Today's Opinions

January 30, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

• Where's the Apology?
  
  By PAUL KRUGMAN
  
  George Bush promised to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability.
  
  Surely even supporters of the Iraq war must be dismayed by the administration's reaction to David Kay's recent statements. Iraq, he now admits, didn't have W.M.D., or even active programs to produce such weapons. Those much-ridiculed U.N. inspectors were right. (But Hans Blix appears to have gone down the memory hole. On Tuesday Mr. Bush declared that the war was justified — under U.N. Resolution 1441, no less — because Saddam "did not let us in.")
  
  So where are the apologies? Where are the resignations? Where is the investigation of this intelligence debacle? All we have is bluster from Dick Cheney, evasive W.M.D.-related-program-activity language from Mr. Bush — and a determined effort to prevent an independent inquiry.
  
  True, Mr. Kay still claims that this was a pure intelligence failure. I don't buy it: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has issued a damning report on how the threat from Iraq was hyped, and former officials warned of politicized intelligence during the war buildup. (Yes, the Hutton report gave Tony Blair a clean bill of health, but many people — including a majority of the British public, according to polls — regard that report as a whitewash.)
  
  In any case, the point is that a grave mistake was made, and America's credibility has been badly damaged — and nobody is being held accountable. But that's standard operating procedure. As far as I can tell, nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a price for being wrong. Instead, people are severely punished for telling inconvenient truths. And administration officials have consistently sought to freeze out, undermine or intimidate anyone who might try to check up on their performance.
  
  Let's look at three examples. First is the Valerie Plame affair. When someone in the administration revealed that Ms. Plame was an undercover C.I.A. operative, one probable purpose was to intimidate intelligence professionals. And whatever becomes of the Justice Department investigation, the White House has been notably uninterested in finding the culprit. ("We have let the earthmovers roll in over this one," a senior White House official told The Financial Times.)
  
  Then there's the stonewalling about 9/11. First the administration tried, in defiance of all historical precedents, to prevent any independent inquiry. Then it tried to appoint Henry Kissinger, of all people, to head the investigative panel. Then it obstructed the commission, denying it access to crucial documents and testimony. Now, thanks to all the delays and impediments, the panel's head says it can't deliver its report by the original May 11 deadline — and the administration is trying to prevent a time extension.
  
  Finally, an important story that has largely evaded public attention: the effort to prevent oversight of Iraq spending. Government agencies normally have independent, strictly nonpartisan inspectors general, with broad powers to investigate questionable spending. But the new inspector general's office in Iraq operates under unique rules that greatly limit both its powers and its independence.
  
  And the independence of the Pentagon's own inspector general's office is also in question. Last September, in a move that should have caused shock waves, the administration appointed L. Jean Lewis as the office's chief of staff. Ms. Lewis played a central role in the Whitewater witch hunt (seven years, $70 million, no evidence of Clinton wrongdoing); nobody could call her nonpartisan. So when Mr. Bush's defenders demand hard proof of profiteering in Iraq — as opposed to extensive circumstantial evidence — bear in mind that the administration has systematically undermined the power and independence of institutions that might have provided that proof.
  
  And there are many more examples. These people politicize everything, from military planning to scientific assessments. If you're with them, you pay no penalty for being wrong. If you don't tell them what they want to hear, you're an enemy, and being right is no excuse.
  
  Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about what's happening to America. Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with such things?

__

Dowd on Rice-a-looney.


February 1, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

• The Mirror Has Two Faces
  
  By MAUREEN DOWD
  WASHINGTON
  
  Why is the foreign policy nanny acting like a foreign policy ninny?
  
  Hitting the morning shows to do damage control after David Kay's scalding admission that we flew to war on a false premise, Condi Rice made a tyro error. She mirrored.
  
  Saddam, she told Matt Lauer, had secretively refused to account for missing stockpiles of botulinum toxin and anthrax, even though he knew he would face serious consequences: "I don't know how you could have come to any other conclusion but that he had weapons of mass destruction."
  
  A conservative, ice-skating Brahms aficionada from Birmingham had assumed that a homicidal, grenade-fishing Sinatra aficionado from Tikrit reasoned just like her.
  
  Bush officials, awash in the vice president's Hobbesian gloom, deduced that Saddam would not hide if he had nothing to hide. Even after all their talk about a Bernard Lewis clash of civilizations and a battle of good versus evil, they still projected a Western mind-set on Saddam.
  
  Ms. Rice argued that the U.S. was right to conclude that Saddam had W.M.D. and attack him because the dictator was not behaving rationally. But why did she think someone President Bush deemed "a madman" would behave rationally?
  
  Cheney & Company were so consumed with puffing the intelligence to try to connect Saddam with 9/11, Al Qaeda and nuclear material, they failed to challenge basic assumptions.
  
  The closer the inspectors got to the truth that Iraq didn't have weapons, the more the Bush hawks asserted that only war would uncover weapons. Their threats to Saddam made him bluff that he had the weapons that they said he had.
  
  "Most intelligence failures are about missing something happening," said a former Bush official. "What's so bizarre about this is, they thought something was happening that wasn't. This is right up there with Pearl Harbor and Bay of Pigs."
  
  Even Paul Wolfowitz observed last May that it was important not to assume that foes like Saddam "will be rational according to our definition of what is rational." Interviewed by Sam Tanenhaus for Vanity Fair, Mr. Wolfowitz said bad intelligence came from mirror imaging — assuming people would behave like us: "The kind of mistake that, in a sense, I think we made implicitly in assuming that anyone who was intelligent enough to fly an airplane wouldn't commit suicide with it."
  
  Saddam's old lieutenants have said that the dictator did not admit his paucity of weapons because he wanted his Arab neighbors to see him as a great leader and he hoped to deter America from war.
  
  Jerrold Post, a former C.I.A. psychological profiler who calls Saddam messianic but not irrational, speculates that he may have built a Potemkin arsenal after his conventional arsenal was decimated in the first Persian Gulf war. "If he came across as an impotent leader capitulating to the West," Dr. Post said, "he might have been pushed out of power or killed."
  
  Besides, according to Dr. Kay, Saddam was both finagling and finagled. "Did he really think he had the stuff because scientists were scared to tell him he didn't?" wondered a G.O.P. foreign policy expert.
  
  Saddam was isolated. And the Bush hawks wanted to isolate themselves from less-paranoid allies. They had come into office itching to replay the '91 war and try out their democracy domino theory in the Middle East — mirror imaging writ large. They grabbed 9/11 as an opening, yanked power away from Colin Powell and persuaded the popular diplomat to compromise his integrity by touting sketchy evidence at the U.N., with the puppet Tenet as his wingman.
  
  The moral of Vietnam was supposed to be that we would never again go to war without understanding the culture of our antagonists, or exaggerate their threat to us.
  
  Some of those involved in running the '91 Iraq war think the U.S. should cut its losses, forget about Iowa-style caucuses (mirroring again), get the U.N. in there and let Kofi Annan and the Iraqi Governing Council negotiate with Ayatollah Sistani, who won't talk to the U.S. anyway.
  
  The White House will have a lot of explaining to do if Iraq exchanges one form of dictatorship for another, or if it takes on a fundamentalist Islamic cast that sets Iraqi women's rights back 40 years.

__

[willy]

Scraping the bottom of the barrel here? Krugman and Dowd? LOL

[willy]

Here. Let's read an op-ed written by somebody who has a functioning brain



Third world sweatshops
Thomas Sowell

January 27, 2004


"Low-Wage Costa Ricans Make Baseballs for Millionaires."


That was the headline on one of those New York Times "news" stories that continued its recent tradition of disguised editorials. The headline said it all but the story ran on and on anyway, with details and quotes that added nothing to the familiar story that Third World workers don't earn nearly as much money as most Americans, even when they work for rich American companies.

Perhaps the best refutation of the implied message of this "news" story also appeared in the New York Times, in a frankly labeled op-ed piece by the paper's own Nicholas D. Kristof. Writing from Cambodia, Kristof reported: "Here in Cambodia factory jobs are in such demand that workers usually have to bribe a factory insider with a month's salary just to get hired."

The workers in Cambodia receive even lower wages than those in Costa Rica. But the difference is that the report from Cambodia spelled out what the local workers' alternatives were and how anxious they are to get the jobs denounced by intellectuals and politicians in affluent countries.

"Nhep Chanda averages 75 cents a day for her efforts. For her, the idea of being exploited in a garment factory -- working only six days a week, inside instead of in the broiling sun, for up to $2 a day -- is a dream."

By and large, multinational companies pay about double the local wages in Third World countries. As for "exploitation," the vast majority of American investment overseas goes to high-wage countries, not low-wage countries.

Why are these international capitalists passing up supposedly golden opportunities for exploitation? Because they understand economics better than most intellectuals and politicians, who are content to score cheap points, without worrying about the logic or the consequences.

If outsiders succeed in pressuring or forcing multinational companies to pay higher wages, that will make it more economical for those companies to relocate many of their operations to more affluent countries, where the higher productivity of the workers there will cover the higher wage rates.

Net result: Third World workers will be worse off for having lost better jobs than most of them can find locally. Meanwhile, Western intellectuals and politicians will be congratulating themselves for having ended exploitation.

At the heart of all this is a confusion between the vagaries of fate and the sins of man. All of us wish that workers in Costa Rica and Cambodia, not to mention other poor countries, were able to earn higher pay and live better lives. But wishing will not make it so and causing them to lose their jobs will not help.

It is tragic that people in some societies simply have not had the same opportunities to develop more valuable skills and that those societies have not had economic and political systems that promote economic progress comparable to that in most Western countries.

Low pay is one symptom of that fact -- and changing the symptom will not change the underlying problem, which is that the people in such countries got a raw deal from fate, history, geography or culture. But the left attempts to blame Western employers who are providing these workers with better options than they had before.

The left-wing spin is that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. That opens the door for a big power-grab by the left in the name of "fairness" or "social justice" or whatever other rhetoric resonates with the unwary and the ill-informed.

Unfortunately, this theory does not also resonate with the facts. Whether domestically or internationally, investors looking for the highest rates of return usually steer clear of poor areas and put their money where there are people with more advanced skills, living in more prosperous countries, even if they have to pay much higher salaries in such countries.

The United States, for example, has long invested more in Canada than in all of poverty-stricken sub-Saharan Africa, where wage rates are a fraction of Canadian wage rates. If the facts mattered -- and if the poor really mattered to their supposed saviors -- the implications of that would have been understood long ago.

[crawjo]

Chris,

I'd be more inclined to read the things you post if you would just place a link to the article, rather than pasting the entire article onto the page. It's easier on my eyes if I can read the material on the original web site.

[willy]

From townhall.com



Covering the primaries
Brent Bozell


January 30, 2004


The coverage of the current Democratic primaries oozes with a quality of charity and brotherhood, with the kind of gentleness that is found among friends or political allies. With a few robust exceptions (Howard Dean's attempt to channel Mr. T), the daily and nightly TV coverage has been mostly obsessed with the horse race at the expense of serious discussion of important political issues.

Someone might claim that the conservatives should be delighted with the lack of bias, all the neutrality in tone, as Dan Rather asks short, sweet campaign-pamphlet questions such as "What's the basic Wesley Clark message in this campaign?" But this is Standard Operating Procedure for the media during the Democratic primaries. When Republican primaries are ongoing, the media are positively obsessed with intolerant, hateful, "anti-choice" right-wingedness. Only when a GOP candidate campaigns against the conservative movement will he garner piles of positive press (See: McCain, John.)

To find real media scrutiny of the Democrats on the campaign trail, usually you have to flip over to cable news. In the last debate before New Hampshire voted, which aired live on Fox News Channel, ABC anchor Peter Jennings earned a star on his forehead for asking some firm questions. He calmly asked Al Sharpton to explain his philosophy on nominating governors to the Federal Reserve Board, and Sharpton collapsed like a 10-year-old kid whose dog allegedly ate the homework. He also asked General Wesley Clark about his endorsement by radical-left filmmaker Michael Moore, whose relation to the truth cannot be found on any genealogical chart.

Jennings asked Clark: Since Moore stood on a stage next to you and declared that he can't wait for the debate between "the General and the deserter," why didn't you disassociate yourself from that characterization of President Bush? For emphasis, Jennings added that this is a "reckless charge not supported by the facts." Clark made a fool of himself in response, suggesting that Moore's typical truth-mangling is somehow independent of his candidacy and had nothing do to with his campaign. Worse yet, when tough Tim Russert pressed him repeatedly the next Sunday on "Meet the Press" to condemn Moore's remarks, Clark continued to claim ignorance, that he'd "never looked into those" wild allegations.

Maybe it's time someone looked into these radicals and their wild allegations for a change. Left-wingers have tried to charge that since the Texas Air National Guard doesn't have records of Bush attending periodic drills in 1972 and 1973, that he was "AWOL." Their source, a May 2000 article by Boston Globe reporter Walter Robinson, also notes that Lieutenant Bush spent 36 days on duty in May, June and July of 1973 "cramming" to put service days on the record. That's not a story of "desertion."

The hilarious thing about this charge coming from left field is, using the loose, hyperbolic Michael Moore definition, Bill Clinton is the one who really would qualify as a "deserter." He avoided the draft by signing up for the ROTC at the University of Arkansas and then abandoned the unit to study at Oxford. Note that Michael Moore never made that allegation against Clinton.

It was great for Jennings to put this question to Clark, but there's one problem. It never aired on Peter's own newscast, "World News Tonight." ABC viewers could have seen the exchange on "Nightline," if they were staying up late. The next morning on ABC's "Good Morning America," reporter Claire Shipman skipped over the "reckless" talk, and even left out any label for radical Moore: "The General defended his Democratic credentials and refused to criticize comments by outspoken filmmaker Michael Moore, who, campaigning with Clark, called President Bush a deserter." Moore's no "radical." No" leftist." Not even a "liberal." He's just "outspoken."

Neither Jennings nor Russert noticed another problem: In 1999, Moore condemned Kosovo, the war his endorsee Clark led, as a "slaughter ... We will all have to answer for this some day, and I would like to be able to say that I did not sit by silently while this was being done." Moore hasn't made Clark answer for the so-called "slaughter," and neither man has been challenged on the statement.

To be sure, Peter Jennings isn't being soft and neutral in his White House coverage these days. After New Hampshire, he was airing voters assailing Bush for putting "men over in Iraq dying for money and oil." Fairness and balance on the evening news means matching your softness or hardness. Either you're soft and neutral toward everyone, or you're hard and skeptical toward everyone. Here and there, we're seeing glimpses of that. But just glimpses.

• Patriot Games
  Bush strategists may feel tempted to attack John Kerry’s
  opposition to Vietnam. Why it’s a battle they can’t win
  
  By Eleanor Clift
  Newsweek
  Updated: 5:46 p.m._ET Jan. 30, 2004
  
  The voters don't want to refight the Vietnam war, but with John Kerry looking like the likely nominee, Vietnam returns to the front pages. Kerry is accompanied on the campaign trail by the men he served with in the Mekong Delta. "I know a little something about aircraft carriers for real," he says, in an allusion to President George W. Bush's premature "Mission Accomplished" landing last spring on the USS Abraham Lincoln.
  
  There is another chapter to Kerry's war history that Republicans are examining, and that is his leadership in 1971 of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Some GOP strategists envision television ads linking Kerry with Jane Fonda in order to undermine his credentials as a decorated war veteran._
  
  Highlighting Kerry's antiwar activism is a risky strategy for the Republicans. To quote Kerry, who quotes the president: "Bring it on." If the election turns into a debate over war records, Bush can't win.
  
  Retired general Wesley Clark was widely criticized for not objecting when left-wing activist Michael Moore called Bush a "deserter" in his presence. As a military man, Clark knows that deserting is a capital offense, reserved for those who have been court-martialed and found guilty. The charge against Bush is that he was AWOL for a year of his service in the National Guard. Once the pundits finished critiquing the impact on Clark of the presumed gaffe, the next logical question is to ask where Bush was during that year, how he got away with his absenteeism, and does it matter?
  
  Boston Globe reporter Walter Robinson did an exhaustive study of Bush's military service, which was published in May 2000. Robinson concluded that during Bush's final 18 months in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 and 1973, he did not fly at all and was "all but unaccounted for," with no records to indicate that he attended any of the required drills. Bush was working for a Senate campaign in Alabama for part of the time, and was supposed to appear for duty there, but never did. After the November '72 election, Bush returned to Houston, but he was a no-show there, as well.
  
  Under the rules at the time, guardsmen who miss duty were supposed to be reported and could then be drafted. Seven months after Bush returned to Houston, two of his commanding officers filed a report noting that Bush had not been "observed" at his unit during the previous 12 months. That evidently shocked Bush into performing. Over the next three months, from May to July 1973, he spent 36 days on Guard duty, for which he was rewarded with an early discharge to attend Harvard Business School.
  
  If Bush wants to continue to occupy Iraq, he's going to have to find some new soldiers to do the work. In his new book, "American Dynasty," author Kevin Phillips traces three generations of Bushes and the web of favoritism and influence that perpetuates the line. Phillips says it was against Navy regulations in 1942 to place 18-year-old George H.W. Bush in flight training, but the rules were bent for the son of Sen. Prescott Bush. The Los Angeles Times found a similar bending of the rules 26 years later, Phillips writes. George W. didn't qualify for either a direct commission or flight training, but he received both when he jumped several waiting lists for a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard.
  
  Bush senior was a member of Congress at the time, and, according to Phillips, had a friend speak to Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes about young George. Barnes in turn contacted the commander of the Texas Air National Guard, who greased the way. Direct commissions were generally reserved for doctors because the military needed flight surgeons, and expensive flight instruction was not normally given to somebody like Bush, who didn't score well on the aptitude test for pilots and who had shown no professional commitment to flying. According to Phillips, it was arranged for Bush to train on F-102 fighters, dated aircraft being phased out of service—added insurance that Bush would not go to Vietnam._
  
  In fairness, Bush has been candid about why he enlisted in the Air National Guard. Like many young men of his generation, he wanted to avoid Vietnam. He told one reporter, "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
  
  He has not been candid about his absences from the Guard. After the Boston Globe story broke in 2000, Bush said through a spokesman that he has "some recollection" of attending drills during the time period in question, but conceded that he was not consistent. Records unearthed by the Globe showed that Bush was removed from flight status in August 1972 for failing to take his annual flight physical. Bush aides said he didn't take the physical because his personal physician was in Houston, and he was in Alabama working on a political campaign. But that explanation didn't hold up because flight physicals must be administered by certified Air Force flight surgeons, and Bush easily could have found one at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., where he was living.
  
  Kerry's candidacy was elevated when a former Green Beret whose life he saved showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa to attest to Kerry's courage. In addition, former Georgia senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam and was defeated in 2002 after GOP attacks on his patriotism, appears regularly with Kerry. Bush can't match that. If he's smart, he won't try.

[willy]

Third world sweatshops: part II
Thomas Sowell

January 28, 2004


Those who vent their moral indignation over low pay for Third World workers employed by multinational companies ignore the plain fact that these workers' employers are usually supplying them with better opportunities than they had before, while those who are morally indignant on their behalf are providing them with nothing.


Some of the more rational among the indignant crusaders for "social justice" may concede that the employers are usually offering better pay than Third World workers would have had otherwise. But they see no reason why wealthy corporations should not pay wages more like the wages paid in affluent countries.

There are at least two reason why not -- one economic and one moral.

The economic reason is that output per man-hour in Third World countries is usually some fraction of what it is in Western industrial nations such as the United States. Pay rates raised without regard to productivity are a virtual guarantee of unemployment, whether it is done in the name of ending "exploitation" in the Third World or providing "a living wage" in the United States.

Most modern industrial nations have minimum wage laws but those with higher minimum wage rates or additional workers benefits tend to have higher unemployment rates.

Germany, for example, has perhaps the most employer-provided benefits mandated by government. These benefits include such huge severance pay that firing anyone is likely to be uneconomical. The costs of these benefits have been estimated as roughly double those of employer-provided benefits in the United States.

If you think that is great for the workers, remember that there is no free lunch, for workers or anybody else. The high cost of labor and the difficulties of firing anyone mean that employers are reluctant to hire, even when times are booming.

It is often cheaper to expand output by using more labor-saving machines, or to work the existing workforce overtime, rather than hire more employees. While Americans become alarmed when unemployment reaches 6 percent, double-digit unemployment has been common in Germany.

At one time, neither Switzerland nor Hong Kong had minimum wage laws. Last year, The Economist magazine reported: "Switzerland's unemployment rate neared a five-year high of 3.9 percent in February." For most countries that have minimum wage laws, 3.9 percent would be a five-year low, if not wholly unattainable.

Back when Hong Kong was a British colony and its wage rates were set by supply and demand, the Wall Street Journal reported that its unemployment rate was less than 2 percent. Then, after China took over Hong Kong and mandated various worker benefits -- which add to labor costs, the same as higher wage rates -- Hong Kong's unemployment rate went over 8 percent.

This was not high by European standards but it was unprecedented for Hong Kong. There is no free lunch in any part of the world.

Why cannot rich multinational corporations simply absorb the losses of paying Third World workers more than their productivity is worth? Why shouldn't they?

First of all, multi-billion-dollar corporations are seldom owned by multi-billionaires. They are usually owned by thousands, if not millions, of stockholders, most of whom are nowhere close to being billionaires. Some may be teachers, nurses, mechanics, clerks and others who own stock indirectly by paying into pension funds that buy these stocks.

Indeed, the average incomes of all the stockholders -- direct and indirect -- may be no greater than the average incomes of those intellectuals, politicians, and others who want them to absorb the costs of higher pay in the Third World.

But if teachers, nurses, mechanics, and clerks are supposed to accept less money to live on in their retirement years, why shouldn't similar donations to the Third World come from reporters for the New York Times or Ivy League professors, movie stars or others who are morally indignant?

Or is this just one of many things that the morally indignant think is worth having others pay for, but not worth enough to pay for themselves?

• Even with $200m to spend, Bush still looks vulnerable
  
  Paul Harris in New York
  Sunday February 1, 2004
  The Observer
  
  The politician looked sincere as he spoke in the New Hampshire town of Merrimack last week. He talked of jobs and growth. Later he stopped at a sweet shop outside town and sprinkled peanut shavings on the chocolate truffles.
  
  This was no Democratic hopeful taking his message the streets. It was President George Bush himself. As the Democrats scrap to find their candidate for the White House, Bush has hit the Republican campaign trail.
  
  But he is not off to a good start. Though conventional wisdom says he is set for re-election next November, a growing body of polls and opinion-makers reveal Bush is starting to look vulnerable.
  
  A poll published yesterday showed Bush's approval rating had slipped further to just 47 per cent. A recent poll showed that just 41 per cent of voters thought Bush should be re-elected, while 48 per cent wanted someone new.
  
  Perhaps most worrying for Bush are recent figures showing that Democratic frontrunner John Kerry would beat him in an election.
  
  It has been a difficult few weeks for Bush. Despite a growing stock market and good economic figures, the recovery is failing to create jobs. Three million have been lost by Bush since he came to power, more than any President since the Thirties. Manufacturing has been hit worst, hurting key swing states like Ohio. The debate over weapons of mass destruction has also come to the fore after revelations last week by chief weapons hunter David Kay that any stockpiles were almost certainly destroyed years ago.
  
  Finally, a row over Bush's service in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam war has resurfaced, after comedian Michael Moore called Bush 'a deserter' at a campaign rally for Democrat candidate Wesley Clark. The issue dogged Bush throughout the 2000 campaign and Republican strategists are desperate to keep it off the radar this year, especially if a decorated Vietnam veteran like Kerry - or Clark - wins the Democratic nomination.
  
  It was no coincidence Bush visited New Hampshire last week. Bush won the state by just 7,000 votes last time. If Al Gore had taken it, he would have won the election. Bush's election themes are now emerging. His political adviser, Karl Rove, has estimated that four million evangelical Christians did not vote for Bush in 2000. Bush has courted their votes with the announcement of a $1.5 billion programme to promote marriage, and threatened a constitutional amendment to prevent same-sex marriages.
  
  Coupled with that are savvy bids for the Hispanic vote, a key block in battleground Southern states. However, experts agree that the main plank of Bush's re-election strategy will be national security. 'That will be his main strength. It will also be key in states with large populations of veterans,' said Shaun Bowler, a professor of politics at the University of California.
  
  It will be backed by a $200 million campaign war-chest that will be used to push Bush as a 'man of the people'. It is too early to say if it will be enough.

[willy]

From National Review online



January 30, 2004, 8:47 a.m.
The Mind of Our Enemies
Sorting out all the agendas in Iraq.

Victor Davis Hanson



“It is easy to be against the war now," boasts Howard Dean, as he goes on to describe Iraq as a hopeless quagmire. We are reminded daily not of the birth of the first consensual government in the history of the Arab world, but only that nine months after the military defeat of the Baathists, there is still resistance to the American reconstruction; and that the number of American soldiers, killed in major combat operations and afterward, has now surpassed 500.

Things in the Middle East are hard precisely because the stakes there are gargantuan. But so are the rewards: The sanctuaries and patrons of murderers, suicide bombers, and terrorists are shrinking with the destruction of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Autocracies like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria are terrified of consensual government in Iraq precisely because they are aware of its implications for their own deprived citizens.

Meanwhile millions — from Libya and Pakistan to North Korea and Iran — watch intently. They wonder whether this new United States is about to run out of gas and return to the old appeasement of the last twenty years, when crafting nukes on the sly, blowing up Americans, and terrorizing innocents earned (at the worst) a televised remonstration expressing "concern" and "disappointment." On the other hand, wonder the world's opportunists, is this new — and often unpredictable — United States going to completely change the rules of engagement, to prevent the conditions that would lead to another September 11?

From our end, if we examine the situation in Iraq rationally, we can see that much is going well for us, and we have a variety of cards yet to play. The enemy die-hards count on killing enough Americans and causing enough disruptions that everyday Iraqis will rejoice upon seeing at least some Arabs defeat the new Crusaders. What they don't count on is that once the Americans have left, everyday Iraqis don't want them — the terrorists — to take over and recreate the Bekka Valley.

In addition, the Baathists and Islamicists — a fraction of the Iraq population — sense that Americans despise ingratitude. They trust that at some point we will shrug and say, "If these people won't fight to protect the freedom we gave them, then screw them, bring everyone home, and let these tribal folk slaughter each other the way they have always done."

For the Islamicists' muddled vision of some theocratic caliphate run on Dark-Age principles to succeed, they must count on killing Americans and frightening Iraqis into inaction while the general quality of life erodes. Given the reputation of American largesse and know-how, our task is not simply to make Iraq no worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, but to greatly improve it, and to do so immediately. This makes things easier for the terrorists: They don't have to ruin the country, just make it chaotic enough to tarnish the image of an otherwise perfectionistic United States falling through on its promises of a better Iraq.

To this end, they ask impoverished fathers to sacrifice their children to blow up Americans. After all, for a mere life and a cheap RPG, he can do much more than take out a half-million-dollar vehicle with its degreed driver: He can send a message to the U.S., saying that killer-terrorists can be far more evil than America can be good. And while the terrorists snipe, mine, and murder, they seek an international pass as the "invaded," who merely wish to remove the "occupier" from their "home soil" — a corny rallying cry to be sure, but hackneyed enough for the cynical Europeans to accept it as a good reason to stay out of Iraq and let the Americans be smeared as imperialists for bringing democracy to the oppressed.

This is classic asymmetrical warfare, and we can handle it with the current strategies employed in such conflict. First, by training Iraqi police and militias and putting them into harm's way, Iraqis sooner or later are going to turn on those — often non-Iraqis — who kill their own. To that end, the more we can change our forces from highly observable armored divisions into lighter counterinsurgency teams, the less visible and vulnerable our own troops will be. These transformations are, at last, underway.

We must put more ostensible political responsibility even more rapidly into the hands of Iraqis — from letting them conduct their own press conferences to creating entirely autonomous local governments. Only then will the explosion of a refinery or school bus rightly be a blow to the Iraqi, rather than to the American occupational, future. The problem is not "Iraq" — two-thirds of the country is progressing well — but a particular area of Sunni and Saddamite Iraq, much of which was never really conquered during the actual shooting war.

No one welcomes the Shiites demonstrating and offering threats. Yet if a method can be found for direct elections, coupled with constitutional protections of minority rights, such populism is not necessarily fatal to our cause. Indeed, part of our predicament in Iraq has been our quest for utopian perfection, or the idea that a few modern-day Jeffersons and Madisons need be present to craft a suitable constitution. Success in Iraq cannot be measured by how much it resembles the Connecticut countryside next month, but instead by whether — in two or three years — it is a country that no longer invades others, promotes terrorists, kills its own citizens, and uses petrol dollars to acquire a strategic arsenal to threaten the West.

To this end, we can remind the Iraqi nation that all three of its constituencies — the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shiite majority — have responsibilities to prevent one another from resurrecting tyranny. If the Sunnis wish to kill and abet killing, then they can be advised that de facto trisection will be their ultimate dividend, leaving them with little oil, without American peacekeepers, and bereft of reconstruction capital — and with many terrorists in their midst, and strong opponents to their north and south.

In turn, despite the dubious presence of Iranian clerics inside Iraq, Iran is — by negative example — of value to us. The Iraqi Shiites may holler about creating a religious paradise on earth, but we can point to the mullocratic chaos across the border and remind them where their rhetoric leads. The Kurds — who time and again have proven themselves the most supportive of American efforts — know that Turkey will not tolerate an independent Kurdistan on its borders. All three constituencies, then, have very real limitations on their political options — unless they desire a civil war, an intervention by Turkey, or the abandonment by and enmity of the United States.

Just because we are spending billions and are tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq does not mean that we must remain complacent with Syria and Iran. Each problem has its own unique solutions. If the two countries continue to aid and abet the insurrectionists, then we, in turn, can promote and fund dissident groups, isolate them diplomatically, and as a last resort contemplate military options that do not involve either invasion or occupation. Indeed, precisely because Syria and Iran see our difficulty in Iraq as being in their own interests, we must find creative ways to remind them that the killing of Americans and the destabilization of Iraq would be, ultimately, their own worst nightmare.

Perhaps both rogue states are beginning to grasp the new reality of the last two years: The United States no longer believes that every instance of the use of force is wrong, but in fact accepts that action is more than justified to end an autocratic regime with a history of frightening arsenals, subsidized terrorism, and a record of harming the interests of the United States. Remember that Musharraf's sudden investigation of Pakistani nuclear scientists, Libya's unexpected admission of nuclear proliferation, the removal of troops from Saudi Arabia, the growing Saudi dissident movements, and renewed Iranian unrest did not happen in a vacuum — and will cease the moment we return to the old way of appeasement and neglect.

Finally, there is a rarely discussed moral question here. Take September 11 away and the United States would never — despite the conspiracists' theories of pre-9/11 mediation — have gone into either Afghanistan or Iraq. Both reactive military campaigns were waged humanely to minimize civilian casualties, often at risk to American military lives. The defeated were odious; their oppressed deserved to have been freed, and their nations returned from the graveyard to the family of nations.

For all the rhetoric about American corporate profiteering — the "Afghanistan pipeline," the Halliburton bonanza, the carving up of the Iraqi petroleum pie — the ultimate cost of restoring the two countries will be enormous, yet justifiable not in economic advantages, but in both national-security interests and, yes, moral terms. This is as it should be, since we Americans recently have had a prior relationship with both the Afghan and Iraqi nations. Unlike the British or Russians, we have never attempted to colonize them, but we are nevertheless obligated to set things right since, at critical times when we had the ability to offer aid, we chose isolationism and retreat — and thousands died as a consequence.

If it was wrong and cynical to have left the Afghans to the mercy of once useful Islamic fundamentalists after the expulsion of the Soviets in the 1980s, it is right and humane now to stay and help after defeating those who further ruined Afghanistan.

If it was calculating and shortsighted not to have helped the Kurds and Shiites after the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991, it is moral and visionary now to rectify that lapse and invest our most precious resources to set the ledger straight with them both.

Arguments against our efforts have already evolved precisely because of the moral nature of our enterprise. Two years ago, American leftists and most Europeans alleged that America was after oil, or sought global hegemony in its plans to take out the havens of terror. Now those same voices — more strident than ever — are cynical and coldly rational: We are spending too much money, too many Americans are dying, the mythical "Afghanistan pipeline" and "Iraqi oil" won't pay for the costs after all, such countries can never adopt democracies, and so on.

Only the ossified Left is shameless enough to have screamed for one year that we were after the petroleum of Iraq, and then harangue that we are breaking our treasury through foreign reconstruction, hoodwinked into thinking Arab natural resources might instead have shouldered the costs of mammoth aid.

Only the ossified Left objects to American foreign aid if it involves first taking out fascists and mass murderers in the bargain.

Only the ossified Left for a year condemned Afghanistan as either hopeless or immoral, but now claims that, in comparison to Iraq, it was a necessary and understandable multilateral response all along.

And only the ossified Left could decry poor intelligence for prompting us to go into Iraq, and then suggest we should have acted earlier on poorer intelligence prior to 9/11, as they now suggest with regard to North Korea.

We are winning a difficult peace. It is not surprising that we have made scores of mistakes, since nation rebuilding in the Middle East has no recent pedigree — not targeting and storming into the Sunni Triangle from the very beginning, distrusting and defaming competent and patriotic Iraqi exiles, allowing thousands to stream in from Iran, dismantling the Iraqi army and police, restraining Americans in war from harming vital infrastructure only to allow Iraqis to ruin it in peace, lax security on captured weapons caches, keeping Iraqis in the shadows while we spoke about their reform, and trying to create a political utopia when the avoidance of tyranny was our real chore. Surely someone in the administration should have been explaining to the American people daily the historical nature of our victory, the critical issues now in play worldwide, and the humane nature of our sacrifice — if only to offer some counterweight to the monotonous negativism of National Public Radio, Nightline, the New York Times, and the Democratic contenders. Instead we have had mostly silence — reticence seen not as Olympian magnanimity, but rather as a sign of weakness that only emboldened critics and fueled the hysteria.

Yet throughout this tumultuous year, what amazes is not that we made errors, or major blunders even — but how quickly we reacted, adjusted, and learned from our mistakes. So we press on, learning as we go, combining power with justice, determined to leave behind something better than we found. We are comforted by knowing that for all the current yelling from Democratic candidates, our own intelligentsia, and the European mainstream, this has not been a war of conquest or exploitation, but something altogether different — a needed effort that, if we see it through, will end up doing a great deal of good for everyone involved.

Our efforts in Iraq to remove a genocidal murderer and inaugurate democracy are not a "quagmire," but one of the brightest moments in recent American history — and we need not be ashamed to say that, again and again and again.

THE NATION
January 31, 2004

• White House Brushes Aside Criticism Over Medicare Plan
  By Vicki Kemper and Richard Simon
  Times Staff Writers
  
  WASHINGTON — Bush administration officials, facing harsh criticism over a newly disclosed estimate that the Medicare prescription drug law could cost $134 billion more than expected, on Friday defended the law and sought to turn aside accusations that they had misled lawmakers about the potential expense.
  
  "The Medicare reform we did is good reform," President Bush told reporters. "It fulfills a long-standing promise to our seniors."
  
  White House spokesman Scott McClellan downplayed the $534-billion administration estimate that became public Thursday, which is about 33% higher than the bill's original price tag of $400 billion spread over 10 years. McClellan said the higher estimate represented "a difference of about somewhere in the 1% to 2% range" of total Medicare and Medicaid spending.
  
  But with the federal government facing a record budget deficit, analysts and members of Congress said the controversy could prompt conservative Republican lawmakers to reject some of the president's election-year spending plans.
  
  "They will certainly insist that the president drop any thoughts of new spending initiatives. Mars has probably lost out to Medicare," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group in Virginia.
  
  The higher cost estimate for Medicare "is going to make it far more difficult for [conservatives] to do what they really want to do, which is to cut taxes and make the existing tax cuts permanent," Bixby said.
  
  Rep. Mac Collins (R-Ga.), who voted for the Medicare bill, said the new cost estimate is "very concerning to those of us who were very reluctant to vote for the bill to begin with." He called on Bush to help Congress "hold the line" on spending.
  
  A congressional Republican aide who spoke on the condition that he not be named said the higher Medicare estimate would test the loyalty of conservative Republicans to the president's agenda.
  
  "The right is steadily getting demoralized," he said.
  
  "This is exactly what conservatives feared," Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who voted against the Medicare bill, said of the apparently ballooning costs.
  
  The new Medicare estimate also prompted some groups to question whether the White House had worked in good faith with Congress on the legislation, which passed the House last year on a narrow 220-215 vote after extensive lobbying to sway conservatives wary of its cost.
  
  Bush signed the measure into law Dec. 8. It will give Medicare beneficiaries their first-ever subsidies for prescription drugs and take steps to give private insurers a larger role in serving Medicare seniors and the disabled.
  
  Keith Ashdown, a vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based budget watchdog group, said that fiscally conservative lawmakers got "suckered by a classic financial bait-and-switch by the administration."
  
  Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the new figures hurt the administration's credibility. "Every pressure tactic known to mankind was used to get it through the House at $400 billion. At another $150 billion, it wouldn't have gotten through," Smith said.
  
  Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who now is president of the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, said the discrepancy represented a "sort of a domestic weapons-of-mass-destruction scenario: Was Congress given the best information at the time they were making the decision?"
  
  "How much did they know and when did they know it?" Reischauer asked.
  
  Bush said Friday that he first learned of his administration's 10-year, $534-billion cost estimate two weeks ago in a briefing on his new budget proposal. The higher estimate came from the actuaries at the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, while the lower and highly publicized estimate of $400 billion had come from the Congressional Budget Office, which works for lawmakers.
  
  "The president is always very clear with the American people in the decisions that we are making and very upfront with them about the information that we have," McClellan told reporters.
  
  But administration officials, budget analysts, lobbyists, political conservatives and congressional sources said the administration, if not the president, had long known of the discrepancy.
  
  The higher cost estimate was "well known in the fall," said John Rother, who as director of policy and strategy for the seniors' group AARP helped draft the Medicare legislation.
  
  "It's not new, it's just now [being made] public," he added.
  
  "This should be no surprise to anyone," said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "During the course of negotiations [with lawmakers], we were at the table. We did tell them our thoughts on these things."
  
  It was widely reported last summer that official cost estimates generated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office were based on different assumptions than the estimates made by the Medicare actuaries.
  
  Specifically, CBO officials believed that fewer of Medicare's 40 million senior and disabled beneficiaries would elect to receive the voluntary drug benefit or join private Medicare managed-care plans.
  
  Early cost estimates also came in lower than final projections because Democrats largely succeeded in removing from the final Medicare bill a Republican cost-containment proposal that would have required private health plans to compete with one another for Medicare contracts.
  
  And after intense lobbying by private insurance companies, the final bill included substantial increases in Medicare payments to managed-care plans, which added to the bill's costs.
  
  "These estimates document that if more people go into managed care it will cost more," said Rother of AARP. "It may save the beneficiaries money, but it will not save the program money." AARP supported the legislation.
  
  Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said Friday that the higher cost estimate should convince Republicans to support Democratic legislation that would "allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, and to get rid of the billions of dollars in giveaways to HMOs that are in the plan now."
  
  But with Democrats in the minority in Congress and Republican lawmakers unlikely to try to scale back the Medicare program in an election year, the effect of the new cost estimates on beneficiaries was unclear.
  
  Under the legislation, seniors will be able to buy a card in June entitling them to drug discounts. The full drug benefit does not take effect until 2006.
  
  Long before then, however, seniors and other U.S. voters will go to the polls. Some analysts wondered Friday how the Medicare cost controversy would affect Bush's reelection campaign.
  
  The significantly higher price tag is "a big red flag," said former House Republican leader Bob Michel of Illinois. "It's just that much more of a debt bestowed upon our kids and grandkids."
  
  Scott Reed, a GOP strategist who managed Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, said Bush could still use Medicare to his advantage.
  
  "The fact that he got this legislation is still a huge achievement," he said.
  
  But Harvard University professor Robert Blendon, a specialist in public opinion and healthcare issues, said the controversy over Medicare cost estimates "really makes it much more difficult an issue for Bush."
  
  The higher cost estimates could also give Democrats ammunition to argue that the bill amounted to a giveaway to the insurance and drug industries, he said.

Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this report.

[willy]

From townhall.com



Why Ignore Supreme Court’s Threat To Free Press?
Mark Tapscott

January 29, 2004


Having spent years as a newspaper reporter and editor, I am proud to be called an “ink-stained wretch.” But I am mystified by the newsroom silence about a legal dagger aimed at the heart of the First Amendment and the free press.

That silence should worry every citizen who cares about preserving his or her right to speak out on the issues of the day. The Constitution makes journalists our independent watchdogs to keep the politicians honest. We all lose if the politicians muzzle our watchdogs. But must journalists help tie their own muzzles?

The dagger is the underlying logic of the Supreme Court’s recent McConnell v. FEC decision upholding McCain-Feingold, the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, including its ban on soft money campaign contributions and issue ads on television and radio.

Congress “shall make no law” limiting freedom of speech or the press, according to the First Amendment to the Constitution, but with its recent decision the Supreme Court now says Congress can limit First Amendment freedoms to avoid the “appearance of corruption” in politics.

The law bans issue ads, which often praise or blast incumbent congressmen for their votes on key issues, for 30 days prior to a primary and 60 days before a general election. The ban should be especially worrisome for journalists whose livelihoods depend upon the unfettered expression of opinion and public debate on the news of the day.

If issue ads create a corrupting appearance 60 days before an election, they must be corrupting 61 or 90 or 120 days before votes are cast. And ads that corrupt on radio and TV must also corrupt in the newspaper and on the Internet. See how the Supreme Court’s logic sets a precedent that can only lead to growing restrictions on freedom of speech and the press?

That is why Justice Clarence Thomas ended his stinging dissent with this disturbing prophecy: "The chilling endpoint of the Court's reasoning is not difficult to see: outright regulation of the press." No wonder Justice Antonin Scalia called the decision “a sad day for freedom of speech.”

Shouldn’t journalists be up in arms when a Supreme Court Justice says government censors in the newsroom could be within sight? Evidently not, judging by the Web sites of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). I found no mention of the decision on the three Web sites, so I e-mailed leaders of the groups asking about their silence.

Other issues have preoccupied ASNE and RCFP, said Scott Bosley, executive director of the former, and Rebecca Daugherty, director of the latter’s Freedom of Information Service Center. “The issue, while important, is not smack in the middle of our wheelhouse, as so many critical public records matters have been in the past couple years,” Bosley said. Conflicting editorial stands by various newspapers also would make finding unanimity difficult, he said.

“Campaign ads have traditionally been a back-burner issue for us, and we've had a lot on our front burners these last few years,” Daugherty said, noting that she had not seen the Thomas or Scalia dissents but would “see if we can at least get those covered in some context.”

SPJ has its regional conferences coming in April. Surely these gatherings would be appropriate forums for discussing the Supreme Court decision. Yet only four of the eight folks listed on SPJ’s web site as conference contacts responded to my e-mail inquiries. None of their conference programs include anything on the Supreme Court decision. All three organizations do great work on those other issues, but doesn’t the specter of government regulation of the press deserve at least some comment?

ASNE’s Bosley suggested part of the explanation here. Many of the nation’s most influential editorial pages supported McCain-Feingold and lustily cheered the Supreme Court decision upholding the law, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Having second thoughts now wouldn’t look so good.

Even so, big corporations own all of those papers. How enthusiastic will they be when federal bureaucrats decree editorial pages owned by big corporations can’t express opinions about candidates or their positions if doing so creates the appearance of corruption?

• Here's an interesting article, I give you a link, because it is rather long. It is also thoroughly referenced.

[willy]

I've heard bin Laden's "1001 Ways to Kill the Infidel" is also thoroughly referenced. LOL



Magic test
Larry Kudlow


January 30, 2004


Out on the campaign trail, Gov. Howard Dean has criticized Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan for being "too political." Dean argues that Greenspan should be harping on Bush budget deficits and opposing tax cuts. Like so many Deanisms, this charge is whacky. Greenspan was in fact an obstacle to Bush's tax cut last May. At the time, the estimable Fed leader was worrying publicly about budget deficits, even though his emphasis has always been on spending restraint rather than higher taxes.

Dean's Fed attack may have legs, but for different reasons. The little-known fact is that Greenspan's job as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is up for renewal this summer. While his seat as a board member doesn't expire until 2006, a decision on his reappointment is scheduled to be made in six months.

As events would have it, the Fed's most recent policy statement on interest rates removed the term-of-art phrase "considerable period" and inserted in its place the word "patient." Financial markets took this to mean a Fed rate hike has been brought a little nearer. Actually, futures markets are predicting a minor one-quarter-of-a-percentage-point increase in the fed funds policy rate sometime this summer. That's about when President Bush will decide on Greenspan's reappointment fate.

But Greenspan's reworking of the Fed's policy language may have been a brilliant move. Just the mere hint that a rate hike could come in mid-2004, instead of next year, caused the beleaguered U.S. dollar to appreciate. This in turn knocked the gold price down nearly $25 to around $400 -- a much more comfortable level, suggesting a diminished risk of higher future inflation. And while broad commodity indexes have had quite a run, these raw-material indicators are simply recouping prior losses and responding to huge industrial demands from the economic booms in China, the rest of Asia and the United States.

Yes, the stock market has been selling off since the announced change in Fed rhetoric. But after a continuous rally since early November, stocks were probably due for a minor correction anyway.

Keep in mind, part of the reason why the Fed is preparing us for an earlier rate rise is the positive economic story. Second-half real growth for 2003 has come in above 6 percent, with more of the same expected this year. Business profits are also coming in above expectations, productivity is gaining rapidly, and thanks to President Bush's last round of tax cuts, business investment spending is surging. Even exports are coming on strong.

Bush told a White House meeting of economists that "the U.S. economy is strong and getting stronger," just as he urged Congress to make his tax cuts permanent and pledged to cut the deficit in half in five years. There's nothing on the Fed's plate that will disrupt this scenario -- certainly not a tiny rate hike this summer.

In political terms, however, the stock market looms as an important influence on the election. The risk of even a minor Fed rate hike a few months before the November tally might lead investors to assume that a string of interest-rate increases are coming. With 95 million shareholders in the United States, and at least 164 million stock market accounts (up from only 20 million in 1988, according to the Investment Company Institute), there can be no doubt that the market's mood running up to November will have a big impact on the voting-booth decisions of investors.

In the 2000 presidential race, stocks slumped most of the year. The onset of the bear market substantially undermined the solid Clinton-Gore economic growth record, and helped elect George W. Bush. This time, any decisive market losses -- such as a 15 percent downward correction -- could jeopardize Bush's re-election shot, even though he is clearly the pro-investor candidate. How could he not be? His large economy-boosting tax-cuts on dividends, capital gains, upper-bracket income and small owner-operated businesses are exactly the tax measures that John Kerry and the other Democrats intend to repeal.


So, this is the political tightrope that Alan Greenspan will have to walk. His re-nomination at the Fed as well as the election itself may be up for grabs.

And yet, with core inflation less than 1 percent, the economy on a tear and job-creation set to explode, the question remains: Is any Fed tightening necessary this year? Or, if the Fed decides that a minor rate hike is necessary this summer, will it be able to sell it in a non-threatening way, so as to not upset the politically powerful stock market?

The so-called Greenspan Standard will be put on full public display during the political season. The Fed chairman's magic touch will be tested as never before.

• GDP growth disappoints; job worries linger
  By James P. Miller, Tribune staff reporter. The Associated Press contributed to this report
  
  January 31, 2004
  
  The nation's economy grew at a solid rate in the final quarter of last year, but the pace was slower than expected and suggests that unemployment is likely to remain a sore subject as the presidential election plays out.
  
  The Commerce Department reported Friday that the U.S. gross domestic product, considered the best measure of overall economic activity in the U.S., grew at a 4 percent annual rate.
  
  Treasury Secretary John Snow asserted the report "further demonstrates that a good recovery is under way."
  
  But most experts had been anticipating GDP to grow in the 4.5 percent to 5 percent range. As a result, the report landed with something of a thud.
  
  "Even though I'm generally confident that the recovery remains on track, it's hard not to be somewhat concerned, especially given the continued weakness in the labor market," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock.
  
  Wall Street also took notice. The GDP numbers "aren't a disaster," said David Wyss of Standard & Poor's Corp., "but we expected better."
  
  Stocks eased Friday on news of the shortfall, but investors' disappointment was partly offset by a more upbeat report, showing a jump in Midwest manufacturing activity in January, which was issued separately Friday.
  
  For all of 2003, the economy grew by 3.1 percent--the best showing since 2000 and an improvement over the 2.2 percent increase in 2002.
  
  But for out-of-work Americans, it may not feel like better economic times.
  
  Since President Bush took office in January 2001, the economy has lost 2.3 million jobs. While the president believes a stronger economy will lead to more jobs, Democrats point to the job losses as evidence of what they say are the president's failed economic policies.
  
  Bush's tax cuts, they say, haven't led to meaningful job creation and have dug the nation's budget deeper in the hole.
  
  "There's little to celebrate when growth doesn't benefit workers," said Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.). "People are saying, `Show me the jobs."'
  
  The government's report on January employment is due to come out next Friday, and many economists are expecting the nation to have gained 150,000 jobs. But in December, with similar forecasts on the line, the nation added just 1,000 jobs.
  
  That helped bring the unemployment rate down to 5.7 percent, from 5.9 percent in November, but economists said the decline was more a reflection of the fact that fewer people were looking for work.
  
  Bush, meanwhile, renewed a call to Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, saying it would help the recovery.
  
  "The American people can know that we'll continue to work hard to make sure this economy is vibrant and robust and strong so our fellow citizens can find good jobs," he said.
  
  In 2003's third quarter, GDP grew at a breathtaking 8.2 percent annual rate, as the economy got a boost from heavy government expenditures, and from a burst of spending from consumers who were flush--thanks to tax-rebate checks from Uncle Sam and cash from mortgage refinancings.
  
  No one had expected the fourth quarter would match that of the superheated third period, which represented the biggest surge in quarterly GDP growth in nearly two decades.
  
  Still, experts had underestimated how much of a slowdown there would be in government spending, in business spending for new capital equipment, and especially in consumer expenditures for housing and goods in the latest period.
  
  The disappointing growth measure means more time will have to pass before economists and politicians learn whether the economy's upturn, which got under way in 2002 and finally accelerated in mid-2003, will become self-sustaining.
  
  The Achilles' heel of the economy remains continued high unemployment, and the GDP data underscore that even though business is firming, American companies remain reluctant to add new hires.
  
  The latest quarter's growth data represent the government's "advance" report; such preliminary figures are routinely subject to revision.
  
  Not everyone was discouraged: The pro-growth National Association of Manufacturers enthusiastically labeled Friday's release "a very balanced and healthy GDP report."

[willy]

From townhall.com



The other America
Rich Lowry


January 29, 2004


It's the 1930s again. At least if you listen to the Democratic presidential candidates. John Edwards' rhetoric about "two Americas" -- one rich, one struggling -- has caught on. John Kerry now talks of "the economy of privilege." As Edwards puts it, invoking the 35 million poor Americans, "You and I together have a moral responsibility to lift these families out of poverty."


Edwards and the other Democrats deserve credit for focusing attention on the least fortunate, who are often forgotten in the rush of both parties to shovel government benefits at middle-class voters, especially if they happen to be elderly. Unless Democrats offer serious solutions to poverty, however, the poor only serve as props for their moral vanity.

Indeed, Democrats on the stump implicitly argue that if only more former Enron executives would be thrown in jail, the downtrodden would magically be lifted into affluence. This is preening nonsense. We know what causes poverty. It has nothing to do with corporations, and little to do even with other, more-relevant economic factors, such as wage rates.

Poverty in America is primarily a cultural phenomenon, driven by a shattered work ethic and sexual irresponsibility. Child poverty would be nearly obliterated if every household had one adult working full time and married parents. Unfortunately, only President Bush has a program that works to make these social conditions a reality, and it is resisted by the party of Edwards.

According to the Heritage Foundation's welfare expert Robert Rector, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work annually, or about 16 hours a week. This number holds in good economic times and bad, because it is a factor of attitudes toward work rather than the availability of jobs. If the amount of work in these households were equivalent to one adult working 40 hours a week, roughly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of poverty.

The problem is not, as liberals argue, low wages. If you are only working 16 hours a week, you will pretty much be poor unless you're a TV anchor. Raising the minimum wage isn't going to help someone working so few hours. It is the amount of work that matters. If a single mother works full time at the minimum wage -- factoring in such income supplements as the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps -- she will not be poor.

The other cause of child poverty is single parenthood. If single mothers married the fathers of their children, according to Rector, three-quarters of poor children would be lifted out of poverty. Again, economic factors are secondary. The average father of a child born out of wedlock is making $17,000 a year. He would be a good candidate for marriage, if the culture of marriage weren't so damaged. The key variable in whether an at-risk mother will marry the father of her child is not his wages, but the couple's attitude toward marriage and their relationship skills.

So, a common-sense anti-poverty program has two prongs -- restore the work ethic and encourage marriage. Work has been so devalued because people have been taught to rely on government support instead. The 1996 welfare reform tapped the brakes on this dynamic, but more remains to be done. Roughly half of adult welfare recipients are still not working, and work requirements don't exist for important government supports such as public housing. Bush wants to strengthen work requirements, but Democrats are balking.

As for marriage, the entire welfare system acts as a subsidy for single parenthood. With his proposal for marriage education and increased funding for abstinence programs, Bush wants to put a little government pressure on the other side of the scale.

You can argue with the particulars of this program, but if you're not talking abut how to increase work and marriage among the poor, well then, you're not serious about addressing poverty. You're just some guy with pretty hair saying pretty words because you like the way they sound.

Rich Lowry??? Aren't we getting a bit too carried away, Willy--perhaps scraping the bottom--well, almost. Grant it, the bottom is your hero, Coulter.

[willy]

From National Review online



January 30, 2004, 9:19 a.m.
Media-Powered Howard
ABC jerks their knees to apologize and sympathize with the Dean Scream.

By Tim Graham

As a general rule, the media despise the thought of examining themselves. Corrections on TV news in particular are so rare that they are generally dragged out only by lawyers threatening expensive litigation. So how does ABC explain Diane Sawyer going to the jaw-dropping length of reexamining the Howard Dean "Scream" speech and apologizing for the frenzy of coverage over it?

It began Tuesday night at the end of World News Tonight. Peter Jennings clucked: "The governor has been the butt of jokes. His adversaries have tried to take advantage of the moment to suggest that he's an angry man. We thought it might be a good idea to try putting ourselves in the room."

Is Dean's record of anger in any doubt? Even Diane Sawyer's interview last week with Dr. Dean and Dr. Mrs. Dean showed several examples of the candidate boiling over. But the Deaniac pressure on ABC is obviously intense enough for them to suggest that black is white and up is down and the anger is a cruel myth.

Sawyer explained that directional mikes, like the one they use around crowds on Good Morning America, drown out the crowd noise. She laid out their attempt to collect other tapes of the "Scream" speech to see how it came across inside the room, as opposed to on television. ABC Dean "embed" Reena Singh said the crowd noise was much louder. American Prospect writer Garance Franke-Ruta claimed the crowd made it difficult to hear Dean yell. Sawyer played alternate tapes to demonstrate that Dean couldn't be heard over the crowd in the room itself.

Then, Sawyer made another unprecedented step of extreme servitude to the Dean camp. She called the heads of the other networks for on-the-record quotes responding to the question if the networks had overplayed the Dean gaffe. "With the exception of NBC, they all said collectively the media did overplay it. CNN said 'If we had to do it again, we'd pull ourselves back.' And the chairman of Fox News? 'We overplayed it a bit and the public clearly thought so, too, and kept Dean alive for another round.' Diane Sawyer, ABC News, New York."

Thursday morning on Good Morning America, Sawyer picked up where she left off the night before: "First, we want to do something we think you don't see a lot in television news...It's a kind of mea culpa, and I'm as guilty as anybody else." She replayed the taped segment from the previous night explaining the perception difference, and then news anchor Robin Roberts asked the audience: "Let's have a show of our hands from our audience. Do you feel that the 'Dean Scream' was showed too much. Show of hands? Wow." Sawyer added: "Yeah, well, we heard that, and certainly the Dean campaign heard it from everybody, and so we thought we should address it and take a look at ourselves." Yes, Dean felt he was so mistreated by Guilty Diane that his campaign mailed 50,000 copies of the Sawyer interview to New Hampshire voters.

Nearly everyone can agree that the Dean scream was overplayed — because it was unforgettably funny and people couldn't seem to get enough of it. But can you remember Diane Sawyer going back and asking everyone if they overplayed "You're No Jack Kennedy" on Dan Quayle, or the earth-shattering "potatoe" frenzy? Would she like to repent now about asking Steve Forbes if he was an undemocratic "crackpot" in 1999? Can anyone remember Diane Sawyer apologizing for pounding Ken Starr about the "demented" Starr Report: "I think there were 62 mentions of the word 'breast,' 23 of 'cigar,' 19 of 'semen.' This has been called demented pornography, pornography for Puritans. Were there mistakes made in including some of this?"

The answer is "no." After the 1992 campaign was over, ABC did take the noteworthy step of investigating letters written to the network about media bias, but only after Bill Clinton was safely elected. In September of 1994, Dateline NBC devoted a segment to apologizing for coverage of Bill Clinton's airport runway haircut by Cristophe. Networks are not in the habit of apologizing for demonizing and mischaracterizing conservatives. Diane's apology demonstrates that the Mickey Mouse network is much more sensitive to complaints about damaging an ultraliberal candidate with an anger-management problem than it is about presenting an appearance of objectivity.


— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center.

February 5, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

• Purity of the Powells
  
  By MAUREEN DOWD
  
  WASHINGTON — Washington is in the virtue business this week.
  
  Center stage is a riveting father-son drama. (No, not that one.)
  
  At the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell is trying to save America's virtue, while over at the State Department, his father, Colin, is trying to save his own virtue. They are both obsessing about something that should have been there, but suddenly wasn't.
  
  The son demanded an explanation for Janet Jackson's missing material, while the father wrestled with an explanation for Saddam Hussein's missing matériel. The son opened an inquiry into something everyone had already seen, as the father defended his speech making the case for war based on something nobody has seen.
  
  (Who could have guessed that Saddam's W.M.D. would be less scary than Ms. Jackson's pierced metal sunburst, a Weapon of Mammary Destruction aimed at the CBS chairman, Les Moonves? Or, as Jon Stewart points out, that a government so reluctant to investigate intelligence lapses is so eager to investigate a breast lapse?)
  
  Asked in a Washington Post interview on Monday whether he would have recommended an invasion if he'd known that Iraq had no weapons, the secretary of state replied, "I don't know," adding that the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get."
  
  But the words had barely left his mouth before furious White House aides forced Mr. Powell to eat them. Just as Janet Jackson had to repent for revealing too much, so did the top diplomat. Secretary Powell had to go out and clarify his remarks to reporters, telling them the war was justified even if weapons are never found.
  
  Rummy stuck to his Orwellian guns, telling Congress yesterday that just because we don't find the weapons doesn't mean they're not there. Or, as postmodern professors say, absence is presence. (At least Ms. Jackson, like David Kay, had the grace to say, "Unfortunately, the whole thing went wrong in the end.")
  
  Once more, Colin Powell was left trying to square being a good soldier with preserving what's left of his reputation. His twin concerns — wanting everyone to think he is a man of purity and not wanting to fight a battle he might lose — have come into fatal conflict because of Iraq.
  
  The younger Powell failed to appreciate the consequences of not curbing big media companies gobbling up rivals. Colin Powell failed to appreciate the consequences of not curbing Dick Cheney, Rummy and Wolfie as they gobbled up foreign policy.
  
  The son vowed in 2001 that he would be patient with cultural excesses: "I don't want the government as my nanny. I still have never understood why something as simple as turning it off is not part of the answer."
  
  But here he is, the biggest nanny in government since William Bennett, starting a little culture war to improve his ratings. The F.C.C. asked CBS for a Super Bowl halftime tape to determine whether standards were violated. What, the F.C.C. can't pop for a TiVo? Next, the F.C.C. will ask the C.I.A. to provide satellite photography of the rogue bustier.
  
  The Janet and Justin show was unbelievably tawdry, but also unbelievably banal — another rehearsed pseudoshock that the media, and now the government, gladly play along with. Isn't the power of social opprobrium in a free society enough?
  
  It's already out of control. Ms. Jackson lost her spot as a presenter at the Grammys. And NBC's affiliates forced the network to take out a scene from tonight's episode of "E.R." because a breast was exposed for a second and a half. It was the breast of an 80-year-old woman dying of a heart attack. Sizzle, sizzle.
  
  Besides, should all the indignation be about a "wardrobe malfunction" when there were all those icky ads — financing our annual festival of testosterone — about erectile dysfunction? (One father I know tried telling his curious 10-year-old son the ads were about "electile dysfunction.")
  
  Michael Powell should stop interfering where he doesn't belong. Colin Powell should start interfering where he does belong. The secretary should get off the sidelines where the vice president and Pentagon banished him and stop waiting for them to fail so he can be vindicated. He should get more involved in rescuing Iraq from chaos.
  
  The hawks' war to make Iraq free and secure is slowly descending into anarchy and ethnic conflict. That's indecent._

[jesus marion joseph]

I've got an idea. Let's start another thread where the participants play tennis with editorials as the balls, stopping occasionally to disparage the opponent's choice of editorialists.

That'd be swell! And we could all llearn so much in the process!

02/04/2004 @ 8:29pm

• Liar, Incompetent or Space Cadet?
  
  Is he incompetent, clueless, lying? Why has President Bush--once again--asserted that he went to war because Iraq refused to allow weapons inspectors into the country? Last Wednesday, Bush went on about how "it was [Saddam's] choice to make, and he did not let us in."
  
  Bush made the same false statement, last July, with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at his side. "We gave [Saddam} a chance to allow the inspectors in," Bush declared, "and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power."
  
  These statements defy rational explanation. As Democrats.com observed last summer--after launching a website petition to declare Bush insane under the 25th amendment--"everyone in the world knows that Hussein allowed a fully-equipped team of UN inspectors to comb every inch of his country...The only conclusion we can draw is that Bush has lost touch with reality. In other words, he has gone mad."
  
  Or is it that he prefers his news heavily filtered, aka censored? As Bush told Brit Hume on Fox News last September, "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."
  
  Objective sources? Like Dick Cheney, who just last week insisted that those mobile trailers were "conclusive evidence" that Hussein "did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction"? The former UN weapons inspector David Kay had earlier told the New York Times that the trailers may have been useful for blowing up balloons. So, maybe Bush really is what his former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened him to--"a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
  
  Then there's question of whether he's lying. My personal view is that Bush doesn't have the fullblown Nixonian character to blatantly lie on issues of war; Cheney does. But, whatever the case, as the esteemed former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee once explained, "Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face."
  
  The nation's media needs to find an effective way of reporting untruthful statements emanating from the White House. As Paul Waldman wrote last year in the Washington Post, "when politicians or government officials lie, reporters have an obligation not only to include the truth somewhere in the story or let opponents make a counter-charge, but to say forthrightly that the official has lied. When a politician gets away with a lie, he or she becomes more likely to lie again. If the lie is exposed by vigilant reporters, the official will think twice before repeating it."
  
  With this President, it may be three strikes before the truth comes out. But, as Eric Alterman wrote months before the war in his Nation column, "Reporters and editors who "protect' their readers and viewers from the truth about Bush's lies are doing the nation--and ultimately George W. Bush--no favors."

February 7, 2004

• Bush Decides to Enter Fray on TV Show
  By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
  
  WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — With his poll numbers slipping and Democrats attacking him and his credibility over the failure so far to find any banned weapons in Iraq, President Bush has decided to strike back. He will throw his first punch in the rough and tumble of a ring familiar to all candidates for high office: a Sunday morning news show.
  
  White House officials said the president had chosen to appear on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday to make a case that he has done well in handling the challenges of terrorism and a weak economy, and to bring the political debate back to the ground he wants to fight on.
  
  "The president's very eager to go out and talk about his policies, the actions he's taken and why it's making the nation more secure," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. "He's more than comfortable talking about those decisions and he believes the country wants to hear from the president about these issues."
  
  But Republicans allied with Mr. Bush's re-election campaign said there was a heavy dose of politics behind the decision as well. As he faces intensifying pressure on weapons in Iraq, they said, it is more urgent that Mr. Bush go on the offensive. After saying for months that he was too busy dealing with the nation's business to descend into the partisan wars, Mr. Bush and his top advisers have concluded that the risk of remaining on the defensive outweighed the risk of dropping the pose that he was above politics and appearing on television in candidate mode, Republicans said.
  
  Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush told him on Tuesday that he wanted to appear on "Meet the Press." Republican officials said Mr. Bush was eager to send a message that he is not afraid to take tough questions from the moderator, Tim Russert.
  
  "He's been chomping at the bit for a while to get into the fray," said Charlie Black, a veteran Republican strategist who has close ties to the White House. "There's no better place to show you can answer the criticisms and put them behind you than on Russert."
  
  Mr. Bartlett played down any suggestion that Mr. Russert presented Mr. Bush with a critical test. He said the president had requested some briefing material and had run over some likely questions with his senior staff on Friday afternoon, but otherwise was not engaging in any intensive preparations for the interview, which is to be taped at the White House on Saturday.
  
  Mr. Bush's appearance will come after weeks of developments that, in the view of some Republicans, undermined the president's political strength and demanded an assertive effort by the White House to get back on track as the campaign heats up.
  
  Mr. Bush's proposal for a return to the moon and a manned mission to Mars fell flat, they said. He got no bounce in the polls from his State of the Union address. He came under unusual criticism from economic conservatives in his own party over continued big increases in government spending and the rise in the budget deficit. Faced with a storm over the use of prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons, Mr. Bush appointed a commission on Friday to study the issue, taking some of the gloss off the commander-in-chief persona that his political team had hoped to make central to his campaign.
  
  At the same time, the Democrats began to coalesce around their front-runner, Senator John Kerry, allowing them to focus increasingly on attacking Mr. Bush rather than each other. With Mr. Kerry's emergence as the front-runner came another problem for the administration: the comparison, highlighted by Democrats, between Mr. Kerry's record as a Vietnam war hero and the questions about whether Mr. Bush fulfilled all his duties as a National Guard pilot in the same period.
  
  "We always knew that as the Democratic race reached a peak it would focus coverage on the criticisms of the president," Mr. Black said. "At the same time, several other issues put the president on the defensive. It would have been smart strategy to go back on the offensive once the Democratic nominee emerged, but with these other things happening, the sooner the better."
  
  Republicans involved with the Bush-Cheney campaign said the appearance on "Meet the Press" marked the start of a more aggressive phase of the campaign. The campaign's strategists are making final decisions on the shape and timing of an advertising campaign that will probably go on the air within weeks, Republican officials said.
  
  Campaign officials said Mr. Bush's appearance on "Meet the Press" was not a sign of panic or of any change in basic strategy.
  
  "We're 269 days from the election, and that's several political lifetimes," said Terry Holt, the Bush campaign's spokesman. "If you've heard anything from the Bush campaign over the past 10 months, it's been that we expect a close race, and that's still operative."

I guess we have all seen Bush fantasize/lie about the economy. His optimistic statements, which he tends to deliver in the guise of facts, belie reality, as so much of this regime's claims do.--CA


February 10, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

• Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
  
  By PAUL KRUGMAN
  
  Last Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics delivered yet another disappointing employment report.
  
  Since there's a lot of confusion on this subject, let's talk about the numbers. The bureau actually produces two estimates of employment, one based on a survey that asks each employer in a random sample how many workers are on its payroll, the other on a survey that asks each household in a random sample how many of its members are employed. Most experts regard the employer survey as more reliable; even in the midst of the recovery, that survey has contained nothing but bad news. The household numbers look better, but not particularly good.
  
  For technical reasons involving seasonal adjustment, many economists expected the January report to show a one-time bounce in both measures. Yet employment as measured by the payroll survey rose by only 112,000 — well short of the increase needed just to keep up with a growing population. If employment were rising as rapidly as it did when the economy was emerging from the 1990-1991 recession, we'd be seeing monthly numbers more like 275,000.
  
  Taking a longer view, the payroll numbers tell a dismal story. Since the recovery officially began in November 2001, employment has actually fallen by half a percent, while the working-age population has increased about 2.4 percent. By this measure, jobs are becoming ever scarcer.
  
  The household survey, on which the official unemployment rate is based, tells a less dismal but far from happy story. (Why the discrepancy? We don't know.) The number of people who say they have jobs has risen since the recovery began — but has still lagged behind population growth.
  
  The only seemingly favorable statistic is the unemployment rate, which has recently fallen to 5.6 percent, the same as in November 2001. But how is that possible, when employment has grown more slowly than the population, or even declined? The answer is that people aren't counted as unemployed unless they're looking for work, and a growing fraction of the population isn't even looking. It's hard to see how this is good news.
  
  Other indicators continue to suggest a grim job picture. In the last three months, more than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks. That's the worst number since 1983, and a sign that jobs remain very hard to find — which is what anyone who has lost a job will tell you.
  
  One last statistic — not about jobs, but about wages. Since the last quarter of 2001, real G.D.P. has risen 7.2 percent. But wage and salary income, after adjusting for inflation, is up only 0.6 percent. This matches what the employer survey is telling us: America's workers have seen very little benefit from this recovery.
  
  In the light of these dreary statistics, President Bush's recent cheerfulness seems almost surreal. On Friday, he said that he was "pleased, obviously, with the new job growth." When Tim Russert asked in the "Meet the Press" interview what happened to all the jobs that Mr. Bush promised his tax cuts would create, he replied: "It's happening. And there is good momentum when it comes to the creation of new jobs."
  
  We expect politicians to place a positive spin on economic news, but to insist that things are going great when many people have personal experience to the contrary seems foolish. Mr. Bush's father lost the 1992 election in large part because he was perceived as being out of touch with the difficulties faced by ordinary Americans. Why is Mr. Bush — whose poll numbers are a bit worse than his father's were at this point in 1992 — running the risk of repeating his experience?
  
  The answer, I think, is that the younger Mr. Bush has no choice. He has literally gone for broke, with repeated tax cuts that have fed a $500 billion deficit. To justify policies that more and more people call irresponsible, he must claim that wonderful things are happening as a result.
  
  For a while, that famous 8 percent growth rate seemed to be just what he needed. But in the fourth quarter, growth dropped to 4 percent. And as we've seen, the jobs still aren't there.
  
  So Mr. Bush must put on a brave face. He and his officials must talk up weak economic statistics as if they represented stunning success, and predict marvelous things any day now. After all, they have to keep this up for only nine more months.

February 12, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

• The Khan Artist
  
  By MAUREEN DOWD
  
  WASHINGTON
  
  I think President Bush has cleared up everything now.
  
  The U.S. invaded Iraq, which turned out not to have what our pals in Pakistan did have and were giving out willy-nilly to all the bad guys except Iraq, which wouldn't take it.
  
  Bush officials thought they knew what was going on inside our enemy's country: that Iraq had W.M.D. and might sell them on the black market. But they were wrong.
  
  Bush officials thought they knew what was going on inside our friend's country: that Pakistanis were trying to sell W.M.D. on the black market. But they couldn't prove it — until about the time we were invading Iraq.
  
  "The grave and gathering threat" turned out to be not Saddam's mushroom cloud but the president's mushrooming deficits.
  
  The president is having just as hard a time finding his National Guard records as Iraqi W.M.D. — and those pay stubs look as murky as those satellite photos of trucks in Iraq.
  
  Mr. Bush said yesterday that smaller developing countries must stop developing nuclear fuel, even as the U.S. develops a whole new arsenal of smaller nuclear weapons to use against smaller developing countries that might be thinking about developing nuclear fuel.
  
  After he weakened the U.N. for telling the truth about Iraq's nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush now calls on the U.N. to be strong going after W.M.D.
  
  Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned the Pakistani hero and nuclear huckster Abdul Qadeer Khan after an embarrassing debacle, praising the scientist's service to his country. Mr. Bush pardoned George Tenet after an embarrassing debacle, praising the spook's service to his country. (So much for Mr. Bush's preachy odes to responsibility and accountability.)
  
  The president warned yesterday that "the greatest threat before humanity" is the possibility of a sudden W.M.D. attack. Not wanting nuclear technology to go to North Korea, Iran or Libya, the White House demanded tighter controls on black-market sales of W.M.D., even while praising its good buddy Pakistan, whose scientists were running a black market like a Sam's Club for nukes, peddling to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
  
  Mr. Bush likes to present the world in black and white, as good and evil, even as he's made a Faustian deal with General Musharraf, perhaps hoping that one day — maybe even on an October day — the cagey general will decide to cough up Osama.
  
  The president is spending $1.5 billion to persuade more Americans to have happy married lives, but plans to keep gay Americans from having happy married lives.
  
  Mr. Bush said he wouldn't try to overturn abortion rights. But John Ashcroft is intimidating women who had certain abortions by subpoenaing records in six hospitals in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
  
  The president set up the intelligence commission (with few intelligence experts) because, he said, the best intelligence is needed to win the war on terror. Yet he doesn't want us to get the panel's crucial report until after he's won the war on Kerry.
  
  Mr. Bush said he had balked at giving the 9/11 commission the records of his daily briefings from the C.I.A. until faced with a subpoena threat because it might deter the C.I.A. from giving the president "good, honest information." Wasn't it such "good, honest information" that caused him to miss 9/11 and mobilize the greatest war machine in history against Saddam's empty cupboard?
  
  Mr. Bush says he's working hard to create new jobs in America, while his top economist says it's healthy for jobs to be shipped overseas.
  
  The president told Tim Russert that if you order a country to disarm and it doesn't and you don't act, you lose face. But how does a country that goes to war to disarm a country without arms get back its face?
  
  Mr. Bush said he was troubled that the Vietnam War was "a political war," because civilian politicians didn't let the generals decide how to fight it. But when Gen. Eric Shinseki presciently told Congress in February 2003 that postwar Iraq would need several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers to keep it secure and supplied, he was swatted down by the Bush administration's civilian politicians.
  
  Yes, it all makes perfect sense, through the Bush looking glass.

__

Aren't we getting a bit too carried away, Willy--perhaps scraping the bottom--

This coming from a Dowd/Krugman disciple...............

February 15, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

• The Thief of Baghdad
  
  By MAUREEN DOWD
  
  
  WASHINGTON
  In the Ford White House, Dick Cheney's Secret Service name was Backseat, because he was the model of an unobtrusive staffer, the perfect unflashy deputy chief of staff for that lord of the bureaucratic dance, Donald Rumsfeld.
  
  As James Mann writes in his new book, "The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," Mr. Cheney started out supervising such lowly matters as fixing a stopped-up drain in a White House bathroom sink; getting a headrest for Betty Ford's helicopter seat; and sorting out which salt shakers — the regular ones or, as he put it, the "little dishes of salt with funny little spoons" — would be best for stag dinners in the president's private quarters.
  
  Rummy's alter ego rose quickly, though, because he seemed to have no ego. Good old Dick could be counted on to be the man behind the man, a butler to power. The new President Bush, a tabula rasa in foreign affairs, put himself in Mr. Cheney's hands.
  
  But W. had barely settled into the Oval when Backseat clambered into the front seat. Retracing the rush to war, the names Cheney and Chalabi are entwined in bold relief.
  
  Back when Dick Cheney was fiddling with salt shakers, Ahmad Chalabi, a smooth-talking and wealthy young Iraqi M.I.T. graduate, was founding the Petra Bank in Jordan.
  
  As Mr. Cheney moved up in the capital, Mr. Chalabi was tripped up in Jordan by a small matter of embezzlement from his own bank. Jordanian officials have said that the crime rocked their economy and that they paid $300 million to depositors to cover the bank's losses. By the time Mr. Chalabi was convicted and received a sentence of 22 years of hard labor, he was a fugitive in London.
  
  During the early 90's, when Mr. Cheney was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Chalabi was in a full courtship press with Washington's conservative and journalistic elites. He saw them as a springboard for his triumphant return to Iraq.
  
  After 9/11, his passionate desire to take out Saddam coincided with that of conservatives. All they needed for their belli was a casus, so Mr. Chalabi obligingly conned the neocons.
  
  He hoodwinked his pals Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle into believing Iraq would be a flowery cakewalk to democracy.
  
  A wily expert in the politics of the bazaar, he knew he had to sell his scheme on what was good for Americans and their security. He was happy to funnel information to the vice president that painted a picture of Saddam hunkered on a hair-raising stockpile of W.M.D. His group, the Iraqi National Congress, tried to spin our government and media through its "information collection program." Intelligence officials now say that the prewar information provided to Washington by this group was suspect and useless, even disinformation.
  
  But here's the wild thing: the propaganda program was underwritten by U.S. government funds. So Americans paid Ahmad Chalabi to gull them into a war that is costing them a billion a week — and a precious human cost. Cops dealing with their snitches check out the information better than the Bush administration did.
  
  Mr. Chalabi's séances swayed the political set, the intelligence set and the journalistic set. In an effect Senator Bob Graham dubs "incestuous amplification," the bogus stories spewed by Iraqi exiles and defectors ricocheted through an echo chamber of government and media, making it sound as if multiple, reliable sources were corroborating the same story. Rather, one self-interested source was replicating like computer spam.
  
  The C.I.A. was stung to find out its analysts had mistakenly thought that Iraq weapons information had been confirmed by multiple sources, when it came from only a single source; that analysts had relied on a fabricating Iraqi defector and spin material from Iraqi exiles; and that this blather made its way into documents and speeches used by the Bush administration to justify war. George Tenet ordered a major change in procedure last week, removing barricades so that analysts can know more about the identities of clandestine agents' sources, and their possible motives.
  
  But even incestuous amplification could not have drowned out reality if Bush officials had not glommed onto the Chalabi flummery for their own reasons — to feed their fantasies about refashioning America's power, psyche and military, and making over the Middle East in our image.
  
  Swept up in big dreams, the foreign policy dream team became dupes in Ahmad Chalabi's big con.

• Facts elude Bush & vice versa
  
  By his own description, President Bush does not do nuance. Neither does his administration. Especially after 9/11, the one thing it had was certainty. It knew what it knew, and because of that, on everything from tax cuts to going to war, Congress followed. The uncertain will follow the certain. It's a rule of life.
  
  But a rereading of the "Meet The Press" transcript suggests that Bush's most critical quality - certainty - has oozed from him like helium from a balloon. Here was a man who was continually trying to pump himself up. He used the word "dangerous" over and over again, applying it to Saddam Hussein without every quite saying why. He repeatedly called the former dictator a madman, which is to say that he was capable of anything. In fact, though, he was capable of very little and in recent years had attempted almost nothing.
  
  After Bush's "Meet the Press" performance, countless commentators tried to figure out why he had done so poorly. Many of them focused on performance - the part of politics that looks so easy until, as Wesley Clark did, you try it for yourself. Yes, Bush did not perform well. But even a brilliant actor needs material.
  
  Others lamented Bush's verbal klutziness. If only he could talk like Tony Blair, one of them sighed. But the reason he cannot talk like Blair is because he doesn't think like Blair. The British prime minister can acknowledge an awkward fact, even a mistake, and keep on going. Bush can only insist that he is right. It doesn't matter that the facts have changed.
  
  This had little to do with speech and a lot to do with thought. Once certainty is snatched from him, he seems in a state of vertigo where he grasps at certain words to steady himself. Dangerous. Madman. But if a madman doesn't have the weapons you said he did, then he is not dangerous, and if he didn't have the weapons, then maybe he was not as mad as we thought he was.
  
  There is much to ponder here. But Bush will ponder not - not on Iraq, not on taxes. He believes in minimal taxes no matter the economic or fiscal conditions - boom, bust, surplus, deficit. There's no notion that in economics one size cannot fit all. "I believe the best way to stimulate economic growth is to let people keep more of their own money," he told Tim Russert. It is that simple.
  
  There is something childlike about the "Meet The Press" transcript. "Saddam was a danger to America," Bush said repeatedly. But how? He had no missiles that could reach our shores. He had no nuclear weapons program. He did not play ball with terrorist outfits or, for that matter, they with him. "The man was a threat," Bush said. How? "He had a weapon," the President insisted. But he didn't, remember? That was the point of David Kay's report. Oh, but Saddam was a madman.
  
  Bush's inability or refusal to come to grips with the facts is not the product of a poor performance or an errant tongue, but of a troubling insistence that his beliefs cannot be wrong. That makes him look like a dope.

Star Tribune

Published 02/20/2004

• Jim Boyd: For 'gutter politics,' look to the Bush camp
  
  Jim Boyd
  
  Readers can decide for themselves whether the Democrats are engaging in "gutter politics" by pushing hard on President Bush's Vietnam-era service, or lack thereof, in the National Guard. The story about Bush peeves me a little; I enlisted in the Army and did my time in Vietnam, not carrying an M-16 but not safely in Saigon either. Almost four years of my life were devoted to service, and Bush apparently couldn't be bothered to show up for some of the weekends he promised to serve.
  
  But what really gets my goat is political operatives in Bush's White House making the "gutter" charge. Whether or not you think the accusation is true, it takes a lot of gall for this group to make it.
  
  Take what they did to Max Cleland, for example. Cleland is a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran, former head of the Department of Veterans Affairs and for one term a U.S. senator from Georgia. Then the Republicans decided to do a number on him. In a hard-fought campaign for re-election, Cleland got everything the Republicans could throw at him, including the kitchen sink. His challenger was Saxby Chambliss, picked and managed by the White House's Karl Rove and Georgia GOP Chairman Ralph Reed. The absolute low point was a television ad which showed Cleland's photo together with those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, equating the three. Cleland, the ad said, had shown his true colors by voting against homeland security. He was, the ad implied, unpatriotic.
  
  Of course he wasn't. Through the long process of creating the Department of Homeland Security, Cleland had supported an alternative plan pushed by Democrats. It differed with the Republican version chiefly in the way it treated federal employees who are members of unions. The new department, after all, was a Democratic initiative, for months strongly opposed by Bush. But the false claim that the moderate Cleland had been soft on terrorism was enough to get him removed by Georgia voters -- in an election animated by the issue of whether the Confederate flag should have been removed from the Georgia statehouse.
  
  Now fast forward to 2004. Cleland has been hitting the campaign trail hard for Sen. John Kerry. Whereas Kerry has been circumspect about Bush's military service, Cleland hasn't. He has repeatedly challenged Bush to prove he met his Guard obligations.
  
  Whereupon the Republicans unleashed their blond guided missile, Ann Coulter. Here's what she had to say this week: "Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix." Coulter's version is akin to saying that John F. Kennedy was injured in World War II while taking a boat ride.
  
  Here's what really happened: In March 1968, the Tet offensive staged by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong was winding down -- except at Khe Sanh, a Marine outpost famous for the siege it endured. An Army-Marine team was put together to relieve the Khe Sanh garrison and Cleland, an Army captain, volunteered. The combat his unit saw was heavy. At one point Cleland, the battalion signals officer, was told to set up a radio site on a hill near Khe Sanh. As he was helicoptered in with a couple of young soldiers (presumably because it was too dangerous to walk or drive), he told the pilot he was going to stay awhile because he knew some of the guys on the hill. Maybe have a beer with them, he said. As the soldiers left the helicopter, Cleland noticed a grenade on the ground. He thought he'd dropped it and leaned down to pick it up. It exploded, shredding one arm and both legs. It took a heroic effort by medics and doctors to keep him alive.
  
  It is sick that Coulter can take that story and make it sound as if Cleland was safely ensconced at some rear area, ambling toward the officer's club for a few brews. She also fails to mention that Cleland won a Silver Star a week before he lost his limbs -- he was honored for braving enemy fire to tend wounded troops.
  
  There's more: The new Republican story about Kerry himself is that his Vietnam experience is sort of exaggerated. Heck, he was only there two months, the Republican shills for this line say. Well, actually, he was there for closer to four months. And the reason he was rotated home? Because he'd been wounded three times -- not to mention winning Bronze and Silver stars along with three Purple Hearts.
  
  Finally, there's the granddaddy of them all: Bush's gutter job on Sen. John McCain in the South Carolina primary of 2000. Bush lost to McCain in New Hampshire and wasn't going to allow it to happen again. So the Bush team resorted to what are called "push polls." They're designed to plant seeds of doubt about candidates. In South Carolina, callers asked those they were polling questions like: Would you be more or less likely to vote for McCain if you knew he'd fathered a black child out of wedlock? Some had him fathering the child with a prostitute. Others inquired whether voters knew that McCain's wife was a drug addict. And did they know he had abandoned his crippled first wife? It was nasty, nasty stuff, and it caused McCain to lose his composure in public, which didn't help his cause at all.
  
  McCain's wife indeed became addicted to painkillers at one time, in much the same way that radio mouth Rush Limbaugh did. Moreover, McCain and his wife had adopted a little girl from an orphanage in Bangladesh, so the "black child" story seemed confirmed to some.
  
  Democrats are capable of some of this, too. But for sheer effrontery, no one can hold a candle to Bush, his father and those who work for them, beginning with the late Lee Atwater and continuing through Rove. When it comes to truly gutter politics, they wrote the book -- or at least the modern version.

Jim Boyd, deputy editor of the editorial pages, is at jboyd@startribune.com.

February 27, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

• In Search of the President's Missing Years
  By MIMI SWARTZ
  
  HOUSTON
  
  Over the past few weeks, President Bush has responded to recurring questions about his National Guard service by saying that the subject is old and tiresome. According to Mr. Bush, reporters conducted a thorough investigation of his time in the Texas National Guard when he ran against Ann Richards for governor in 1994, and again when he ran against Al Gore in 2000. The complete Guard records, the president told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," were "scoured."
  
  This came as news to me, as I lived in and reported from Texas during those times and feel that questions about the story — Mr. Bush's life story — linger 10 years after his first political victory. Why they linger is a more complicated question, one that has as much to do with the press as it does with the president.
  
  Let's start at the beginning, with the 1994 governor's race between Ann Richards and Mr. Bush. Like many of George W. Bush's early opponents, the Richards team made the mistake of underestimating him. Ms. Richards's consultants and campaign strategists tried to portray Mr. Bush, initially at least, as a son of privilege who couldn't possibly be taken seriously. (Later they tried to spin him as a Machiavellian business mastermind; that didn't work either.) Mr. Bush's military record emerged as a weapon in the son-of-privilege arsenal, but the story had weak legs.
  
  This was partly because the records that the consultants and reporters possessed were incomplete — they were torn, with Mr. Bush's name and other crucial pieces of information blacked out — but also because the Richards campaign backed off the issue. As many people in Texas and beyond now know, Mr. Bush's Guard unit included more than a few sons of the state's rich and powerful, including Lloyd Bentsen III, son of the state's august Democratic senator. As Patrick Woodson, one of Ms. Richards's campaign consultants, told me earlier this month, "We were unofficially told that because of Bentsen's kid the Guard thing was not on the table."
  
  Then, too, the questions about Mr. Bush's military record were not focused on what he did in the Texas Guard but on how he managed to get in at a time when the waiting list for the National Guard, for instance, contained more than 100,000 names. Local reporters could coax one former Democratic state official into admitting, off the record, that he had interceded on Mr. Bush's behalf at the request of either a prominent Dallas businessman or George H. W. Bush, who was then a member of Congress. But the official's story — the source was later revealed to be former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes — was subject to change and there were no documents to support his claims.
  
  Late in the campaign, James Moore, then a reporter with KHOU-TV in Houston, put the question to Mr. Bush in a televised debate: had he received special treatment while other young men had fought and died in Vietnam? The candidate's less than illuminating answer: not that he knew of. But by then most Texans had made up their minds to vote for Mr. Bush — he trounced Ms. Richards, and the issue, not surprisingly, went away.
  
  Until 2000, at least. Mr. Bush's military service was an issue in the campaign, but, again, for various reasons, the digging didn't go very deep. Why? First, George Bush was a very popular governor. Ann Richards had run a divisive, partisan Statehouse. Mr. Bush, in contrast, was a genial host, and an efficient one. He wasn't the lightweight reporters had expected; he unified the Legislature, and he kept his campaign promises. His door was always open to the press — yes, he gave reporters nicknames — and many journalists were surprised that he could discuss tort reform as easily as he could talk about the Texas Rangers pitching staff. Not surprisingly, the state's political reporters took the governor seriously as a presidential candidate long before the national press did.
  
  But that loyalty created a new set of problems. Historically, journalists for the local daily don't do very well when the hometown pol makes a play for higher office. The Boston Globe, for example, has done a superb job investigating Mr. Bush's Guard record; it's my feeling, though, that the paper wasn't as impressive in its coverage of Michael Dukakis during his 1988 presidential run. (It was the local alternative weekly, The Boston Phoenix, that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for its campaign coverage.) And in Mr. Bush's case, many representatives of the Texas press corps — consciously or unconsciously — fell prey to the seductive notion that they were on a nickname basis with a man who might become the leader of the free world.
  
  The few who continued to dog Mr. Bush about his military service — most notably reporters at The Dallas Morning News — found their paths blocked in myriad ways. This time, it was Al Gore's handlers, not Ms. Richards's, who lacked enthusiasm for this particular avenue of attack. The vice president had served in Vietnam, but he couldn't claim war hero status, and any talk of military service inevitably reminded voters of Bill Clinton, who hadn't served at all.
  
  What's more, Mr. Bush's military service file remained incomplete — as it had in 1994. Some reporters got their information from time-consuming Freedom of Information Act requests, others took what they were handed by opposition researchers — in my experience, the unfortunate norm in most modern campaigns. If there was a release of documents comparable to the one made by the administration earlier this month, no one around here recalls it.
  
  What journalists had in the way of a paper trail led to suspicions that Mr. Bush's military record had been altered in preparation for a presidential bid — something that James Moore, the reporter who asked the Vietnam question in the 1994 governor's debate, suggests in a forthcoming book. Also, many people who were chatty in 1994 clammed up in 2000, perhaps fearful that they would alienate the future president or his famously long-memoried family. Without conclusive documentation or an attributable source, most reporters were stymied.
  
  It took Walter Robinson of The Boston Globe to look at Mr. Bush's file with a fresh eye; Mr. Robinson was the first to report, in May 2000, that Mr. Bush did not perform flight drills while in Alabama, and that the commander of the Alabama unit didn't remember him showing up for duty. But even that story was soon eclipsed by others in the heat of the campaign, most notably the revelation, late in the game, that Mr. Bush had been arrested in 1976 for driving under the influence. The issues surrounding his military service disappeared for another four years.
  
  In some ways, then, the president is right: questions about his military service have been raised every time he's run for office. But it's also true that the story still seems woefully incomplete and that there have been clear inconsistencies in the answers Mr. Bush and his associates have given about his time in the Guard. (Mr. Bush's associates said that he didn't take his 1972 military physical because his doctor in Houston was unavailable and that he lost his flight status because the plane he was training on was phased out — statements that have been shown to be debatable at best.) It's also disconcerting that each election cycle comes with a new set of "complete" documents.
  
  Perhaps 2004 will be the year that details of George W. Bush's time in the National Guard — indeed, his life in the early 1970's — finally get filled in. This time around, there are certain factors that might put added pressure on reporters, editors and news organizations to complete the story. After all, the questions about Mr. Bush's service are being raised while we are at war and while the president is facing a genuine war hero as a potential opponent. Maybe this year, 10 years after Mr. Bush's first political victory, the lingering questions will finally disappear.

Mimi Swartz, an executive editor of Texas Monthly, is the author, with Sherron Watkins, of "Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron."

February 29, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

• Sorry, Right Number
  
  By MAUREEN DOWD
  
  WASHINGTON
  
  Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, George Tenet was asked why the C.I.A. never picked up the trail of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed Flight 175 into the south tower on 9/11.
  
  Thirty months earlier, German intelligence had passed on a hot tip to the C.I.A. — the Al Qaeda terrorist's first name and phone number.
  
  "The Germans gave us a name, Marwan — that's it — and a phone number," the director of central intelligence replied, adding: "They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11, with then additional data."
  
  For crying out loud. As one guy I know put it: "I've tracked down women across the country with a lot less information than that."
  
  Mr. Tenet is not in any trouble for that sorry answer, of course, just as he hasn't had to pay any penalty for building up the phantom arsenal that Saddam only dreamed he had.
  
  The catchphrase du jour is Donald Trump's snappy, "You're fired." But no one has lost a job over the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 or the war that was trumped up and velcroed to 9/11. In fact, the only people the president and vice president are trying to put out of business are the members of the commission charged with figuring out how 9/11 happened and how to prevent another one.
  
  The White House seems more worried about the public's finding out how much it knew and how little it did before 9/11 than it does about identifying and fixing security weaknesses.
  
  After trying to kill the commission and then trying to put Dr. Strangelove-Kissinger in charge, President Bush and Dick Cheney have done their best to hamper the panel that's the best hope of the 9/11 widows, widowers and orphans to get justice.
  
  "This is not no-fault government," said Lorie Van Auken, a 9/11 widow. "You don't just let people go on doing what they're doing wrong."
  
  It is a triumph of chutzpah for Mr. Bush to thwart the investigation into 9/11 at the same time he seeks re-election by promoting his handling of 9/11 and scaring us with the specter of more terrorism. He's even using 9/11 memorials as the backdrop for his convention in New York.
  
  Last week, the president played it sly, acting as though he was willing to extend the commission's deadline to finish the work that was taking longer because the administration was stonewalling. But the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, was clearly helping out the White House, answering the "who will rid me of this meddlesome panel?" call.
  
  Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, who helped create the commission, played hardball, threatening highway funds and federal jobs if the commission didn't get two extra months. Mr. Hastert caved.
  
  Mr. McCain said he's expecting the same administration "obfuscation and delay" when he sits on Mr. Bush's hand-picked intelligence review board. "That's why I made sure I got subpoena power," he said. "No bureaucracy will willingly give you information that may be embarrassing to them."
  
  Especially not such a secretive, paranoid and high-handed administration. Bush officials act as though they own 9/11, even while refusing to own up to any 9/11 mistakes.
  
  Because of 9/11, they think they can suspend the Constitution, blow off investigators, attack nations pre-emptively, and keep Americans afraid by waging a war against terrorism that can never be won.
  
  As Bob Kerrey, a frustrated member of the 9/11 commission, told Chris Matthews, the U.S. should have declared war on Osama as soon as it became apparent that he had an army with a "tremendous, sophisticated capability" and an ideology that dictated killing Americans.
  
  "To declare war on terrorism, it seems to me to have the target wrong," he said. "It would be like after the 7th of December, 1941, declaring war on Japanese planes. We declared war on Japan. We didn't declare war on their tactic. . . . Terrorism is a tactic."
  
  A Bush 41 official agreed: "You can't fight terrorism conventionally like a war. Any 16-year-old kid can strap on dynamite and take down any building. It must be fought clandestinely, dealing with the underlying causes and taking security measures in our own country."
  
  Here's a hot tip: If you think the White House should be more cooperative with the 9/11 commission, call George at (202) 456-1111.
  
  I'm sure everyone outside the C.I.A. can take it from there. _