Quick hits from Sin City

It's a busy time out here in Vegas - talking to lots of bloggers who think they're the future kingpins of Democratic politics, commiserating with bloggers who were cleaned out at the blackjack table...but I do have a few drive-by observations on various and sundry matters:

As I noted here yesterday about the Zarqawi killing, there seem to be a fair number of Americans who can't easily be labeled by the right as "defeatist," just because they fail to view the event as a turning point in the war. Here's another, David Brannan, who worked for the Bush administration back in 2003 and 2004, directing security policy in Iraq for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

An excerpt from his Los Angeles Times op-ed piece yesterday: "But what will the death of Zarqawi mean to the hopes for peace in Iraq? Probably very little. An Al Qaeda website has already declared him a martyr. New leadership has likely stepped into place and is probably planning the next attacks on Iraqi Shiites and coalition forces. Zarqawi was credited with recruiting fighters from Jordan, the Palestinian territories and other lands previously unconcerned with Iraq, but his 'glorious' martyrdom at American hands will probably prove a potent recruitment tool for the fighters he trained. The overarching problem is that death and martyrdom are all that any Al Qaeda leader expects, so Zarqawi may be as effective in death at inspiring terrorist acts as he was in life."

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Earlier this week, I analysed Democratic candidate Francine Busby's loss in a key congressional election in southern California, and, prior to the vote, I also wrote how a crucial verbal gaffe committed by Busby was quickly circulated by the well-oiled conservative communications empire. On that latter point, here's a piece that puts it all in a larger political perspective.

Robert Parry, the author, discusses the GOP apparatus that pounced on the Busby gaffe: "The conservatives keep building up their media infrastructure; the Republicans exploit this advantage with an instantaneous message machine that keeps them plugged into their backers and the broader electorate; the GOP then puts into play a powerful wedge issue in the weeks before the election; the missteps of the Democrats – no matter how minor – are blared out to voters."

But, as you see for yourself, he also contends that the Washington-based Democratic consultants are part of the problem. That's a widely-held view at the bloggers convention here in Vegas - there's major tension in the Democratic party between these outsiders and the DC insiders -- and I'll mention some of that Monday, in my print column on the blogosphere.

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The quote of the week comes from Republican congressman Chris Shays, who is fighting for his job in Connecticut largely because of his early support for the Iraq war. He now says that he should have demanded more pre-war accountability when the Pentagon said the price tag wouldn't be high: "I fault myself. I was hearing voices in my own head that this was going to cost more, and I accepted the Pentagon numbers that were too low."

When a politician talks favorably about hearing voices in his head, you know he must be in trouble.

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The New York Times ran a piece this morning on the bloggers convention, and flattered itself by mentioning that one of its visiting luminaries, Maureen Dowd, was getting mobbed by fans. So I'll balance that anecdote with this one:

At one point, the popular blog MyDD.com held a caucus meeting. The room was filled with bloggers, all toting their laptops. Since the room was wired for the Internet, they all went online, called up the MyDD website, and, as the meeting progressed, they blogged their reactions onto the website, in real time. A big screen was set up at the front of the room, beaming the website to one and all, presumably so that the bloggers could react to their blogged reactions in real time.

Anyway, Maureen Dowd came in and sat in the corner. Within seconds, this appeared on the big screen: "Oh (darn). New York Times in the corner." Rest assured that the scathing word was not darn.

Zarqawi bad, perspective good

Can a guy think straight and serious in Las Vegas, a place where it's 90 degrees at 8 in the morning and a hung-over Elvis impersonator with a tattered gauze bandage hanging loose off his ankle just staggered across the hotel parking lot? I'll try.

First, on the death of al-Qaeda reign-of-terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Obviously, nobody in America will mourn the passing of a murderous thug who beheaded westerners and sought to foment and exploit sectarian strife. But it's predictably striking to note how the war's defenders are mocking any attempts by skeptical Americans to put his death in perspective and to suggest that perhaps his passing will not make much of a difference.

Call it the Dixie Chickification of skeptical thought.

Dare we recall that when Saddam Hussein was captured in December of 2003, during the ninth month of the war, President Bush's loyalists assailed anyone who had the temerity to suggest that this event might not be a watershed turning point in the conflict? Remember how Howard Dean was pilloried for saying that Hussein's capture would not necessarily make America safer? Dean had many flaws as a candidate, but that particular view is now shared by a majority of Americans, as the polls have long reported.

And dare we attempt to put Zarqawi's death into perspective? Sure, why not:

1. As Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Pentagon aide under Republican administrations, pointed out this morning in USA Today, the al-Qaeda operation in Iraq is a relatively small facet of a sprawling and decentralized Sunni insurgency. And, insurgency aside, many terror experts now say that the biggest threats to peace in Iraq are the sectarian militias, both Sunni and Shiite, that have infiltrated the government security forces.

2. Zarqawi, who was betrayed by somebody inside his organization, was already on the way to being sidelined as a leader of the al-Qaeda operation. This suggests that those bad guys were already in the process of retooling when he was taken out. Where have I heard that Zarqawi was being sidelined? From the conservative press, which reported this on April 4. Headline in the Washington Times: "Zarqawi replaced as al Qaeda chief."

3. With regards to Zarqawi, public amnesia plays to the Bush administration's advantage. Historical perspective does not. Apparently, they could have taken out Zarqawi four years ago, before the war. In March 2004, NBC reported that the White House in 2002 had thrice rejected a Pentagon request to target Zarqawi, who then was believed to be running a weapons lab in territory not controlled by Saddam Hussein's government. Jim Miklaszewski's sources told him that the administration balked at attacking Zarqawi and his terrorist camp, out of concern that "destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam." Terrorism expert and ex-National Security Council member Robert Cressey told NBC that "People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president's policy of preemption against terrorists."

Some war skeptics have sought to provide this kind of perspective over the past 24 hours, but that is what the Republican National Committee is now calling "a commitment to defeatism."

One of the RNC's targets is Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat who actually voted for war authorization and has not renounced that vote. He was labeled a defeatist for saying this yesterday on CNN: "I predict to you that two weeks from now you're going to be showing people being ripped off of buses, and beheaded still. I think you're going to be seeing every morning 10 to 50 people with their arms chained behind their back and shot in the head."

But somehow, in its eagerness to append its label, the Republican party omitted the fact that Biden actually defended Bush yesterday on NBC: "We get one president at a time....This election in November is not for President of the United States....I hope it (Zarqawi's death) does improve his standing and emboldens him to take bolder moves in terms of his policy in Iraq."

And it would be interesting to know whether the Republican party would label as "defeatists" those Marines on the ground in Iraq who are telling the media that Zarqawi's demise won't change the situation. Here's Maj. Tom Hobbs, executive officer for 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Rregiment in Ramadi, speaking this morning in USA Today: "Things will remain the same, or get worse as insurgent leaders conduct attacks to make a name for themselves and become the next top dog." He was seconded by Marine Capt. Andrew Del Gaudio, who said, referring to Zarqawi's death, that the insurgents "will get over it quickly and move on."

Nevertheless, having said all this, I can't help but note that sometimes the anti-Bush Democratic activists make it easy for the other side to mock them. Last night, here in Las Vegas, at a reception dinner for 1000 liberal bloggers, a comedian made a passing reference to Zarqawi's death. Very tepid applause. Then he mentioned that the indicted Tom DeLay had delivered his farewell speech In Washington. Wild applause, whistles, and whooping. And there it was, another gift for Karl Rove.

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I want to finish with just a few words about Ann Coulter, and her attack this week on the 9/11 widows, who, in her view, are enjoying the fact that their husbands are dead. It's a waste of time to condemn Coulter, because she is merely the most extreme product of our increasingly uncivil era. Witness the fact that even Time magazine, that once venerable paragon of the eastern media establishment, has today given her yet another forum. The coarser the culture, the better for Coulter. She brings to mind a classic scene in the 1987 movie Broadcast News, when the news producer, played by Holly Hunter, rebukes the airheaded anchorman, played by William Hurt, for crossing an ethical line. And Hurt responds, "Well, they keep moving the little sucker, don't they?"

Why the "ring bearers for gay marriage" acted the way they did

Greetings from the Philadelphia airport, where I am soon bound for Las Vegas, site of the first-ever national convention of liberal bloggers, and the numerous Democratic politicians who will trail in their wake. Bloggers and Vegas...now there's a combo: images of geeks in bathrobes bumping into one-armed bandits, with Sinatra singing "I got the world on a string." But seriously, folks. I anticipate there will be blogworthy items, and a long analysis about the blogosphere's potential impact on Democratic politics is planned for the Monday newspaper. Meanwhile, here's what came off the keyboard in the lounge this morning: Gay marriage.

Which is to say, so much for the gay marriage issue. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the Republican quest for a U.S. constitutional amendment banning the concept – a symbolic gesture aimed at pleasing the party’s social and religious conservatives – was shelved yesterday on the Senate floor. Perhaps the only surprise was how easy it was to defeat.

By their voting behavior, Senate Republicans demonstrated that gay marriage remains a highly divisive topic within the party; that it pits moderates against conservatives; that it divides Republicans along geographic lines; and that, bottom line, a notable number of senators in President Bush’s own party don’t want anything to do with the issue.

Some of those senators see the issue as a distraction from the stuff that is really important (witness John McCain’s remark in the New York Times yesterday about how he was anxious to get to the defense authorization bill). Some see the issue as a turnoff for the folks back home (more on that below). And some see the constitutional amendment route as a betrayal of conservative small-government principles (more on that below).

The vote yesterday was not even on the bill’s merits, or lack thereof. It never got that far. The showdown was only about whether to move toward a vote on the merits. Sixty votes were needed to go forward – presumably, all 55 Republicans and five helpful Democrats. But only 49 senators voted that way. Most importantly, seven Republicans broke with their party and said, in effect, let’s quit talking about this. And that meant the issue was DOA in 2006.

It’s worth noting that, with the exception of McCain of Arizona, the Republican dissidents all hailed from the Northeast: Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), Judd Gregg and John Sununu (New Hampshire), Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (Maine), and Lincoln Chafee (Rhode Island). That is no accident. The northeastern brand of Republican does not share the religious right’s passion for using the federal government to regulate morality.

As I’ve twice noted recently in print columns (here and here), some GOP strategists are concerned that a crusade for a gay marriage amendment could further alienate moderate Republican and independent voters in the northeastern suburbs, where a number of moderate Republican congressmen are fighting for survival in November.

Among those increasingly disapproving voters, Bush, who voiced support this week for a gay marriage amendment, is already viewed as too close to the religious right. A new poll released yesterday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center reports that support for Bush among moderate/liberal Republicans has dropped by 25 points since December 2004, and by 19 points among independents. In the Northeast, among all voters, Bush’s approval rating now stands at 27 percent.

And while 58 percent of Americans believe gay marriage should be illegal – this, according to an ABC News poll on Tuesday – only 42 percent believe that the Constitution should be amended to ban it. The gap in those percentages is mainly attributable to moderates and independents who view such a move as too drastic. (The document hasn’t been amended since 1992, on an issue of compensation for members of Congress; the previous instance was back in 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18.)

Some of the dissident Republicans had their own take on why a constitutional amendment was inappropriate; they saw that option as a betrayal of party principles – namely, the traditional GOP notion that the feds should never tread on policies best left to the states. McCain and Sununu have made this argument, which clashes with the religious right’s more new-fangled notion of using Washington to police morality (witness last year’s famed attempt by Congress to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case).

Perhaps the best articulation for the states’ rights argument was offered the other night on MSNBC by Joe Scarborough, the conservative ex-congressman from Florida: “You can be for or against gay marriage, (but) it just seems to me that Republicans are going to have to decide once and for all whether they believe in states’ rights or not, because…the same conservatives who are saying we need this national preemption…are some of the same Republicans that, when it comes to abortion, are saying ‘Let the states decide what to do on the issue on abortion.’ You can’t have it both ways…I believe that the federal government should mind its own business.”

All the factors cited above help to explain why the dissident Republican senators acted as they did yesterday, although that won’t assuage the anger of the religious right, which feels betrayed. Last night, religious right leader Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council circulated an email charging that the Dissident Seven should now consider themselves to be “ring bearers for gay marriage.” He also charged that the will of the people is being stymied by “48 United States senators.” (Memo to Perkins: That’s democracy, as decreed by the founding fathers. They intended the U.S. Senate to be the place where public passions are cooled. George Washington essentially said that to Thomas Jefferson.)

No matter. Ban supporters insist they are undeterred, despite their decisive loss. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana said that what happened yesterday was actually a step toward ultimate victory. He said, “We’re building votes,” which is actually a creative inversion of simple math, given the fact that, in 2004, when Senate Republicans last tried and failed to enact a ban, the supporters actually had one more vote (50) than they have now (49).

The Senate floor debate yesterday did have its theatrical moments – such as when Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma displayed a huge photo of his brood and proudly declared that “in the recorded history” of his family, they had never suffered “any kind of homosexual relationship” – but more value-based entertainment is still on tap:

Passage in Washington is already dead this year, but that won’t stop the House Republicans. In July, they plan to resurrect the issue anyway. Why would they bother? The answer was revealed on Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC program.

Scarborough, speaking to Republican strategist Jack Burkman: “Jack, it sure smells like political pandering to me. Is that what the president is doing?”
Burkman: “Sure, but there’s nothing wrong with pandering, if it’s the right thing to do, Joe.”

Spin ain't the same as a win

My dictionary defines victory as "defeat of an opponent," and, to the best of my knowledge and experience, an election victory occurs when one side gets more votes than the other side.

But those little details aren't hindering the Democrats this morning, nor their supporters, as they strive to spin yet another election loss into some kind of victory - moral, Pyrrhic, symbolic, or whatever.

The topic this time is the special congressional election that was staged last night in the suburban California district on the north side of San Diego (for details, see yesterday's post). In this Republican enclave, corrupt Republican congressman Duke Cunningham was recently dispatched to jail, thus necessitating a June 6 contest to replace him. Democrats were anticipating that if their candidate, Francine Busby, could pull off a win, the news would galvanize the political world, demoralize the GOP, and give the Democrats psychological momentum for their bid to topple the Republican majority in the November congressional elections.

Well, it didn't happen. Busby took 45.46 percent of the vote; the victor, Republican Brian Bilbray (who previously served in Congress, in a neighboring district), garnered 49.43 percent. And turnout, among supposedly energized Democratic voters, was reportedly tepid.

But that isn't deterring the losing side. Let the spin begin!

1. Here's Chris Bowers, at the grassroots website MyDD: "No matter what the media says, no Democrat should be mistaken about this result. First, this is a huge, seismic shift in our favor that bodes extremely well for November." In his view, Democrats made great gains because Busby, who lost by 22 percentage points against Duke Cunningham in 2004, lost by only 4.5 points this time around. He notes that the national Republicans pumped big money into this race, and "if Republicans want to spin losing 18 points after spending $4.5 million of committee money as a good thing, go for it. "

2. Here's John Kerry, who had weighed in for Busby during the campaign. He emailed his supporters: "This morning, Republicans are making laughable claims of momentum in the 2006 elections. They (spent big money) to hold onto a seat that they've held since it was created by the GOP, for the GOP 15 years ago. And they eked out a victory by 5,000 votes. Their claims of momentum are as phony as their claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

3. Here's Howard Dean's brother at the grassroots Democracy for America. He too lauded Busby for losing by less this time around, and declared: "If Democrats everywhere improve that much this November, we'll have a Democratic House and Senate!"

4. Here's House Democratic campaign spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg, on the CNN and MSNBC websites: “In an election cycle that is shaping up to be a change vs. the status quo contest, Francine Busby has shown that a strong change message can make even former members of Congress vulnerable in deeply red Republican districts."

Just wondering: Can you win the House by making the victors look "vulnerable?"

I know the drill: Divining silver linings is what spin is all about. After all, Democrats and liberal bloggers are still dining out on last year's special congressional election in Ohio, when Democrat and war vet Paul Hackett almost defeated Republican Jean Schmidt. (Sure enough, a liberal blogger today declared that Hackett would have won the California race.) But building a case for a moral victory requires a certain selectivity about facts: Even though the optimists today are billboarding the fact that the national GOP put big money into the California race, they fail to mention that the national Democrats also kicked in a couple million for Busby.

Ken Rudin, the political editor at National Public Radio, artfully doused the Democratic spin today, writing that "it would be wrong to paint the result as anything other than a victory for the Republicans. Given the national mood, given the fact that their previous incumbent is now spending eight-plus years in the slammer, given the split in the (GOP) over issues such as immigration, given the fact that the pre-election polls had the race dead even, a win is a win is a win."

And let's also remember that an anti-immigrant conservative, with backing from the Minutemen, was also on the ballot, and took four percent of the voters, most of whom otherwise would have probably gone to Bilbray.

The fact remains that these California results again fail to suggest that a great Democratic wave is building. Busby's share of the district vote (45 percent) is roughly the same as what she received in April, during an open primary for the seat. In 2004, while running for president, Kerry won roughly that same percentage inside the district. In 2000, Al Gore won roughly that same percentage. I pointed all this out in April, when I reported on that primary and voiced initial skepticism about forecasts for a big Democratic year.

Bottom line: Busby did not grow the Democratic vote. Yes, there was a high hurdle in a predominantly Republican district, but if a Democrat can't win on the corruption issue in a district where the corrupt Republican incumbent had to go to the pokey; and if the Democrat can't turn a tough district with the wind at her back (Iraq, gas prices, competence, etc.), then I still fail to see how anyone on the Democratic side can presume to have bragging rights today.

On this one, I cede to John McIntyre, a blogger at RealClearPolitics, who wrote, before the returns were counted, that "this is exactly the type of race Democrats are going to have to win at around a 75 percent clip if they hope to net the 15 seats they need to take over the House."

As California goes, so goes the nation?

Busby versus Bilbray, check it out. By this time tomorrow morning, we may finally have some raw evidence of the national political mood, some insight into whether the Democrats really do have a realistic shot at taking over the U.S. House of Representatives in November.

Today, in the affluent, heavily-Republican congressional district that covers the north side of San Diego and neighboring La Jolla, a special election will be held to fill the seat vacated by convicted bribe-taker Duke Cunningham, a Republican who now wears prison garb. The Republican candidate today is Brian Bilbray; the Democratic candidate is Francine Busby. In a normal year, in this district, somebody like Bilbray (an ex-congressman himself, from a nearby district) would win in a walk. Yet the final polls are showing a statistical tie.

And that fact alone is worrisome for the national GOP, which has pumped more than $5 million into a race that should normally require very little outside money. This is a district where 44 percent of the registered voters are Republican, and only 30 percent are Democrats. The fact that Democrat Busby, a local school board member, is totally competitive on election eve would appear to confirm the warnings of Republican strategists that their party may be facing a tough political climate this year. As California political analyst Gary Jacobson put it the other day, "It's a district Republicans should never lose."

Stu Rothenberg, who runs the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington, put it best the other day. He wrote (in the subscription-only Roll Call newspaper) that the election tonight is "a test of Democratic efforts to ride a wave of voter dissatisfaction, and of Republican efforts to energize the party's conservative base."

If the GOP does lose tonight, the political impact would be felt nationwide. Democrats would claim bragging rights tomorrow, and declare that, as California-50 goes, so goes the nation in November. Whether that would be true, who knows. But, if Busby does win this district tonight, it would be a major story, for its rarity alone. Consider this statistic, courtesy of Jacobson: In California, since 1966, Democrats have lost every single congressional race in districts where registered Republicans have outnumbered registered Democrats by 3.7 percent or more; and as I noted above, the GOP advantage in this particular district is 14 percent.

But it's noteworthy that, even in this district, President Bush has not made an appearance on Bilbray's behalf. He has confined himself to leaving automated phone messages in the households of registered Republicans, praising Bilbray as "an ally in the war on terror." This is a testament to Bush's declining popularity, even in a district that he won in 2004 by 11 percentage points. Meanwhile, the national Democrats have countered with Al Gore, who has left his own phone messages on Busby's behalf, contending that "George Bush and the congressional Republicans have taken us in the wrong direction." (This is the same Al Gore who says that the political world is "toxic," and that he has no plans to get involved again.)

Both candidates have had their woes. Bilbray was embarrassed last week when John McCain abruptly canceled a fundraising appearance to boost the Bilbray candidacy, apparently because he and Bilbray strongly disagree on the immigration issue. McCain wants a "guest worker" program, while Bilbray is more outspoken about border enforcement. One might argue that maybe the McCain cancellation would help Bilbray with conservative voters in the district; the hitch is that another candidate on the ballot, independent William Griffith, is talking even tougher on immigration and boasts the endorsement of the San Diego branch of the border-patrolling Minutemen. Even if Griffith draws only a percent or two of the vote away from Bilbray, that could be crucial in a tight race.

Busby has been trying to tie Bilbray to the national anti-incumbent mood, and to the Democratic message about a GOP "culture of corruption." One Busby ad says: "Had enough? Corruption in Congress. High gas prices. No action on illegal immigration...It's time to fix our broken system, so Congress works for us again." On the other hand, Busby has been weathering her own problems. She has been targeted by the national conservative media for some ill-chosen words that she uttered last week at an Hispanic rally.

During this rally, an audience member told Busby, in Spanish: "I want to help (the campaign), but I don't have papers." The comment was translated. Busby gthen replied: "Everybody can help, yeah, absolutely, you can all help. You don't need papers for voting, you don't need to be a registered voter to help."

You don't need papers for voting...Somebody had taped Busby's comments, and the recording of that particular line quickly made the rounds. Within the past few days, it turned up on Rush Limbaugh's program, on the home page of The Drudge Report, and in a Republican party ad which suggested that Busby was encouraging illegals to vote.

Busby, whose previous experience as a major league candidate was the 2004 congressional race, in which she garnered 36 percent of the vote against Duke Cunningham, has sought to explain what she meant. The other day she issued a statement: "I was clarifying the question that was being asked in Spanish and then stated that you do not have to be a registered voter to help the campaign because there were so many people who appeared to be under 18 in the group who wanted to volunteer....I want to make it very clear that anyone here illegally does not have the right to be here, does not have the right to vote, does not have any right to be a part of the electoral process, and illegal people shouldn't be working on a campaign."

Maybe this episode won't matter; maybe the Democratic voters will simply be more energized than the more numerous Republican voters, and maybe the swing independents (22 percent of the district's electorate) won't care. But if Busby does lose this race by a hair, that parsed remark -- "You don't need papers for voting" -- will be remembered as her equivalent of John Kerry's "I voted for it, before I voted against it."

It could also be argued that a Busby loss would put the Democrats back at square one in the battle of 2006. But Stu Rothenberg, the Washington analyst, doesn't necessarily think so; he says it's important to remember the overwhelmingly Republican makeup of this particular district. Perceptions matter in politics, and he believes that, even in defeat, Busby could still give Democrats a PR victory: "A strong Busby showing (say, near 50 percent) would be evidence that the Democratic Deluge of '06 has begun."

The "hazy" and "gauzy" Haditha story

Note: Technical problems all day prevented me from posting this much earlier. Apologies.

In Iraq, the Bush administration and its defenders have been dealing in recent days with yet another tricky public relations dilemma:

Last Thursday, the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whom President Bush proudly calls his "ally and friend," uttered some decidely unfriendly comments about that alleged massacre by Marines of 24 innocent Iraqi civilians in Haditha -- and about what he views as a hostile American military attitude toward Iraqi civilians in general.

He charged that violence against civilians, perpetrated by the American-dominated coalition, is "a regular occurrence." He said that many troops in the coalition "do not respect the Iraqi people. They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion. This is completely unacceptable."

This was most embarrassing for the White House. Maliki is supposedly our pal, our new bulwark against the bad guys. Therefore he could not be simply dismissed as, say, a "Bush-bashing hysteric" or "liberal handwringer" or "cut and runner" or "Michael Moore clone."

So the decision was made to say that Maliki was simply misquoted. Last Friday, Bush flak Tony Snow told the White House press corps that our own ambassador to Iraq had consulted with Maliki, and that Maliki had told our ambassador, who then told the White House, that Maliki had never actually said what he was quoted as saying.

Got that?
Or maybe this is clearer. Here's Snow: "(I)t becomes a little convoluted, and so I don't want to make a real clear characterization, because it's a little hazy to me, too. All right? What I do know is that he was misquoted, he's looking into it. But that what he said, and when he said it, and in reaction to what is a little gauzy."

Which brings us to Condoleezza Rice's appearance yesterday on Fox News Sunday. When asked about Maliki's remark, she came up with a new defense. They're not claiming any longer that Maliki was misquoted; that spin is apparently inoperative. The new spin is that he was quoted accurately, but out of some larger and unspecified context.

She said that Maliki's charge about Americans killing civilians "was in a much longer set of comments." She didn't elaborate on what that "longer set of comments" was, or whether those comments somehow canceled out his provocative charge. But she needn't have worried about being pressured to explain, because Fox News was having none of that. Her helpful host, Chris Wallace, only asked one question about Maliki's charge, and here it is: "What do you think of his broad criticism of the role of U.S. troops who, after all, liberated his country?"

Translation: Hey Condi, can you believe the gall and ingratitude of that guy, daring to knock America?

Fox's hospitality notwithstanding, other crucial questions could have been asked. Such as:

Madame Secretary, on another touchy PR matter, can you explain why -- nearly seven months after Haditha, and long after the death certificates proved that the innocent civilians had been shot at close range -- the Marines' PR office still hasn't corrected its Nov. 20 press release which stated that the innocents "were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb"? And why, as late as January, was a Marine spokesman telling inquiring reporters that asking questions about Haditha was the same as swallowing al Qaeda propaganda? Was that appropriate?

But even as Time and Newsweek both give Haditha cover treatment this week (thereby, no doubt, sparking talk of treason among Fourth Estate-haters), some questions are being raised within media circles that perhaps the press was lax in uncovering the story. One such account appears here.

And this article provides a broader perspective on the Marines' thankless task in Iraq, and of how Haditha could have happened ("Like other Marine battles, from Tripoli to Iwo Jima to Khe Sanh, the story of their battles in Iraq will center on themes of extraordinary hardship, endurance and loss, as well as a remorselessness in combat, that offer a context, though hardly any exoneration, for what survivors allege happened that November day.").

"Ozone man" and the mainstreaming of green

Perhaps the most astonishing political moment of 2006 occurred back in January, during the State of the Union speech, when President Bush suddenly started talking like some kind of dreamy-eyed tree-hugger, as he extolled the virtues of hybrid cars, wind technologies, wood chips, and switchgrass.

All that green stuff sounded a tad odd rolling off the tongue of an ex-oilman -- he reminded me of Frank Sinatra back in the '60s, when Ol' Blue Eyes sought to stay hip by crooning a few Beatles tunes -- but Bush's rhetoric was significant. It was a recognition that the environment was gaining ground as a cutting-edge political issue, and that the administration knew it needed to get hip really fast -- in order to dispel the widely held perception that the White House, and the GOP, are allied with the global warmers.

Now comes Al Gore's global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which I caught at a screening last night, and it's doubly clear what many Republicans (and their energy industry patrons) are worrying about. The film is not perfect -- it skirts a questionable episode in Gore's personal history; it is far stronger on dire predictions than on realistic political solutions -- but, as pure cinematic argument, it is powerfully effective. And, despite its largely non-partisan tone, it offers the perpetually wayward Democrats a campaign issue on a silver platter.

This explains why conservative critics have been working so hard to discredit the film. It has not been an easy task, particularly since global warming - and man's role in causing it - is now considered a settled issue by, among others, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences (in conjunction with its counterparts in Britain, China, Germany, and Japan), the American Geophysical Union, the American Meterological Society, the National Climactic Data Center, and 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Even the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Program concluded in May that it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system."

Faced with such sentiment in the reality-based science world, and realizing that many once-skeptical Americans might well conclude that Gore was actually a far-sighted guy with a prescient message, the opposition has sought to undercut the message by personally assailing the messenger. In recent days, I have been compiling a list. Some highlights:

1. Al Gore is "crazy," with his "long slide into insanity." (Patrick Hynes, at spectator.org)
2. "Wild-eyed" Al Gore is a "zealot" and a "nut." (Tucker Carlson, on MSNBC)
3. Al Gore is "clinically insane." (Ann Coulter)
4. Al Gore is "one slice short of a loaf." (Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker)
5. Al Gore, in so many words, is a fraud: "After all, some people do believe in the DiVinci Code, so some will believe the DiGore Code." (Steve Forbes, the ex-GOP presidential candidate, on Fox News.)

None of those putdowns can compete with the prizewinner, uttered in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, who said of Gore, "Ozone Man, Ozone. He's crazy, way out, far out, man...(If Gore gets his way), we'll be up to our neck in owls and outta work for every American." But the sheer vehemence of the insult campaign suggests fear in certain quarters that the film -- and environmental issues more generally -- could resonate widely if left unchallenged.

The film is being inadvertently aided, however, by those who seek to dismiss it. A group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is heavily financed by the oil industry, notably ExxonMobil, has crafted a pair of TV ads that appear to have been written by the parodists on Saturday Night Live. In one ad, seeking to preempt the film's evidence that rising levels of industry-generated carbon dioxide are trapping excessive amounts of heat in our atmosphere, CEI's narrator intones, "They call it pollution. We call it life."

A second CEI ad declares that ice in the Antarctic is actually getting thicker, not thinner as Gore suggests; for evidence, it cites a study by University of Missouri scientist Curt Davis. The problem with the ad is, Curt Davis has denounced it. He released a statement the other day saying that the ad distorts his findings, and that, overall, both ads "are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public..."

These attacks are playing into Gore's hands, because he addressed his critics in the film, contending that "their objective is to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," and noting the similarities between that strategy and the tobacco industry's long campaign to dispute the link between cigarettes and cancer. He cited an old line from a Brown & Williamson document: "Doubt is our product."

Because the attacks have been so crude, the film seems almost saintly, and impervious to criticism. Actually, it is not impervious. While drawing parallels between the tobacco industry and the oil industry, it also dwells on a painful episode in Gore's past, the 1984 death of his older sister Nancy from lung cancer. She had been a smoker, and Gore the narrator mentions that after she died, the Gore family farm stopped growing tobacco. (Cut to shot of abandoned tobacco shed.) The film fails to mention, however, that Gore didn't cut his ties to tobacco farming until 1991, seven years after Nancy's death; and that in 1988, while stumping for votes among tobacco farmers, he bragged about how he'd grown it, "shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it."

And on global warming itself, Gore skates past certain issues. He mentions that the U.S. is one of the few western nations not to sign the Kyoto Protocols, and we are left to assume that this is Bush's fault, since Bush opposes ratification. But he omits the fact that Kyoto was rejected in the Senate by a vote of 95-0 during the Clinton-Gore era. He's also short on specifics about what proposals to halt global warming might be realistically feasible in polarized Washington (a modest carbon tax, at least for starters? caps on greenhouse gas emissions?), and especially at the state level (as a safety measure, would he propose mandatory curbs on shorefront development-- which no doubt would be denounced as an attack on free enterprise?).

I am not a scientific expert, but I also got the feeling that Gore was loading his entertaining presentation with a lot of worst-case scenarios, just to ensure that public apathy is sufficiently dispelled; in fact, he has implied that he did so. In one recent interview, he stated:

"Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."

But it's tough for his opponents to attack him, even for that, because of their own credibility problems. Gore occupies the high ground on the global warming issue in part because the Bush administration has done so little. It hired Philip Cooney, a former oil industry lobbyist, a guy who lacked scientific training, to run the White House environmental program; in that capacity, he watered down scientific reports on global warming, at one point writing in the margins that the conclusions were "speculative findings/musings." The White House has also sought to muzzle NASA's top climate scientist from speaking out against global warming (the scientist, James Hansen, complained publicly about the muzzling effort in January).

Hence, the political opportunity for Democrats. Dick Morris, the ex-Clinton pollster who has also worked for Republicans, wrote a column this week on the topic. He argues that voters are beginning to see the environment and national security as facets of the same issue -- that our oil dependence (a) harms the earth, (b) leaves us vulnerable to high gas prices, (c) and finances our enemies abroad. Morris says that Gore's movie "threatens the Republican grip on Washington" because climate change is now being linked "to a broader public anger..."

Goaded by the Gore movie, Democrats might arguably embrace the environmental issue, not just on its merits, but as way to draw clear contrasts with the GOP. There was a time, back in 2000, when candidate Gore's strategists didn't want him talking about the environment, figuring that only the lefty greens cared and that those folks were already in his camp. But today, with the scientific community now having reached consensus on global warming, the environment seems poised to be a swing voters' issue in the years ahead.

War defenders tap their inner Ovid

In the year 8 A.D., a lauded Roman poet named Ovid pondered the topic of warfare and famously asked, "Isn't the best defense always a good attack?"

Apparently so. Ovid's credo is alive and well today. The conservatives who defend the Iraq war are clearly rattled by the increasingly credible allegations that some U.S. Marines killed 24 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in the town of Haditha last November. A new report today lays out the imminent findings of the U.S. military's probe: the incident did occur; some officers lied in an effort to cover it up; and their superiors missed the clues that would have enabled them to detect the lies.

This incident obviously involves only a small handful of Marines, and is atypical of the manner in which the vast majority of U.S. troops have been conducting themselves, even under the most stressful circumstances. Nevertheless, during the months ahead (bad timing for the GOP, which doesn't want Iraq to dominate the '06 elections), Haditha will fuel more public discussion about the administration's well-documented failure to anticipate and plan for a long and bloody occupation.

Hence, the quandary for the pro-war right: Realizing that Haditha is impossible to defend on the merits, particularly at a time when the majority of Americans have turned against the war and against the president who launched it, conservative activists have tapped their inner Ovid and decided that the best defense is a good attack.

Thus far, here are the main elements:

1. Attack some of the officials who have called attention to the killings. Attack John Murtha, the ex-Marine Democratic congressman, in particular. Murtha has been out front on this incident, clearly utilizing his many contacts inside the Marine Corps. Dallas radio talk show host Mark Davis wrote yesterday, "Mr. Murtha has led the pack of baying critics casting negative light on our fighting forces...savoring every nugget...barely able to contain the spring in his step as he basks in the grisly particulars."

2. Attack the people who have long harbored concerns about this war, and brand them as traitors and loons. Michael Reagan, another radio guy and son of the late president, writes today that "these traitorous antiwar zealots are salivating over the possibility that they can exploit whatever happened in Haditha last November just as they exploited the My Lai massacre (in Vietnam)....The worst aspect of this treasonous activity is the motive behind much of the antiwar hysteria - an insane hatred of George W. Bush and the overwhelming lust of the Democratrs to regain control of Capitol Hill no matter what it costs the United States of America in blood and treasure."
Jeb Babbin, a former defense official in the senior George Bush administration, also writes today that "the left will try to use Haditha as it used My Lai 30 years ago: as a political tool to take apart America's support for the war." (His memory, however, is very shaky. The My Lai massacre was publicized in 1971, by which time the majority of Americans had already turned against the Vietnam war. In 1970, according to Gallup, 56 percent were opposed.)

3. Attack the messenger (big surprise!). Dismiss the Haditha story as "a media feeding frenzy" (Babbin's words). Contend that the story is simply being overplayed in the press; as blogger John McIntyre at RealClearPolitics wonders, "(C)an't the story just be mentioned in passing or relegated to page A19 where they put all of the good news about Iraq and the economy, until at least the military finishes its investigation? Why the urge to cover this story on the front page...? Who does that help?"
Lastly, if it looks like the culpable Marines lied to cover up what they did, blame their lying on the media; as Philadelphia talk show host Michael Smerconish suggests, "Isn't it conceivable that...fully understanding that the media would vilify them for their mistake, they compounded their error and lied...If so, I think the lie was a mistake, but an entirely understandable one."

These applications of the Ovid credo have flaws, however.
For instance, the "media feeding frenzy," otherwise known as a free and independent press trying to do its job, is being supported by military insiders who are working to get the truth out.

Today's Washington Post story, linked above, clearly owes its veracity to an Army official who supplied key information about the incident and the aftermath. And a Marine who helped load the slain Iraqis into body bags, Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, has already spoken on the record, telling the Los Angeles Times in its May 29 edition that "they ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart."

And another thing: attacking the critics, messengers, et al does not erase the larger context in which Haditha occurred. Those Marines have been working in a hot zone heavily populated by insurgents, and the mounting evidence suggests that some of them may have snapped after having been hit with one too many roadside bombs. A key sentence in the Post story reads: "One of (the investigation's) conclusions is that the training of troops for Iraq has been flawed...with too much emphasis on traditional war-fighting skills and insufficient focus on how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign."

Connect the dots on that one. The evidence is overwhelming that the Bush war planners failed to adequately anticipate the prospects of a post-Hussein insurgency. Bush himself, several years ago, told the New York Times that he had "miscalculated" on that scenario. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told Fox News that he has also failed to anticipate the strength of resistence, although he offered an excuse: "No one has a perfect view into the future."
When the Haditha incident is fully aired in public, this failure of policy execution will be the context in which it is widely debated.

I was going to end there. But maybe we should give the last word to Samir Sumaidaie, the new Iraqi ambassador to the United States. The other day, he was warmly welcomed by Bush. He hails from the new government that Bush lauds as the best hope for democracy in Iraq. Yet he too is upset about Haditha. Here's what he said on CNN the other day: Haditha was "a cold-blooded killing" -- and, worse yet, he claims that in a separate incident, a Marine also murdered one of his cousins ("killed intentionally...unnecessarily").

Memo to the conservative talking heads: Is Sumaidaie just another Murtha, "savoring every nugget?"

Apparently the Pentagon didn't get the memo

One year ago this week, Dick Cheney said the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes."
How's that assessment working out?

Well, this little nugget was buried deep in a New York Times story today, on page 12:
"In other news, Reuters quoted the Pentagon's quarterly report to Congress on Tuesday as saying that the strength of insurgents 'will likely remain steady throughout 2006'..."

The Pentagon obviously deemed that to be a wise prediction, given the fact that, between Feb. 11 and May 13, the average number of weekly attacks by insurgents (600) was up by 13 percent over the previous six-month period; and that Sunni insurgents have been joining forces with other anti-American bands, thereby "increasing the terrorists' attack options."

But the report wasn't all gloomy. It merely said that the light at the end of the tunnel has receded just a tad: "(The insurgents') appeal and motivation will begin to wane in early 2007."

So, as they used to say in Brooklyn, wait til next year.

By the way, the new Bush domestic policy advisor, Karl Zinsmeister, whom I have mentioned several times, weighed in three years ago with a conservative magazine article about the war correspondents who were working in Iraq: "Alas, many of the journalists observable in this war theater are bursting with knee-jerk suspicions and antagonisms for the warriors all around them. A significant number are whiny and appallingly soft....I almost wished there would be a very loud explosion very nearby just to shut up their rattling."

Karl: Be careful what you "almost" wish for. Those insurgents scheduled for '07 last throes might take out some of those whiners who venture into war zones without any weaponry....Wait, they already have. Get well, Kimberly.

Oh, those tremblin' Dems

We interrupt all the reports about a GOP meltdown in the 2006 elections to bring you this reality check about the loyal opposition:

Here we are on the cusp of June, and still we find that the Democrats (a) still haven't agreed on what they stand for, (b) still haven't decided whether to highlight those issues where they do agree on what they stand for, and (c) still haven't decided, if they do choose option B, whether they should act now, or in September, or maybe they're waiting for the end of the World Series.

As reported here today, the ongoing internal debate continues. One camp still thinks that everybody should shut up and wait for the Republicans to implode, so that the Democrats can essentially win by default. But another camp still thinks that it might be a smart idea for the party to tell the voters what it stands for, so that people can make an affirmative choice, and so that the Republicans won't be free to simply paint the Dems as the party of tax hikes, "cut and run," and impeachment (which the GOP is already trying to do, as evidenced by the emails I receive from party headquarters).

Here's the most revealing quote, from an anonymous Democratic aide who hails from the shut-up camp: "If you start to [discuss] big government programs … you open yourself up to criticism in all directions, and there's no reason for Democrats to do that now."

You open yourself up to criticism...There's the Democratic syndrome in a nutshell: a fear of taking hits, a lack of confidence in their ability to advocate and persuade.

Just asking: When was the last time Republican strategists voiced any concern that standing up for what they believed would expose them to criticism?

Maybe it all depends on what the definitions of "no" and "leaving" and "resignation" are

I devoted much of my thoughts yesterday to the topic of deceit. Let's continue in that vein for just awhile longer.

Some years ago, an editor at another newspaper called me and asked whether I had any interest in their latest job opening: White House correspondent. I replied that, aside from the fact that the job title would surely impress my mother, I nevertheless couldn't imagine a worse fate -- being penned up all day, and fed a steady diet of semi-truths, creative wordplay, outright evasions, and bald-faced whoppers. (As I recall, Bill Clinton was still president.)

The Bush administration's track record certainly confirms all this. And now we have yet another example, in the wake of the news that Hank Paulson has replaced John Snow as the Treasury secretary.

Last Thursday, May 25, a member of the press corps asked the President, "Has Treasury Secretary Snow given you any indication that he intends to leave his job any time soon?"

Addressing the reporter as "Stretch" (his Bush-designated nickname), the President replied: "No, he has not talked to me about resignation. I think he's doing a fine job."

Compare that remark with what the White House press secretary said yesterday. When asked to provide a timeline for Paulson, he replied this way: "The tick tock is that the two of them (Paulson and Bush) met on the 20th of May, and there was a conversation. And Hank Paulson accepted the job a day later."

OK, I'm consulting my reality-based calendar...let's see...yes, just as I thought: May 20 and May 21 come before May 25.
Now I'm looking at my reality-based dictionary...yes, the word resignation is defined as leaving a job.

The new press secretary, Tony Snow (no relation to John), was asked yesterday why Bush couldn't truthfully answer a straightforward question. He said that Bush's "carefully worded" response was necessary in order to prevent "chaos in the markets." (Nice try. After the Paulson announcement was made yesterday, the markets went down. Apparently the Treasury shuffle didn't matter one way or the other. Wall Street experts said that the drop was due to concerns about inflation and lagging consumer confidence.)

Maybe this should be the next question for Tony Snow: Are you having fun yet?

Holiday? What holiday?

So much for the holiday break. So much news, so much to say. For instance:

1. John Kerry announced over the weekend that he is tan, rested and ready to take on those Swift Boat guys who have been ridiculing his war record.
As the New York Times reported, Kerry "is now fighting back hard. 'They lied and lied and lied about everything,' Mr. Kerry says in an interview in his Senate office. 'How many lies do you get to tell before someone calls you a liar? How many times can you be exposed in America today?' His supporters are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat."

Well. Dare I state the obvious? Perhaps it would have been better for Kerry if he had responded this way in August of 2004, instead of ignoring the Swift Boaters and embarking on a windsurfing vacation.

No doubt Kerry's people are looking ahead to 2008, and figuring that if they fight back now, they will boost his prospects of winning another nomination. I think it's more likely that Democrats will conclude that the man missed his moment.

2. The email box was stuffed last night with the usual irate correspondents who were aggrieved for various reasons by the newspaper column I wrote yesterday about Al Gore. My friends on the right charged that I was shilling for Gore (by writing about him at all), while my friends on the left charged that I was maligning Gore.

I am more interested in commenting on the latter. Several liberal readers complained that I was perpetuating the stereotype of Gore as a dissembler, because I mentioned in passing "his occasional embellishments of the facts" without offering any examples. They challenged me to cite examples.

OK, here they are: Gore's insistence that his sister was the first Peace Corps volunteer (she was a salaried office employee); his claim that he was "under fire" in Vietnam (it didn't happen); that he had provided wording for Hubert Humphrey's 1968 acceptance speech (not true, as he admitted in 1999); that he had helped sponsor the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill (it was introduced after he left the Senate).

And here's a new one. In my column yesterday, I quoted from a recent Gore speech that assailed the broadcast media for being superficial. He said: "One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in the hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier in the day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years.... He had trouble getting dates."

I was curious about that hiccup story, so I searched for it in Nexis. I soon found it. The story, about a date-deprived hiccupper in Utah, ran on CNN on April 18, 2001.
But CNN said he had been suffering from his malady for eight months, not three years. How Gore came up with three years is anybody's guess.

I'm not suggesting that Gore's various embellishments should be equated, for example, with the documented, fact-challenged track record of an administration that took America to war. I'm just saying that journalists need to check out what everybody says. I am also suggesting that partisans for any candidate, on the left or right, would be wise to never assume that their hero of the moment is perfect. Nobody is.

Having said that, it is also interesting to observe the lengths to which Gore's enemies are still seeking to paint him as a master liar, in order to undercut his current comeback.

Take Jonah Goldberg, for example. (Jonah is a conservative commentator whose mother, Lucianne, was instrumental in ensaring Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal.) Jonah got suspicious last week when Gore went to the Cannes Film Festival. Gore told the press that this was second trip to Cannes: "The first was when I was 15 years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists."

Jonah went to work, to find out what Gore was doing during the summer when he was 15. He found a passage in a Gore biography which mentioned that Gore was working on the family farm when he was 15. Therefore: Gore's a serial dissembler!

But he never called Gore's people. However, Greg Sargent, at the American Prospect website, did check with Gore's people. And a flak told him, "Mr. Gore did indeed spend an educational week in Cannes during the summer when he was fifteen. That summer he also spent a great deal of time working on the family farm."

Confronted with this statement, Goldberg is now tempted to say that Gore's big lie was that he only went for a week, and not "for the summer" (which presumably is another reason why Gore should be disaqualified for high office).

Nevertheless, Goldberg did state yesterday: "(I)f I had found any evidence that Gore had been in Cannes for even a week that summer, I would not have written the column the way I did....I should take Gore at his word. I apologize for the imprecision and overly broad insinuations."

No wonder Gore says he has no overwhelming appetite to leap back into politics.

3. But enough about what Gore did or didn't do when he was 15 years old. More pressing today is what a squad of U.S. Marines did or didn't do in the heat of the moment, during the war in Iraq.

Follow the Haditha story (also here and here), because, politically speaking, it has all the earmarks of scaldingly hot potato. Credible allegations of Marines killing 24 innocent Iraqi civilians last Nov. 19 (including the shooting of a four-year-old in the chest) could further complicate President Bush's attempt to recoup his political standing at home.

His defenders, of course, are already assailing the press for focusing on the negative by tracking this story, and they are attacking Pennsylvania Congressman (and ex-Marine) John Murtha for publicizing the matter and for warning that Haditha could be "worse than Abu Ghraib." Murtha, they say, is just an antiwar partisan who is trying to convict Marines ahead of the evidence for his own political purposes. But now we also have a Republican congressman confirming what Murtha has been saying:

Minnesota Republican and ex-Marine John Kline, who has been briefed on the incident by Marine officials: "This was a small number of Marines who fired directly on civilians and killed them. This is going to be an ugly story....There's no doubt that the Marines allegedly involved in doing this — they lied about it."

For President Bush, the political perils of this incident are obvious. More questions will be raised about whether young American soldiers are being overwhelmed by their mission, and stretched to the breaking point by inadequate resources and backup. In other words, more congressional hearings and another long hot summer.

4. Last Thursday, I posted some comments about Karl Zinsmeister, the new White House domestic policy adviser who declared in print last June that the U.S. military struggle in Iraq was essentially over. But now we have a new twist in his saga:

Over the weekend, a conservative newspaper unearthed evidence that Zinsmeister endeavored in 2004 to cover up the fact that he had uttered some comments that might be read as - gasp - critical of the President of the United States. By altering his quotes after the fact.

That year, Zinsmeister, in his capacity as a scholar at a conservative think tank, was interviewed by a newspaper, the Syracuse New Times. During that interview, he said that Bush was trying to do something truly historic in Iraq. Then Zinsmeister added his own little dig about Bush's handling of the war. Here's Zinsmeister speaking in the New Times article:

"[Bush] said, 'I'm gonna do something for history.' To say nothing of whether it was executed well or not, but it's brave and admirable."

Zinsmeister never objected to the quote as published, or anything else in the piece; in fact, he wrote to the newspaper's editor in August 2004: "I just read your story online, and wanted to thank you for an extremely fair and thoughtful treatment.... I really appreciate your professionalism and kindness. You wrote it straight up, which is the best and hardest kind of journalism."

Nevertheless, when he posted the article on the website of his think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, the quote was altered. A certain little phrase now was missing. The AEI version - which was still credited to the Syracuse New Times - read this way: "[Bush] said, 'I'm gonna do something for history.' It's a brave and admirable attempt to improve the world."

He made other alterations as well: excising a quote in which he implied that all Iraqis of his acquaintance are liars, for example.

Molly English, who edited that story, is justifiably perturbed that Zinsmeister decided on his own to cleanse the record: "It's reprehensible, frankly. Once this is published, it's not his property. From that point in time, he can't just pick and choose."

Why did Zinsmeister act as he did? Take a wild guess: To protect his career options. To ensure that a prospective future employer, the dissent-averse President Bush, did not discover that he had once uttered a phrase of dissent.

But the story doesn't end here. The Washington Post weighed in today, saying that Zinsmeister feels bad about what he did. But then he offered his rationale: the Syracuse reporter, Justin Park, had screwed up, by misquoting him four times. (Strange that Zinsmeister never complained that way two years ago.)

Retroactively impugning the competence of a reporter is standard stuff in the DC blame game. What's noteworthy, to me, is that the Post didn't offer Park a chance to tell his side of the story. Welcome to the clubby Beltway culture. This is why the Washington media's many critics (in this case, on the left) believe that the watchdogs are insufficiently vigilant.

"The Axis of Feeble"

Watching British prime minister Tony Blair on TV last night, as he shared a White House podium with his longtime senior partner in war, I was struck by the fact that his famed silver tongue was no longer waxing eloquent about the mission in Iraq; that his once-boyish features now seemed as rumpled as an unmade bed; and that his once-buoyant grin had been replaced by the dour stoicism usually seen on a British bobby caught in a London downpour.

That's what happens when you hitch yourself to a falling star. All those years of being ridiculed as "Bush's poodle," coupled with reality-based evidence of mayhem in Iraq, have clearly taken their toll. You know that things must be going badly when a master practitioner of the English language decides to let the other guy do most of the talking. No wonder the respected Economist magazine now refers to Tony Blair and President Bush as "The Axis of Feeble."

It was clear that Blair was already hurtling toward lame-duck status a year ago, when I spent a week in Britain prior to the national elections. Voters in his own party, Labor, were furious with him for hanging tough with Bush on Iraq and refusing to admit error. I went door-knocking in southern Nottingham, a Labor stronghold, and quickly encountered a resident named Dave Smith, who set the tone for that evening:

"I've voted Labor all my life, but I won't do it again! Get rid of that Blair bloke! He's got that supercilious smirk, like he doesn't care how many people get killed! He lied to get into that war, just to be friendly to America! Stick him on an island, like what the French did to Napoleon!"

A week later, Blair's party was humbled at the polls, nearly losing all of its once-mighty Parliament majority, and it has been clear ever since that Blair's days are numbered. (In Britain, unlike in America, the political leader sometimes deems it wise to truncate his own tenure if it is is clear he has lost the confidence of the people.) Perhaps that explains why the PM showed little self-confidence last night, preferring at times to utter rare words of contrition.

Standing beside Bush, he admitted error on a key issue of postwar execution that has long been cited by his critics: The decision to quickly disband the Iraqi military, a move that allowed former Saddam Hussein loyalists to join (and fuel) the insurgency; a move that also sowed administrative chaos in what remained of the governmental infrastructure. Retaining his gift for British understatement, Blair said that this process could have been accomplished "in a more differentiated way." It was also noteworthy that Blair renounced the prewar talk of a cakewalk, saying instead that he should have better foreseen that "it was going to be a more difficult process" to build a "democratic Iraq."


As for Bush, he too ate a few slices of humble pie. That was in sharp contrast to his behavior on the night of April 13, 2004, during a press conference, when he resisted any suggestion that anything had gone wrong in Iraq. Asked to cite a mistake that he might have made, he shook his head twice and replied, "I'm sure something will pop into my head in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet." And it didn't. Instead, he added that "even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would've called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein."

Bush last night didn't renounce that statement, of course, but it was somewhat startling to hear him walk away from his 2003 Texas swagger - notably, his call to the insurgents to "bring it on." Two thousand American deaths later, that line apparently no longer seems politic.

So this time Bush said: "Kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner."

I had to replay that remark to ensure that I was really hearing it. Clearly, the president who always says he pays no attention to the polls, is paying attention to the polls. But I think there is something more: He is thinking about his legacy.

Self-absorption as a point of principle

The Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, who have rarely fought back against the Bush administration's ongoing efforts to diminish Congress' constitutional powers, are suddenly declaring that they are mad as hell and they're not gonna take it anymore.

Yes, they are outraged. They are inveighing against what they call an unconscionable executive branch violation of the separation of powers. They are drawing a line in the sand, and spoiling for a fight.

So what's the reason?

Is it because the Bush administration bypassed Congress, and 1978 statutory law, by setting up a warrantless surveillance program?
No.

Is it because the White House stonewalled Congress' attempts to obtain the full documentary evidence of the administration's performance during Katrina?
No.

Is it because President Bush has reportedly signed 750 bills into law, and then declared in "signing statements" that he would not enforce those laws as written, but rather as he chose to interpret them?
No.

Is it because Bush's lawyers argued in legal briefs that Congress is powerless to interfere with any presidential decision to torture enemy prisoners?
No.

Is it because they perhaps agree with the conclusions of the Cato Institute, the conservative think tank which contends in a new report that Bush has "repeatedly dishonored" his pledge to respect the separation of powers and that Bush "has weakened the constitutional order on which the American way of life depends"?
Again, no.

Here's the reason: An assertive act by an executive agency has personally ruffled the politicians' feathers.

Last Saturday night, some FBI agents armed with a search warrant raided the Capitol Hill office of a congressman who's under investigation for taking bribes. House Speaker Dennis Hastert is suddenly voicing outrage, invoking the seperation-of-powers doctrine, and declaring that "no person is above the law," even in the executive branch, because this time the prerogatives of lawmakers are directly involved. And the House Judiciary chairman, Republican James Sensenbrenner is suddenly gearing up for a hearing next week, entitled "Reckless Justice: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?" (Hastert was joined in protest by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who must be enjoying this moment.)

In other words, the politicians have drawn a principled line in the sand...at their own office vestibules.

This isn't even a particularly good crusade, because, as legal scholars point out, the search by an executive agency of a congressional office, while unprecedented, is not a specific violation of any wording in the Constitution; as one scholar, Akhil Reed Amar, noted, "It's really a matter of etiquette. I don't see any constitutional principle here."

More importantly, however, is the unintended political message. Voters, who are already sour on the performance of Congress, might draw the conclusion that the leaders on Capitol Hill, far from appearing to be standing on principle, might be coming off as a tad self-absorbed, as more concerned about their own nests than the civil liberties of average folks.

One Republican senator, David Vitter of Louisiana, sensed this danger yesterday. He warned that the public "will come to one conclusion: that congressional leaders are trying to protect their own from valid investigations...For congressional leaders to make these self-serving arguments in the midst of serious scandals in Congress only further erodes the faith and confidence of the American people."

An honors graduate of the Last Throes School of Military Policy

See if you can guess who uttered these confident words last June:
"With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over."

Was it...
(a) President Bush, updating his 2003 declaration that major combat was over?
(b) Donald Rumsfeld, telling Pentagon reporters why the reality-based media had it all wrong?
(c) Dick Cheney, improvising on his earlier announcement that the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes?
(d) Claude Allen, White House domestic policy advisor, defending the war during his final days on the job -- before he was arrested for shoplifting?
or (e) none of the above?

The correct answer is (e). The man who last June declared the end of our warfare in Iraq is:
Karl Zinsmeister, a veteran of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, whose perception of a basically peaceful Iraq might be of interest to the families of the 710 American soldiers who have been killed since he wrote those words -- and to the 4,502 soliders who have been wounded since then.

Why am I spotlighting Zinsmeister?
Because he just got named by Bush to be the new White House domestic policy advisor, replacing the aforementioned alleged shoplifter.

There was a time, several months ago, when mainstream Washington Republicans such as David Gergen and Vin Weber were urging the Bush administration to shake up the staff and bring in a wider spectrum of opinion. Those Republicans may question whether the addition of Zinsmeister meets that standard.

On the other hand, Zinsmeister is being hired for domestic policy, so he probably won't be tapped to contribute to the administration's comunications effort on the war. That task still falls, primarily, to the President. The problem is that he is still making statements that do not square with the facts.

Late Tuesday afternoon, while speaking about Iraq, the Decider took on the Suicider:
"It is a difficult task to stop suicide bombers. That’s the — but that’s one of the main — that’s the main weapon of the enemy, the capacity to destroy innocent life with a suicider." However, "If one were to measure progress on the number of suiciders, if that's your definition of success, I think it obscures the steady, incremental march toward democracy we're seeing."

But Bush got it wrong. The Suicider is no longer "the main weapon of the enemy."
As documented in a chart here (see page five), 56 percent of U.S troop deaths during May have been caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), not suicide bombs. In fact, IEDs have caused the majority of U.S. deaths during seven of the past nine months. And during 2005, only 411 of 34,131 insurgent attacks featured suicide car bombs.

Yet the strife in Iraq today (or, as Zinsmeister might call it, "periodic flareups in isolated corners") goes far beyond the largely Sunni insurgency. Bush may still be focused on Suiciders, but the biggest threat to peace appears to be the roaming death squads that have infiltrated the Iraqi government, to the point where it's tough to tell the sectarian killers from the peace officers.

Naturally, as an attention-getter, this is not an issue that can begin to compete with American Idol, but it's clear that the "periodic flareups" caused by death squads and IEDs will nevertheless continue to bedevil this administration in the runup to the '06 elections.

A fresh start

I am traveling today, so any thoughts on politics won't be posted until late this evening. However, the historic sale yesterday of my longtime employer warrants a few words.

This may mean nothing to those readers of this blog who don't live in the Philadelphia region, but the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News were sold yesterday -- by the corporate chain that purchased the paper from another corporate chain -- to a local collection of investors, businessmen, and civic leaders all gathered under a new privately-owned entity called Philadelphia Media Holdings.

This is a big deal. It means that the two papers will be freed from the dictates of Wall Street, where, under the destructive credo of capitalism run amok, publicly-traded media companies for decades have been under constant pressure to milk their products dry, diminish quality, slash costs, and generally violate the public trust, all in the interests of squeezing extra dollars for the next quarterly report. I, along with many others, have witnessed this process in action at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Two personal examples: I used to be a foreign correspondent based in London; now there is nobody in London. I used to write regularly for the Sunday magazine; now there is no Sunday magazine.

It would be foolish to think that the new PMH, helmed by marketing/advertising executive Brian Tierney, will suddenly rain down money on the Inquirer newsroom, restore foreign bureaus, bring back the Sunday magazine, and hire scores of young and hungry reporters. That's not how the world works; I couldn't help but notice, in our coverage of the sale this morning, that Tierney declined to say what level of profits the Royal Bank of Scotland expects to see. The new owners may not have to march to the tune of quarterly earnings, or tremble whenever some Wall Street bean-counter forecasts the death of newspapers, but they still need to staunch the losses that have been exacerbated by burgeoning Internet competition, and they still need to develop long-term business plans to "grow revenue."

So nirvana will not dawn tomorrow; nor will we know, in the short term, whether the various special interests that comprise PMH will adhere to their signed pledge to keep their mitts off the newsroom. Nevertheless, there is a great sense of relief that we have avoided the worst of all outcomes -- being stripped, ravaged, and abandoned by some new absentees who know or care little about these papers and the community they serve. We had enough of that from the dying Knight Ridder, whose chairman, Tony Ridder, leaves the scene with his golden parachute. Tierney has the opportunity to play a key role at ground zero of a great national experiment, and those of us with a stake in that experiment wish him well. We would like nothing more than to see it succeed, and help make it happen.

The pitfalls of selective outrage

There's not much political news this morning -- aside from a report that Democrat Chris Dodd of Connecticut wants to run for president, thus making him roughly the 500th senator to look in the mirror and glimpse glory -- so let's take a moment to dwell on the weekend kerfuffle at the New School university in Manhattan. It seems that conservative pundits are outraged by the rough treatment (in the form of booing and heckling) that graduating students meted out to commencement speaker John McCain.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is ground zero for conservative punditry, blamed the rudeness on "the peculiar rage" and "mere Manhattan derangement" of "the angry left." Catcalls aside, the Journal was particularly incensed that a graduating senior speaker tossed aside her prepared text and said this, in the presence of the hawkish senator who supported the decision to launch a war with Iraq: "Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction." (To the Journal editorial page, that kind of observation qualifies as "derangement.")
And Rich Lowry at the National Review weighs in today, calling the rude students "spoiled brats...flagrantly tatooed and pierced left-wingers."

On a point of principle, I have no problem with the conservatives' complaint, because, as a First Amendment absolutist, I tend to think that all speakers of all persuasions should be free to enter the marketplace of ideas without being censored or shouted down. As a college student way back in the last century I saw students on the radical left assail and obstruct speakers who sought to defend the war in Vietnam. That kind of behavior seems undemocratic, no matter who is perpetrating it.

But here's the problem: The conservatives apparently have a double standard. They are outraged about how McCain was treated, but seem to have overlooked a similar incident last week, at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, involving conservative students who heckled their commencement speaker -- an antiwar Democratic congressman.

A conservative website recounted the incident without apology: Missouri Rep. Lacy Clay spent a few minutes talking about failures in Iraq, whereupon, according to eyewitness accounts provided to the website, "people began to boo and yell...(H)e had to stop three times during his talk because the boos from the crowd had drowned him out!...Lacy Clay needed security to escort him friom the building..."

I don't see the Journal talking about "the angry right," or Lowry reducing these students to a stereotype and dismissing them as, say, "flagrantly cornfed and applecheeked right-wingers." And the website that applauded the heckling of Clay has also been untroubled by similar treatment meted out to Democratic congressman and war critic John Murtha. Their basic defense of that kind of heckling is that the students were justifably provoked.

First Amendment lawyer and blogger Glenn Greenwald frames the double standard this way: "So, to re-cap the rules: (1) When a pro-war politician gives a pro-war speech as part of a graduation ceremony, and students in the audience heckle and boo him, that shows how Deranged the Angry Left is -- because they heckled a pro-war speech. (2) When an anti-war politician gives an anti-war speech as part of a graduation ceremony, and students in the audience heckle, walk out and even riot, that also shows how Angry the Left is -- because they 'provoked a near riot' by pro-war students."

There is an imperfect solution to these commencement contretempts: Maybe colleges should just stop inviting politicians -- of either party -- since they generally tend to use the occasion to stump for themselves anyway (as evidenced by the fact that their transcripted remarks all wind up as emails to people like me). It's not as if they don't have plenty of other outlets in the marketplace of ideas.

But since that isn't likely to happen, and since students in this politically polarized era won't sit silent, it might be best for the ideologues -- on either side -- to avoid the intellectually dishonest practice of selective outrage.

The camera doesn't lie

Baghdad ER debuted last night on HBO not with a bang, but with a whimper. And that tells us a lot about the national mood.

If this documentary - a grim and gritty depiction of life and death on the gurneys inside the Green Zone - had been aired during the first year of the Iraq war, the backlash from President Bush's defenders would have been intense. They would have charged that the visual depictions of severed body parts, writhing National Guardsmen, and blood-spattered floors were calculated attempts by the "liberal media" to undermine the war effort at home. They would have contended that the documentary was designed to make squeamish Americans question whether the (literal) spilling of blood was worth the mission, as outlined by the president. They would have lumped HBO with the Dixie Chicks and called for a boycott.

Yet the reaction among the war's supporters has been noticeably muted. Naturally, there have been some complaints; as one conservative newspaper said, "There is no overt anti-war message, but the medical people are frequently heard muttering standard war-is-hell phrases like 'sheer madness,' 'stupid war,' and 'a lot of young kids getting hurt.' And the cumulative effect of the film...is powerfully negative....Baghdad ER is neither for weak stomachs nor supporters of the war." But, on the backlash meter, these grievances barely register at Def Con One.

In fact, even the Weekly Standard magazine -- ground zero for the neoconservative case for war -- dismissed the idea that the graphic visuals in the HBO documentary would send the wrong, i.e. antiwar, message. Such a fear, said the magazine, "would be mistaken...It takes a hard look at the human cost of war. But the film is also a testament to the sacrifice and perseverance of our soliders in the face of terror. Their story needs to be told."

True enough. The documentary is such a testament. And that theme can arguably resonate across the political spectrum, because in this war everybody supports the troops; on the left, where anti-Iraq war sentiment is strongest, there is none of the hostility toward the troops that was common during the Vietnam era. But if this kind of film had been aired a few years ago -- when support for the Iraq war was greater, and when Bush's defenders were far more numerous and assertive -- HBO's testament-to-the-troops theme would have been dismissed as a fig leaf for an antiwar "agenda."

The visuals of severed bowels in a plastic tray, the severed limbs being placed in red plastic bags, the close-ups of emergency eye surgery, the tag being affixed to the toe of a dead soldier (whose skin had turned the color of pale ivory)...these images would have been assailed as items on the agenda. Much the way that Ted Koppel was assailed two years ago when he decided to read the names of dead soldiers on Nightline.

The difference today, as evidenced in every poll, is that most Americans have already turned against the war. They either reject its underlying premise, or reject the way that the administrating has handled it. It would be futile for the president's dwindling core of defenders to attack Baghdad ER for undermining domestic morale -- because it has already been sapped, both by the facts on the ground, and by the accumulation of evidence that has undercut the president's prewar rationale. (This morning on CBS, for example, John Murtha, the hawkish Democratic congressman and ex-Marine who has broken with the administration over the war, said: "There’s not only no progress, it’s worse than it was prewar. This thing has been mishandled so badly. The American people needed to hear. We’re spending $450 billion on this war by the end of the year, $9 billion a month, and so we need to change course. ")

There is a moment, during the HBO documentary, when an ER chaplain pauses in front of the body of a dead soldier. He says, "Lord, we pray that his life - and even his death - might be used to hasten peace and end this terrible war." A few years ago, that scene would have been widely denounced as evidence of an antiwar agenda. But today, it plays more as a consensus plea for deliverance.

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Speaking of the war, Bush talked about it in Chicago today.Here's the headline I saw: "Bush Urges Patience on Iraq." Stop the presses. He does have a new word, however: incremental. He used it a lot, to explain why we still face "days of challenge and loss." That's certainly not a phrase that would play well on a GOP bumper sticker in election '06.

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Still speaking of the war, it continues to roil the Democratic ranks. Following up on my recent column about pro-war Joe Lieberman's travails with the antiwar left, I duly note today that the Connecticut senator will be officially challenged in an Aug. 8 Democratic primary by antiwar hero Ned Lamont.

Lamont, a cable TV entrepeneur with minimal political experience, won the right to challenge Lieberman last Friday night, when, at a state party convention, he won 33 percent of the Democratic delegates. (In Connecticut, the minimal share required for an aspiring primary challenger is 15 percent.) In other words, it was an embarrasing night for the incumbent senator, because his aides got hurt by their own spin. In advance of the convention, they spread word that Lamont would get around 33 percent, in an attempt to raise expectations; then, assuming Lamont would get a lower share, they could paint the challenger's tally as disappointing. But they wound up nailing it perfectly. Rest assured that wasn't part of the Lieberman game plan.

Anyway, here's what it means: At the exact time that Democrats everywhere want to be focused on keeping Bush and the GOP on the defensive, they now have to pause in their labors and conduct what will be, in essence, a national referendum on their own internal divisions about the Iraq war. In the dead of summer, no less, when there is typically not much competing political news. Maybe it's "healthy" for Democrats that this will occur; antiwar Democrats have long sought such a confrontation with Lieberman. But rest assured that this primary is not part of the national party's ideal game plan.

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Meanwhile, regarding my posting here Friday about the blogosphere's faux scoop on Karl Rove's purported indictment, we're still waiting. The offending website, truthout.org, has now decided to eat crow: "The time has now come...to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story. While we paid very careful attention to the sourcing on this story, we erred in getting too far out in front of the news-cycle. In moving as quickly as we did, we caused more confusion than clarity. And that was a disservice to our readership and we regret it."

"Too far out in front of the news cycle?" What's that supposed to mean? Whatever. Howie Kurtz has more on the topic, here.

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I wrote a newspaper column this morning on the religious right's expectations for a federal amendment banning gay marriage (a Senate vote is slated several weeks from now), and its desire to hold Republicans accountable if they don't push the issue. I mentioned that John McCain might be on the spot; he's wooing the religious right, but in an earlier Senate vote two years ago, he came out against the anti-gay amendment. Well, he may get in trouble with his new best friends, because apparently he plans to vote against it again. Every respositioning politician apparently has his limits.

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Here's yet another blow to the Democratic '06 message that the GOP has fostered a "culture of corruption." Now it turns out that ethically-challenged Lousiana congressman William Jefferson was videotaped taking 100 grand in bribes from a guy wearing a wire for the feds. Memo to the Democrats: When one of your own people is captured on video acting corrupt, then it's time to dump the party message. Because the camera doesn't lie.

Defending Karl Rove from the perils of "blog porn"

I don't mean to sound like an old buzzard, a "mainstream media" relic who pines for the bygone days of manual typewriters, glue pots, and rotary phones (all of which I used). But here is my main beef with the blogosphere:

All its attributes aside, it still has the potential to debase journalistic standards that are worth preserving.

A classic case in point:
It has now been a week since an online report declared breathlessly that not only was GOP strategist Karl Rove facing imminent indictment, but that he had already shared that impending news with President Bush and numerous high-level administration officials. This report, according to a website called truthout.org, was supposedly based on the inside skinny from "a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee."

What happened next was the blogosphere at its worst. Even though the report was really no more than a rumor -- in the sense that no other news organization was able to confirm its veracity, or to determine why eight high-ranking sources would spill the beans to somebody named Jason Leopold and nobody else -- it nevertheless sped through the "new media" like a virulent disease.

Liberal blogs linked to the story, thus spreading the word, not because they had checked it out and found it to be true, but because they wanted it to be true. Last Friday, a few hours after Leopold's report appeared online, Kevin Drum of the respectable Washington Monthly blog provided a link and said, "What the hell. It's Friday evening, and that's a good time for some blog porn."

Also that same night, a blog called the Democratic Daily allowed a reader to link the story. Others soon followed, with headlines such as "Bush's Brain Takes a Hike." One blog linked to Leopold, simply saying, "This is huge news if true." And as I mentioned a few days ago, the "news" moved so swiftly that Rove's supposed indictment was announced at the podium of a Michigan trial lawyers association dinner on Saturday night.

I recently watched the movie All the President's Men, and was struck by the fact that those reporters spent weeks on one story, methodically nailing down each fact -- and then Ben Bradlee tosses it back at them and says, "You haven't got it...Get some harder information next time." What an amazing concept -- OK, I am sounding like an old buzzard -- because today we're in a climate where basically a reporter empties his raw notes into the blogsophere and people who like the premise simply pick it up without a moment of reflection.

Here's what a moment of reflection, and a few minutes on Nexus, would have turned up: Jason Leopold, by his own admission, has "a checkered past," which includes being deficient in the craft of collecting facts. Four years ago, he wrote an article about a Bush administration official for Salon, the online magazine, and there were so many questions about the material that Salon had to retract it. Leopold has also written a book that talks about a 1996 arrest for grand larceny, and a dispute with a former employer, Dow Jones Newswires, which was upset with his coverage of Enron because (in Leopold's words) "seems I got all of the facts wrong."
All this was covered by Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz, just one year ago.

By the way, if Rove is ultimately indicted, I'm sure somebody will argue that Leopold was right all along. Sure. In the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day.

This whole incident reminds me of what happened to John Kerry during the 2004 presidential primary season, when the right-wing Drudge Report (which in the past had billed itself -- this is an attribute? -- as 80 percent accurate) posted the "world exclusive" that Kerry had dallied sexually with a young unnamed woman. And since the rumor was deemed to be "out there," it was spread by bloggers who wanted it to be true. It took a week for that non-story to die.

I wrote a piece about that incident at the time. It appears in full below (because I can't link it from the paid archives), and it deals with some of the same underlying issues. Call it another cautionary tale. If you're still interested in this topic, keep reading:
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February 18, 2004
By Dick Polman

When a gaggle of national political reporters sat down to an Italian dinner in Milwaukee on Thursday night, they were too wired to read the menu. Instead, they peppered one another with questions:

"What do you hear? What do you know?"

It was fruitless. They had all heard the same rumor - that Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry had allegedly dallied with an unnamed woman - but nobody "knew" anything, beyond the fact that the rumor had been floated on a right-wing Web site that bills itself as 80 percent accurate.

But six days later, now that the frenzy has subsided, it's possible to look back and track the rumor as it moved like a virus through the media bloodstream - demonstrating, yet again, the ways in which instantaneous scandal-mongering threatens traditional news values, warps the discourse of campaigns, and imperils political careers.

In this case, despite the best efforts of the anonymous tipsters, the rumor flopped. As posted last Thursday on the Drudge Report Web site, the "world exclusive" stated that some respectable news outlets were looking into whether the rumor had any basis in fact. But apparently there is no such fact, because Kerry's alleged lover now says there is nothing to allege.

Within the mainstream media community, the apprehension persisted all weekend, in part because memories of 1998 were still raw. Drudge had been right that year: There really was a complicit intern, and she really did have a soiled dress. Drudge had gone where the mainstream media had feared to tread, and everyone followed. Suddenly, it seemed old-fashioned to believe that a rumor should be vetted as true prior to dissemination.

And the speed of dissemination has quickened during the last decade. When Bill Clinton ran in 1992, his first accusers were the supermarket tabloids (especially the Star, which paid Gennifer Flowers for her allegation). Today, there is no respite from infotainment; Web-driven rumors can flash on your Blackberry within seconds.

In the words of ex-reporter Tom Rosenstiel, who runs the nonpartisan Project for Excellence in Journalism: "There are more outlets to shovel this stuff out fast. People who want to manipulate the press and public have more leverage than ever. It's a seller's market."

And there are no rules of evidence in cyberspace, no editors to ask irritating questions about accuracy. Matt Drudge posted his tease Thursday morning (he offered no proof of a liaison), and by noon, Rush Limbaugh was in full cry on his radio show ("This is sort of like the Lewinsky situation. . . . If Kerry denies this, that's not going to be good enough."). To underscore the point, Limbaugh's Web site ran a doctored photo of former intern Monica Lewinsky hugging Kerry.

Two Web sites, run by the National Review and the Wall Street Journal, also recycled the rumor, even though the Journal site noted that Drudge was sometimes wrong. Indeed. In 1997, Drudge "exposed" a Clinton White House aide as a wife-beater. The aide sued, and Drudge had to run a retraction.

Then last Friday, the British, with their looser standards, weighed in. The Sun, a tabloid owned by conservative magnate Rupert Murdoch, ran the rumor and outed the woman, Alexandra Polier. (It also quoted Polier's parents speaking harshly about Kerry; Terry Polier now says that he was misquoted and that his wife never spoke to the Sun.) Later Friday, Wonkette, a U.S. Web log, supplied a link to the Sun, and that put Polier's name in play stateside.

Also that day, Kerry dismissed the rumor on the Don Imus radio show. That, in turn, prompted the New York Post and New York Daily News tabloids to decide that Kerry's denial of an unsubstantiated rumor merited cover-page treatment Saturday.

Another London newspaper, the conservative Telegraph, ran its own weekend story, hinting that a blockbuster scandal was on the way. This is the same paper that, during the '90s, ran a long string of articles accusing Clinton of drug-smuggling, money-laundering, murder, and "incipient fascism." But its Kerry story was displayed on C-Span on Sunday morning, when a caller from Ohio complained that the U.S. press was covering up.

Meanwhile, Drudge wasn't delivering promised goods. Thursday, the site had hinted that Kerry's purported affair was being outed by a disgruntled former aide named Chris Lehane. It had attributed this rumor to Craig Crawford, a respected analyst employed by MSNBC. But it turned out that this was merely Crawford's unproven theory, which Crawford had shared in private e-mail with MSNBC producers - only to discover later that someone had forwarded it to Drudge. Crawford complained to Drudge, and the Lehane item was removed.

Lehane, who had moved from Kerry to candidate Wesley Clark, also denied that he was Drudge's tipster. Not everyone buys that, particularly since Clark reportedly mentioned the rumor during some off-the-record banter with reporters prior to the first Drudge posting. But Clark went mum on the matter when he endorsed Kerry on Friday; the campaigns of Howard Dean and John Edwards stayed silent, treating the rumor as radioactive.'

Actually, most of the mainstream media did the same. The Inquirer didn't acknowledge the rumor until yesterday, when it reported Polier's Monday denial. This approach was not atypical; as Larry Sabato, author of Feeding Frenzy, a book on scandal coverage, said yesterday: "The mainstream media has generally weathered this one responsibly. TV, too. I was on some shows over the weekend, and I was repeatedly warned by producers, 'Don't bring it up.' "

The caution paid off, because this rumor failed the Lewinsky test. There is no independent documentation of guilt (Lewinsky's friend Linda Tripp had worn a wire), for starters. But Rosenstiel said that more sordid Web rumors would probably plague the '04 campaign, because "there are more outlets with low standards. If a rumor is 'out there,' that's enough justification to cover it."

For some conservatives, the Kerry rumor is still "out there." In the chat room on FreeRepublic.com, they don't buy Polier's denial. As "Doctor Raoul" writes: "Was she threatened? Were parents pressured? . . . It's time for John to release all his records with regard to 'Le Affair Kerry.' "