President Bush gives a radio address every Saturday. It’s a tradition inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and observed with various degrees of faithfulness by every president since. Although Roosevelt’s Saturday radio addresses number only 30 or so, every President since Ronald Reagan has made it a weekend staple.
This Saturday marks president [...]

At the risk of veering off into the forbidden area of “understanding,” something we understand is inimical to success in wartime, is there really anyone in this country who honestly cannot understand that telling someone we’ve torched their country to keep someone else from torching ours might engender just the tiniest bit of resentment?

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We need to explain that national security is much more than a matter of bombs and testosterone, and we need to explain it in simple terms that anyone can understand. We need to explain that understanding your enemy is a strength, as is understanding how your enemy became your enemy. We need to respond to the Roves by saying things such as (in all immodesty) this:

It wasn’t a meek man who said, “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat;” it was the Chinese general SunTzu, and he could scarcely have been proved more emphatically correct than the Bush administration have done in Iraq.

Whatever one might think of Fitzgerald’s pursuit of Miller and Cooper, quoting Miller’s own reference to “irresponsible martyrdom” has to be recognized as an inspired bit of prosecutorial and personal savagery.

The U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) announced this week that the number of worldwide terrorist attacks that occurred in 2004 was 3,192.

I can’t help but wonder when we will, as Londoners apparently understood, adopt the notion that it’s a question of when—not if—and start planning and acting accordingly. Because the truth is what we’re doing now, regardless of the reason or ideology behind it, is deploying our limited resources poorly—it’s not the best bang for the buck.

And that’s cold comfort on the #5 Express from Bowling Green at night.

Once again: the idea that invading Iraq and throwing open its borders to foreign terrorists somehow prevents other terrorists from striking us or our allies is absurd. No clearer declaration of the intellectual poverty of that argument could have been made than the fact of the atrocities in London.

London’s Daily Mail reports that yet another leaked British government document, this one from the office of British defense minister John Reid, says both the UK and the US plan to reduce their respective troop numbers in Iraq by at least half within the next year.
According to the Mail, the number of British troops in [...]

On September 29 of 2003, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that “if anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.”

Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the House government reform committee, has called on the committee chairman, Republican Congressman Tom Davis, to convene hearings into the role senior White House advisor Karl Rove played in the 2003 leaking of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
Waxman told Davis that placing Rove under oath in [...]

Today Scott McClellan took time out from dodging questions about the Rove-Plame scandal to deny the truth of last year’s major increase in international terrorism.

Karl Rove leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent and the White House press are furious. But not at Rove; it’s press secretary Scott McClellan’s blood they want.
In April of 2001, Time Magazine published a profile of senior White House official Karl Rove. It revealed that at the end of the president’s first 100 [...]

Ed Stephan points out (rightly) that the Democratic Party is based on the cities. Urban areas tend to be full of the people we represent, and tends to inculcate values that we share. The red-state/blue-state regional divide is illusory. The real divide in America is between rural and urban.
Where Stephan goes wrong is when [...]

I could get into a long involved philosophical explanation as to why a belief in God or an afterlife isn’t necessary to prevent us from going around raping and killing each other (via Pandagon), but I won’t – Kant already did it for me.
I’ll just say this instead: what does it say about [...]

A little-noticed New York Times story says that the Pentagon is considering major changes in its quadrennial Defense Policy Guidance Review (DPGR), due out early in 2006.
The Pentagon’s most senior planners are challenging the longstanding strategy that requires the armed forces to be prepared to fight two major wars at a time. Instead, they [...]

Within the space of a few days, Karl Rove has gone from being one of the most successfully vicious political operatives of all time to being a hapless angel on the verge of being flensed at the stake.
According to John Gibson of Fox News, Rove deserves a medal for burning Valerie Plame, if that’s [...]

Other questions include whether Bolton was on the Air Force One expedition for which phone records were subpoeanaed — the trip lasted from July 7, 2003, to July 12, 2003, and Rove identified Mrs. Joe Wilson as a CIA agent to Time reporter Matt Cooper on July 11 — and what exactly is it about Ari Fleischer’s July 12, 2003, Nigeria press gaggle comments about Wilson that got the full transcript subpoenaed by the investigators.

Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) today raised the question of whether White House advisor Karl Rove violated the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement (NDA) Rove and other administration recipients of classified information are required to sign as a condition of employment.
After first denying that Rove had anything to do with the identification of former amabassador Joe [...]

Eric Brewer, our very own White House correspondent, will be on Brad Friedman’s “The Brad Show” Saturday evening to talk about his recent encounters with White House press secretary Scott McClellan, and to give his assessment of how Scott is holding up under the pressure being applied by a newly invigorated White House press corps [...]

The book in its unpublished form is only the most recent in a series of assaults on and revelations about Tony Blair’s involvement in and handling of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is unlikely to be the last: another former British diplomat opposed to the war, Blair’s ambassador to the US during the runup to the invasion, is writing his own memoir for publication in October of this year.

Senator Jon Cornyn of Texas is being mentioned as a candidate for a seat on the US Supreme Court. A New York Times profile of Cornyn, a Texas Supreme Court alumnus and now the junior senator from Texas, suggests his close relationship with senior Bush advisor Karl Rove, who is now under intense scrutiny for [...]

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) told Fox News Sunday host Brit Hume that “it would be useful, in my judgment, to have somebody on the court who does not come from the graduates of the courts of appeals. When you look back at the court which handed down Brown v. Board of Education [...]

Much is being made by Karl Rove defenders of the apparent fact that neither Karl Rove nor Lewis “Scooter” Libby named Valerie Plame to Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper.
“Ah Ha!” they cry. “They never named her!”
But of course the point isn’t whether or not they named her, but rather whether or not they identified [...]

Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man (or woman) can be educated to maturity…Respect for the word—to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth—is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race. To misuse [...]

President Bush announced today that “if someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration,” modifying the original White House statement that “if anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.” “It” is the leak, although I suppose the administration could argue that it [...]

Only 25% of the public think the Bush administration is cooperating in the investigation of who at the White House leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, according to an ABC News poll. 47% say the White House is not cooperating, and 28% are unsure.
75% of respondents said the matter was very serious [...]

The Wall Street Journal reports that Valerie Plame’s CIA employment was designated as “sensitive” information in a State Department memo circulating on Air Force One the week Karl Rove confirmed her identity to columnist Bob Novak and leaked it to Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper.

Curiously, the flood of leaks relating to the Plame investigation has suddenly and completely dried up today. No news about all the people the investigators are interested in who aren’t named Karl. No news about all the people named Karl who weren’t aboard Air Force One reading the infamous memo. Not even any news about Karl helping reporters avoid silly stories, or rescuing kittens someone tossed out of a flyspecked window in Foggy Bottom. No blast faxes from the Republican National Committee. Gone. Vanished.

Let’s do something about that.

The invaluable Warren Strobel at Knight Ridder has the scoop on Congressman Curt Weldon’s (R-PA) secret meeting with a disciple of gun runner and Iran-Contra darling Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Weldon, R-Pa., claims in a new book that the Iranian exile, whom he calls “Ali,” told him of dramatic Iranian-sponsored terrorist plots against the United States.
But [...]