Page Pals

Well, we had a small but fun meeting at Patty and Sue's house last night. We talked about the book, about the fact that Katie has repackaged cognitive therapy in a way that is accessible. And we had a wonderful conversation about the nature of insight and epiphanies.

Thanks Patty, for this book. It has already been helpful to me.

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One interesting result of the controversy as to exactly how much the Administration was lying about an Al Queda-Iraq connection is that folks are going back and trying to figure out how they actually went about it. Here, for instance, is Matt Yglesias on Bush's Gricean implicatures.

"People are Fungible"

a.k.a., Rumsfeld betting the American voter won't look "fungible" up.

The Memory Hole

I'd like to assemble as big a list as possible of links/resources/whatever that confirm Clarke's story -- for instance, there's a couple of unguarded quotations from the Shrub Himself in Woodward's Bush at War that have been bouncing around blogland, and I ran across more than a few other revelatory stories -- e.g., Bush was heard saying the words "Al Queda" or "bin Laden" between 1/01 and 9/01 exactly zero times -- before I thought to start archiving them. Please send anything you have as comments to this thread, and I'll assemble 'em all for the RPF website. Meanwhile, Slate has some good stuff on who isn't part of the smear campaign -- Tenet and Powell, the ones who are in the best position to confirm or deny Clarke's claims.

UPDATE: Here's the kind of thing I'm looking for: It was 27 months ago that Bob Woodward, writing in The Washington Post, first quoted the president as saying that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before Sept. 11. The Bush administration's downsizing, stalling and fumbling of the fight against terrorism in the seven-plus months between Inauguration Day and 9/11 was reported by Time in August 2002. The failure of Rice to advance Clarke's Jan. 25, 2001, memo on Al Qaeda's urgent threat has been recounted (and sourced) in detail in such best sellers as Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" and Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud," both of which beat Clarke's own account to the stores. (Still to come is a new Woodward best seller about the ramp-up to Iraq, "Plan of Attack," which "60 Minutes" will herald two weeks from tonight and which Rush Limbaugh is already pre-emptively trashing as being from "the same publisher" as the Clarke book.) From an IHT article on the telegenicity, if that's a word, of various players in the 9/11 hearings, c/o Kos.

Atrios, and Bill Gallagher, and Kevin Drum, and John Nichols are all saying in one way or another how much grief the Bushistas could spare themselves if they only could find some way around the, in Nichols's words, "absolute inability on the part of Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to admit when they have failed."

I don't have much to add to this, except I wouldn't pin it so much on Rice .... Check Rumsfeld for instance, who -- even knowing how much praise, how much of a boost to his credibility, Clarke got out of a very simple act of contrition -- still was psychologically incapable of anything close to that act, even with Jim Lehrer handholding him through it:

MR. LEHRER: At these 9/11 hearings yesterday, as I reported in the news summary and everybody knows now, the counterterror – former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke said to the families of the 9/11 victims, quote, “your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. I failed you,” end quote. As secretary of defense, do you have any sense of failure concerning what happened on 9/11?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, I hate to separate myself as secretary of defense. Secretary – the Department of Defense, of course, is oriented to external threats. This was a domestic airplane that was operated by people who were in the United States against a United States target, which makes it a law enforcement – historically a law enforcement issue.


Amazing. And, of course, when it might have been our responsibility it was a law enforcement issue, but when there's a chance to go kill folks it's a war.

Analyses of the State of the Union address by Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet, Jeff Koopersmith (who reams the biblical diction that Kusnet finds effective), Arianna Huffington (on the "marriage initiative"), Rahul Mahajan, Tom Engelhardt, David Corn, Greg Palast (on Bush's "educational eugenics"), Richard Cohen, David von Drehle and Calvin Woodward, George Lakoff, Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, and Matthew Yglesias. Plus some fact checking by The Center for American Progress.