-
A match made in heaven.
Posted at November 16, 2005 6:17 PM in response to Woodward's Fatal Flaw
-
nandrews3 has it right. This is all he's got?! This was supposed to be the big pushback that reframed the controversy and showed once again why Bush is the only adult in washington. And this is it? The argument is extremely weak when confronted with the facts, and given the bush-fatique in the press, he won't ge t free ride this time. Referring to the Roberts Report is pathetic! The NYT effectively undermines the idea that the Roberts report exhonerated the admininstration by mentioning some details about how the administration tried to put questionable intelligence into public statements and had to be restrained by CIA and State. The content of the report clearly belies the conclusions and people have started to notice.
The sad thing, though, is that Bush has one ace in the hole. He got us into a real nightmare in which our future really is entangled. As bad as things get in Iraq, it will always be worse for us to pull out and give up. Bush has all of us wrapped around his finger in that sense.
This is why the historical argument is so important for democrats and potentially so disastrous for republicans. By making the historical argument, democrats can criticize Bush without undermining the current situation in Iraq. It won't be easy though. Achieving some measure of political accountability in the middle of a war is incredibly difficult for any government. From Bush's perspective, if he can prevent the historical argument from happening, he can continue to weild the political sword of patriotism.
Posted at November 11, 2005 8:35 PM in response to Those who created history are doomed to live with it
-
The victories tonight are great and the benefits start tomorrow. Will the republican senate really want to do away with the filibuster now that they have lost mommentum and are looking at the possibility of becoming the minority party? Will the bullying by the WH (of dems and repubs) be successful without the fear that they really represent popular attitudes?
Posted at November 8, 2005 9:55 PM in response to What Do You Think?
-
The appoach the president outlined follows in classic Rove style. Use the opportunity of the disaster to push one's pre-existing agenda farther than anyone would have believed possible. Caught off guard by your audacity, your opponents will be disarmed.
Here the plan is to admit some errors, and use that good will to push through billions of dollars in patronage funds. Turn a sow's ear into the largest bonanza of a politician ever dared dream of, and maintain complete control over its distribution.
Moreover, do it in a way that makes it unassailable. Anyone who would oppose the plan is just as unpatriotic as anyone who might oppose the Iraq war. Opposing the plan is defined as suggesting that someone might be at fault and that an investigation is called for, i.e. rather broadly.
The goal of this strategy is only secondarily to scare off Democrats. The more pressing goal is to acheive party loyalty by providing rank and file legislators with both positive and negative incentives to stay in line. The positive incentive is that the bandwagon is strong and fast. The negative incentive is that the bandwagon will role over republicans first. Party loyalty is not something in the water republicans drink (though it helps to have orthodox religiosity on your side), it is the product of control strategies implemented from the top.
The only way to fight this is head on. Trying to push back at the margins isn't going anywhere.
Posted at September 15, 2005 8:35 PM in response to Bush From Jackson Square
-
Has anyone heard anything about the contradiction between the equally lame excuses put forward by Novack and Rove. Novack is saying that he did nothing wrong because finding Plame's name in the Who's Who was childsplay once he knew she was Wilson's wife. Rove, on the other hand, is saying that he didn't do anything wrong because he didn't identify Wilson's wife by name. They can't both be right. However, they can both be wrong.
Posted at August 5, 2005 9:18 AM in response to Novak
-
Please correct me if I am wrong. The defense of Rove's statment about Wilson's wife to Cooper is that Rove was doing Cooper a favor: "Don't waste your time on that story young man..." After all DCIA Tenet was about to make an announcement about Wilson's trip that would discredit the whole thing. Kind Karl just didn't want Cooper to waste his valuable investigative time on a story that wasn't going anywhere. But this defense reverses cause and effect. Tenet's statment was part of the same attack on Wilson, not an indepdendent assessment.
I am assuming that the content of Tenet's statment was similar to that of the Vice President: 'Wilson is not important because I didn't authorize his trip'. It is clear that Wilson's trip was not 'authorized' by DCIA and equally clear that this does not diminish its importance in the slightest. In other words, Tenet was just putting up a smoke screen in defense of the intelligence that had been fixed around the ultimate goal of invasion.
Am I wrong? Did Tenet have anything else of interest to add to the story?Posted at July 12, 2005 8:29 PM in response to This Just In...
