Next this picture is just adorable imho
Posted on 03/24/2004 2:35:13 PM PST by GretchenEE
Next this picture is just adorable imho
And guess what..............CNN and MSNBC are reading from an EMAIL that Clarke send to Condi Rice a few days AFTER 9-11.....and it also contradicts his book!
WOO HOO! Poor little Dick Clark will no longer be on "Grandstand" Your fifteen minutes are up Dickie!
To ALL: Just to update......we're leaving for Ft. Campbell tomorrow. Eric is arriving on Friday.
I've been running around like the proverbial decaptitated chicken, and experiencing roller coaster emotions, but all is well.
He'll have a weekend pass, so we'll spend Saturday and Sunday with him, and then he'll outprocess and be home (Lord willing) by the end of the week.
We need a little extra prayer that nothing goes wrong, since we are heading to Minnesota to hear our older son's final college choir/orchestra concert, and Eric HAS to be with us, so he HAS to be home by Friday.
I won't be around much tonight or tomorrow morning, but I'll check in a couple of times before we leave.
Thanks for your prayers for his safety in this last leg of a long and difficult journey! HOOAH!!
Thanks for the update!
I hope ALL of you will enjoy your son's concert. Have a safe journey!
MAR. 24, 2004: DICK CLARKE'S AMERICAN GRANDSTAND
Finished his book late last night – and have to say that while I began reading it with disapproval, I ended with dismay.
Here is a once great public servant engaging in the shabbiest kind of name-calling and George Soros-style paranoia. (The “Enemies” of the Constitution in the “Against All Enemies” title refers pretty clearly to George Bush and the Bush administration. Clarke goes on to tut-tut over how the Patriot Act has been interpreted as a fascist piece of legislation – without pausing to point out how crazy that interpretation that is or how essential the Patriot Act has been to just the kind of counter-terrorism work that he favors.)
Still, there are things that can be learned from the book. One is that for all the praise that Clarke pours on Bill Clinton personally, he presents an absolutely damning account of the terrorism record of the Clinton administration. Time and time again, he and his team agree that a course of action is vital – up to and including air raids against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan (air raids not cruise missile raids – cruise missiles are slow and gave the Pakistanis time to tip off al Qaeda that the bombs were coming). And nothing happens. Either the bureaucracy refuses to carry out the order or the military drags its feets or (most typically) President Clinton rules out courses of action that carry any risk at all.
Just as Bob Bartley and Barbara Olson predicted at the very onset of the Clinton presidency, so Clarke agrees that Clinton’s ability to defend the country was paralyzed by his personal failings. (Although Clarke shares that strange Clintonian self-pity which adjudged the president’s inaction always to be somebody else’s fault.)
“Because of the intensity of the political opposition that Clinton engendered, he had been heavily criticized for bombing al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, for engaging in ‘Wag the Dog’ tactics to divert attention from a scandal about his personal life. For similar reasons, he could not fire the recalcitrant FBI Director who had failed to fix the Bureau or to uncover terrorists in the United States. He had given the CIA unprecedented authority to go after bin Laden personally and al Qaeda, but had not taken steps when they did little or nothing. Because Clinton was criticized as a Vietnam War opponent without a military record, he was limited in his ability to direct the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct. He had tried that in Somalia, and the military had made mistakes and lamed him. In the absence of a bigger provocation from al Qaeda to silence his critics, Clinton thought he could do no more.” (p. 225.)
Sometimes reading Clarke’s book makes you wonder whether the United States had a president at all between 1993 and 2001. Please excuse the blue language in the following passage.
“On a brisk October day in 2000, [Army Special Forces colonel Mike] Sheehan stood with me on West Executive Avenue and watch[ed] as the limousines left the White House meeting on the Cole attack to go back to the Pentagon. ‘What’s it gonna take, Dick?’ Sheehan demanded. ‘Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell, they won’t even let the Air Force bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention.”
That same Constitution that Clarke accuses George Bush of violating also appoints the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
**
On to the Bush material.
Early on, the Bush team made a fateful decision about Clarke. They asked him to stay on at the National Security Council – but demoted him from the high position he had held under Bill Clinton. Clarke had for eight years enjoyed more access to the president than the head of the CIA or FBI. Suddenly he found himself just another NSC senior director.
It’s a general rule of management that you never demote anybody important: You fire them, and fast, or else they will sabotage your organization. If Bush wanted to retain Clarke’s services, he should have kept him in his old job. Failing that, he should have pushed him out the door on the Monday after Inauguration day.
That didn’t happen, for pardonable reasons and not so pardonable. The pardonable reason was the shortness of time: Bush had less than six weeks to complete his transition – the recount plus the ever-increasing sclerosis of the clearing and confirmation process meant that he did not have his own people up and ready to go until the second half of 2001. The not so pardonable reason was a phenomenon I noted in The Right Man: a reluctance to use the hiring and firing power to shape the NSC in favor of the president’s policies. For almost a year, Bush and Condoleezza Rice tried to use Clinton holdovers to carry out Bush’s policies. Unsurprisingly, the experiment has not been a happy one.
**
More important though is that Clarke confirms something else I saw – and that something is the essence of the case for George Bush’s leadership. The core of Clarke’s unhappiness with George Bush is that Bush disregarded the “expert” advice of government professionals after 9/11. Clarke saw 9/11 as a reason to continue and expand the policies of the Clinton years: to hunt down individual terrorists while taking one more whirligig ride on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so-called, Bush’s breakthrough after 9/11 was his willingness to rethink old assumptions and to consider new and seemingly radical ideas – because only such ideas were equal to the newness and radicalism of the situation.
When a set of ideas are tried over eight years – and result in one of the greatest disasters in American history – you’d think that might tend to discredit those ideas. You’d think so – but as we’re discovering in this campaign season, you’d be wrong.
We'll hand the cameras over to family members when Eric comes because we want all our hands and arms free to hug him for a REALLY long time...............and cry like babies. (Mr Ohio's a 'weeper' just like the President!)
The concert thing is a BIG deal for us. Eric was supposed to stand next to his brother in choir (one of the best) this semester, but obviously didn't make it back on time.
It's REALLY important to him to hear this concert, and the timing has to be perfect.
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