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Politics

McClellan apologizes to Richard Clarke for smearing him as press secretary.

By Satyam Khanna on May 30, 2008 at 8:55 pm

Scott McClellan is currently the subject of a White House smear campaign because of his new book. But as press secretary, McClellan helped smear Richard Clarke after Clarke revealed that the White House “ignored terrorism for months” and sought to tie 9/11 to Iraq immediately. According to Clarke, McClellan apologized to him last night, stating, “I should have known how personal it would get when they went after me, well, I mean, after what I said about you.” On MSNBC today, Clarke said the apology was “genuine.” Watch it:


Update

McClellan confirmed he apologized to Clarke in a Washington Post online chat:

Richard Clarke is someone
I criticized from the podium. I actually saw him last night in New
York and expressed my regret for the way I handled that situation.

Economy

McCain Claims His Iraq Plan Will Help The Economy

By Sarah on May 30, 2008 at 8:29 pm

war-economy.jpgYesterday, at a predominately supporter-attended town hall meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sen. John McCain was asked some tough questions about the “central tenets” of his campaign. One question, centered around the Iraq war and the American economy, was particularly poignant:

Q: No surrender and not being willing to negotiate, how is that going to help our economy going further?

McCain: Let me put it this way, there would be catastrophic consequences. I would like to assure you, ma’am, no one hates war more than a veteran. I know war. I hate war. I believe that our economic difficulties can be addressed. I also believe that by winning in Iraq, that will reduce those costs.

Only by leaving Iraq would we be much better equipped to “address” the difficulties of the American economy — mostly because we won’t be spending $200 million per day to fight an unnecessary war.

But does McCain have any intention of getting us out of that mess? McCain has professed his express intention to stay in Iraq for another 100 years if we have to. His Bush-esque rhetoric also remains consistent: “stay the course” in Iraq and “expand defense spending.”

Starting back in 2002, before the American invasion, economists predicted that waging a war in the Middle East would make the US budget deficit soar. In January, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the US deficit is estimated to amount to $219 billion — $56 billion more than last year — by the end of 2008. This does not include the $165 billion check that Congress just wrote for additional war funding.

At the end of the day, John McCain believes that sustaining a war that could conceivably cost American taxpayers $200 million/day x 365 days/year x 100 years would help the economy. He must really not know much about the economy.

Politics

Does McCain have ‘a lack of appreciation’ for Gulf Coast reconstruction?

By Faiz Shakir on May 30, 2008 at 7:50 pm

John McCain has asserted that, because Barack Obama has not visited Iraq since 2006, it demonstrates a “lack of appreciation of the importance of this issue.” The Huffington Post notes that, by analogy, McCain must have a lack of appreciation for the importance of post-Katrina reconstruction. “Up until traveling there one month ago, [McCain] had made just one public tour of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina touched down in August 2005.” Obama has visited five times over the same period.

Yglesias

Summer Mixtape, Delayed

By ThinkProgress on May 30, 2008 at 6:50 pm

[Alyssa]

I know I promised ya’ll a summer mixtape, but I do have a day job, and I haven’t had time to sort through all your suggestions yet. So I’ll ask Matt if we can put one up as soon as I can get it together, by the first day of summer at the latest. And feel free to keep the selections coming.

Media

The joys of niche journalism

By ThinkProgress on May 30, 2008 at 6:44 pm

[Alyssa]

So, I think it’s probably fair for me to guess that almost all of you have no idea what my employer, Government Executive, does. I didn’t either, until I started freelancing for them, and discovered that this magazine catering to federal employees had almost 80,000 subscribers and web traffic growing in the direction of half a million unique visitors each month. I just had no idea the audience was out there, because I never really bothered to think about it. But since I started covering federal workforce issues full-time, I’ve learned two things, one about journalism, and one about government.

1) Niche publications may be an increasingly important part of journalism’s future, as long as the niche is of reasonable size. There are 1.8 million civilian federal employees, not including Postal Service workers. That’s a huge market, and those readers are incredibly hungry for information about the conditions that govern their jobs.

And by narrowing down our beats, we get to do much deeper reporting than we might if we were at a publication that had a broader mandate. For example, my colleagues Robert Brodsky and Elizabeth Newell took the New York Times’ story on AEY Inc., ran with it, and figured out the backstory behind how AEY got labeled a disadvantaged business, a status that proved crucial to the firm’s success. The Times had the story of what happened, but Elizabeth and Rob figured out why.

2) What’s going on in the federal workforce right now is drastically under covered. Huge numbers of career federal employees are about to retire, especially in senior leadership ranks, and hiring freezes in the 1990s mean there aren’t enough people to move smoothly up the ranks to fill those vacancies. These circumstances are prompting a reform boom: federal agencies are working to streamline the hiring process, adopting alternate work schedules and telework policies, and developing programs in coordination with nonprofits like the Partnership for Public Service to reach recruits of all who wouldn’t have considered federal service before.

But those efforts may be too late to prevent disruptions to federal services and federal agencies. Wonder why your plane is late? It’s partially airport capacity, but it may also partly be due to a mass exodus of air traffic controllers. Has it taken forever for you to get a passport? The State Department had to shift junior employees to process applications. Upset about the U.S. Attorneys scandal? The complexities of the relationships between political appointees and career federal employees provides key context. More stories than I ever realized come back to the people who work in government.

Politics

Conservatives Try To Smear McClellan By Calling Him A ‘Left-Wing Hater’ Reciting ‘Blogworld Talking Points’

By Amanda Terkel on May 30, 2008 at 6:16 pm

mccc.jpg The White House and its allies have gone out and attacked former press secretary Scott McClellan as “disgruntled,” a “traitor,” and even “Judas.” But one of the insults increasingly popping up is probably, to the Bush administration, the most insulting: comparing McClellan to a left-wing blogger.

Today, for example, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes went on The Diane Rehm Show and tried to undermine McClellan’s allegations by saying that he was simply reciting “left-wing blogworld talking points” in order to get attention:

HOST: Steve, do you think this deserves all the attention it’s getting?

HAYES: I don’t know that it deserves all the attention it’s getting, and I think, as Eamon points out, Scott’s not necessarily saying much that’s new, he’s just saying a lot that’s new for him. And you know, to see Scott go from White House talking points to these new, almost left-wing blogworld talking points, is enough to make our colleagues in the Washington press corps pay close attention to it.

Listen here:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/05/shayesdrlb.320.40.flv]

Some more examples of this right-wing meme:

Former White House aide Karl Rove: “First of all, this doesn’t sound like Scott. It really doesn’t. Not the Scott McClellan I’ve known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger.”

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer: “We were wrong about whether Saddam had a WMD but that didn’t mean the president manipulated anything. And Scott uses the very same words that the far-left uses and I find that troubling because I find it inaccurate.”

Former counselor to the President Dan Bartlett: “But he uses these very infammatory and explosive words like, ‘shading the truth,’ ‘propaganda,’ all these touchstones of the liberal left, which really makes me pause to think, ‘are these Scott’s words or are they the words of a liberal publisher who’s the guy behind this book.” [The Mike Gallagher Show, 5/30/08]

The Politico’s Mike Allen also said that Scott has adopted the “vocabulary, rhetoric of the left-wing haters.”

The right wing needs to get over its conviction the “liberal left” is responsible for any criticisms of the Bush administration. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, 67 percent of the American public disapproves of the job Bush is doing. Sixty-seven percent also disapproves of the way he is handling the Iraq war. It’s highly doubtful that all these people are left-wing bloggers.

Security

The Consequences Of McCain’s Bad Judgment

By Matt Duss on May 30, 2008 at 5:39 pm

mccain-market1.jpgJeffrey Goldberg’s interview of John McCain is very worth reading, as it gives a pretty good view into the coloring book version of the Middle East that McCain offers to the American people. For all of the Middle East leaders that McCain has met with — and he really, really wants you to know how many he has met with — McCain’s knowledge of the region persists at the level of a twenty minute briefing. It’s nice that he can name-check Barak, Olmert, and Abbas; It would be really nice if he demonstrated any knowledge of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, or offered any good idea on how to move the peace process forward, which he does not.

What’s really troubling is McCain’s cluelessness about the disastrous effects of the Iraq war on American security. Asked by Goldberg whether he thinks Iran’s intention “is the actual destruction of America,” McCain answers that…the United States should stay in Iraq:

It’s hard for me to say what their intentions are, but the effect -– If they were able to drive us out of Iraq, and al Qaeda established a base there, and the Shiite militias erupted and the Iranian influence was expanded, which to my mind is what would happen, then the consequences for American national security would be profound. I don’t know if their intention is to destroy America and what we stand for, but I think the consequences of them succeeding in the destruction of the state of Israel and their continued support for terrorist organizations – all of these would have profound national security consequences.

You know what’s also had profound negative consequences for American national security? Invading and occupying Iraq. McCain has offered this justification before, and continues to completely miss the point.

Iran has been the single biggest beneficiary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Former diplomat Peter Galbraith wrote last September that Iraq was a “mission accomplished–for Iran“:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching…For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran’s allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini’s army could not.

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote in March that “the United States has spent most of the past five years in a de facto alliance with Iran in support of the Shiite-led (and US-installed) regime in Baghdad….Washington’s decision to topple Saddam’s government has put in place a ruling elite that is far closer to Iran than it is to the United States.”

Rather than weakening Iranian hard-liners, as the Iraq war’s advocates insisted it would, the American invasion only strengthened them.

The consequences of Iraq for Israel’s security have also been negative. Brian Katulis writes that “in the summer of 2006, when Israel was fighting a live war with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, it was clear whose side most Iraqi leaders were on — and it was not Israel.”

Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki condemned Israel’s “aggression,” and that same summer, the Iraqi speaker of parliament Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani accused “Jews” of being behind the violence and murders in Iraq. Are these the type of allies that the United States wants? Is the current policy in Iraq undermining U.S. and Israeli security interests by giving Iran some breathing room to expand its influence further around the region? These are tough questions to answer, but U.S. leaders need to address this fundamental contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Rather than consider these questions, however, McCain prefers to engage in empty sloganeering and fear-mongering as he plans the next war.

Politics

Bartlett agrees with right-wing radio host: McClellan’s book hurts military families.

By Matt Corley on May 30, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Writing at Townhall.com, right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher argues today that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new book will cause “pain and grief” for “the families of the brave men and women who are serving their country overseas.” Later, on his radio show, Gallagher asked McClellan’s former colleague, Dan Bartlett, if “a guy like Scott ever stopped to think how he would hurt families in this way?” Bartlett agreed with Gallagher:

BARTLETT: He knew better than most that all this would be doing is pouring gas on a political fire in which, you’re right, some of the victims of all this political uproar are the very people out here in America who are supporting our troops, those who have loved ones in harms way.

Listen here:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/05/BartlettMcClellanGallagher.320.40.flv]

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Going to Iraq

By ThinkProgress on May 30, 2008 at 5:11 pm

[Matt]

Obviously, a political gimmick is what a political gimmick is, but there’s really something very strange about the conceit that flying to Iraq and taking a guided tour courtesy of the U.S. military is the best way to learn about the country. I went to Spain for a week once, saw the central parts of Madrid and took some day trips to noteworthy towns that were easily accessible by train, but to answer even very basic question about Spain like “how wealthy is this country?” or “how many immigrants live here?” you need to look up the data not wander around. The McCain approach leads to a lot of incidents like this, “McCain’s claim that Mosul is “quiet” was disproved earlier today in grim fashion. Three suicide bombings — two in Mosul and another in a surrounding town — left 30 Iraqis dead and more than two dozen injured, according to press reports.”

Of course we can expect to hear more about this and about related things like McCain using General Petraeus in fundraising appeals, since turning MNF-Iraq into an extension of the McCain is a pretty appealing tactic. Active duty officers will try to avoid getting dragged into the political fray, but the Bush administration has repeatedly shown that it can be done easily enough, and active duty generals are hard surrogates for Obama to push back against.

Politics

MSNBC: White House Has Had A Copy Of McClellan’s Memoir For ‘At Least A Month’

By Ben Armbruster on May 30, 2008 at 4:42 pm

MSNBC correspondent Jeannie Ohm reported breaking news this afternoon that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had provided the White House with an advance copy of his recent memoir “at least a month before excerpts became public this week.”

Current Press Secretary Dana Perino argued that the White House had taken “the high road” by waiting to attack McClellan until his book was reported in the press:

OHM: I happen to speak briefly with Dana Perino and she says she thinks this speaks volumes about the type of route that the White House chose to take, they took the high road in terms of not preemptively attacking Scott McClellan.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/05/msmcbook.320.240.flv]

On Wednesday, Perino told reporters that Bush first read an excerpt of this book back in November at Camp David, and at that time, the President believed it “would not essentially be that harsh.” Did Bush not read the copy McClellan gave the White House a month ago?

Apparently, the White House thinks that as long as it didn’t attack McClellan before the book was published, that is taking the “high road.” But now that the cat is out of the bag, it seems McClellan is fair game. Fox News’ Brett Baier reported today that a “senior White House official” compared McClellan to Judas selling out Jesus:

BAIER: A senior white house official reacting to the AP saying that McClellan got $75,000 in advance for this book said and a quote here, “ironically in today’s dollars that amount is worth exactly 30 pieces of silver.” that of course is a biblical reference to the 30 pieces of silver Judas got for selling out Jesus.

Referring to McClellan’s book, one reporter said that when talking to White House officials he “heard the word ‘traitor’ and ‘Benedict.’” Perino called McClellan “disgruntled” while former Bush aide Karl Rove said that McClellan “sounds like a left-wing blogger.” Some high road.

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