During today’s press briefing, White House press secretary Dana Perino was asked about yesterday’s assassination attempt on Afghan president Hamid Karzai. She said she was “frustrated” by the fact that Afghan security forces weren’t getting the credit they deserved, adding that it’s “damn hard work” protecting against terrorist attacks:

Look, we have to be right every single time in order to prevent terrorist attacks. It is damn hard work. And I shouldn’t have probably said that word, but I am just really frustrated of thinking about how hard these Afghan security forces work and how much they are up against and how we have a responsibility to continue to stay there and help them.

Watch it:

Add “securing Afghanistan” to the Bush administration’s extensive list of failures it excuses away by calling it “hard work.”

As a married couple, John and Cindy McCain are multi-millionaires. But John McCain on his own is just a guy with some money in a Wachovia savings account. In other words, he’s stashed all his considerable assets under his wife’s name, and then proceeded to not disclose anything at all about his finances under pretense of protecting his daughter’s privacy. It’s absurd. Meanwhile, what could possibly be in there that he’s worried would be damning. Stock in the Umbrella Corporation?

At a Hudson Institute event today, Iraq war architects Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, as well as Dan Senor and Peter Rodman, reconvened to celebrate Feith’s new book, War and Decision, which tries to explain the failures of the Iraq war as just failures of other people.

Wolfowitz said Feith’s book is “valuable” because it “demolishes” the “well-nurtured myths” about the Pentagon’s execution of the war. In his book, Feith claims the “chief” mistake in Iraq was “maintaining an occupation government for over a year.” Wolfowitz agreed, adding that the “occupation” in fact ended in 2004:

The fact is, however, that we did end up with an occupation authority for a full nine months, and I’m afraid that the label occupation sticks to us even to this day, although the occupation ended in June of 2004. Doug considers that the biggest mistake we made.

Watch it:

Wolfowitz was presumably referring to the June 2004 act of “officially” transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis when Paul Bremer, who ruled the country for 14 months, “snuck out of the country.” Left out of Wolfowitz’s definition of occupation are the over 150,000 troops still in Iraq who are, to this day, helping the Iraqi government squash its political enemies.

Wolfowitz also agreed with Feith in saying the level of resistance to coalition forces was “not anticipated by any office”:

As Doug does write: “What was not anticipated by any office as far as I know was the Iraqi regime’s ability to conduct a sustained campaign against coalition forces after it was overthrown.” … “I never saw,” Doug says, and I never saw either, “a CIA assessment to the Baathists after their ouster would be able to organized, recruit for, finance, supply, command, and control an insurgency let alone an alliance with foreign jihadists.

Wolfowitz’s memory seems selective. In May 2007, Walter Pincus reported that two pre-war intelligence assessments were produced by the National Intelligence Council titled “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq” and “Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq,” predicting that an occupation of Iraq “could lead to internal violence and provide a boost” to extremists and terrorists in the region.

But a senior Pentagon official reportedly dismissed them, saying the reports were “too negative” and that the papers “did not see the possibilities” the removal of Hussein would present.

Digg It!

Barack Obama plays three-on-three:

His opponents seem to be putting up a defensive effort that’s reminiscent of recent New York Knicks squads. The fact that they’re all Obama campaign volunteers may play a role in this.

On April 20, The New York Times first reported on the Pentagon’s secret program using retired military analysts to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Until today, however, the three presidential candidates have all been largely silent on the issue. The Nation’s Ari Melber has now received statements from both Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Barack Obama (D-IL) condemning the program. Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) response? Silence.