Tom DeFrank, a veteran reporter for the New York Daily News and a frequent commentator on MSNBC’s Hardball, has better access inside the Bush White House than most reporters, and he surveys the scene in today’s “All disquiet on West Wing front” (linked at Raw Story with the title, “A CRESTFALLEN WHITE HOUSE”).
“The staff basically still has an unyielding belief in the wisdom of what they’re doing,” a close Bush confidant said. “They’re talking to people who could help them, but they’re not listening.”
Time and time again in the Bush White House, reality bites them in the ass, but they don’t seem to learn, do they. Take Karl Rove. Tom DeFrank writes:
Much to Bush’s relief, political mastermind Karl Rove is said to be engaged in day-to-day strategy, even though he still could be indicted in the CIA leak case. Some in the White House think Rove is a continuing drain and has also hurt Bush’s recovery by not clearing the reputation of spokesman Scott McClellan, who repeatedly told reporters Rove assured him he had nothing to do with leaking covert agent Valerie Plame’s name, even though it’s now clear he did.
The problem for Bush, advisers admit, is that the ongoing leak probe reinforces allegations that the White House allegedly hyped prewar intelligence to justify a war most Americans no longer support.
So far Team Bush doesn’t know how to separate the two issues, and compounding its woes is the fact that aides aren’t talking to each other as much as they once did.
Gone from the schedule are weekly cholesterol-laden breakfasts at Rove’s home where top Bush hands discussed strategy. Also missing are Sunday “message meetings” with outside thinkers like GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman, campaign pollster Matthew Dowd and superlobbyist Ed Gillespie.
Rove’s woes mount with this CIA Leak Case news, just in 39 minutes ago from Reuters:
A second Time magazine reporter has been asked by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify in the CIA leak investigation, the magazine disclosed in its December 5 issue.
Viveca Novak, who covered the inquiry into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s cover for Time, has been asked to testify under oath about her conversations starting in May 2004 with Robert Luskin, attorney for White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, Time said. …
Why Luskin? The Reuters piece doesn’t say, and Luskin wouldn’t comment.
Meanwhile, back at the WH, writes DeFrank, nobody’s tuned in to reality:
A card-carrying member of the Washington GOP establishment with close ties to the White House recently encountered several senior presidential aides at a dinner and came away shaking his head at their “no problems here” mentality.
“There is just no introspection there at all,” he said in exasperation. “It is everybody else’s fault – the press, gutless Republicans on the Hill. They’re still in denial.”
Not ready to throw in the towel and declare the boss a lame duck, the Bushies are hoping two issues can help firm up their base and perhaps make inroads with centrists who voted for Bush: the anticipated confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and a plan to reinforce the border with Mexico to help stop illegal immigration.
This week Bush will begin to press the border security issue, while Alito’s Senate confirmation hearings start early next year. Aides hope those issues will draw attention away from the war and leak probe.
As if. Really, the only thing that’d help Bush now is a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and that’s something that a lot of us have speculated about here. But, it hasn’t happened. At least yet. Why?
The other night, BooMan called me and we chatted for an hour or so. The one thing that BooMan and I can’t figure out about the Bush White House is — even if there were no WMDs in Iraq, as nearly everyone (except Scott Ritter) had expected (or at least a few WMDs) — why didn’t BushCo plant one or two WMDs? Would it be that hard to do? Couldn’t be, could it?
BooMan exclaimed to me, “If they’d just planted one vial of anthrax, that would have helped!” But they didn’t. Why not? Why are they still missing the big picture?
And why aren’t they “creating” alternate realities (such as planting WMDs in Iraq) instead of speechifying about Iraqi troops to an audience of dutiful Navy midshipmen and trotting out jawed-out complex issues like border security?
What fatal flaw is there that prevents them from saving themselves?
Susan, I was reading some time ago and read that during the first part of the war, BushCo did try to smuggle some WMD’s in Iraq. I just felt it was bru ha ha but when I read further into the article, it was Plame and her old company of Brewster-Jennings that found out and of course the CIA and stopped it from occurring.
I think they tried to plant some but was unsuccessful. I do not know that to be the truth, but it was reported.
As far the the denial of the aids, that is very typical, IMHO. I would not expect anything but denial. That is how they would cope; otherwise, they would all be going out and finding other avenues of making a living.
This is just my opinion, but knowing this administration, anything is going to happen. I really want to know the whole truth on things..no punches pulled. I think America deserves this. Maybe the whole world deserves this, but most of all we do.
PS: this is why they went after Val. Wilson, and her husband happened to be the one who was giving the adm. a hard time…;o) Makes sense to me..sortta..
Any chance anyone knows where this was reported? I’d love to see this story….
the International Press was all over a number of things. For instance:
And because of the above the International Media was speculating that we might try to plant WMD.
Had some been found there would have been a world wide consensus that they needed to be verified by the UN (Han Blix) – and that was the last thing BushCo wanted. So bottom-line, planting WMD was a very risky proposition.
And even with all that remember when they found the ‘Balloon Mobiles’ and Bush proclaimed we had found WMD mobile labs – – that were soon discovered to be manufactured by the British for inflating observation balloons(ha ha). Also Bush tried to make a big deal out of a few old spare parts found buried which were from when they did have a nuclear reactor.
So it is not that they didn’t try to claim WMD’s. They just did it verbally instead of physically.
The article that Brenda read may very well be true as might be this one.
(the unembedded link made the page too wide)
* [new] ONE MORE REASON (none / 0)
<<Alito’s Senate confirmation hearings start early next year. (White House) Aides hope those issues will draw attention away from the war and leak probe>>
ONE MORE REAS
<<Alito’s Senate confirmation hearings start early next year. (White House) Aides hope those issues will draw attention away from the war and leak probe>>
ONE MORE REASONT TO TELL YOUR SENATORS, NO TO ALITO:
Petition
AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, SIGN PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S ANTI-ALITO PETITION, TOO:
petition
NARAL IS SHOOTING FOR 500,000 SIGNATURES, PLEASE ADD YOURS:
another petition
AND DON’T FORGET: URGE CONGRESS TO SUPPORT PLAN B:
Plan B
by judybrowni (judybrowni@usa.net) on Sun Nov 27th, 2005 at 07:48:54 PM EDT
P.S. The format to embed a link:
< A HREF = ” ” > name of link < / a >
— REMOVE the spaces, which I inserted so you can see the code, except for the single space after the <A<p>
— after you do it a couple times, it’s really easy
Two things:
I read an piece on the web a few days ago about a attempted (pre-war) shipment of nerve gas, from Turkey to Iraq, that was discovered, and derailed, by the CIA front company that Plame worked for – and speculated that that was yet one more reason for the outing of Plame. I’ll look for the specifics.
Second, I think Bush et.al. really belived that our soldiers would be greeted with roses, and that after toppling Saddam and taking over the country, there’d be no more inquiry.
Off to look for links.
yup, that is the same story I read.
Leave it to you, Brenda. You and Sybil find some of the best stuff. Does anyone have a link?
And is Valerie Plame mentioned in the piece?
For more go to: http://www.rense.com/general68/plamene.htm
That is IT keres. That is the piece I was reading about all this. Thanks for finding it.
I’ve got a mind for details, so I searched for “nerve gas turkey iraq plame,” and got the article first hit.
but extremely difficult to cover it up. One vial of anthrax would have provoked more questions than it precluded. The military would have had to do it, or at least know about it, and would have seen it as an extreme conflict with its ethical standards (however deeply those standards might differ from those held by civilians). Plus, there were troops there from other countries that, at best, might have used their knowledge of the scam as leverage, or at worst, blown the whistle then or later.
I think one lie they really did believe was that Iraqis would welcome the invasion. In the closed little faith-based hothouse they live and work in, this probably made sense — as much sense as the belief that there was absolutely nothing they couldn’t get away with at home.
As to launching or allowing another terror attack in the US, for one thing they might not be quite that bad, at least not every single one of them. Even assuming they ARE all that bad, an orchestrated attack might have helped them early on, but at that point they didn’t think they needed it. Now, with Katrina and widespread recognition that the Iraq occupation is a disaster, another attack would only confirm the widespread perception of our “leaders”” incompetence and malevolence. They missed their window of opportunity.
They are dysfunctional because they have become a tight little cult feeding each other the same ol’ round of delusions and lies, over and over again, and going lalalala whenever anyone not quite certifiable tries to let in some fresh air. It seems hard to believe that a whole administration and its acolytes could be insane, but folks like Hitler and Pol Pot — as well as most of the crowned heads of Europe — are among many who set a precedent.
Well, you know whilst it’s all very well wondering why they didn’t plant WMD, there are some pretty standard technical reasons why they couldn’t do so.
If you cast your mind back to the anthrax attacks for example, the FBI were able to determine that the strain of anthrax used in those attacks could be referenced back to the US’s own bio-weapons programmes, and were able to point to a domestic source of origin. This is the pesky thing here – all WMD’s/chemical weapons/biological agents will have a unique production signature. It’s all very well planting VX gas – but if it turns out that the VX gas you uncover is in fact US VX gas, as opposed to Iraqi VX gas – which the UN weapons inspectors know an awful lot about – then you’re fucked. And it’s not good enough to just come up with one vial of something – you need dispersed stockpiles of various agents.
Likewise with mustard, sarin, tabun etc – you have to be able to replicate Iraqi production standards, and then you encounter the second problem. If the agent that you’re trying to reproduce is of “contemporary” manufacture, it has to be, er, manufactured somewhere, which implies that it should be possible to locate the production infrastructure that made it in the first place. And you end up with a whole host of multiplying problems to deal with, that involve the complicity of ever more people – and you begin to see the problem.
My first comment here at the Trib, and it looks like it’ll be right up near the top!
I’ve long wondered why nothing was ever planted. Was it because of a fear of getting caught? This seems out of character for this crew, but would have allowed them to maintain plausible deniability: we thought there were weapons, had to go fight, but it seems we were mistaken, but didn’t do anything wrong….sound familiar? Alternately, could it be that they really truly believed, in their hearts of hearts, that there would indeed be weapons there, that the inspections had been the failures that their propaganda had claimed and that something would have remained from the Gulf War era that they could prop up as exhibit A?
I seem to remember reading a bit of an essay a while back by a Princeton philosopher called On Bullshit. Frankfurt’s basic premise was that the difference between a liar and a bullshitter was that the liar has some regard for the truth: he knows what the truth is and is willfully attempting to deceive his interlocutors. The bullshitter differs in that he doesn’t particularly care one way or the other whether what he says is true or untrue, and this complete disregard for the truth is what makes bullshit so insiduous. He’s just bullshitting his way through the conversation and is not seeking to mislead so much as to simply make a statement that helps him to achieve some end result that is similarly detached from any question of truth.
We’ve all been talking a lot about how the Bush administration lied its way into Iraq. I wonder: Were they really lying? Or were they actually just full of shit?
Both?
And what an auspcious first post!
Welcome to BooTrib, qushner! We’re glad you’re here.
Check everything out. If you have any questions, e-mail me or post a Q in one of the Open Threads or one of the cafe diaries (which are also great fun).
What Susan said.
Welcome! And what a great post.
What happened to the user formerly known as
Auntie Peachy? She was great>
(((giggles)))
She’s still here! Same great taste–fewer calories … er, letters.
It was time for me to change it, but I figured that not everyone would get “AP” just yet so I amended my sig.
Nah–can’t get rid of me that easily.
;<)
I heard that, first comment thing, and here is an invite to go to the Tell Us about you diary ( resurrected tradition of the Booman past) and do just that, tell us about you…please,,,,and after that stop by the froggy bottom cafe for a rest and a drink and get to know the place to stop by whenever you come to the site.
We are living in the Age of Bullshit. It certainly is rampant in Washington, along with the fatal flaw of unbridled ego.
qushner, welcome aboard. good to have y ou here.
Welcome to Boo Trib!! 🙂
I can only speculate that Iraq has been thoroughly enough picked apart by the inspectors that to plant something invites the risk of getting “caught” as one of the ex-inspectors goggles at the location of a WMD where there were no WMDs found before. The admin would have to vet that info somewhere before releasing it and claiming righteous victory.
The inspectors weren’t finished, no, but they did go through quite a bit. Could you imagine how damaging it would be to be called a liar by one of the UN people? Wow.
Bushco never suspected they’d be questioned — or allow themselves to be questioned — after the fact.
And even if they were, lying had always held them in good stead before, why not forever?
And hey, once they had the oil for Halliburton, a grateful nation would happily and unquestioningly drive their SUVs off into the sunset, unconcerned with whatever lies might have been needed to keep the pumps pumping.
And if the little bastards had the nerve to complain, who would listen? The press? They were in thrall to Bushco. Congress — dominated by Republican bully boys. Elections? Mention abortion and all the right wing nuts would turn out, and the middle class would never believe it would be taken away, so they’d continue to vote for a “strong” president, if the fear level was amped up properly to orange.
In Bushco world there never had been consequences, so there never would be.
You may be right. I am only speculating, after all.
But…Why haven’t they put planted something? They have little sense but it’s not sensible on our part to assume they have none at all.
My own take on it is.. if they KNOW they can get away with it they will do it. So, the question we have to ask (if i’m right) is ‘what is the thing that gives them pause’ so that they will not try to use more of their dirty tricks?
“They have little sense but it’s not sensible on our part to assume they have none at all.”
I think this is the underlying problem of our country – we are so flumoxed by, and unable to peronally relate, the idea of people so removed from even a hint of reality, that we can’t accept the Captain Codpiece, and all his little friends are absolutly off target by a jillion miles.
They “get ahead,” therefore they must do something right, at least occassionally. Sorry, no, they deal from the the top and the bottom of the stacked deck of delusion land, where all their delusions are reinforced by sycophantic underlings and hangers on.
In short, they’re barmy, batty, berserk, bonkers, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, daft, delirious, demented, deranged, dingy, dippy, erratic, flaky, flipped, flipped out, freaked out, fruity, haywire, idiotic, insane, kooky, lunatic, mad, maniacal, mental, moonstruck, nuts, nutty, potty, psycho, screw loose, screwball, screwy, silly, touched, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged, unzipped, wacky, whacko. Just to name a few. And it’s far past time the reasonable sane amongst us stopped expecting them to catch a clue.
jpol and I had the same discussion last night, and the planting of anthrax or some other infectious agent was out of the question because the different strains are easily identifiable and traceable, and would have led back home.
With larger WMDs, it was probably just too hard to pull off without a ton of US military having to see it and be in on it, and they didn’t want to risk it.
Although the Brewster Jennings story Brenda mentioned made a lot of sense to me too.
I agree with you CabinGirl. The markers molecularly embedded in chem/bio WMD precursors and components are evidently fairly easy to trace back to “source” origins, and considering that the US had previously supplied much ofthis material to Saddam during the Reagan regime, it makes sense that BushCo might be wary of trying to hard to “find” such WMD in Iraq.
One could even argue that because of this tracability factor, the fact that no WMD were “found” in Iraq might ultimately have served the Bush cabal better than if some had been turned up. Just like their supposed “failure” to capture bin Laden left that maniac as an extremely useful boogeyman with which to deepen the levels of fear the bushies were busy instilling into the public psyche, so too, the fact that we didn’t “find” the WMD could be used in the same way, tricking people into maintaining the idea that “We haven’t found them yet so this means they’re still out there”; another boogeyman used to terrorize the public and dupe them into supporting the invasion.
Seriously. The religious right backers of President Bush subscribe to the evangelical doctrine which has Jesus his own self showing up any day now to rule over the world from Jerusalem.
So whatever the consequences of Bush’s decision, he must stay the course, because Jesus is coming back and he’s going to make everything all right. God is on their side, they have to be right.
If Jesus coming back is even part of the payoff for these folks. Can you imagine Dobson, Falwell, Robertson and their ilk giving up one teeny-tiny piece of their vast empires?
I think they see the “God on their side” as a silent partner.
Let’s face it, is the religious right really worth the trip?
If someone like the Jersus of myth did show up, the Dobson/Falwell/Robertson crowd would be the first ones in line to string him up again as soon as they realized he wouldn’t support their own power schemes.
Yup. I’ve always said that if Jesus came back, that crowd would try to lynch him.
He said this time Jesus wouldn’t look like Ted Nugent — he would be a steelworker from Pittsburg and he would say “I’m back and I’m goddamned pissed off!”
Oh, absolutely. Lots of people are going to be surprised when/if Jesus ever actually shows up, and his coming would be most unwelcome to the Falwells et al. of this day and age. But if you really do believe that you’ve got the Ace of Raptures in your pocket, you gain a lot more mental leeway for screwing up the world.
What’s God for if God can’t make your lemons into lemonade?
The cabal is actually quite small; neo-cons and true believers. Planting Weaponized Nerve Gas or Anthrax involves working with federal civil servants since they are the only ones that can make it besides terrorists or Russia. The cabal was quite effective at scaring the shit out of the bureaucracy to keep them quiet and go along with the Iraq Invasion but it is another thing to get them to participate in planting WMD.
Even at this late date, the NY Daily News published All disquiet on West Wing front. This indicates that the Bush White House can’t figure out why their polls have tanked and expect a new media blitz to pull them out of the pits. There is one term to describe this; Magical Thinking.
The only reason that there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack in America is plain luck and the work of civil servants who aren’t delusional.
You and Joan Didion. (I’d like to read that book.)
The war in Iraq isn’t about WMDs. It never was. Oh, sure, the Bushies used it to spur fear and to legitimize an attack on a sovereign nation. But that was just the smokescreen for their real reason for going to war in Iraq, which is this neo-conservative utopian view of the United States as the democracy missionary to the world. WMDs can be found and destroyed and that’s the end of the engagement. This whole concept of spreading democracy is a long-term – ie, permanent – commitment.
The threat of WMDs was the bait. The neo-conservative democracy crusade was the switch. See, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, the old bait and switch. And everyone fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
I agree with you.
You could be right Drew. I know you are right about WMD’s being bait. But that is only part of it. Now I am often wrong, and could very well be here, but the neo-con democracy thing is just another lure in the water for different fish.
In my view, GW would not give a d— about Saddam, or Iraq, or most of the middle east, IF we were not running out of oil, AND if they were not setting on most of what is left of it. Cindy Sheehan keeps wanting GW to tell her what the noble cause is. He won’t tell her because if he does, we will hate him forever. He will have destroyed our ability to deny reality. IMHO.
The denial of reality that we keep hearing about in the West Wing (cf. Seymour Hersh’s interview on CNN today, if you want to read something alarming) is disturbingly reminiscent of the atmosphere of the Hitlerbunker in the last days of WW II.
It’s a no-brainer that they considered it, and wished they could get away with it. The obvious reason why they didn’t do it is that they would have to murder the persons who did the planting, to ensure they would not be blackmailed. Though I am persuaded that Cheney would have been more than willing to do this, I doubt Tenet would subscribe to it, and I don’t think Bush would have approved, as he undoubtedly believed they were there.
You do something like that and you give a hostage to fortune. It’s too dangerous. It guarantees impeachment or blackmail. Think about how Iran could have blackmailed the President if Allawi had been in on the plot. It doesn’t make sense, and even someone as dense as Bush could be made to see that it didn’t.
Because they are at war with the faction in the government that is most able to pull off such covert stunts. Old money Intel actually UNCOVERED whatever lame attempts they mounted because the BushCo Boys are so incompetent that they are totally able to run an op like that.
Or run much of anything else past vote fraud and media manipulation, as has been all too plainly illustrated over the past 6 years.
This generalized incompetence is WHY they are being opposed by establishment intel people.
You didn’t think it was about “morality”, did you?
No.
It is just mainstream practical politics on a covert level.
The neo-cons are bad for business, and the intel people were smart enough to know it early on. (That’s why they call it “intelligence”.) Intel fucked up in letting them get their foot in the door in the first place, and have been backpedaling like crazy as they try close the door that they inadvertently left open during the Clinton era.
Washington is a writhing pit of poisonous snakes, all competing for the most efficient way to down their prey.
Darwinian in its complexity.
May the best snakes win.
That’s all we have left now.
May the best snakes win.
SSSSSS$$$$$$$$ssssssss……..
AG
The last thing I am worried about is what fatal flaw keeps them from saving themselves. Don’t claim to know, don’t care what it is as long as we can turn this thing around. That is what I care about.
I’ve thought about this a lot, too, and one piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite add up is David Kay, former UN chief weapons inspector. He is the only vocal critic of the Bush administration that was not aggressively and immediately smeared. He came out swinging in testimony to congress and appearing on news shows, but they never really came after him. He gave an excuse about improper funding for his reason for leaving, but perhaps there’s more to it than that.