Angrier and Angrier

National Review ^ | 08/25/03 | Michael Ledeen

[Pokey78]

People need to have faith in George. W Bush. Sometimes conservatives tend to panic at the first sign of "difficulties".

Stay the course.

[Pokey78]

Ledeen ping.

[sauropod]

Ledeen is correct. The State Department is an utter and total failure.

[Arkie2]

Pretty accurate representation of the State Dept though.

[Iris7]

I don't know, Washinton DC has been an insane asylum as far back as I can remember. Digging around in the historical record makes me suspect that DC has been an insane asylum for quite a while. Maybe since the 1830s.

[Iris7]

What is really amazing to me is that in spite of overwhelming evidence, mounting by the day, that those people have no idea whatever of what they are doing, those people believe that they are of good will and doing good work. Insane, no?

[Pokey78]

True, but I got visions of conservatives screaming about the slow going in Afghanistan over a year ago. I especially remember Krauthammer almost having a fit.

A week later we were in Kabul.

[Uncle Miltie]

See Tagline.

[LarryM]

Ledeen seems to blame Bush's current weakness on the intelligence agencies. My theory is that the problem lies with Bush himself. He is too weak of a person and not ruthless enough to destroy our enemies. So instead, he beats up on our friends (Israel).

[Question_Assumptions]

While I have no doubt that the intelligence community ignores warnings that it should not ignore, hindsight is 20/20. What this article doesn't discuss are the whistle-blowers and warnings that don't pan out. It is a balancing act between believing every warning and believing none.

They have the same problem with volcano warnings. If they see signs of volcanic activity, they don't immediately predict a volcano or call for an evacuation. Why? Because if they evacuate a city and the volcano doesn't erupt, (A) there will be a backlash against those who made the warning and (B) people will be less likely to pay attention to the next warning. Similarly, if the intelligence community went into full alert every time it had a warning, we'd likely see a lot of false alarms and instead of complaining about how they missed the warnings for 9/11, we'd be complaining about how they keep over-reacting.

In hindsight, it is easy to separate the real warnings from the false ones, just as it is with volcanoes. It is very easy to look at only half of the story and say that they weren't paying enough attention once we know better.

[Consort]

...the NSC under Bush the Father simply refused to believe that Saddam would invade Kuwait,...

That doesn't seem to jibe with the April Gadsby scenario.

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

As Bashar Assad told us some months back, they are going to turn Iraq into a second Lebanon.

He doesn't know much about the current DoD, does he, or the President?

8 "THERE WILL BE NO RETREAT" ~ and other quotes from experts the PRESS ignored this week.
  ~ White House, DoD, various  | 8/25/03 | Pres. Bush, Amb. Bremer, SOD Rumsfeld +

[MeekOneGOP]

[staytrue]

People are extremely fickle. I remember when the UCLA fans were calling for John Wooden to be fired. His crime was that his teams had won 7 championships in a row and one year he did not win one. More recently, U of MD fans were calling for Gary Williams to be fired. His crime was his team had failed to win more than 2 games in the NCAA tournament. 2 years later, he won the championship and now all is forgiven.

GW Bush will have a very tough election unless there is peace and prosperity.

[carton253]

If LarryM couldn't bash Bush, he would have nothing to post.

[300winmag]

I like Bush a lot, and I think he's giving the right broad orders, they're just not being fully implemented by some of his subordinates.

This article tiptoes around, but never clearly states, how far the federal government has been klintonized during the regime of Bill and Hiltery. Even "protected" civil servants found out that if someone ratted them out, and said they had a picture of George H. W. Bush on their desk, bad things would happen to their careers. Generals who retired in disgust during the klinton years, and there were many, were warned to keep quiet, or see "complications" develop with their pensions.

The State Department was pretty well klintonized even before the klintons took power. But they spread their evil, and their own "sleeper agents" throughout the civil service system in other angencies, too. The entire emphasis was on not reporting what the klintons did not want to hear, and making sure your subordinates didn't nose around in those areas, either.

[Publius6961]

Would somebody please answer a reasonably simple question?

Does the legal concept "treason" still exist?