Sometimes The New Republic tries to pretend it is not a GOP shill

[Robbien]

The have an article today which does a great response to the WH smear campaign on Clarke. It is entitled All Bark, No Bite
The four Clarke smears and the four TNR answers which expose the WH "misspeakers" are:

He's a partisan Democrat: "His best friend is Rand Beers, who is the principal adviser to the Kerry campaign," asserted White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. Leave aside the fact that Clarke was a registered Republican who served under three GOP presidents without betraying any signs of Democratic leanings. Instead, consider the bizarreness of the allegation that Clarke is untrustworthy due to his association with Beers, whom Bush appointed to head counterterrorism at the National Security Council. Of course, Beers, like Clarke, quit the administration in disgust over its deficient anti-terrorism policy. So Beers, a Bush official who turned against Bush, has become a partisan, and thus Clarke has become a partisan as well, by dint of personal association. If Dick Cheney were to quit the Bush administration in protest, then he too could be dismissed as a disgruntled anti-Bush partisan. Cheney, after all, was friends with Paul O'Neill.

He doesn't know what he's talking about: " was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. ... He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff," Cheney told Rush Limbaugh on Monday. Clarke, in this telling, comes across as some sort of lonely computer geek whom the administration briefly allowed to hang around, perhaps out of pity. In fact, he was the anti-terrorism czar until two months after September 11. Cheney might remember Clarke being in his office shortly after the attacks or perhaps national security adviser Condoleezza Rice asking Clarke, "OK, Dick, you're the crisis manager, what do you recommend?" or perhaps the scene that afternoon in the White House situation room, when Cheney asked him, "Are you getting everything you need, everybody doing what you want?"

He has a strange meetings fetish: Clarke has pointed to his inability to secure high-level meetings on terrorism as the best evidence of the administration's lack of interest in the subject. Bushies have tried to paint this as some kind of irrational fixation. "To somehow suggest that the attack on nine-eleven could have been prevented by a series of meetings--I have to tell you that during the period of time we were at battle stations," asserted Rice. But then McClellan tried to demonstrate the White House's seriousness by arguing that "Doctor Rice, early on in the administration, started holding daily briefings with the senior directors of the National Security Council, of which was one." Apparently, some meetings are more important than others.

He was too soft on Al Qaeda: Clarke vigorously advocated aggressive action to roll back Al Qaeda, but the Bushies have tried to spin his suggestions as a form of appeasement. "We didn't feel it was sufficient to simply roll back Al Qaeda; we pursued a policy to eliminate Al Qaeda," argued McClellan. According to Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying before the 9/11 Commission this week, "We wanted to move beyond the rollback policy of containment, criminal prosecution, and limited retaliation for specific terrorist attacks. We wanted to destroy Al Qaeda." So now "rollback" is synonymous with "containment," and both are the opposite of "elimination." In fact, as anybody with even a passing familiarity with foreign policy can attest, "rollback" means just the opposite of containment--it is synonymous with "elimination." The administration might want to better arm its peasants.

[billybob537]

1. Do you think

they just want to remain in business after Nov.04. A meetings fetish? Probably the greatest success Clarke had was DEC 31 1999. They stopped that attack!