompanied by a "diplomatic surge," but again offered no details.

Joe Biden, who at least has floated a post-withdrawal plan for Iraq's political future, riffed quickly on his main points about decentralizing the Iraqi government and setting up separate ethnic jurisdictions. (In that sense, he gave the best answer.) He was followed moments later by Hillary Clinton, who, rather than detailing any of her ideas for post-withdrawal Iraq, contented herself with assailing the President Bush's Pentagon for not adequately developing its own ideas ("there are a lot of questions that we’re asking, but we’re not getting answers"). Then, shortly thereafter, Chris Dodd offered a few general principles - redeploy the troops, "robustly" pursue diplomacy, develop a program "that allows us to become much more engaged in the region" - but nothing else.

In fairness to some of these candidates, it should be noted that the debate format continues to defeat them. The stage is way too crowded (thanks to the presence of people who haven't the remotest chance of getting elected), and therefore the available time to respond in detail is severely limited.

But maybe, even with more time, these Democrats would still be taking refuge in generalities. I sense that such a posture won't suffice in the long run. Many Americans who back troop withdrawal are nevertheless concerned about what would happen in Iraq and the region when we leave. Swing voters will want specifics on how the Democrats would minimize resulting bloodshed and, at the very least, how Democrats would protect our broader security interests.

Will Marshall, a moderate Democrat and prominent Washington policy wonk, has effectively framed the stakes in a new piece posted online. He writes:

"Democrats are right to argue that the United States should start moving its major combat forces out of the country. But since we don’t know how that will affect Iraq’s civil strife, we need to pull out gradually and keep the worst from happening.
Specifically, we should redefine our military mission in Iraq as enforcing three 'noes' that are essential to protecting America’s strategic interests — no safe havens for al Qaeda, no genocide, and no wider regional war. This happens to be the position of most Democratic Congressional leaders and presidential candidates. Given the central role national security will play in next year’s national elections, Democrats would be wise to start emphasizing the longer-range aspects of their Iraq plans."

Later in the piece, he writes: "Too hasty an American departure would likely leave behind a failed state that plunges deeper into sectarian violence and sucks neighboring countries into the maelstrom. All this would add immensely to the prestige of al Qaeda, which would claim credit for having driven the Americans out, just as it claims to have been instrumental in forcing Russia’s exit from Afghanistan in the early 1980s. So instead of promising glibly to stop the war, Democrats should spell out the next phase in what will likely be a prolonged endgame in Iraq."

Marshall basically likes the idea of trimming troops levels to 60,000 in 2008, with full withdrawal by 2012. He argues that this plan "meets the basic demand of war critics: get U.S. troops out of the business of mediating Iraq’s sectarian conflicts and focus those who remain on protecting essential American security interests battling al Qaeda, discouraging intervention by Iraq’s neighbors and preventing genocide."

That kind of timetable might be too slow for the liberal Democratic base. But the liberal Democratic base isn't big enough to deliver the '08 election. Swing voters in search of a credible commander-in-chief will want assurance that, beyond simply pulling out the troops, Democrats are also thinking seriously about the day after.

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By the way, there's a new twist in the Pentagon's tiff with Hillary Clinton. As I noted the other day, high-ranking apparatchik Eric Edelman sent her a snarky letter last week accusing her of emboldening the terrorists. She had asked, months ago, for information on the Pentagon's troop withdrawal contingency plans, and received no reply - until Edelman (one of Dick Cheney's former minions) finally told her that a request like hers "reinforces enemy propaganda."

Edleman's boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, assured Hillary late last week the congressional oversight was a good thing. And today, the Associated Press is reporting that Gates has now gone a step further. In a new letter, he tells Hillary that her credentials as a loyal American are still in order:

"I emphatically assure you that we do not claim, suggest, or otherwise believe that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies, nor do we question anyone's motives in this regard."

It wasn't exactly an apology, but no matter. Confessions of error by the Bush war planners are rare indeed. All they managed to do, in the Edelman episode, was to further embolden Hillary Clinton.

Obama's Bambi problem

Five foreign policy experts allied with Barack Obama want to reassure you that the candidate has the right stuff to be commander-in-chief. They sent out an email message, late yesterday afternoon, saying it was so. They said that Obama would engage in “tough-minded diplomacy,” in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, who “personally negotiated arms agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev.”

If you’re wondering why these Obama allies suddenly felt compelled to laud their man as Reaganesque, here’s the explanation:

Damage control.

Obama screwed up big time in the CNN-YouTube debate on Monday night, by leaving the impression – during a response to a crucial foreign policy question – that he would not be sufficiently tough-minded when dealing with America’s adversaries. That’s a fatal error for any Democrat, given the party’s traditional image. And it’s a potentially special problem for Obama, because he is still new on the national scene, and is stuck with the task of demonstrating to skeptical voters that his commander-in-chief instincts might at least compensate for his lack of experience.

But he might’ve hurt himself on Monday might, when he left the impression that he would be Bambi in a forest of predators.

(He has done this before, by the way. I’ll get to that in a moment.)

In the latest debate, a YouTube questioners asked: “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?”

Obama replied: “I would.”

He went on to explain that, as a matter of principle, it’s “ridiculous” for America not to talk to hostile countries, but the damage had been done: He had basically said he would break bread with people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro without any preconditions, such as whether they were merely going to use a presidential summit as a grandstanding opportunity.

Hillary Clinton listened to Obama, spotted the rhetorical opening, and drove a Hummer right through it. She said that it would be wrong to “promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are. I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse….I will use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way. But certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.”

Translation: Obama, by his own words, is a naif who would be rolled by the bad guys.

Gee, do you think the Republicans would have a field day with something like that, if Obama won the nomination? All they’d need to do is quote the Hillary camp, which said yesterday: “Senator Obama has committed to presidential-level meetings with some of the world’s worst dictators without precondition during his first year in office.” Or they could just quote Hillary, who called Obama’s remarks “irresponsible and frankly naive.” As for Hillary, she now has a potential weapon for the Florida primary; Cuban-Americans might not look kindly on a candidate who says he’d talk to Fidel without any preconditions.

Maybe a case can be made that this is unfair to Obama, that perhaps in his remarks he only intended to signal his general affinity for diplomacy as a foreign policy tool, and that, in doing so, he simply overlooked the more specific question at hand – whether it’s wise, in the name of diplomacy, for a president to simply talk with the bad guys under any or all conditions. Yet, if that’s what happened, then at the very least Obama showed he might not be sufficiently sensitized to the nuances of delicate national security questions. And, arguably, that connects back to his lack of experience.

Obama tried to recoup late yesterday, by contending that Hillary was trying to create a "fabricated controversy" and that she was really the naive one, because she voted to authorize the Iraq war. Then he said: "What she’s somehow maintaining is that my (debate) statement could be construed as not having asked what the meeting (with the bad guys) was about. I didn’t say these guys were going to come over for a cup of coffee some afternoon...I think that is absolutely wrong.”

Then why didn't he respond that way at the time, when he took the question? Obama has brought this on himself. His first instinct, during all these debates, is to speak in stirring generalities. One of his favorite phrases (I heard it again on Monday night) is, “Let me go to the broader issue here.” For a candidate, eloquence can be a powerful asset. But a candidate with a thin track record in Washington needs to demonstrate an instinct for nuance as well.

And a Democrat in particular, fairly or not, needs to demonstrate toughness, at least rhetorically. Obama’s problem is that he has also whiffed on that test before. In a debate back on April 26, he was asked: “If, God forbid a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities have been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned, beyond the shadow of a doubt, it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?”

Note that he was specifically being asked how he would command the military in response to a homeland attack. But his first instinct was not to talk about how he would command the military. He talked instead about something else – the home front.

He replied: “Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.” And, much like what we witnessed on Monday night, Hillary Clinton spotted that opening as well, and spoke like a commander-in-chief: “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.”

Politically, Obama can’t afford to keep flubbing these national security questions. If he somehow wins the nomination, yet is widely perceived as a naïf, the Republicans will put him in a tank with Mike Dukakis.

The Democrats and box populi

Regarding last night’s historic Democratic debate, which featured regular folks posting questions via YouTube, here’s my thumbnail review: Thumbs-up, with an asterisk.

Thumbs-up, because the ’08 candidates had to field a wide range of citizen questions that were, at various times, heartfelt, provocative, impertinent, irreverent, and insouciant.

In other words, they were often framed in ways that journalists would not have dared to attempt, for fear of being scolded later by some candidate’s flak. For instance, Hillary Clinton was asked whether a woman president would be taken seriously in Arab countries that treat their own women as second-class citizens; John Edwards was asked whether it’s fair that he opposes gay marriage on religious grounds; Barack Obama was asked whether he considers himself authentically black; everybody was asked why the quality of the balloting process varies so much from state to state, in an era when a Starbucks latte tastes exactly the same regardless of locale. I also liked the Michigan guy who brandished his jumbo assault rifle and demanded to know whether the Democratic candidates would protect his “baby” – thereby prompting Joe Biden to stray off-script and grumble, “If that’s his ‘baby,’ then he needs help.”

But I’ll add an asterisk, because these questions were merely a fraction of the 2700 submitted to CNN. In other words, the gatekeepers of the “old media” functioned as editors, culling the “new media” for quality queries. I’d bet the ranch that hundreds of the videographers lobbed open-ended softballs, along the lines of: “What would you do to ensure that our children have more economic opportunity?” I’d also bet that many others hailed from the dark side. All the more reason for the pros to function as arbiters – as CNN will do again, when the Republican candidates face the YouTube citizenry in September. It makes sense to me. If the Internet is indeed today’s version of the Wild West, then give it a sheriff.

Anyway, regarding last night: If Hillary Clinton’s rivals don’t start taking her on, if they don’t find a way to trim her commanding lead, this Democratic race will be over in a hurry. At this point, seven candidates are eating her dust.

In a few short months, she has managed – despite her ’02 vote authorizing an Iraq invasion - to remake herself as an antiwar candidate. As recently as last year, she was still opposing any troop withdrawal timeline. She was against it then, and she’s for it now. But apparently the Democratic primary electorate is taking this flip-flop in stride; the latest ABC-Washington Post poll reports that she leads Obama, by 51 to 29 percent, among those who want to pull out all the troops – and this is despite the fact that Obama opposed the war long before President Bush ever started it.

Last night, she again polished her new credentials (“I put forth a comprehensive three-point plan to get our troops out of Iraq, and it does start with moving them out as soon as possible”). At another point, she reminded people that she has been asking the Pentagon to map a pullout plan and to share that information with her; she also mentioned proudly that the Pentagon has accused her of emboldening the enemy. Also last night, she aired a campaign video that borrowed a Bob Dylan ‘60s protest riff: One placard asked how many WMDs had been found in Iraq, and the next placard said “Zero.” (Wait…hadn’t she voted to authorize the war on the belief that Saddam Hussein did have WMDs? Doesn’t this mean that SHE screwed up?)

She wasn’t challenged on any of this – except once, when Obama uttered one passing remark: “I think it’s terrific that she’s asking for plans from the Pentagon, and I think the Pentagon response was ridiculous. But what I also know is that the time for us to ask how we were going to get out of Iraq was before we went in.” Hillary didn’t bother to rebut it, nobody else followed up on it, and the moment passed.

She was pushed a lot harder by a YouTube questioner, during the early moments of the debate. A guy from California asked how she’d define the word “liberal,” and whether she’d use the term to describe herself. In a sense, this was a great question, because it tested whether Hillary might have the political courage to take on the Republicans who have succeeded, over the past 30 years, in reducing the word to a pejorative.

Well, she didn’t. Instead she said this: “It is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom, that you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head…”

By who? In what way? For what presumably craven purpose?

She skipped all that. She then said, “I prefer the term ‘progressive,’ which has a real American meaning…So I consider myself a proud modern American progressive.”

Wait…the word “liberal” doesn’t have a real American meaning? By simply ceding the word, doesn’t that validate the frequent GOP insinuation that a “liberal” is somehow unAmerican? And doesn’t she sound a bit defensive, the way she twice felt compelled to slap “American” onto her preferred label?

That answer was a far cry from what John F. Kennedy said in September of 1960: "What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label 'liberal'?...If by a 'liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'liberal,' then I'm proud to say I'm a 'liberal.'"

Hillary's caution, as evidenced in her answer, still bugs some Democrats. On the other hand, last night she again demonstrated her skill at defusing inconvenient questions, and turning them to her advantage. A Democratic committeeman from Illinois, via his video, asked her whether the election of another Clinton (after a Bush, a Clinton, and another Bush) would “constitute the type of change in Washington that so many people in the heartland are yearning for.” This was the 28-year-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton Dynasty Question, and she promptly squashed it:

“Well, I think it was a problem that Bush was elected in 2000. (Pause for laughter) I actually thought that somebody else was elected in that election, but…” (Pause for applause)

In other words, she undercut the entire premise by suggesting that, if not for the ’00 Florida election overtime crisis, nobody would be talking about any two-family dynasty; and, simply by bringing up the ’00 events, she tossed raw meat to the liberal Democratic voters. Then she played the nostalgia card by invoking her husband’s tenure. Then she lauded the other candidates on stage, and said they all would have been better presidents than the (apparently illegitimate) current Bush. By this time, the rapturous audience wasn’t even aware that she had never answered the guy’s question about whether a second Clinton would actually be able to change Washington. (Fringe candidate Mike Gravel, moments later, said in one of his trademark harangues that Hillary would not be able to change anything, but nobody listens to him anyway.)

One last observation about this debate, at least for now: None of the Democrats gave substantive answers to what was probably the best question of the evening.

“Mitch from Philadelphia,” who said he was no fan of the Iraq war, nevertheless asked how it was feasible to simply pull out now, and leave the Iraqis to their violent fate, with perhaps Iran and Syria waiting in the wings. “I mean,” he asked, “do you leave a newborn baby to take care of himself?”

Biden, as always, took a decent stab at that question. Obama said something about “a diplomatic surge” in the region, but little else. Democrats, if they want to demonstrate that their national security credentials are in order, will have to persuade voters that they can pull out the troops responsibly, with an eye toward securing the region in the long term. Mitch from Philadelphia is hardly the only American who is hungry for an answer.

Bush's spymaster says yes to reality

Most Americans have long believed that the Bush team knowingly misled the nation into war by building a specious case against Saddam Hussein – in one national poll last October, 58 percent shared that view – but it’s rare indeed that a high-ranking Bush teammate stands up in public and says the same thing.

Actually, Admiral Mike McConnell was sitting down yesterday when he confirmed the Bush team’s prewar deceptions; it was a newsworthy event, given the fact that McConnell, a former National Security Agency official, currently serves Bush as director of national intelligence. It was valuable to get him on the record. His words yesterday, on Meet the Press, will probably be grist for those future historians who will assess Bush's legacy.

The key moment came when Tim Russert brought up some McConnell remarks that appear in a new book written by Stephen Hayes, a conservative scribe at The Weekly Standard magazine. Hayes, in preperation for his biography of Dick Cheney, interviewed McConnell in late November of last year. McConnell basically said that the top Bush officials cooked the intelligence in order to sell their case for war:

“All of these current players, Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and the president…had, first and foremost, very strong political convictions. My sense of it is their political faith and convictions influenced how they took information and interpreted it, how they picked up and interpreted outside events. As a former intel pro, when you don’t like the answer and you set up your own thing, you tend to get the answer you want. You hire people who think like you do or want to satisfy the boss. I’ve read much more about the current set of players, and they did set up a whole new interpretation because they didn’t like the (intelligence community’s) answers. They’ve gotten results that in my view now have been disastrous.”

They’ve gotten results that in my view now have been disastrous...Good grief, does this man have Bush derangement syndrome (as no doubt the dwindling band of Bush idolators would argue), or, as an "intel pro," is he merely speaking as a member of the reality-based community? Clearly, he was referring to the neoconservative Pentagon office, set up by Cheney acolyte Douglas Feith, who skewed the intel until it was Cheney-worthy.

On NBC yesterday, Russert read that long McConnell quote, and asked the admiral to comment. I was expecting him to utilize the standard Washington dodge, and claim that Russert was taking his comments out of context; instead, McConnell confirmed and elaborated:

“I am a concerned citizen…What I was taking greatest exception to was to have a secondary unit established in the Pentagon to reinterpret information…The way you do (proper) intelligence is all sources considered. You have to factor one issue against another and balance it. If you start an independent effort with a point of view, it’s not infrequent that you would take a single piece of data to make a point as opposed to consider everything…. I consider myself an intelligence professional. I’ve been doing this either in—on active duty or serving this community for 40 years. The first responsibility of an intelligence professional is ground truth, and the second responsibility is to speak truth to power.”

From a Bush team perspective, McConnell was clearly “off message” - and this happened repeatedly yesterday. Russert pointed out that, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the war in Iraq has actually helped al Qaeda by providing the terrorists with a handy recruiting tool. (Bush, we now know, was warned of this dark possibility during the prewar phase.) Russert wanted to know what McConnell thought of that NIE observation. McConnell didn’t hesitate: “It (the war) has served as a recruiting tool to draw additional terrorists into Iraq.”

Moments later, Russert followed up: “But al-Qaeda is a much more robust and larger presence in Iraq now than it was before the war.”

McConnell’s response: “That’s fair to say, that’s fair to say.”

I doubt that Bush will be awarding this guy a Presidential Medal of Freedom any time soon.

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My latest Sunday newspaper column – which argued that the typically timid Democrats need to go for the gut and paint the GOP as the weak-on-terrorism party – was featured yesterday on C-Span’s Washington Journal; during the show’s first 30 minutes, many of the 18 Democratic callers argued that it’s high time the Democrats grew a backbone and engaged voters on an emotional level.

While reading a new book by clinical psychologist/Democratic consultant Drew Westen – entitled The Political Brain, as discussed in my column – I was struck again at how often the Democrats have rendered themselves mute while under heavy GOP bombardment. Westen resurrects some of the golden oldies, such as Michael Dukakis’ 1988 decision to ignore the senior George Bush’s gut-level attempts to paint the Democrat as an unpatriotic coddler of criminals; Al Gore’s 2000 passivity as Republicans painted him as a serial liar; and John Kerry’s failure, for two long weeks, to hit back at the Swift Boaters. In all those cases, the Democrats simply convinced themselves that the GOP hyperbole lacked intellectual merit and that, therefore, they should not deign to hit back. They never imagined that the voters would buy the GOP arguments. The rest is history.

But Westen, on page 338, also brought up an incident that I had forgotten – one that is quite relevant at the moment.

In 2004, again on Meet the Press, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle debated Republican challenger John Thune, who was vying for Daschle’s South Dakota seat. At one point, when Daschle criticized Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, Thune retorted that any and all second-guessing of the Leader “emboldens our enemies.” In other words, Thune went for the gut, calling Daschle a coddler of terrorists. And Daschle - who, unlike Thune, was a military vet - said basically nothing in response, except to lament how he was “disappointed” and “saddened” that Thune would attack him that way.

Westen weighs in here: “You don’t express sadness or disappointment when someone slugs you. You express rage, and you start slugging back.”

For a textbook response on how to slug back, consider the way Hillary Clinton handled the Bush administration’s attempt last week to paint her as a coddler of terrorists.

This past May, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (and, of course, as a Democratic presidential candidate), she had asked the Pentagon to explain how it would work out the logistics of any eventual troop withdrawal from Iraq. This was not a shocking request; it was widely reported, nearly 18 months ago, that the Pentagon has worked on such contingency plans. But Hillary got no response for nearly three months.

Finally, a week ago, Pentagon underling Eric Edelman, apparently channeling his old boss Dick Cheney (whom he served as deputy assistant for national security), sent Hillary a letter, warning her that any “premature” discussion of U.S. troop withdrawal “reinforces enemy propaganda.”

Rather than say that she was saddened or disappointed by being labeled a terrorist propagandist, she lashed back, in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “Under Secretary Edelman…claims that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies. Under Secretary Edelman has his priorities backward. Open and honest debate and congressional oversight strengthens our nation and supports our military. His suggestion to the contrary is outrageous and dangerous...Redeploying out of Iraq will be difficult and requires careful planning. I continue to call on the Bush Administration to immediately provide a redeployment strategy that will keep our brave men and women safe as they leave Iraq - instead of adhering to a political strategy to attack those who rightfully question their competence and preparedness after years of mistakes and misjudgments.”

And in response, Gates quickly caved. He said Friday that of course he values congressional oversight; in fact, he considers it “constructive and appropriate.”

The lesson for Democrats – as Westen outlines at length in his book - is that weakness in the face of GOP aggression is fatal: “The kind of candidate who will not appeal to the American voter in the post-September 11 world is a candidate (who is) advised to take stands that exude timidity in the face of political aggression at home, for fear of being branded or outflanked. If the American people take that timidity at home as an indicator of how Democrats will respond to aggression from abroad,” then Democrats deserve to lose.

“What we need to today,” writes Westen, is a Democrat “with cajones. As we have seen, you don’t have to be born with them to use them.”

Why Hillary should thank Elizabeth

Hillary Clinton should drop a note in the mail to Elizabeth Edwards. The note should be effusive (something along the lines of “thank you, thank you, thank you”), because it’s clear that Elizabeth did Hillary a big favor the other day. She certainly didn’t intend it as a favor, but that’s what it was.

Elizabeth was really intending to help her spouse when she dissed Hillary as weak on women’s issues during an interview this week with the online magazine Salon. She was trying to address a political problem in her own camp. Husband John, the self-declared populist who’s running third in the ’08 Democratic race, badly needs to gain ground among unmarried, modest-income working women if he is to have a reasonable shot at the party nomination – but right now those likely primary voters are solidly behind Hillary. The latest New York Times-CBS poll, for instance, cites those women as Hillary’s strongest supporters, and, more generally, it reports that Hillary is viewed favorably by 69 percent of all female Democratic primary voters.

So Elizabeth sought to redress the imbalance. She argued that her husband is more sensitive to women’s issues, in part because Hillary is trying to campaign as a man. She said, for instance, that “keeping that (career) door open for women is actually more a policy of John’s than Hillary’s…(Hillary) is not really talking about poverty, when the face of poverty is a woman’s face, often a single mother…Look, I’m sympathetic, because when I worked as a lawyer, I was the only woman in these rooms, too, and you want to reassure them you’re as good as a man. And sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women’s issues. I’m sympathetic – she wants to be commander-in-chief. But she’s just not as vocal a women’s advocate as I want to see. John is.” (italics mine)

Elizabeth’s first mistake is that she leveled a charge that most women will never believe. She claimed that Hillary is not a sufficient advocate for women, but that line won’t sell, basically because it isn’t true. Here’s the best summation of Hillary’s track record:

“Attacking Hillary Clinton on women's issues is a tough sell. There's no possible way she can get any traction out of this…She has consistently sponsored key pieces of legislation that take direct aim at women's issues. She has sponsored The Paycheck Fairness Act to battle wage discrimination; The Prevention First Act, which expands family planning services; and just recently she picked a fight with the FDA over Plan B to get the ‘morning after’ pill available over the counter. In Democratic politics, these issues matter and you would think Elizabeth Edwards would have known that. Additionally, Hillary Clinton has been very outspoken about her pro-choice position; also, as First Lady she helped introduce the National Campaign to Prevent Teenage Pregnancies. And of course one of her most famous statements as First Lady was when she said ‘women's rights are human rights.’”

And that’s not a rebuttal from Hillary’s camp. That’s from David Brody, the Capitol Hill correspondent for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Elizabeth’s second mistake is the favor she did for Hillary. The flip side of Hillary’s abiding strength with women is her weakness with men; in the Times-CBS survey, only 35 percent of swing-voting independent men view her favorably, while 42 percent view her unfavorably. Hillary badly needs to make gains with that crucial slice of the electorate.

And what better way to advertise herself to a skeptical man, than to have a rival complain that she is campaigning “as a man”?

That’s exactly how Hillary wants to be perceived by male voters. As Georgia Duerst-Lahti, an expert in gender politics, recently told Salon: “The first woman absolutely has to out-masculine the man, kind of like Margaret Thatcher did.” Fairly or not, swing-voting men want to be reassured that a female president would not hesitate to act assertively as commander-in-chief. Elizabeth’s complaint – that Hillary is emphasizing her commander creds at the expense of her women’s creds – can only help Hillary among the guys.

And, yesterday, Bill Clinton spotted the opening; in his rebuttal to Elizabeth's charge, he signaled to men that his wife does not intend to be bound by gender stereotypes: "I don’t think it’s inconsistent with being a woman that you can also be knowledgeable on military and security affairs and be strong when the occasion demands it. That’s — I don’t consider that being manly. I consider that being a leader."

Lest we forget, Hillary is aided by the fact that her spouse is still the best verbal tactician in the Democratic party.

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The quote of the week goes to White House spinmeister Tony Snow.

In a USA Today guest column, he wrote this astounding sentence about Saddam Hussein: “We never argued that he played a role in 9/11; political opponents manufactured the claim to question the president's integrity.”

On the one hand, I wonder at this point whether it’s worth rebutting fact-defying and blame-shifting assertions from the Orwellian Ministry of Truth; on the other hand, it’s worth sticking up for empirical reality.

For nearly a year, starting in October 2001, the Bush regime floated the story (officially debunked in 2004 by the 9/11 Commission) that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met secretly in Prague with one of Hussein’s intelligence officers. Naturally, some reporters ran with it; columnist William Safire cited the Atta-Hussein link as an “undisputed fact.” But by September of 2002, the story had unraveled. U.S. officials, including CIA and FBI sources, were telling reporters that there was no proof of any such meeting, and that the tip had come from a dubious informant. The Czech president even told the Bush team at the time that the story was a crock. Yet none of this deterred the Bush team; Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press that autumn and repeated the Atta story anyway (“we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center”).

And then the Bush team proceeded to draft language, for their Iraq war authorization, that strongly implied a Hussein-9/11 link without explicitly saying so: “Members of al Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, its interests, including the attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq.”

So, with reference to Snow’s aforementioned claim of innocence, suffice it to say that not only has the Bush team repeatedly uttered falsehoods, but now it is telling falsehoods about its falsehoods.

A Pyrrhic Republican victory

So, in political terms, which side “won” the latest inconclusive Senate battle over Iraq?

It can certainly be argued that Harry Reid’s Democrats look like losers, because they have failed yet again to find a way to put the brakes on President Bush’s war strategy. Stuck with their slim majority, the Democrats were able to coax only a handful of Republicans to side with them on the key procedural issue; in plain English, the Democrats couldn’t muster the 60 votes needed to cut off the Republican filibuster and thus bring the Reid-Levin troop withdrawal bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote on the merits. (A majority of 52 senators did vote to let the pullout bill come to the floor, but that wasn't enough.) So, certainly in the parliamentary sense, the Republicans and their beleaguered president have won another round.

But the political shorthand is damaging for the GOP. In essence, Bush’s enablers have again defied the will of the American landslide majority. The latest CBS News-New York Times poll, released yesterday, reports that 61 percent are willing to continue financing the war – but only on the condition that lawmakers enact a timetable for troop withdrawal. A mere 28 percent support continued financing without a pullout timetable, a percentage that roughly parallels Bush’s popularity rating. On a separate question, even half of all surveyed Republicans say the war is going badly.

The upshot is that, given the ever-souring national mood, many Senate Republicans are in virtually no position to stick with Bush on Iraq beyond the September firewall. They stayed firm in July by floating the fig-leaf argument that lawmakers should wait for Gen. Petraeus’ September report before trying anything new. Which means that, roughly eight weeks from now, they’re going to faced with a difficult decision – whether to remain loyal Bushies, or take steps to save their political hides.

Certainly, despite their fondest hopes, they will get little guidance from Petreaus. There’s no way that he is going to show up on Capitol Hill with an announcement that he sees bright light at the end of the tunnel. He will hem and haw, he will talk about progress here and setbacks there, and he will ask for more time. He signaled as much yesterday, during his guest appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.

Hewitt, the conservative host, trying as always to lob softballs, asked: “Now you’re due to make a report back in September, I don’t know if it’s early, mid or late September, General Petraeus, is that enough time to really get a fix on how the surge is progressing?” And Petraeus replied, “Well, I have always said that we will have a sense by that time of basically, of how things are going, have we been able to achieve progress on the ground, where have there been shortfalls, and so forth. And I think that is a reasonable amount of time to have had all the forces on the ground, again, for about three months, to have that kind of sense. But that’s all it is going to be.”

So the Republicans, while winning the parliamentary battle yesterday, are slowly and incrementally losing the political war.

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Following up on the Fred Thompson story I mentioned a week ago:

Remember how the ostensible GOP savior and great conservative hope was pleading amnesia in the wake of reports that, as a Washington lobbyist in 1991 and 1992, he had done some backroom lobbying for an abortion-rights group? Remember how his press secretary declared that Thompson had never done any such lobbying at all, while Thompson himself was saying he had no “recollection” of taking money from the kind of people who are viewed by conservatives as baby-killers?

Well, now it turns out that, according to a fresh report on the billing records, Thompson conferred with the president of the abortion rights group on 22 separate occasions, put in roughly 20 hours of work overall, and lobbied officials of the senior George Bush administration over a total span of 3.3 hours.

By the way, this story is good news for Mitt Romney, who will be fighting Thompson for conservative primary voters if or when Thompson finally decides to officially take the plunge. Romney already has a long history of flip-flops, as he has sought to tweak his track record for pandering purposes, and no doubt he will welcome the company – since some conservatives might look amiss at a candidate who worked as a lobbyist gun for hire, sometimes at variance with conservative principles.

Thompson’s mission, on behalf of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, was to persuade senior George Bush officials to overturn a federal “gag rule” that banned tax-financed clinics from giving out abortion information. He got $5000 for his persuasion efforts. Somehow he omitted mention of that payday when, as a Senate candidate in 1994, he promised conservative Tennesseans that he would not support tax-financed clinics that recommend “abortion as a method of birth control.”

Or maybe he didn’t consciously omit anything. Maybe, a mere two years removed from his 20 hours of work and 22 conversations, he had already managed to purge the episode from his mind.

Or maybe the question is: What did he know, and when did he stop knowing it?

The hypocrites go to the mattresses

It’s time, once again, to dine out at the U.S. Senate’s hypocrisy smorgasbord.

What a veritable feast of double-talk. The senators are currently engaged in a marathon spin war over Iraq – they were in session all last night, complete with sleeping cots – and not much of substance was accomplished. But they did manage to show how adept they are at bending their so-called principles to the exigencies of the moment. This is a bipartisan talent, by the way.

The minority Republicans have been working hard to prevent the majority Democrats from bringing their various antiwar bills to a vote in the chamber. Their chief tactic has been that time-honored Senate parliamentary maneuver, the filibuster. The Republicans have been saying, in effect, “You Democrats can’t cut off debate and force us to vote on these bills unless you first round up 60 votes. And since you’ll never get 60 votes, there ain’t no way you can cut off debate and force us to vote. Sorry, guys, but under Senate rules, we are within our rights to play it that way.” In response, the Democrats, led by Harry Reid, have been saying, in effect, “These antiwar bills deserve an up-and-down vote. You Republicans are obstructionists who are thwarting the will of the American people.”

But what’s noteworthy is that the Democrats were saying exactly the opposite back in 2003 and 2005, when, as members of the Senate minority, they were filibustering President Bush’s conservative judicial nominees, and insisting that they were in their rights to gum up the chamber machinery. And the majority Republicans were talking the other way, claiming at the time that the filibuster was an unforgivable act of obstruction.

In recent days, as the GOP has stymied the antiwar bills, Senate Republicans have been talking about the honorable traditions of the filibuster, about how it has long been a device designed to safeguard the rights of the chamber’s minority party. Virginia Sen. John Warner (one of the growing number of Republicans who merely talks big about opposing Bush on the war) said the other day, with reference to the filibuster, that “these are old rules that date back, I might say with some sense of pride, to Thomas Jefferson.”

But, just two years ago, when the minority Democrats sought to wax Jeffersonian in their bid to stymie Bush’s judicial picks, the ruling Republicans sputtered in outrage. Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (did you doubt it?) insisted that the Democrats’ filibuster tactic was “an infection that has entered the bloodstream.” His colleague from Louisana, David Vitter, complained that the use of a filibuster was “not fair, in the minds of ordinary Americans.” Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch complained that Democratic filibusters were “unprecedented, unfair, and partisan.”

Senate Democrat Harry Reid, back when he was in the minority, thought that the filibuster tactic was fair indeed. On Sept. 18, 2002, he argued that no issue of major importance should voted upon in the Senate chamber unless the majority party could first muster 60 votes to cut off debate. In his words, “Matters that are in controversy take 60 votes.” One year later, as Senate minority leader, he personally filibustered Bush’s judicial nominees for nine hours, in a bid to deny those nominees an up-or-down vote on the floor. Reid also spoke up for minority rights: “Don’t think we can be pushed around…We have a say in here.” And two years later, in 2005, Reid was still big on minority rights; when the majority Republicans threatened to change Senate rules and erase the 60-vote hurdle, Reid warned that such a move would be “a dark day in the history of the American constitutional form of government.”

Yesterday, however, majority leader Reid complained on the Senate floor that “Republicans are using a filibuster to block us…They are denying us an up-or-down, yes-or-no, vote.” He also sent out an email to supporters, assailing the Republicans for using “technical maneuvers,” and calling on the Republicans to “stop obstructing.”

The Republicans, extolling the filibuster principle, said yesterday that they would not stop. (Late this morning, they succeeded in thwarting an up-or-down vote on the main Democratic troop withdrawal bill.) The Republicans also thought it was outrageous that Reid staged an all-night session, complete with sleeping cots, just to highlight the GOP’s filibuster intransigence. Minority leader Mitch McConnell assailed the Democratic move as “bad theatre” and a “publicity stunt” – which is somewhat amusing, since it was just two years ago when the Republicans staged an all-night session, complete with sleeping cots, just to highlight the Democrats’ filibuster intransigence.

It’s a pity that senatorial hot air cannot be harnessed as a fuel source. We would be well on the road to energy independence.

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Heckuva job, Jimmy...

I have to cop to a glaring omission. Last week, I attempted to list all the federal departments and agencies that have suffered serious performance failures, thanks to partisan meddling from the Bush administration: The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Justice Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Defense…

Yet somehow, I forgot the Department of Veterans Affairs, headed by GOP apparatchik Jim Nicholson – yet another Bush appointee with no previous substantive experience for the task at hand. My memory was jolted yesterday, by the news that Nicholson, the ex-GOP national chairman, was leaving his job and returning to the more lucrative private sector. All the more reason to quickly note some of his contributions to the Bush track record of incompetence:

In the spring of 2005, Nicholson publicly admitted that the VA had underestimated the number of Iraq war vets who were expected to seek medical treatment that year – by nearly 80,000, because somehow his agency hadn't taken the growing Iraq caseload into account. Records show that the VA was slow to react when casualties mounted far beyond their initial expectations; the disability claims backlog reportedly exceeds 400,000. Meanwhile, for fiscal 2006, Nicholson approved bonuses to top VA executives, totaling $3.8 million. This spring, he dismissed reports of widespread vet treatment shortfalls, calling them “anecdotal.” In his words, “when you are treating so many people there is always going to be a linen towel left somewhere.”

Nicholson, a former real estate developer, said yesterday that “my yearn to get back into the business world is strong.”

Ya think?

A rare Republican free for all

Now that erstwhile GOP frontrunner John McCain has become the political equivalent of Chinese toothpaste – yesterday, most of his top Iowa staffers joined the general exodus – it is worth pausing to reassess the ’08 Republican presidential campaign, and to ponder its ahistorical elements.

Those of you fortunate enough to be younger than I may not fully realize that this contest – especially now, with McCain clearly in eclipse – is quite unique in the annals of postwar GOP politics. It is exceedingly rare for Republicans to find themselves in the midst of a presidential election cycle without a virtually anointed nominee. The general rule, ever since 1948, is that the nomination should go to the guy who has worked his way up the party ladder, who has paid his dues by running for president in the past. Republicans, more than Democrats, prefer an orderly process; they respect the notion of hierarchy.

Tom Dewey, who ran against FDR and lost in 1944, got the nod again in 1948. Richard Nixon, who ran against JFK and lost in 1960, got the nod again in 1968. Ronald Reagan, who unsuccessfully sought the 1968 nomination at the eleventh hour, and tried again in 1976, got the nod in 1980. George H. W. Bush, who failed to get the nomination in 1980 and subsequently served as vice president, got the nod in 1988. Bob Dole, who tried and failed to win the 1988 nomination, got the nod in 1996.

(Rookie politician Dwight Eisenhower, the 1952 nominee, was arguably an exception, but the World War II hero was nevertheless the anointed frontrunner; and national newcomer George W. Bush was arguably an exception in 2000, but, in part because of his family pedigree and connections, he was nevertheless the anointed frontrunner long before the primaries began. The sole true exception, perhaps, was conservative insurgent Barry Goldwater in 1964 – but after he was clobbered in a landslide, the GOP learned not to take big risks.)

Anyway, McCain seemed (at first glance, anyway) to fit the traditional pattern, since he paid his dues during the 2000 campaign and had emerged as a popular senior figure with crossover appeal and 100 percent name ID. But his summer plummet has opened up the race and left grassroots Republicans feeling somewhat disoriented, as if they have somehow stumbled into an alternative universe. This is best evidenced by a new (and stunning) AP-Ipsos poll, released today. Its July survey of likely GOP primary voters reveals that the current frontrunner on the Republican side is a guy named Nota. If you haven’t heard of Nota, perhaps you know him by his full name:

None of the Above.

That’s right. The top choice for the ’08 nomination – and this poll was conducted before McCain’s top lieutenants quit the race, and before it was revealed that McCain was essentially broke – is None of the Above, with 23 percent. Rudy Giuliani finished second, with 21 percent (down from a leading 35 percent in March). The perpetually teasing Fred Thompson finished third, at 19 percent. The pre-meltdown McCain was fourth, at 15 percent. Mitt Romney checked in fifth, with 11 percent.

In recent decades, GOP voters have been generally happy with their choices and stable in their habits, while their Democratic counterparts have been dissatisfied with their choices and restive in their behavior. But in the alternative universe of 2007, the reverse appears to be true. The embrace of Nota was foreshadowed back in the spring, when a CBS poll reported that only 35 percent of GOP voters liked their candidates (whereas 59 percent of Democratic voters liked theirs). And, as I noted here yesterday, Republican disenchantment is also evidenced by the fact that the Democratic candidates are raising far more money.

The Republicans appear to have been struck by a perfect storm. This time, unlike in 1960 and 1988, the Republican vice president (who would normally be considered the anointed frontrunner) is taking a pass – which is probably just as well for the party, given the fact that Dick Cheney might win his native Wyoming but little else. Also this time, there is nobody else with anointed frontrunner bona fides – someone who can excite the conservative base and satisfy the party establishment. Arguably, that might have been Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, but his bumbling brother has clearly damaged the family brand (at least until the voter amnesia of 2012 or 2016). Or it might even have been Condoleezza Rice, who could have trumped Hillary Clinton and Barack Obamas with a race/gender two-fer, but her complicity in one of America’s signature foreign policy disasters has dealt her out.

And that same disaster is weighing down the current GOP candidates. Aside from all their other fundamental shortcomings (Romney’s transparent flip-flops, Giuliani’s liberal track record on social issues, Thompson’s shaky conservative creds and Beltway lobbyist pedigree), their ongoing fealty to Bush’s war policy is a general election albatross. It’s true that most grassroots Republicans still support Bush on the war, and that any candidate who breaks with the president might well suffer the consequences during the primary season. But Republican voters also care a lot about finding a candidate who is electable, and many of them are well aware that any ’08 nominee perceived to be a Bush loyalist runs the risk of being slaughtered in November. I agree with the much-quoted uber-pundit Larry Sabato, who now says that “any Republican candidate is going to be held accountable for Bush’s policies, no matter how much the presidential hopeful tries to distance himself,” much the way Democrat Hubert Humphrey paid the price for LBJ’s Vietnam failures in 1968.

Bush fealty is one key factor in the John McCain meltdown. His staunch support for Bush’s war stewardship, his willingness to out-hawk Bush, and his rose-colored stroll through a war-torn Baghdad marketplace, canceled the “maverick” image that once endeared him to swing-voting independents. That, in turn, erased the argument that McCain was the most electable Republican. And he badly needed that electability asset, because he had scant sway with grassroot conservatives; they disliked his support for campaign finance reform and immigration reform, and never forgave him for voting against the Bush tax cuts back in 2001. (Given his inherent problems with the party base, McCain was never an ideal anointee anyway.)

So what we have is a uniquely unsettled Republican race, with candidates twisting in the wind. They will get no political guidance from their titular leader. Conversing last Friday with a hand-picked audience of conservative scribes, Bush said he remains convinced of his rightness; in his words, “it’s more of a theological perspective.”

Not too hot to fight and die

Back in May, a group of Republican lawmakers, understandably agitated by the very real possibility that President Bush is driving them over a cliff, met with their lame-duck leader at the White House. They voiced their strong concerns about the Iraq disaster, and warned Bush about the ’08 political repercussions. Then one GOP congressman lashed out at Bush over reports that members of the Iraqi Parliament were planning to exercise their new-won freedom by actually going on vacation for the entire month of August – despite the fact that a war was raging around them, and despite the fact that they had enacted none of the crucial “benchmark” legislation that Bush first asked for back in January.

The congressman reportedly asked, “How can our sons and daughters spill their blood, while the Iraqi government goes on vacation?” And Bush sought to reassure the congressman by declaring that Dick Cheney was on the case: “The vice president is over there to tell them, ‘do not go on vacation.’”

Well, sure enough, the Iraqi Parliament will be going on vacation for the entire month of August - which is really no surprise anyway, since those lawmakers don't really care about Bush's benchmark timetable. And the White House, ever protective of its disputatious clients, is insisting that the hiatus is no big deal.

Last Friday, Bush press secretary Tony Snow confirmed the news, and at first sought to minimize it by saying that the Iraqis are going on vacation “just like the U.S. Congress is.” That was a creative defense, to suggest that if the Democratic-run Congress opts to go on vacation, then the Iraqi Parliament should feel free to do the same. Somehow, that feels like a false equivalence; last I checked, the Iraqi Parliament was sitting on some bills that are crucial to the regime’s survival, while people are being blown up in the streets, and, last I checked, the Bush administration and its dwindling band of enablers were urging the Iraqis to make some real progress in time for Gen. Petraeus’ September report.

Therefore, one might have expected that Snow would tell the Iraqis to put those vacation plans on hold, to shake up and hunker down. After all, that’s precisely how Bush reacted back in April, when the Democratic Congress left town – merely for the Easter break – without completing some Iraq funding legislation. At the time, Bush went to the Rose Garden to grumble about the Democrats: “And now they have left Washington for spring recess without finishing the work.”

But apparently it’s OK if the Iraqi lawmakers blow off a whole month.

And Tony Snow came up with a second creative excuse: “You know, it's 130 degrees in Baghdad in August.”

In other words, according to Snow’s spin, it’s way too hot for an Iraqi lawmaker to walk down a hallway with a file folder under his arm – but not too hot for American soldiers to patrol the mean streets while clad in full body armor, risking life and limb so that the Iraqis can twiddle their thumbs at leisure. This is surely a new wrinkle on the old Bush admonition about "supporting the troops."

Which brings us back to the question that the GOP congressman asked Bush in May: “How can our sons and daughters spill their blood, while the Iraqi government goes on vacation?”

The answer is now clear: Because Bush says so.

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As further evidence that the war is dampening GOP electoral spirits, consider the latest fund-raising stats filed by the '08 presidential candidates. During the second quarter of this year - from April 1 to June 30 - the eight Democratic hopefuls raised roughly $81.3 million...while the 10 Republicans raised $47.3 million.

Grading on a curve in Iraq

Yet again, President Bush demonstrated yesterday why he is the most potent weapon in the Democrats’ 2008 campaign arsenal.

Witness his latest truth-challenged attempt to show that “progress” is being achieved in Iraq. His summer report card, mandated by Congress, is vivid proof that grade inflation is not just an issue confined to academia. Bush, who has joked in the past about being a C student at Yale, clearly believes that his ruinous war should be judged far more leniently. As he sees it, a score of 44 percent should not be considered an F; rather, it should be viewed as “a cause for optimism.”

He’s like one of those Little League dads who thinks that every kid deserves a trophy just for showing up. His stock has fallen so low that even the newspaper in Wichita, Kansas - which endorsed him in 2004 - is now telling its red-state readers that Bush should "face reality" and recognize that "America cannot prosecute an open-ended war without achievable goals and without the support of the American people."

Bush believes that a 44 percent score is proof that goals are being achieved. In his report card, he Decided yesterday that progress is being made on eight of the 18 congressionally established benchmarks; thus, they were marked as “satisfactory.” Another eight were marked as “unsatisfactory,” and two others were marked as neither. Hence, 44 percent. But even that score is deceptively high, because most of the eight “satisfactory” achievements are relatively minor – while virtually all the failures are major.

For instance, the Bush team considered it a “satisfactory” benchmark that the various political factions in Iraq continue to have a Constitutional Review Committee, which is tasked to figure out how much power should be exercised in Baghdad, and how much power should be exercised in the regions. That’s pretty fundamental stuff, and even though this committee has been around since last November, nothing has been resolved; indeed, the committee has received an extension so that it can continue its “review.”

So even though this committee has done nothing substantive, clearly because – as the Bush report card concedes – the “political blocs still need to reach an accommodation on these difficult political issues,” the Bush team awarded this benchmark a “satisfactory” grade.

In other words, under Bush’s generous criteria, you can get a passing grade not for actually doing something, but merely for continuing to talk about maybe doing something.

The whole point of Bush’s troop “surge” is to provide a safer security environment, so that the Iraqi factions can pursue national political reconciliation. But there is no sign, in Bush’s report card, that the factions are any closer to that goal than they were prior to the “surge.” Nowhere in the report card does Bush mention, for example, that more than 25 percent of the Iraqi Parliament’s 275 members are reportedly boycotting the proceedings on a regular basis (thus often making it impossible for the body to conduct business), and that at least 12 of the 38 cabinet ministers reportedly are not attending Cabinet meetings any longer.

Which brings us to all the benchmarks that even the Bush team had to mark as “unsatisfactory.” These are all the big-ticket items: No progress on setting up provincial elections; no progress on establishing a a serious program to disarm the sectarian militias, no progress on permitting Iraqi army and security police to crack down on militias without interference from sectarian factions; no progress on the key legislation to fairly distribute oil revenue to all sects and ethnicities; no progress on ratcheting up the number of Iraqi military and security forces that can protect citizens without U.S. help (on the contrary, the Pentagon yesterday said there has been a “slight reduction” in those all-important numbers).

Nor did Bush happen to mention, in his press conference yesterday, that the government’s National Intelligence Council signaled this week that the political situation in Iraq is actually far worse than Bush’s report card suggests. In House testimony the other day, deputy director for analysis Thomas Fingar said there have been “few appreciable gains,” primarily because the sectarian strife is so intractable: “(C)ommunal violence and scant common ground between Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds continues to polarize politics.”

There is no rational reason to believe that anything is going to change in the next eight weeks, at which point Gen. David Petraeus is supposed to tell us whether the “surge” is working. David Shorr, a foreign policy specialist who posts at Democracy Arsenal (a website sponsored largely by Democrats with strong national security credentials), argued the other day: “The reason Iraqi political leaders haven't achieved the benchmarks is that they don't really want to…(It) doesn't make sense to wait for something that isn't going to happen.”

But Bush doesn’t entertain opinions that are expressed outside his bubble. Not even poll numbers rivaling Richard Nixon at the nadir of Watergate will have any appreciable impact on his thinking – as indicated by his remark yesterday, “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war.” The ’06 elections actually demonstrated that the public does want Congress to run the war – in a new direction. But Bush will cede nothing unless Congress confronts him with a veto-proof majority. That will require the assistance of Republicans, few of whom, even now, have shown any willingness to act.

In the absence of countervailing power, Bush will work every possible loophole to buy more time; that’s precisely what his grade inflation was designed to do. And with each passing day, procrastinating Republicans will have to face the fact that their president is leading them to ruin in 2008.

Fred remembers, "Oh yeah, I was a lobbyist"

These are dark days for conservative Republicans, as they continue to search in vain for an ’08 presidential candidate with purist anti-abortion credentials. Many have latched onto Fred Thompson as a potential savior, and indeed the actor/lobbyist/politician has been trying his best to bond with the purists in the hopes of acing their litmus test.

But, as you may have heard by now, Thompson has run into a bit of a problem in recent days: His past caught up with him. It turned out that, back in 1991, a Washington abortion-rights group hired him to do some lobbying for the abortion-rights cause. The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association wanted to get rid of the abortion “gag rule,” which banned abortion counseling at federally-financed clinics, and it thought that the well-connected Thompson might be able to help out. So, according to the minutes of an association board meeting, he was hired.

Let’s look at the shifting responses from the Thompson camp, as it seeks to wriggle out of this inconvenient episode. Its first impulse was to stonewall, to deny the story outright (a spokesman insisted, “Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period”), while also leaving the door ever so slightly ajar, by claiming that the prospective candidate was afflicted with amnesia (“Thompson says he has no recollection of it”).

The amnesia defense seemed a tad specious, since it meant that Thompson had absolutely no recollection of having dinner with association president Judith DeSarno at Washington’s Galileo restaurant, or having lunch with DeSarno at Washington’s Monocle restaurant, or of conversing with DeSarno by phone about his lobbying progress (all of which DeSarno says she remembered). This defense also put him at odds with four other people who remembered Thompson’s lobbying work.

Nonetheless, this was the initial Thompson defense: It never happened/ I have no memory that it happened. In other words, part stonewall, part amnesia. And that’s apparently what Sean Hannity expected to hear two days ago, when the Fox News host quizzed Thompson on his show. Actually, it was hardly a “quiz.” Hannity’s predictably obsequious query about the lobbying story was akin to asking Thompson, “Can I please be allowed to wash your car if I bring my own soap and sponge?”

Hannity: “They have attacked you, they have attacked your family, and now, they come out in the Los Angeles Times with a piece that says you lobbied for abortion rights. You say that’s absolutely not true.”

But, in response, Thompson did something interesting. He didn’t go with the stonewall/amnesia spin. Instead, he introduced a whole new defense: “In the first place, you need to separate a lawyer who is advocating a position from the position itself.”

Hannity, naturally, was too busy bowing and scraping to recognize that Thompson had shifted his ground, and exposed himself to some obvious follow-up questions: “Are you now saying, Mr. Thompson, that your memory has suddenly improved – and that you may indeed have lobbied for the abortion-rights group, as ‘a lawyer advocating a position?’ And, if so, should conservatives be concerned that you were so willing to compromise conservative convictions by hiring yourself out to the other side?” But those are the questions that real journalists, with professional instincts, are trained to ask.

Thompson, having gotten off easy with Hannity, is sticking with his new defense. In a posting yesterday on Powerline, a conservative blog, he wrote that it’s totally appropriate for lawyers to hire themselves out to all kinds of clients: “The practice of law is a business as well as a profession. It’s the way you support your family. And if a client has a legal and ethical right to take a position, then you may appropriately represent him as long as he does not lie or otherwise conduct himself improperly while you are representing him. In almost 30 years of practicing law I must have had hundreds of clients and thousands of conversations about legal matters. Like any good lawyer, I would always try to give my best, objective, and professional opinion on any legal question presented to me.”

He’ll get off easy on Powerline as well, because blog author John Hinderaker made the same argument a few days earlier. Defending Thompson in the wake of the abortion-rights lobbying story, he wrote that “a lobbyist, like lawyers in general, represents clients. To assume that a lawyer always agrees with the clients he represents is not only juvenile, it tends to undercut the premises on which our legal system in based.”

No argument here. This is what lawyers and lobbyists do; their professional code gives them plenty of cover. But what’s fascinating is that – politically – Thompson is now employing a defense that undercuts his carefully crafted image as a down-home southern boy, an image he introduced during his Senate campaign, when he rode around Tennessee in a rented pickup truck, clad in backwoods clothes.

He’s been trying to sell himself to GOP primary voters as a conviction conservative – and now his best defense is that, even if he did lobby for an abortion-rights group, it was merely because he, like all Washington lawyer-lobbyists, parked his convictions in the interests of "business." (And when was the last time that a Republican candidate sought to defend the legal profession? The typical GOP approach is to demagogue all lawyers as “ambulance chasers.”)

Some prominent conservatives aren't pleased with the idea of backing a candidate who suddenly takes pride in being a Washington mercenary. Richard Viguerie, one of the pioneers of the Reagan-era conservative movement, is unhappy about the abortion-rights lobbying episode (“that kind of behavior is inconsistent with principled conservatism”), and, more broadly, he concludes that “Fred Thompson plays a tough guy in the movies and on television, but in real life he is a marshmallow.”

But will Fred’s new fans give him a pass anyway? Quite possibly. Just listen to the Hannity broadcast, which featured an obsequious live audience. Here’s Thompson speaking again, punctuated by audience reaction. After defending his lawyer-lobby work, he said: “I’m not going to get down in the weeds with everything they dredge up over the next six months (Yayyy!). But in terms of being a target, all I can say is, they know who to be afraid of.” (Yayyy!)

Conservatives desperate for a savior are prepared to overlook all kinds of inconvenient facts, including their man’s attempts to defend himself as a Washington gun for hire. As Paul Simon once sang, “Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”

The national doc's damaging dish

George W. Bush is hardly the first president to use government power for selfish political purposes, and to treat nonpartisan public servants as mere errand boys for a partisan agenda. But no predecessor has ever sought to institutionalize these practices with such fervor – as we learned, yet again, in sworn testimony yesterday on Capitol Hill.

Dr. Richard Carmona, an ex-Army Special Forces medic and ex-Arizona deputy sheriff who served as U.S. Surgeon General from 2002 to 2006, clearly had an unenviable job. He tried repeatedly to speak out publicly about empirical scientific truths (on everything from stem cells to sex education), but he was working for a regime that adhered to faith-based certitudes; hence, he spent most of his tenure trying in vain to remove the masking tape that had been affixed to his mouth.

For instance, he once was invited to attend a meeting on global warming. At that meeting, a Bush official dismissed global warming as a liberal cause. Carmona wanted to discuss the science, but he was “never invited back.” And when he tried to raise the issue of stem-cell science, “I was told to stand down and not speak about it. It was removed from my speeches.”

It’s rare to hear a former loyalist dish on the Decider with such impunity, but apparently he’s still rankled by his dealings with the Bush apparatchiks: “Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried. The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds…The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party…”

Carmona followed up his testimony with an interview last night on PBS: “(I) was not allowed to speak out on health issues when needed, based on the best science, to deliver the best science…information that the American public needed to know, to be better informed to make good decisions…”

I was particularly struck, however, by one item in his sworn testimony – fresh evidence that the loyal Bushies were trying to compel nonpartisan public servants to subscribe to the kind of leadership cult commonly seen in places like North Korea:

It was the little detail about how he was ordered to invoke Bush’s name three times on every page of every speech.

By the way, the White House countered in the usual fashion yesterday, contending that Carmona failed in his job. Make of that what you will. I also anticipate that the Bush defenders will blithely ignore Carmona’s list of substantive complaints (among other things, he was ordered not to talk about advances in stem-cell science, or about how Bush’s abstinence-only stance on teen sex contradicted the best public health science), and simply take refuge in the “What About Clinton?” defense. And, yes, it’s true that Carmona’s predecessor, David Satcher, was barred in 1998 from releasing a new report about sexuality because its release would have been politically awkward for a president enmeshed at the time in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And yes, it’s also true that Clinton forced Satcher’s predecessor, Jocelyn Elders, to resign in 1994 after she suggested publicly that masturbation should be discussed in sex ed courses.

But Carmona’s remarks need to be seen in proper context – as further evidence of the Bush regime’s unprecedented attempts to politicize the institutions of government, to bend them in the service of partisan ends.

As we already know, Bush has brought his same inimitable governing style to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (staffed with loyalists, such as Michael “heckuva job” Brown, who gutted the FEMA mission); the Justice Department (the still-unfolding prosecutor purge scandal), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (where scientists were barred from speaking out about global warming), the Food and Drug Administration (where the apparatchiks delayed the nonprescription availability of the morning-after pill), the Environmental Protection Agency (where Dick Cheney ordered the easing of air pollution rules, to satisfy the power plant industry that had donated heavily to the Bush-Cheney campaign), and, most infamously, the Department of Defense (where neoconservatives set up their own shop to push the case for war in Iraq).

Indeed, everything Carmona said yesterday merely confirms what John DiIulio was the first to say, five long years ago. DiIulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor and domestic policy expert, lasted barely a year as director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. His parting shot looks more prescient with each passing day:

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

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Quote of the day: “He seemed to be one of the nicest men and most honorable men I’ve ever met.”

- Jeanette Maier, former madame of a New Orleans whorehouse, extolling Republican Senator David Vitter, a “family values” conservative and married father of four, who, it turns out, regularly patronized her place of business during the ‘90s, at $300 a pop...while he was publicly writing that Bill Clinton should be impeached “because he is morally unfit to govern.”

I wonder whether Maier’s glowing character reference will help Vitter in his latest effort, serving as Rudy Giuliani’s liaison to southern Christian conservatives. A prayerful session on religious right leader James Dobson’s radio show may be in order.

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Quote of the day (runner-up), courtesy of ex-Bush White House political director Sara Taylor, as she tried to explain, during Senate testimony today, why she was refusing to shed any light on Bush's possible role in the Justice Department's prosecutor purge scandal:

"I took an oath to the president, and I take that oath very seriously."

There it is again, the cult of the Leader. The fact is, Sara Taylor did not take an oath to the president. She took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution - as she later acknowledged under questioning.

Is Bush merely in Corleone mode?

So now we’re hearing that President Bush, clearly recognizing the erosion within his Republican base, intends to recalibrate his message about Iraq, and express a stronger desire to reduce the number of U.S. troops at what he deems to be the earliest opportunity. Or something like that. His aides are hinting that, as early as today, he will begin to unveil “his vision for the post-surge,” presumably as a counterweight to all the Bush visions that have come to naught thus far.

But, amidst the latest evidence that the war has already cost the American taxpayers nearly half a trillion dollars, with nearly 3600 U.S. soldiers dead, and with more than 70 percent of the electorate now favoring the withdrawal of nearly all troops by next April, the big question is whether restive Senate Republicans – particularly the 10 members who are already distancing themselves from Bush – will buy the idea that the Decider has suddenly learned humility.

They won’t fall for that. They know he is only trying to buy time – until the Petraeus status report in September, at which point he will try to buy even more time. They can perhaps seize upon one slender reed - the latest USA Today/ Gallup poll says that a majority of Americans are still willing to wait until September - but the political momentum is clearly for a strategy change, sooner rather than later.

Bush is starting to sound like Michael Corleone in Godfather II, at least in the scene when his wife Kay announces that she’s leaving him. His response: “Kay, in time you’ll feel differently. You’ll be glad I stopped you now…I’ll make it up to you. I’m going to change. I’ll change. I’ve learned that I have the strength to change…And we’ll go on, you and I. We’ll go on.”

Moments later, he slapped her.

The Senate Republicans are tired of getting slapped around; even Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the chamber, said something quite remarkable the other day. McConnell, who is up for re-election in 2008, said: “The majority of the public has decided the Iraq effort is not worth it. That puts a lot of pressure on Congress to act because public opinion in a democracy is not irrelevant.” (Nice of him to say that.)

Does Bush really have the strength to change? Consider all aspects of the current spin game. On the one hand, White House sources are saying that Bush might approve a gradual troop withdrawal, and be willing to accept less ambitious goals. On the other hand, Bush said today in Ohio, "we've got a plan to lead to victory." (Remind me...have we heard that one before?) And press secretary Tony Show appeared this morning on The Today Show, and seemed not to be ceding much of anything: “We need to give our forces time to show what they have done…We are at the very beginning stages of an effort to try to create the space so the Iraqis can stand up for themselves…(We are) going to try to find even more nuanced ways of trying to measure success.”

This is what happens when a president loses his political mojo – he has to make conciliatory noises to the critics in his own party, while also somehow signaling to his most diehard loyalists that he still has the old resolve. Snow was dispatched this morning to perform the latter task. The war hawks may be out of touch with landslide majority American opinion, but they’re still a vital part of Bush’s base.

Among Snow’s intended targets was Bill Kristol, the longtime neoconservative activist who edits Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard magazine. Kristol went ballistic yesterday, in the wake of reports that Bush might cede some ground to his war critics. Kristol derided the dissident GOP senators as “the current calamity-Janes of the Republican party,” and warned that if Bush caves in to this “insane, irrational panic,” he “would properly be viewed as a feckless, irresolute president, incapable of seeing his own strategy through a couple of months of controversy before abandoning it.” All told, here’s Kristol’s sage suggestion: “The best strategy for the president is to hold firm.”

But, for Bush, here’s the problem: He’s stuck between the mainstream Republicans who are waking up to political reality (McConnell’s belated recognition that “public opinion in a democracy is not irrelevant”), and the home front warriors, such as Kristol, who have been wrong about Iraq every step of the way, and who therefore would appear to lack the credibility to offer new advice.

Kristol is the same guy who said, on April 1, 2003: “There’s been a certain amount of pop psychology in America…that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni, and that the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all.” He’s the same guy once said: “Nor is there any doubt that after Sept. 11, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction pose a danger to us that we hadn’t grasped before.” He once said that “reconstructing Iraq may prove to be a less difficult task than the challenge of building a viable state in Afghanistan.” And last winter, he dismissed the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s recommendations – including its call for a reduced U.S. presence in Iraq – as “deeply irresponsible.”

Yet today, mainstream Senate Republicans such as Lamar Alexander and John Sununu are backing a bill to put the ISG’s recommendations into effect – and that’s one of the milder options now on the table. As I mentioned here last Friday, the new GOP dissidents have yet to back up their defiant words with actual antiwar votes, but clearly that prospect is growing. If Bush sincerely intends to bond anew with the GOP, and forestall further erosion, he may be well advised to stiff the tainted neoconservative prophets and cede substantive ground.

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Bill Kristol, on many other fronts, is a smart and perceptive guy. And, as I sought to demonstrate in my latest newspaper column, he was downright prescient, back in 1999, about how the conservatives intended to remake the U. S. Supreme Court, in the aftermath of a Republican presidential victory.

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By the way, the latest USA Today-Gallup poll (referenced near the top of today's post) also contains this little nugget:

When asked whether Bush was right to commute Scooter Libby's jail sentence, 13 percent said yes. Sixty-six percent said no.

No wonder most Capitol Hill Republicans have been staying far away from that one. The only Republican willing to brave the Sunday shows and defend Bush's decision was Utah congressman Chris Cannon, whose predictable response was to change the subject to Bill Clinton.

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The latest on the McCain campaign meltdown: This morning, his two top strategists quit. In terms of inside baseball, this is very big news.

Early last week, while insisting that McCain's fundraising crisis was no big deal, campaign manager Terry Nelson said he was honored to forego a paycheck and toil for McCain free of charge. Now he says it was a “tremendous honor” to serve McCain, but he won’t do it any longer. Nevertheless, “I believe John McCain is the most experienced and prepared candidate to represent the Republican Party and defeat the Democratic nominee next year."

Nelson was a relative newcomer to the McCain fold. Not so John Weaver, the chief strategist, who stuck with and suffered with McCain, amidst the smears from unnamed Bush partisans, during the 2000 primary season. But now Weaver is leaving, as well. He too says it was an “honor” to serve McCain; moreover, “There is only one person equipped to serve as our nation's chief executive and deal with the challenges we face, and that person is John McCain.”

If they still think he’s the best candidate, why are they bailing? The latest reports indicate that McCain fired Nelson, prompting Weaver to quit, and, in turn, prompting longtime McCain intimate Mark Salter (co-author of McCain's books) to quit as well.

No doubt we'll learn more about what triggered this implosion, which will surely feed the perception that the purported Straight Talk Express is out of gas. For McCain, maybe this exodus is an act of mercy, because there’s virtually no chance that an unreconstructed Iraq war hawk can win the presidency in 2008.

My Dick Cheney fantasy interview

I surfed the Sunday talk shows yesterday, but this is the one I really wanted to see:

TIM RUSSERT: Our stories this morning - President Bush keeps Scooter Libby out of jail and triggers more controversy for a beleaguered administration that is also facing major Senate Republican defections over the war in Iraq. These issues and more for our exclusive guest, the vice president of the United States. Dick Cheney, welcome back to Meet the Press. It’s good to have you here.

CHENEY: I’m not here.

RUSSERT: Excuse me?

CHENEY: Well, clearly I am ‘here,’ if by ‘here’ you are referring only to a temporal physical presence, one that is most certainly superseded by the provisions of Article VIII of the U.S. Constitution.

RUSSERT: I was not aware - forgive me, sir, but I was taught many years ago that the U.S. Constitution contains only seven articles. Are you saying -

CHENEY: Exactly right. Alexander Hamilton was a very prescient man, and he clearly foresaw the loss of life on Sept. 11 when he personally crafted Article VIII, which enumerates the inherently implicit powers of the vice president to create the fourth branch of government in time of national emergency. I would share this newly discovered document with you, but legal counsel compels me not to, although I can say with confidence today that we will be sharing it with our Iraqi friends, who continue to seek advice on how to best construct their new democracy.

RUSSERT: All right, let’s move to the topic of Iraq. Your superior, President Bush –

CHENEY (lopsided grin): My what?

RUSSERT: All right, perhaps I'm not up to speed on Article VIII. Let me rephrase. Mr. Bush last week announced that he had commuted the jail sentence of your longtime close aide, Scooter Libby, even though Mr. Libby had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a national security investigation into an alleged White House effort to smear a critic of the Iraq war. Newsweek has just posted a new article about the president’s backstage deliberations. Let’s look at a key passage.

NEWSWEEK EXCERPT ON SCREEN (RUSSERT NARRATING): The president was conflicted. He hated the idea that a loyal aide would serve time. Hanging over his deliberations was Cheney, who said he was “very disappointed” with the jury’s verdict. Cheney did not directly weigh in with Fielding – that’s Fred Fielding, the White House counsel – but nobody involved had any doubt where he stood. “I’m not sure Bush had a choice," says one of his advisors. "If he didn’t act, it would have caused a fracture with the vice president.”

RUSSERT: Any comment?

CHENEY: Tim, as you know, Newsweek is affiliated with The Washington Post, and The Washington Post, as you know, has not always been a friend of those who understand the threat of our enemies at home and abroad. And it would appear, from this report, that it was sourced in part by leaks that I did not authorize –

RUSSERT: But isn’t there something disturbing about the suggestion that Bush didn’t have a “choice” in the matter? That he had to let Libby off, because if he didn’t, he would make you angry? Forgive me, sir, but who is running this country?

CHENEY: Again, Tim, I could reference Article VIII, but if you insist on seeing it, legal counsel advises me to take preventive measures, through the use of a burn bag.

RUSSERT: That won’t be necessary. But some people allege, Mr. Vice President, that the decision to free Mr. Libby sets up a double standard of justice. It is well known, for example, that when Mr. Bush was the governor of Texas, he turned down 57 requests to commute the death sentences of inmates who had received shoddy legal representation. One of those lawyers literally fell asleep during his client’s trial. Amnesty International even issued a report about the Bush years. I'm quoting now: “At every step of the process in Texas, a litany of grossly inadequate legal procedures fail to meet minimum international standards for the protections of human rights,” while also failing to adopt the minimum standards set by the American Bar Association. Mr. Vice President, is it fair to free Mr. Libby, who had the best legal representation money can buy –

CHENEY: Tim, again, Sept. 11, 2001 was a day that changed America, and I was of course disappointed that the judge and jury in Mr. Libby’s case declined to honor Mr. Libby’s contributions in taking the fight to the enemy in Iraq –

RUSSERT: Sir, are you suggesting that Saddam Hussein planned the Sept. 11 attacks…But let’s stay on point here. Why is it fair that Mr. Bush should be lenient with Mr. Libby, in direct contradiction to his tough-on-crime record in Texas – where as documents clearly indicate, he repeatedly refused to commute the death sentences of inmates who were mentally ill and mentally retarded?

CHENEY: Tim, I can say categorically that the mentally ill had absolutely no role in planning or executing our vital war in Iraq.

RUSSERT: Well, let’s talk for a moment about that war. You’re losing support these days even among Senate Republicans who don’t see any progress in Iraq. This weekend, in fact, a suicide truck bomb killed as many as 200 people, perhaps the deadliest single event since the 2003 invasion, and scores of other deaths were reported as well. Yet here is something you said, on this show, back on Sept. 14 of that year. Let’s watch.

VIDEO EXCERPT ON SCREEN (CHENEY, 9/14/03): We’re moving aggressively to deal with the security situation. We’re continuing those efforts. We’ve got some first-rate troops undertaking those efforts, and, needless to say, we’ve had major success, major progress when you think about the number of Iraqi bad guys that we’ve eliminated or captured….We’ve got Iraqis now in charge of each ministry in the government. We’ve got 90 percent—over 90 percent of the cities and towns and villages of Iraq are now governed by democratically elected or appointed local councils. We’ve got all the schools open; we’ve got all the hospitals up and functioning…

RUSSERT: Given the current bloodshed, Mr. Vice President, were you perhaps too optimistic in 2003?

CHENEY: Well, again, Tim, let’s talk about the unfortunate incident this weekend. To me it clearly demonstrates that the perpetrators are increasingly desperate, and that the Iraqi insurgency itself is in its last throes, if you will. And may I say one thing more, Tim?

RUSSERT: Absolutely, Mr. Vice President, it’s always a pleasure to have you here.

CHENEY: Yes, well, I would like to confiscate the video of this particular show –

RUSSERT: Excuse me?

CHENEY: - and request a permanent embargo on any and all transcripts of this show, as they might signal our future intentions to the enemy, under the provisions of Section 3 of the aforementioned Article VIII.

RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, that is an extraordinary request. Perhaps I may at least be permitted to read the relevent provisions of Article VIII, before forwarding your request to NBC.

CHENEY: Well, we might be able to arrange that –

RUSSERT: Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.

CHENEY: - but then we might have to kill you.