“[Y]ou have somebody being fired from the CIA for allegedly telling the truth, and you have no one fired from the White House for revealing a CIA agent in order to support a lie. That underscores what’s really wrong in Washington, D.C.” Following the recent dismissal of CIA historian and Africa specialist Mary McCarthy for telling the Post about our secret gulags, several Dems, including John Kerry and Rep. Jane Harman, question the Dubya double standard regarding leaks. Update: Was it not McCarthy after all?
Category: Politics (2005-2006)
And Tyler Too.
“The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.” Retired CIA officer Tyler Drumhiller, formerly the highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, calls out the Dubya administration anew for their manipulation of intelligence during the lead-up to Iraq. “‘It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure,’ Drumheller told CBS’ Ed Bradley. ‘This was a policy failure. I think, over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time.’“
Asleep at the Switch.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet our crack foreign policy team, who apparently decided to catch some Z’s during the slight-happy official state visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao. China…sure, this one’s not important. Might as well get some shut-eye.
Two out of Three Ain’t Bad.
Further dispatches from the GOP freefall: As the Republican Congress desperately tries to look busy, that bastion of the liberal media FOX News puts Dubya’s approval rating at a new low — 33%.
Batten down the hatches.
“One of Bolten’s biggest challenges, administration allies say, will be to find ways to open up the Oval Office to new ideas and to the opinions of people who are not longtime Bush confidants. On that score, many people who know the administration best are privately dubious.” The WP ponders the Dubya White House’s “shift into survival mode.”
Worst President Ever?
“Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities.” As seen all over the place, historian Sean Wilentz wonders aloud in Rolling Stone if Dubya is the worst president in American history.
To my mind, the only other president that even comes close is James Buchanan. Sure, Warren Harding was lousy, but he knew it (“I am a man of limited talents from a small town. I don’t seem to grasp that I am President.“), and thus didn’t go out of his way to be actively terrible like Bush has been. (Plus, for all the corruption of the Ohio gang, Harding’s cabinet also included Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover, all impressive in their own right.) Speaking of Hoover, both he and Ulysses Grant have been given a bad shake. Even if the Depression basically ate his administration alive, Hoover — once renowned as the “Great Engineer” — was a more innovative president (and empathetic person) than he’s often remembered. And Grant’s administrations, although plagued by corruption, at the very least tried to maintain Reconstruction in the South. (In fact, I’d argue that Grant’s sorry standing in presidential history is in a part a reflection of the low esteem in which Reconstruction was once held by the now-woefully obsolete Dunning School.) Regarding the other Reconstruction president, Andrew Johnson is assuredly down near the bottom too, but to be fair, he faced an almost impossible situation entering office in the time and manner he did, and — as with Clinton — his impeachment was a bit of a frame-job. And Richard Nixon, for all his many failings, had China (as well as the EPA despite himself, and, although it didn’t pan out, the Family Assistance Plan.) Nope, I think it’s safe to say that we may be experiencing perhaps the most blatantly inept, wrong-headed, and mismanaged presidency in the history of the republic. Oh, lucky us.
See how they snide.
Man, you should have seen them kicking Scott McClellan. In related news, “I’m the Decider,” to the tune of I am the Walrus.” (Where did I find this? The walrus was Paul.)
Beam me Out, Scotty.
I dannae if the ship of state could take any more…As suspected, the continuing White House shakeup claims another victim in press secretary Scott McClellan. (Text of statement.) Also, Rove got reassigned from policy to politics, but that sounds like more of a cosmetic switch than anything else.
Talk ’em down.
“There are two likely outcomes from serious American efforts to negotiate, both good. First, if Iran cooperates with the talks, then it might suspend its nuclear program in exchange for economic benefits. Second, if Iran doesn’t cooperate, then the Bush administration will have made its case to China, Russia, and Europe that the regime is dangerous and untrustworthy. At that point it will be much easier to impose the economic sanctions that will scare the Iranians into better behavior.” With the military strike option looking increasingly ill-conceived, if not suicidal, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan makes the case anew for a diplomatic solution to our current problems with Iran. Update: Dubya the Decider declares, “All options are on the table.” (Yes, that includes nukes.)
Pulitzer Punches.
As you likely heard, the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Special kudos go to the WP team of Susan Schmidt, James Grimaldi, and R. Jeffrey Smith for helping to expose Casino Jack; to the Post‘s Dana Priest for disclosing Dubya’s secret gulags; to the NYT‘s Nicholas Kristof for his consistently excellent commentary on world issues that merit more US (and GitM) attention; to historians David Oshinsky, Kai Bird, and Martin Sherwin for their recent books on polio and J. Robert Oppenheimer respectively; and to the inimitable Edmund Morgan — one of my favorite historians — who won a special citation for his “creative and deeply influential body of work” over the last half-century.