A consultant to Hughes said that “roughly 80 percent of the explanation for the poor American image stemmed from American policies, but that much could be done to improve the communication of those policies to affect the other 20 percent.” If successful, then, Hughes could bring approval ratings for the Bush foreign policy soaring into the low two-digit range, not far behind the approval ratings here. . . . → Read More: Karen Hughes set to assume “public diplomacy” lead
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One of the most common complaints heard from supporters of the occupation and invasion of Iraq is that good news from the country is seldom heard in the US. Now it appears as though the bad news has been obscuring the awful news. . . . → Read More: Iraq: The bad news is good news compared to the real news Although there’s nothing to this point connecting Weldon with the off-the-books diplomatic and intelligence operations in which Franklin, Rhode, Ghorbanifar and Ledeen were involved, there are some common threads, chief among which are a contempt for the CIA and other government agencies, the fixation on Iran and the connection with Iran-Contra, which of course is another example of individuals attempting (and in the Iran-Contra instance, succeeding; for the ultimate example, read Charlie Wilson’s War) to conduct their own foreign policies. . . . → Read More: Axis of Evil, Fulcrum of Folly®: Round up the usual suspects When the New York Times broke — or rather, rebroke, as it turned out — the story about Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon and his insistence that a secret Pentagon data mining operation called Able Danger had, during the summer of 2000, identified and tried without success to inform the FBI of a US al Qaeda cell led by 911 hijacking ringleader Mohammed Atta, we were a bit skeptical. Weldon, after all, had just written a book based on intelligence from a secret source who turned out to be an associate of exiled Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and was, along with Ghorbanifar, regarded by the CIA as extremely untrustworthy. Ghorbanifar may have played some role in the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger, and he played a central role in the Iran-Contra scandal that led to the conviction of current National Security Council official Elliott Abrams for lying to Congress, and garnered seven felony convictions (later overturned because of the possible taint from his immunized confessions to Congressional investigators) for Reagan administration national security official John Poindexter. Poindexter resurfaced in the current Bush administration as — what else? — the head of the Pentagon’s data mining research effort, called Total Information Awareness. Continue reading Able Danger: Just when you think it’s safe to go in the water We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor. The clearest indication that there is a sea change—a political sort of high slack tide—that point when the water reaches its highest point and pauses as the currents shifts and begin to ebb—is that the marketing people are on the job first. When you need to repackage the ‘war on terror’ as ‘the global struggle against violent extremism’ as though fixing our national security, misadventures and lack of integrity and foresight were as easy as getting a thinner more athletic version of Ronal McDonald to dance on a commercial instead of hang out with Mayor McCheese and chase fries, then you know the bullshit meter is in the red. There, are of course, other accompanying signs of upcoming discomfort for those clinging to last year’s status quo views that seemed to just barely carry the election. Bush’s approval rating is at an all time low, gas is approaching (or at, and in some cases above) $3.00 a gallon and rising, a democratic Iraq veteran gets 48% of the vote in a reliably conservative district in Ohio (calling Bush a ‘chicken hawk’) and Newt Gingrich calls it a wake up call. General Casey publicly sets a timetable for reducing troops next Spring (just in time to impact the fall elections) despite the President’s repeated statements that setting a time table for withdrawal helps the terrorists, and the constitution looks to be in trouble—er…, I was referring to the Iraqi constitution, but yeah, ours too. It’s unlikely in the extreme the Iraqis can negotiate past the Shiite/Sunni impasse prior to the deadline and there are noises about leaving the Sunni’s out of the process entirely. What Douglas and Chin are talking about is image, and there’s ample evidence suggesting Bush doesn’t particularly care what other people think about him, least of all “Middle East and domestic political analysts.” For him, his legacy will be whatever he thinks it is and not the effects his actions and decisions have had on anyone else. . . . → Read More: A pre-Copernican President and Press Harris, who most recently made the news with her complaint that newspapers have retouched her photos to poke fun at her Tammy Faye-esque makeup, is not popular among the Florida or national GOP leadership despite her 2000 heroics. . . . → Read More: Joe Scarborough v. Katherine Harris in Florida Senate Race? The Bush administration have acknowledged that the energy bill just signed into law by the president will do nothing in the short term — the short term being a decade or so — to ease fuel prices and decrease US dependence on imported oil, and the New York Times reports today that the administration are abandoning a proposal to subject large sport utility vehicles such as the Hummer to fuel economy regulations. . . . → Read More: Administration on fuel prices: Not our problem, but yours Post sources declined to specify what might have inclined the paper’s management to believe that an event conceived by the Pentagon’s political appointees in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war might conceivably develop political overtones, or that donating time and advertising space to such an event might call into question the paper’s objectivity. . . . → Read More: Washington Post: Pentagon event “could become politicized” |
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Duffy: Bush doubters want to lose “war on terror”
To clarify: it is now official White House doctrine that the substantial majority of Americans who think Bush has done a bad job of handling Iraq and the plurality who would like him to articulate some sort of plan for reaching something approaching a non-catastrophic outcome there, and in particular those Americans with the temerity to say so in public, want to lose the “war on terror.” . . . → Read More: Duffy: Bush doubters want to lose “war on terror”