What we really need to know is, who took the last eggroll? A day late, and a bit more than a dollar short, the Richard Clarke story lands on A1. The lead tells you everything you need to know:

As the White House opened an aggressive personal attack against its former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, a furious debate broke out on Monday about the credibility of his assertion that President Bush pushed him the day after the Sept. 11 attacks to see if there was a link with Saddam Hussein.

The White House dismissed the accusations, described in a new book by Mr. Clarke, by casting him as a disgruntled, politically motivated job seeker and a "best buddy" of a top adviser to Senator John Kerry. But Mr. Clarke defended his account, and several allies rallied to his defense.

Elisabeth Bumiller and Judith Miller, "Ex-Bush Aide Sets Off Debate as 9/11 Hearing Opens"

Remember the playbook? Dear Leader is never on the defensive. The initiative is always with Bush and his surrogates. Clarke's making accusations of non-feasance on the part of the President on vital matters of national security: charges which (in a different world than the one we appear to inhabit) might well be enough to run him from office. [The most significant failures to act, of course, are the ones in the period before 9/11. The two Millers, Judy and Bu, never acknowledge that that's what really puts the sting in Clarke's charges, as they acknowledge only midway through the piece, practically as an aside, the broad scope of his attacks. Instead their lead focuses on his claim about a single incident, "a conversation that Mr. Clarke said he had with Mr. Bush in the White House Situation Room on the night of Sept. 12, 2001," on which narrow synecdochic base the whole is apparently supposed to stand or fall.] And yet what "furious" national debate has been touched off by these accusations? Naturally, a debate about the accuser's credibility!

Notice, by the way, the rhetorical deftness of "a furious debate broke out": as if "debate" on Clarke's credibility were general, and had emerged disinterestedly and spontaneously—not as if, you know, the White House had immediately sprung up with an orchestrated attempt to discredit its accuser, an effort which the VRWC and the on-our-backs press is expected to amplify.

The real journalistic impoverishment of the article is in the last sentence of the quote above. What happens when you put two stenographers (Liz Bumiller, stenographer to White House flacks, and Judy Miller, self-admitted stenographer to neo-con securocrats and Ahmed Chalabi) on one assignment? Unsurprisingly, you get stenography. So the Millers type up some of Clarke's charges, and they type up a few quotes from his "defenders," (understood that the context is, whether or not Clarke can sustain his credibility), then they type up—no, of course not Administration response to the charges, but the efforts of Bush cutouts to smear Clarke:

The angry White House response to Mr. Clarke, which was authorized by Mr. Bush, reflects the administration's fears over the book's potential political damage. In a daylong assault on Monday, administration officials portrayed Mr. Clarke, a secretive, combative terrorism expert who spent more than three decades working in the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations, as a bitter former employee who had been denied the No. 2 position in the Department of Homeland Security and who was now trying to help the Kerry campaign.

From here, we follow with a graf distilling Dick Cheney's conversation yesterday with Rush Limbaugh, in which he essentially calls Clarke a failure at his job who nobody should pay attention to, and then it's on to Scott McClellan letting us know that Clarke's "best buddy is Senator Kerry's principal foreign policy adviser." As always, the he-said-he-said form absolves the writers of having to do anything except type (though it's funny how the stenography inexorably skews to the GOP side): as they feel no real responsibility to evaluate or contextualize Clarke's accusations, they also seem to feel it's no responsibility of theirs to assess whether the BushCo counter-charges are true or fair or on-point. They slime, you decide.

By all means persist to the end of the article, because you don't want to miss this nya-nya comic highlight from Condi Rice's spokesguy:

Administration officials said that throughout his tenure in the Bush administration, Mr. Clarke appeared to be generally supportive of the president's policies, and never brought to Ms. Rice a broad critique of either the administration's approach to terrorism or its plan for invading Iraq.

Sean McCormack, Ms. Rice's spokesman, said that Mr. Clarke ate lunch with Ms. Rice in her West Wing office after he had left the administration, a month or two before the attack on Iraq, and gave none of the warnings he gave in the book.

He ate lunch with Condi in her office! See, they were pals—how dare he say all this bad stuff now! [That lunch would have been the perfect time to give her the warnings she'd completely fucking ignored on every other occasion that he'd tried to press them. I'm sure she'd have called the whole Iraq thing off if only he'd opened up to her over the moo goo gai pan.]

posted by michael  10:27:24 AM  
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