THE PRESIDENT: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly — yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities…
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Four years ago today, coalition forces launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to remove Saddam Hussein from power. They did so to eliminate the threat his regime posed to the Middle East and to the world. Coalition forces carried out that mission with great courage and skill…
WASHINGTON, March 18 — The Democratic senator leading the inquiry into the dismissal of federal prosecutors insisted today that Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush must testify publicly and under oath, setting up a confrontation between Congress and the White House, which has said it is unlikely to agree to such a demand.
Some Republicans have suggested that Mr. Rove, as well as Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and William Kelley, the deputy White House counsel, testify privately, if only to tamp down the political uproar.
But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seemed to rule out such a move today, saying that his committee would vote Thursday to issue subpoenas in the inquiry, which centers on whether the White House allowed politics to interfere with law enforcement.
“I do not believe in this, ‘we’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,’ and they don’t,” Mr. Leahy said on the ABC News program “This Week.” adding: “I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this.”
Lawmakers of both parties agree that the fate of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales may rest on what happens this week, as the White House and Congress either come to blows — or finds a compromise — over the testimony lawmakers are demanding. With Mr. Bush out of town at Camp David, the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, spent the weekend in Washington weighing whether to allow Mr. Rove and the others to talk and, if so, under what conditions.
There is some expected but very sad news today: Arthur Silber’s sister died yesterday morning at 63, just weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Arthur has written about her here.
Arthur is one of the most unusual and insightful voices online, and I hope everyone who admires his writing can stop by today to leave their condolences.
I have been advised by the CIA, that even now after all that has happened, I cannot disclose the full nature, scope and character of Ms. Wilson’s service to our nation without causing serious damage to our national security interests. But General Hayden and the CIA have cleared these following comments for these hearings. During her employment at the CIA, Ms. Wilson was undercover. Her employment status at the CIA was classified information, prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958. At the time of the publication of Robert Novak’s column on July 14, 2003, Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment status was covert. This was classified information.
This of course, makes no sense, as Sean Hannity and the right wing bloggers have spent the past year assuring us that Valerie Plame was not a covert operative. In fact, Conservative Jones grappled with this very mystery last year, in this cartoon.
Everything I really needed to know about transnational terrorism I learned from George M. Cohan
According to the transcript (pdf) of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s recent military hearing, he confessed to dozens of terrorist plots. But amid all the tumult, he never forgot what’s really important:
George M. Cohan: “I don’t care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right.”
Eric Boehlert’s great piece at Media Matters asks the following hypothetical questions:
All of which begs the questions, why do Fox News execs spin so furiously whenever they’re the ones accused of having a bias? Why do they consider it “sad” and “pathetic” to be tagged as Republican? Why do Fox News employees find the label “conservative’” so insulting? Why does Fox News indignantly demand news outlets print corrections if they simply report that Fox News has a Republican tilt?
The answer here is that Fox News can’t fight back against charges of bias the way other news organizations do. When Howard Kurtz, for example, was criticized in an online chat at the Washington Post, he trotted out the old line “I get criticized from both sides, which tells me I must be doing something right”. For the traditional media, that’s their (lazy, logically-flawed, foolish…) go-to excuse to get out of any charges of political bias, but that would never, ever work for Fox News. Even their most ardent defenders would crack a rib laughing at the notion that anyone would ever accuse Fox of having a liberal bias. They can’t play the “both sides hate us” card, so they have to resort to Plan B : throw a temper tantrum like the overgrown children that they are.
A happy announcement for this Wednesday morning: my cartoon returns to the Village Voice today.
Didn’t have anything to do with the online petition many of you signed a month or so ago — that was pretty much ignored (though the show of support meant quite a lot to me). It was just an unexpected turn of events, the sort of last minute plot twist that readers would find annoyingly implausible if my life were a novel. Basically, the editor who didn’t like my work was suddenly ousted, and his replacement turned out to be somebody who’s been championing it for years. I had decided the whole thing was a lost cause, and was none too happy about it — and then in a single day everything was realigned.
My head is still spinning.
Anyway, you New Yorkers, tell your friends: time to start picking up the Voice again.
At Harvard Business School, George W. Bush was what they called a “skydecker”—a guy who sat in the top back row of the lecture hall to minimize the risk of being called on. I asked Mitt Romney, another HBS alum, if he had been one, too. “Oh, no,” he assured me, sounding only barely amused by the question. “I wasn’t one of those.” He was the kind of focused fellow who sat down front, well prepared, hand raised. No one was surprised that he became spectacularly successful as a consultant and hedge-fund manager. He loves “wallowing in the data,” as he puts it, applying quantitative methods and a deft managerial touch to knotty problems of business, nonprofit enterprises (the Olympics) and, as former governor of Massachusetts, government. Since when did a taste for data become something to brag about in a race for the Republican presidential nomination? The answer: ever since it became clear, even to most Republicans, that the term “Bush administration” was an oxymoron. A concatenation of crises convinced most of the country that the skydecker in the White House doesn’t know—or much care—about the actual operation of the federal government.
Howard Fineman, Newsweek, Dec. 25, 2000:
Bush is a quick-enough study, and in fact there is a method to his preppy casualness. At Harvard he was what is still known as a sky decker—a student who chooses to sit in the top row of the horseshoe-shaped classroom amphitheater. Sky deckers sat back and listened, taking in the scene, contributing consensus-building observation from on high. Sky deckers also had a better shot at surviving the professors’ legendary “cold calls”—demands for impromptu class presentations…. It suited his methods, and even now he’d much rather learn through briefings than paper.”
