Author: Jonathan Schwarz

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there seem to be a lot of blogs around these days. But BTC News is unique in their ingenuity and initiative: they somehow wrangled a press pass for White House briefings. It’s something they don’t get nearly enough credit for, and an embarrassment for everyone else that we haven’t tried something similar.

Anyway, the designated BTC reporter Eric Brewer was at the White House today, and asked some worthwhile questions. Check it out, and if you can manage it, give BTC some bucks to keep the blog-powered questions coming.

Harry Reid is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore:

The President’s decision to commute Mr. Libby’s sentence is disgraceful. Libby’s conviction was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence and silence critics of the Iraq War. Now, even that small bit of justice has been undone. Judge Walton correctly determined that Libby deserved to be imprisoned for lying about a matter of national security. The Constitution gives President Bush the power to commute sentences, but history will judge him harshly for using that power to benefit his own Vice President’s Chief of Staff who was convicted of such a serious violation of law.

Oh, if only the United States Senate had some way of judging George Bush! If only our Founding Fathers had had the foresight to provide such a method in Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 of our Constitution!

But sadly, the Senate is completely powerless in such situations, leaving this matter entirely in the hands of history.

Did you know the House of Representatives just voted 411-2 for a resolution which stated “Iran has aggressively pursued a clandestine effort to arm itself with nuclear weapons”? So when Bush bombs Iran in spring, 2008 and we later learn they actually weren’t trying to make nukes, Democrats will (rightfully) hear “But everyone thought they were!”

Arthur Silber has the gruesome details.

Part II of Roger Morris’ fantastic Robert Gates history is up at Tomdispatch.

I particularly like this quote from Archie Roosevelt in the 1960s about the Baathists on the CIA payroll:

“They’re our boys bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can’t be trusted.”

Man, it’s so hard to get trustworthy quislings these days!

BONUS: Archie was the cousin of Kermit Roosevelt, who ran the CIA coup in Iran in 1953. Via All the Shah’s Men, here’s what the British discovered at the time in a psychological study of Iranians:

The ordinary Persian is vain, unprincipled, eager to promise what he knows he is incapable of or has no intention of performing, wedded to procrastination, lacking in perserverance and energy, but amenable to discipline. Above all he enjoys intrigue and readily turns to prevarication and dishonesty whenever there is a possibility of personal gain. Although an accomplished liar, he does not expect to be believed. They easily acquire a superficial knowledge of technical subjects, deluding themselves into the belief that it is profound.

It’s quite strange the way the countries with all the oil are filled with such awful people. I guess we’ve just been very unlucky.

This is from a transcript of Frederick Kagan, one of the intellectual architects of the “surge,” being interviewed in a new Frontline documentary:

KAGAN: I think it’s important to mention this — we have really suffered from the fact that the opposition to the war has not been constructive and that there have been many, many opportunities for critics of the war to challenge the administration on the way that it was fighting the war that had been missed as critics through the end of the 2004 presidential campaign focused on whether we should have gone to war or not at all.

As it happens, I also have a transcript from a precocious 2 year-old Freddy Kagan speaking in 1971:

KAGAN: I think it’s important to mention this — we have really suffered from the fact that opposition to me smearing shit all over myself and the walls and everyone else has not been constructive. There have been many, many opportunities for critics to challenge me on the way I’ve been smearing shit on everything, but they have been missed as critics focused on whether I should have started smearing shit on everything at all.

AND: Let no one say the Bush administration hasn’t followed through on his 2001 inaugural address:

America, at its best, is a place where personal responsibility is valued and expected…

Our public interest depends on private character…

I will live and lead by these principles…