The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, October 28, 2005
Steyn: Much Ado about Nothing
God I love Mark Steyn; he has such a way of getting straight to the heart of a matter. And no writer out there is quite so facile at getting me to laugh aloud almost every time I read him. And so it was no surprise when, in the frenzy of the hysteria over Tom DeLay and (now) Scooter Libby, Steyn brings us (and the rabid left) back down to earth, in his latest article in the UK Spectator (bold emphases are my own):
The ‘Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead’ fever rages on, disappointments notwithstanding. Hurricane Katrina was, at best, a wash. The more looters and welfare deadbeats who went on TV to whine that Bush wasn’t doing enough, the more most Americans remembered that New Orleans is a nice place to have a margarita with a topless transsexual but they wouldn’t want to live there and they don’t see why they should pay a gazillion dollars to those who do.
But in the wake of Katrina came a string of Category One or Two storms which the Democratic base and the media figure they can huff and puff into Category Four and total the White House. Tom DeLay has been indicted in Texas! Bill Frist is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission! Scooter Libby is up before the most zealous Federal prosecutor in the country! Can the impeachment of the President be far behind?
Look, you’re a well-informed Spectator reader: have you heard of any of these guys? Well, nor have most Americans. What’s that? You’ve heard of Scooter? No, you’re mistaken, you’re thinking of Skeeter — Skeeter Davis, the late country and western singer who had a top three hit in 1963 with ‘Don’t the-ey know it’s The End Of The World/ It ended when you said goodbye’, which is apparently what George W. Bush will be singing as Karl Rove’s led out of the Oval Office in handcuffs.
Just for the record, Tom DeLay is the House Majority Leader, Bill Frist is the Senate Majority Leader, and Scooter Libby is the highest-ranking Scooter in the administration, chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. By the time you read this, Scooter may have been indicted. For a week now, I’ve woken up to emails beginning ‘Happy Fitzmas, asshole!’ — a seasonal greeting from prematurely ejaculating lefty gloaters. ‘Fitzmas’ is the Left’s designation for that happy day when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments against Libby, Rove, and maybe Cheney, and — boy oh boy, who knows? — maybe Chimpy Bushitlerburton himself. Pat Fitzgerald has been making his list, checking it twice, found out who’s naughty or nice, and he’s ready to go on a Slay Ride leaving Bush the Little Drummed-Out Boy and the Dems having a blue blue blue blue blue-state Christmas in November 2006, if not before.
Well, I enjoy the politics of personal destruction as much as the next chap, and one appreciates that it’s been a long time since the heady days when Dems managed to collect the scalps of both Newt Gingrich and his short-lived successor within a few short weeks. But, as I’ve said before, one reason that the Democratic party is such a bunch of losers is because they’re all tactics and no strategy. Let’s suppose they succeed in destroying DeLay, Frist, Libby and a bunch of other names the majority of Americans aren’t familiar with. Then what? Several analysts are suggesting that the 2006 elections are shaping up like 1994, when Newt’s revolution swept the Democratic old guard from power. It’s a bit early for my reckless election predictions, but I’d bet on the Republicans holding both the House and Senate.
Though the electorate was disgusted by the sheer arrogance of Democrat corruption, 1994 wasn’t just a throw-the-bums-out spasm — despite ABC’s Peter Jennings’s sniffing that ‘the voters had a temper tantrum’. Au contraire, it was also a throw-the-bums-in election. Voters liked the alternative — a coherent conservative agenda. It’s quite possible that the electorate will have a throw-the-bums-out attitude to the Republicans in 12 months’ time, but I’d say it’s almost completely unfeasible that they’ll be in a mood to throw the Dems in. There are not a lot of competitive Congressional districts and those that are are mostly in Democrat blue states that, if not yet red, are turning distinctly purple. The Dems’ big immovable obstacle remains their inability to articulate a set of ideas that connects with the electorate. James Carville and Stanley Greenberg are said to be working on a Democrat version of Newt’s Contract with America, but Greenberg’s a pollster and Carville’s an attack dog. Whatever their charms, these aren’t the ideas guys.
The difficulty for the Left is that if the problem is Iraq, Katrina or pretty much anything else, the solution is not obviously the Democratic party. The future of Iraq is mostly a matter for Iraqis now and it’s not going badly, as you can sort of tell if you decode the headlines — ‘Bitterly Divided Iraqis Take Time Out From Trembling On Brink Of Civil War To Overwhelmingly Ratify New Constitution’, ‘Three Sunnis And Their Pet Camel Boycott Poll In Sign Iraq May Be Becoming Ungovernable’, etc. In fact, it’s Syria that’s bitterly divided and becoming ungovernable and, as noted here three weeks ago, Baby Assad’s fall will not be long now. Meanwhile, Brent Scowcroft, one of the foreign policy ‘realists’ from Bush’s daddy’s day, recalled a conversation with his protégée Condi Rice two years ago. ‘She says we’re going to democratise Iraq, and I said, “Condi, you’re not going to democratise Iraq,” and she said, “You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,” and she comes back to this thing that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years and so on and so forth.... But we’ve had 50 years of peace.’
Well, yes, if you don’t include the Iranian hostages, Lebanon, Lockerbie and a lot else on the long road to 9/11. Nonetheless, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, also chipped in. As the Financial Times reported, ‘Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government’s foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.’
What does he mean by ‘hijacked’? Is Wilkerson saying that Cheney and Rumsfeld have imposed their foreign policy on the United States against the wishes of the President? I think not. If you read any Bush speech or talk to him for five minutes, it’s clear that he’s no supporter of the disastrously complacent State Department realpolitik herd mentality reflected by both Scowcroft and Wilkerson. Every word he utters on the subject suggests he inclines to the Cheney-Rumsfeld view of the world — or, rather, that they incline to his. The President sets foreign policy. He’s the pilot; he can’t ‘hijack’ his own plane. Wilkerson is a whining stewardess in a snit because she doesn’t want to learn a new spiel. ‘Do you want the chicken or the beef?’ She’s been serving up State Department chicken in Cairo and Amman and Damascus for decades, and she’s not comfortable with the new Texas beef. But the only hijack that’s going on is the State Department’s bland assumption that it has the right to block the President’s foreign policy.
I can’t claim to know George W. Bush, but as the years go by it strikes me that the caricature — the idiot sock-puppet manipulated by Cheney and Rove to do their bidding — is exactly backwards. The President is his own man — to such a degree that he seems not to notice that very few others are and, when he does, his response is to hunker down among a tight circle of loyalists. So, while he has a certain amount of stellar talent around him, most of his administration is either in the hands of active obstructionists like Wilkerson or trusted mediocrities like Harriet Miers. When I say Miss Miers is a mediocrity, that in itself is not a reason not to appoint her to the Supreme Court. For the first two centuries of the Republic, mediocre cronies were the rule rather than the exception. One thinks of Roscoe Conkling, appointed by Chester Arthur — or, rather, one doesn’t. It’s only in the revisionist interpretation of the Supreme Court as the ultimate nine-man omniscient parliament in which resides all true power to legislate the affairs of the nation that mediocrity would seem to be a disqualification. A decision of the court, according to Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ House leader, is ‘almost as if God has spoken’. Even in a robe, it’s hard to see Harriet Miers like that. But, on the other hand, one could argue that restoring the tradition of appointing hacks, creeps and time-servers to the court is a profoundly conservative act.
In their different ways, Miss Miers and Patrick Fitzgerald’s supposedly imminent indictments sum up the Bush administration, caught between the Scylla of third-rate cronies and the Charybdis of fourth-rate obstructionists.
The Fitzgerald investigation arises from the ‘leak’ to the media of the name of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame. Miss Plame is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, who in 2002 was dispatched by the Agency to Africa to investigate reports that Saddam was attempting to procure uranium from Niger. Ambassador Wilson spent a week ‘sipping sweet mint tea’ with old contacts from Major Wanke’s regime. (I suggested to the New York Times the scandal should be called Wankegate, but they seem reluctant to take me up on the offer.) If this rings a vague bell with you, it’s because I wrote about it in these pages back in the summer of 2003 and concluded:
‘If sending Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger for a week is the best the world’s only hyperpower can do, that’s a serious problem. If the Company knew it was a joke all along, that’s a worse problem. It means Mr Bush is in the same position with the CIA as General Musharraf is with Pakistan’s ISI: when he makes a routine request, he has to figure out whether they’re going to use it to try and set him up.’
That’s still the real scandal, and the only thing wrong with that judgment is that since then Musharraf and the ISI have reached a rough’n’ready modus vivendi that the Bush administration can only envy vis à vis the CIA.
Otherwise, everything that’s come out only confirms my original view. In his laughably misnamed book The Politics Of Truth: Inside The Lies That Led To War And Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, Wilson strenuously denies that ‘my wife had somehow influenced a decision to send me to the middle of the Sahara Desert.... Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter.’
Really? How about the memo she wrote to the deputy director of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division suggesting hubby was the ideal man for the job? (‘My husband has good relations with the PM and the former Minister of Mines,’ etc.) Or the meeting convened by Mrs Wilson at CIA headquarters on 19 February 2002 to introduce her husband to the relevant intelligence officials.
But Wilson’s curiously faulty memory of his wife’s role in getting him the assignment is as nothing compared with his recollection of what he ‘found out’ in Niger. The 2004 Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report on pre-war intelligence has 48 pages on Wilson that exposes everything he’s said publicly about his mission as a lot of baloney. Not only did the Senate report and the Butler report in London and British Intelligence and French Intelligence think Saddam was trying to acquire uranium from Niger, but so did a former Prime Minister of Major Wanke’s, who said so to Wilson, who said so to the CIA.
The scandal here is not that ‘BUSH LIED!!!’ about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, nor even that Wilson lied about Bush lying, but that the world’s most lavishly funded intelligence agency can do no better on a priority security matter than flying in a vain unqualified buffoon for a week of pseudo-spook tourism.
When Wankegate first erupted, the alleged ‘crime’ was that of leaking the name of a covert agent. Miss Plame was not in the least bit ‘covert’ and Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the relevant law, says no crime was committed. Wankegate may yet take down Libby and Rove, but so far all it’s done is drive the New York Times nuts. Judith Miller, a Times reporter and a peripheral figure in the Wilson farrago, went to jail for three months for the usual noble reasons, and the paper proudly stood by her. She got sprung from the big house just the other day, since when her colleagues have been trashing her name in daily 32-page pull-out supplements. Maureen Dowd, the paper’s elderly schoolgirl columnist, went for the jugular, and I haven’t seen a catfight like that since lesbian mud-wrestling night at Bud’s Roadhouse out on Route 123. If the Left were nimbler, they’d have figured that the whole thing is just a Karl Rove front operation to provoke the Times into tearing itself apart.
The Democrats are going to be mighty disappointed by the time this is all over, and still confronting their own identity crisis. Enjoy Fitzmas while you can, guys. You need a gift that keeps on giving, and this one won’t.
The ‘Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead’ fever rages on, disappointments notwithstanding. Hurricane Katrina was, at best, a wash. The more looters and welfare deadbeats who went on TV to whine that Bush wasn’t doing enough, the more most Americans remembered that New Orleans is a nice place to have a margarita with a topless transsexual but they wouldn’t want to live there and they don’t see why they should pay a gazillion dollars to those who do.
But in the wake of Katrina came a string of Category One or Two storms which the Democratic base and the media figure they can huff and puff into Category Four and total the White House. Tom DeLay has been indicted in Texas! Bill Frist is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission! Scooter Libby is up before the most zealous Federal prosecutor in the country! Can the impeachment of the President be far behind?
Look, you’re a well-informed Spectator reader: have you heard of any of these guys? Well, nor have most Americans. What’s that? You’ve heard of Scooter? No, you’re mistaken, you’re thinking of Skeeter — Skeeter Davis, the late country and western singer who had a top three hit in 1963 with ‘Don’t the-ey know it’s The End Of The World/ It ended when you said goodbye’, which is apparently what George W. Bush will be singing as Karl Rove’s led out of the Oval Office in handcuffs.
Just for the record, Tom DeLay is the House Majority Leader, Bill Frist is the Senate Majority Leader, and Scooter Libby is the highest-ranking Scooter in the administration, chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. By the time you read this, Scooter may have been indicted. For a week now, I’ve woken up to emails beginning ‘Happy Fitzmas, asshole!’ — a seasonal greeting from prematurely ejaculating lefty gloaters. ‘Fitzmas’ is the Left’s designation for that happy day when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments against Libby, Rove, and maybe Cheney, and — boy oh boy, who knows? — maybe Chimpy Bushitlerburton himself. Pat Fitzgerald has been making his list, checking it twice, found out who’s naughty or nice, and he’s ready to go on a Slay Ride leaving Bush the Little Drummed-Out Boy and the Dems having a blue blue blue blue blue-state Christmas in November 2006, if not before.
Well, I enjoy the politics of personal destruction as much as the next chap, and one appreciates that it’s been a long time since the heady days when Dems managed to collect the scalps of both Newt Gingrich and his short-lived successor within a few short weeks. But, as I’ve said before, one reason that the Democratic party is such a bunch of losers is because they’re all tactics and no strategy. Let’s suppose they succeed in destroying DeLay, Frist, Libby and a bunch of other names the majority of Americans aren’t familiar with. Then what? Several analysts are suggesting that the 2006 elections are shaping up like 1994, when Newt’s revolution swept the Democratic old guard from power. It’s a bit early for my reckless election predictions, but I’d bet on the Republicans holding both the House and Senate.
Though the electorate was disgusted by the sheer arrogance of Democrat corruption, 1994 wasn’t just a throw-the-bums-out spasm — despite ABC’s Peter Jennings’s sniffing that ‘the voters had a temper tantrum’. Au contraire, it was also a throw-the-bums-in election. Voters liked the alternative — a coherent conservative agenda. It’s quite possible that the electorate will have a throw-the-bums-out attitude to the Republicans in 12 months’ time, but I’d say it’s almost completely unfeasible that they’ll be in a mood to throw the Dems in. There are not a lot of competitive Congressional districts and those that are are mostly in Democrat blue states that, if not yet red, are turning distinctly purple. The Dems’ big immovable obstacle remains their inability to articulate a set of ideas that connects with the electorate. James Carville and Stanley Greenberg are said to be working on a Democrat version of Newt’s Contract with America, but Greenberg’s a pollster and Carville’s an attack dog. Whatever their charms, these aren’t the ideas guys.
The difficulty for the Left is that if the problem is Iraq, Katrina or pretty much anything else, the solution is not obviously the Democratic party. The future of Iraq is mostly a matter for Iraqis now and it’s not going badly, as you can sort of tell if you decode the headlines — ‘Bitterly Divided Iraqis Take Time Out From Trembling On Brink Of Civil War To Overwhelmingly Ratify New Constitution’, ‘Three Sunnis And Their Pet Camel Boycott Poll In Sign Iraq May Be Becoming Ungovernable’, etc. In fact, it’s Syria that’s bitterly divided and becoming ungovernable and, as noted here three weeks ago, Baby Assad’s fall will not be long now. Meanwhile, Brent Scowcroft, one of the foreign policy ‘realists’ from Bush’s daddy’s day, recalled a conversation with his protégée Condi Rice two years ago. ‘She says we’re going to democratise Iraq, and I said, “Condi, you’re not going to democratise Iraq,” and she said, “You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,” and she comes back to this thing that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years and so on and so forth.... But we’ve had 50 years of peace.’
Well, yes, if you don’t include the Iranian hostages, Lebanon, Lockerbie and a lot else on the long road to 9/11. Nonetheless, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, also chipped in. As the Financial Times reported, ‘Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government’s foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.’
What does he mean by ‘hijacked’? Is Wilkerson saying that Cheney and Rumsfeld have imposed their foreign policy on the United States against the wishes of the President? I think not. If you read any Bush speech or talk to him for five minutes, it’s clear that he’s no supporter of the disastrously complacent State Department realpolitik herd mentality reflected by both Scowcroft and Wilkerson. Every word he utters on the subject suggests he inclines to the Cheney-Rumsfeld view of the world — or, rather, that they incline to his. The President sets foreign policy. He’s the pilot; he can’t ‘hijack’ his own plane. Wilkerson is a whining stewardess in a snit because she doesn’t want to learn a new spiel. ‘Do you want the chicken or the beef?’ She’s been serving up State Department chicken in Cairo and Amman and Damascus for decades, and she’s not comfortable with the new Texas beef. But the only hijack that’s going on is the State Department’s bland assumption that it has the right to block the President’s foreign policy.
I can’t claim to know George W. Bush, but as the years go by it strikes me that the caricature — the idiot sock-puppet manipulated by Cheney and Rove to do their bidding — is exactly backwards. The President is his own man — to such a degree that he seems not to notice that very few others are and, when he does, his response is to hunker down among a tight circle of loyalists. So, while he has a certain amount of stellar talent around him, most of his administration is either in the hands of active obstructionists like Wilkerson or trusted mediocrities like Harriet Miers. When I say Miss Miers is a mediocrity, that in itself is not a reason not to appoint her to the Supreme Court. For the first two centuries of the Republic, mediocre cronies were the rule rather than the exception. One thinks of Roscoe Conkling, appointed by Chester Arthur — or, rather, one doesn’t. It’s only in the revisionist interpretation of the Supreme Court as the ultimate nine-man omniscient parliament in which resides all true power to legislate the affairs of the nation that mediocrity would seem to be a disqualification. A decision of the court, according to Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ House leader, is ‘almost as if God has spoken’. Even in a robe, it’s hard to see Harriet Miers like that. But, on the other hand, one could argue that restoring the tradition of appointing hacks, creeps and time-servers to the court is a profoundly conservative act.
In their different ways, Miss Miers and Patrick Fitzgerald’s supposedly imminent indictments sum up the Bush administration, caught between the Scylla of third-rate cronies and the Charybdis of fourth-rate obstructionists.
The Fitzgerald investigation arises from the ‘leak’ to the media of the name of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame. Miss Plame is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, who in 2002 was dispatched by the Agency to Africa to investigate reports that Saddam was attempting to procure uranium from Niger. Ambassador Wilson spent a week ‘sipping sweet mint tea’ with old contacts from Major Wanke’s regime. (I suggested to the New York Times the scandal should be called Wankegate, but they seem reluctant to take me up on the offer.) If this rings a vague bell with you, it’s because I wrote about it in these pages back in the summer of 2003 and concluded:
‘If sending Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger for a week is the best the world’s only hyperpower can do, that’s a serious problem. If the Company knew it was a joke all along, that’s a worse problem. It means Mr Bush is in the same position with the CIA as General Musharraf is with Pakistan’s ISI: when he makes a routine request, he has to figure out whether they’re going to use it to try and set him up.’
That’s still the real scandal, and the only thing wrong with that judgment is that since then Musharraf and the ISI have reached a rough’n’ready modus vivendi that the Bush administration can only envy vis à vis the CIA.
Otherwise, everything that’s come out only confirms my original view. In his laughably misnamed book The Politics Of Truth: Inside The Lies That Led To War And Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, Wilson strenuously denies that ‘my wife had somehow influenced a decision to send me to the middle of the Sahara Desert.... Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter.’
Really? How about the memo she wrote to the deputy director of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division suggesting hubby was the ideal man for the job? (‘My husband has good relations with the PM and the former Minister of Mines,’ etc.) Or the meeting convened by Mrs Wilson at CIA headquarters on 19 February 2002 to introduce her husband to the relevant intelligence officials.
But Wilson’s curiously faulty memory of his wife’s role in getting him the assignment is as nothing compared with his recollection of what he ‘found out’ in Niger. The 2004 Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report on pre-war intelligence has 48 pages on Wilson that exposes everything he’s said publicly about his mission as a lot of baloney. Not only did the Senate report and the Butler report in London and British Intelligence and French Intelligence think Saddam was trying to acquire uranium from Niger, but so did a former Prime Minister of Major Wanke’s, who said so to Wilson, who said so to the CIA.
The scandal here is not that ‘BUSH LIED!!!’ about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, nor even that Wilson lied about Bush lying, but that the world’s most lavishly funded intelligence agency can do no better on a priority security matter than flying in a vain unqualified buffoon for a week of pseudo-spook tourism.
When Wankegate first erupted, the alleged ‘crime’ was that of leaking the name of a covert agent. Miss Plame was not in the least bit ‘covert’ and Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the relevant law, says no crime was committed. Wankegate may yet take down Libby and Rove, but so far all it’s done is drive the New York Times nuts. Judith Miller, a Times reporter and a peripheral figure in the Wilson farrago, went to jail for three months for the usual noble reasons, and the paper proudly stood by her. She got sprung from the big house just the other day, since when her colleagues have been trashing her name in daily 32-page pull-out supplements. Maureen Dowd, the paper’s elderly schoolgirl columnist, went for the jugular, and I haven’t seen a catfight like that since lesbian mud-wrestling night at Bud’s Roadhouse out on Route 123. If the Left were nimbler, they’d have figured that the whole thing is just a Karl Rove front operation to provoke the Times into tearing itself apart.
The Democrats are going to be mighty disappointed by the time this is all over, and still confronting their own identity crisis. Enjoy Fitzmas while you can, guys. You need a gift that keeps on giving, and this one won’t.
