Pity poor David Halbfinger, whose quest for the Great White Whale of the Kerry campaign—Kerry's Veep choice—has reduced him to standing like a mook outside Kerry HQ:

On Friday afternoon, the campaign was mum on the subject, even though a man who looked exactly like Senator Bob Graham of Florida arrived at and departed from the building where Mr. Kerry has his campaign headquarters.

[big snip]

On Friday, Mr. Kerry again sought to throw the news media off his scent, but again was not 100 percent successful. The man who looked exactly like Mr. Graham arrived in a sedan with dark-tinted windows at 2:35 p.m., about half an hour before Mr. Kerry's motorcade showed up at the campaign headquarters, but before reporters had taken up positions at every entrance to the building. The man left just before 5 p.m., minutes after Mr. Kerry's motorcade had left for Capitol Hill, with another passenger holding a portfolio in front of the man's face.

"Recalling Anguish in 2000, Kerry Is Mum on No. 2"

[This isn't the first time Halbfinger's been put in this position lately—eRobin at Fact-esque noticed an earlier installment of this little access drama just a couple of days ago.]  It's just not fair, is it—where's the traditional dignity of the Timesman?

Notice Halbfinger's whipped-puppy tone as he reports Kerry's determination to shield his selection process as far as possible from media view:

Unlike Mr. Gore, who did little to disavow what his aides were saying to reporters, Mr. Kerry seems to revel in reminding journalists that even his own staff is woefully uninformed.

"I read with amusement about aides who don't know what they're talking about," Mr. Kerry said on Thursday. "I have not made a decision yet, and I'm the only person who knows when I will make a decision and what direction it will take."

And on Wednesday, after leaving a scarcely concealed 90-minute meeting with Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, Mr. Kerry cautioned reporters, "I wouldn't report anything you haven't confirmed"—though two Democratic officials did confirm that the men had indeed discussed the vice presidency.

Halbfinger is reduced to rehashing the four-year-old story of Al Gore's VP selection process (when Kerry was one of the possibles) as background—leading him to what has to be one of the most laughably pathetic grafs he's ever written:

Through an aide, Mr. Gore declined to comment on Friday. But Mark Fabiani, who was his deputy campaign manager, defended the way the vice presidential search was publicized four years ago.

When you're asking the last campaign's operatives to defend their process of four years back, you're really gasping for air.

And I say to Kerry, brilliant job, keep it up.  Don't give these guys an inch.  Pack animals like Halbfinger only learn who's boss when they get sufficiently well pissed on.

posted by michael  3:12:30 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Utterly without balls on its own account, at least where Dick "Dick" Cheney is concerned (see yesterday's post), the Times today finds itself in the somewhat humiliating position of having to report on how those who've managed to retain their cojones respond to outrageous provocation.

Cheney, of course, continues madly to insist that he knows something nobody else does, including the 9/11 commission, about those ties-that-didn't-bind between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.

"Probably," Mr. Cheney replied. ...

Mr. Cheney also said in the television interview that after Osama bin Laden had requested "terror training from Iraq, the Iraqi intelligence service responded; it deployed a bomb-making expert, a brigadier general." The commission's report concluded that Mr. bin Laden's requests went unanswered.

Philip Shenon and Richard W. Stevenson, "Leaders of 9/11 Panel Ask Cheney for Reports"

Well, the chairmen of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, aren't having any of it.  They've engaged in a bit of polite but extremely pointed bureaucratic kung fu to emphasize that fact, insisting that Cheney and the White House turn over whatever "intelligence" they possess that would demonstrate Iraq-Al Qaeda connections the commission had missed.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton made the requests in separate interviews with The New York Times as the White House continued to question the findings of a staff report the commission released on Wednesday and to take exception to the way the report was characterized in news accounts. The report found that there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the terrorist network.

"It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have," Mr. Hamilton said in an phone interview. "I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about."

Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in a phone interview that he was surprised by Mr. Cheney's comments and would be "very disappointed" if the White House had not shared intelligence information about Al Qaeda with the commission.

The Hamilton-Kean tag-team play here is admirably deft.  By the simple expedient of pretending to take Cheney seriously (because the Vice President of the United States wouldn't just make shit up, would he?), they suggest a world of hurt for the White House:  shut down this insane spin operation, or we'll pummel you for withholding from the 9/11 commission.  [The play wouldn't work, incidentally, if Hamilton and Kean hadn't skillfully maneuvered the commission in these last months into a position of greater political legitimacy—vastly greater at this point, I'd say—than the Presidency itself can claim.  Let's remember the Administration's somewhat abortive PR effort of a couple of months ago, in which the Times' Jim Rutenberg gleefully and ignobly enlisted, to disparage Kean and Hamilton as politically motivated blowhards ("9/11 Panel Comments Freely (Some Critics Say Too Freely)").  Yeah, that didn't get the Bushies anywhere, did it?]

Buried in the report, in fact, is information suggesting that the commission chairs know, thanks to the White House's own implicit admission, that they're on quite firm ground.

Other commission officials disclosed on Friday that the White House had sent a letter to the commission—stamped "secret"—on the eve of this week's hearings that demanded a variety of changes in its staff reports this week. But the officials said the White House letter did not seek any changes in the portions of the report that dispute any relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

[Shenon and Stevenson go on to quote anonymous White House "advisers" promising continued aggressiveness in "countering the commission's conclusions"—without seeming to notice that they've just reported a significant failure of such promised aggressiveness.] This bit of info, by the way, also suggests that it was Kean and Hamilton, knowing they already held all the cards and determined to go on the offensive, who initiated their interviews with the Times, rather than the Times approaching them (which, while not exactly being ballsy, would have shown at least a minimum of gumption).  That, and the fact that Shenon and Stevenson remain too craven, and too lazy, to oppose Administration spin today with facts drawn from the record.  This is true in several places in the article, nowhere more embarrassingly than in the matter of the much-debunked fable of a Prague meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence, which Kean and Hamilton say they're particularly interested in seeing Cheney's "evidence" for:

Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either.

"We just don't know," Mr. Cheney said.

Leave aside Cheney's transparent intellectual dishonesty, which turns the impossibility of absolutely proving a negative into a practical affirmation of the positive.  (Rhetorical notions, like plausibility, or degrees of proof, have no place in Cheney's Platonic la-la land.)  As nearly complete disproof of the Prague story as possible (to convince reasonable people) has, in fact, already been offered in the commission staff report—as noted by, among others, the NY Times' own James Risen earlier this week:

The report cited a photograph taken by a bank surveillance camera in Virginia showing Mr. Atta withdrawing money on April 4, 2001, a few days before the supposed Prague meeting on April 9, and records showing his cellphone was used on April 6, 9, 10 and 11 in Florida.

Needless to say, none of this manages to surface in today's article, which simply takes Cheney's "We don't know" at face value. I continue to marvel at Richard Stevenson's unwillingness, not just to commit the sin of reporting fact (where fact would irritate anyone in the Bush Administration, at least), but to read his own fucking newspaper.

posted by michael  2:27:13 PM  
tell me about it []