Zing!

John Kerry on CNBC's Street Signs, responding to the (valid) notation that roughly 7 million of his 10 million job proposal is in natural labor force growth--the assumption that generally there is enough growth to give jobs to new entrants into the labor force.

Ron Insana:
"Economists tell me that that 7 million jobs go to the President no matter who's in the White House for those for years, like getting 200 for signing your SATs..."

Kerry:
"Excuse me, Ron. They haven't gone to George Bush. He's lost three million jobs. He's the first president in 50 years to have a net loss of jobs."

Brief silence.

The press gets quicker

Having already read the basic facts of the MSBNC online "cover story" regarding Richard Clarke and claims that he had "lied under oath" in classified testimony to Congress, I semiconsciously wondered if something had developed during the afternoon that indicated leaked contradictions or something. When I had left it last, Bob Graham--who supports declassification of the testimony, by the way--had said he recalled no contradictions or inconsistencies. Was there a firm discrepancy that had gotten out, perhaps via--gasp--Drudge?

This is the GOP. Why did I think it would actually regard new evidence?

“Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath,” Frist said in a speech from the Senate floor, alleging that Clarke said in 2002 that the Bush administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al-Qaida before the attacks.

Frist later retreated from directly accusing Clarke of perjury, telling reporters that he personally had no knowledge that there were any discrepancies between Clarke’s two appearances. But he said, “Until you have him under oath both times, you don’t know.”

In the parlance of internet bulletin boards, :rolleyes:

At least it didn't cross over a news cycle for the charge to be defused. But what is MSNBC doing debunking the strong language in the body, and running the language in the headline?

Bush at the correspondents dinner

This got more play on the cable news shows tonight than it has so far in the mainstream bibles. I caught the best article so far from The Chronicle, routed through Lucianne Goldberg. The Lucies are pretty psyched over the performance of self-deprecation, but apparently "liberals" are a little put off by Bush presenting a parodied slide show in which he fruitlessly searches the Oval Office for those darn WMDs. It does seem like a very odd choice to make, given that it occurred the same night that Washington was buzzing about the former terrorism czar calling him out on Iraq. It's supposed to be a joke, obviously, but there's at least some truth in most jokes. And that small truth is that Bush really DOESN'T appear to care that they didn't turn up, or that a central pillar of the invasion justification turned out to be terribly wrong. It's grist for the humor mill in front of the press. A press, who it should be said (and it was by Hardball tonight) mostly laughed heartily and seemed to enjoy the joke (although David Corn at Nation did not, to his credit). So it was taken as one in the context, but when you're President and it's being taped, you'd better vet your jokes for possible callousness or outright offensiveness. As Chris Matthews noted, it may not be very funny to wounded veterans or the families of KIAs to hear their Commander in Chief joke about the reasons he sent them to Iraq.

There's plenty swirling around Bush at the moment, so this may easily fade into the background and never make much of a story. But Matthews also had one of the 9/11 family spokespeople on, and they've done several shows responding to Bush's ads and the hearings, among other things. I'm very curious about "the 9/11 families" as a bloc to be reckoned with. How are they organized? Do they really speak of one mind, or are their factions even among the public faces they put on? If you know the answers point me toward them, but so far there's only been one side expressed, and it's unfavorable to the administration.

They were on the morning shows praising Clarke for admitting responsibility and apologizing. They were on Hardball calling for Rice to testify, and whaddya know, now Rice says she wants to come back. The number of direct reversals from the administration this week has been dizzying. Clarke is out of the loop! No wait, he was integral! He was in cyberterrorism before 9/11! Wait, no he wasn't. The president had no plan for Iraq the week after 9/11! Uh, well, OK, he did. And now Rice goes from refusing on principle to involve staff in testimony, and to declassify internal documents, to asking for the chance to testify (privately, again) and declassifying those that make Clarke look bad and the admin good. My head!

I really do think that if Kerry runs to victory in November, yesterday was the day we hit critical mass. Stirling Newberry at BOP04 does a nice job of trying to capture the zeitgeist.

Back to Hardball for a postscript. A nice line by Karen Tumulty during coverage of the "Democratic Unity Dinner": as one variant of this image of presidents and candidate showed up on the monitor: "They all look like flight attendants for the same airline."

The new Fox poll

Regular visitors to the World know I like Fox's polls. Not because I think they're the most accurate, but because they are a reliable lagging indicator. By the time Fox gets around to catching a negative Bush trend, it's become the CW.

I'm developing another interest in them recently, though. Today's series is the third in a row over about five weeks--five very dynamic weeks, poll-wise--to show both a dead heat and no movement. In fact, it's basically identical to the one taken two weeks ago; 44-all with one percent more deciding they won't vote. (Maybe if you're going to bail out early on an election, this is the one). When Nader gets thrown in, he has no effect whatsoever. (Also notice how much lower Nader's support is in the Fox poll than elsewhere--down to 3%.)

Not only is it curious that a poll of 900 people entirely different from the 900 they talked to two weeks ago would come out exactly the same, it's positively spooky given the ups and downs already in the campaign. Mickey Kaus has been going bezerk over tracking polls and it's no coincidence he calls them "crack" in today's notes. It's horse race mythology boiled down into daily box scores, and as someone who scrutinizes actual box scores with an unhealthy zest I can tell you that today's game will bear no relationship to tomorrow's, and in fact is likely to be 180 degrees from it.

There's no denying that Kerry got a huge bounce from the primary/coronation season, and then was buffeted to a certain extent by Bush ads before the Clarke shoe dropped. But the seven point spread in the last three days against Bush at Rasmussen is what it takes to make the movement any kind of real. Kaus watched Kerry go from 1 point up to 3 points down in the CBS poll--all within the margin of error, mind you--and declared "Bush moves ahead" to be the story. That's not movement. That's why they call it a margin of error. Also, CBS's poll trend represents two points in time, two weeks apart. Going from three up to four down in a tracking poll where each day's number is a weighted three-day average, is a much bigger deal than that kind of movement in two one-day polls.

And yet, none of this registers with so much as a blip for the people who answer Fox's surveys. Perhaps they're cryogenically frozen between series.

Around the sphere on Clarke

Well, it's a big story, officially. The right half of the blogosphere and punditocracy is going positively apeshit, which seems to reflect more than a little panic in my view. They're following the lead of the White House, which is lashing out with all kinds of spokespeople saying all kinds of things--almost whatever comes into their heads. Clarke was both out of the loop and proof that they took terrorism seriously because they hired him; he was too obsessed with al-Qaeda, but the White House was obsessed just enough; they thought he was a crackpot so they demoted him, but terrorism was so important they...demoted their terrorism expert from Cabinet status. And none of it really refutes any of the charges Clarke makes.

National Review goes for broke: not one or two, but FIVE top columns putting Clarke through the wringer. Mansoor Ijaz wants the 9/11 Commission to focus on the mid 90s, and chooses to repeat some of the shady claims of failed bin Laden handovers. Jim Geraghty wonders why Clarke isn't more pissed at Clinton for ignoring him too (although at least Geraghty parses excerpts and charges from Clarke's book), Bill Buckley shamelessly continues to plug the Iraqi terrorist connection and plausibility of nuke holocaust, Rich Lowry amusingly contends that it's Bush critics who are going all out to tar the president, and Byron York reprises a 2002 article where people had the audacity to bring up some of the same charges as Clarke, but that Clinton was worse, so they didn't stick. Apparently, and this is just a guess, the columnists at NRO do not think much of Richard Clarke's book.

John Podhoretz goes apoplectic, defeating Clarke's claims by calling him a "self-regarding buffoon."

FoxNews, once again utterly silent on the issue.

As usual, Phil Carter is a breath of fresh air when it comes to these things. He has the analyst's eye that may make it easier for him to feel comfortable criticizing the administration on tactics, but he's not one to lay out hyperbole, and he is entirely uncomplimentary of Bush's team. He thinks Clarke is credible, and in a reversal of the charge that Clarke was too old school to be believed, Carter pins that tail on Rice's donkey. He also links back to Josh Marshall, who (OK, the "battle stations" thing may be true about Josh) is firing with several barrels at once, and Fred Kaplan, who gives a 100% endorsement to the book and the man. Bill Saletan also weighs in, noting the sharp tendency for any Bush representative to squawk "Clinton was worse!" when poked.

It's still early, but the first attempts at attacking Clarke's credibility have not appeared to have been able to kill the story. Clarke gets his rebuttal tomorrow in the 9/11 hearings, which will likely provoke another massive White House response for Thursday's papers. Which means this will get at least a week's worth of news cycles. At this point, I'd be willing to bet that the "Bush bounce" of a couple points will be reversed by next week, and we'll be back to square 1.5.

More on Clarke coverage

Here's Fox's news page via MyWay, as of today at 140pm. See any mention of the Clarke story? See any mention of the White House hammering the Clarke story in any venue they can find? See any mention of the Clarke story at the bottom, among their "earlier news" stories?

Me either.

The best they can do?

The non-denial denials and character disparagements have begun against Richard Clarke. Note how there doesn't appear to be anyone disputing the content of the three conversations Clarke had with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, or the President. Condi Rice doesn't even really dispute Clarke's account of their conversation, in which he accused her of not appearing to know anything about al-Qaeda:

"I wasn't born yesterday when Clarke briefed me," she said. "This wasn't an issue of who knew about al Qaeda, but what we were going to do about al Qaeda."

But the reason I post this particular article is for the two patently absurd comments made in the administration's defense. Here's the first, also from Rice:

Rice said looking at Iraq made sense. "Iraq, given our history, given the fact they tried to kill a former president, was a likely suspect," she said.

Let's put aside for the moment the fact that this is another non-denial--she doesn't deny that they made Iraq a likely suspect; she continues trying to justify making them a likely suspect. But look at the reason she chose: they tried to kill GDub's dad. First of all, what assassination of a head of state has to do, terrorism-wise, with bringing down two skyscrapers with hijacked planes, I have no idea. Secondly, isn't this one of the rationales that the administration would probably like to avoid--"we invaded because he tried to kill George Senior?" It oozes of Inigo Montoya-like overemotionalism: "My name is George W Bush. You tried to kill my father. Prepare...to die!" The last thing Bush needs right now is to have his Iraqi war framed as a revenge job.

The other strange comment comes from a "Pentagon spokesman," an odd title to give anonymously. If they're not willing to go on record, obviously they're not _really_ speaking for the Pentagon, are they? Anyway, here's the line:

"Richard Clarke is missing the context. It's not clear he understands what the global war on terrorism was about," said the Pentagon spokesman.

A four-president, 30-year NSC anti-terrorism specialist doesn't understand what the global war on terrorism was about? That doesn't even pass the internal logic sniff test; one of the excuses the denial machine turned out today was that the administration was definitely focused on terrorism, otherwise they wouldn't have held over the NSC terrorism expert, Richard Clarke. Of course, they were so focused on it that they demoted the job down from Cabinet-level. What this spokesman is saying is*, Clarke didn't understand what the White House wanted to make the global war on terrorism about. I think he clearly understood it; he just happened to think it was all wrong.

I wondered how many news cycles would come of this, but if these are the best shots the smear machine can fire at Clarke, it will have some legs. The testimony to the 9/11 commission tomorrow will re-stoke those fires.

*Update--this meme has been successfully echoed into the punditocracy; both Kondracke and Krauthammer explained that Clarke was Osama-obsessed, that he was just too civil service and too old to accept the paradigm shift to nation states, and Rice alluded to the same theme in her defiant tour of the studio shows who love a good slapfest between intel nerds. Don't disbelieve for a minute the "Pentagon spokesman" was a trial balloon with a leak to the papers, so they could reinforce it in the evening and have it echoed in prime time on the shows. They've known this was coming for months.

Liberal media to blame for spam!

David Broder, stop bothering people!

:)

Sordid details

I knew Richard Clarke surely had unkind things to say about the performance of the Bush administration before and shortly after 9/11 when his book came out, and I knew he also wanted to sell a book. But Clarke--who served under four consecutive Presidents and basically managed the country immediately after the attacks--on CBS laid out three devastatingly specific conversations with three senior administrative figures, each of which, in Clarke's mind, left no doubt that Iraq was to be the focus, not al-Qaeda. The three conversations:

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking...Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

and the most mysterious and big-time conversation:

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

I imagine this story is weighing down the left end of the blogosphere seesaw tonight, so I won't say much now. I just wanted to highlight what I thought was the key evidence (alleged evidence) from Lesley Stahl's report. Kerry had a pretty bad week, but there's a perfect storm of books and hearings and investigations coming down the pike this summer, and I think Bush is going to be on the defensive for a good portion of it.