Foley: I Was Molested

ABC is reporting that former Congressman Mark Foley’s attorney is going to hold a news conference shortly. My guess is that Foley’s actions have been sufficient for a D.A. somewhere to charge Foley on charges of soliciting a minor — there’s no question as to evidence, and there’s no way a grand jury would fail to uphold an indictment. Sadly for the nation, this story isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

UPDATE: Instead, Foley is now saying that he was molested by a clergyman when he was between 13 and 14 and is gay. None of which excuse his actions in any way. Foley seems to be trying to garner sympathy for himself: I rather doubt that will work.

UPDATE: Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy has some interesting background on the legal issues that arise from this sordid tale.

Should Hastert Go?

National Review‘s Kate O’Beirne says the calls for Hastert to step down as Speaker will only increase. She’s almost certainly right — the House leadership utterly and completely mismanaged a major scandal at the worst possible moment, and it’s quite possible that the GOP will lose the House because of this. It isn’t certain that Hastert knew enough to start investigating Foley, but it’s hard to argue that what was apparently an open secret on the Hill shouldn’t have resulted in some kind of action. This lapse in judgment and propriety is absolutely unacceptable.

The Foley incident could swing the balance of power in the House, and the GOP has no one to blame for themselves.

Foley Resigns

Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) has resigned from Congress after it was revealed that he had sent potentially inappropriate emails to a 16-year-old Congressional page.

It sounds like there may be more skeletons in Foley’s closet that he doesn’t want revealed, which would explain why Foley is resigning now rather than fighting the matter. ~~The Florida GOP can still replace him on the ballot~~, but it is anyone’s guess what the fallout of this matter may be, both in Florida and nationally.

UPDATE: Apparently Foley’s name must stay on the ballot, which makes things much more difficult in replacing him.

Twin Cities To Host 2008 GOP Convention

The Twin Cities will be the host of the 2008 GOP National Convention, in a move likely designed to bring Minnesota into the national GOP column. I’m not sure that strategy will necessarily be successful, but 2008 will certainly be an interesting year. Then again, I’d better count on having one hell of a commute that week…

UPDATE: Apparently the convention will be at the XCel Energy Center in St. Paul — which is appropriate given that current Senator Norm Coleman was instrumental in getting that venue built. The Center is the normal home to the Minnesota Wild pro hockey team, and has been the site of the state GOP conventions for the last few years. It will undoubtedly be an excellent venue for what is sure to be a very interesting race.

My hope is to blog from the floor as Rudy Guiliani gives his acceptance speech, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself there…

Asking The Right Questions

David Ignatius has an interesting piece from The Washington Post on why the Democrats can’t capitalize on the Iraq issue. Despite the lingering concerns about the direction of Iraq and the widespread belief that Iraq is in a state of de facto civil war, the closest thing to a Democratic consensus view is that we should get out as soon as possible (the Murtha/Kerry position). Ignatius explains why this position is absolutely untenable:

Here’s a reality check for the Democrats: There is not a single country in the Middle East, with the possible exception of Iran, which favors a rapid American pullout from Iraq. Why? The consensus in the region is that a retreat now would have disastrous consequences for America and its allies. Yet withdrawal is the Iraq strategy you hear from most congressional Democrats, whether they call it “strategic redeployment” or something else.

I wish Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter) were asking this question: How do we prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state? Many critics of the war would argue that the worst has already happened — Iraq has already unraveled. Unfortunately, as bad as things are, they could get considerably worse. Following a rapid American pullout, Iraq could descend into a full-blown civil war, with the Sunni-Shiite violence spreading outward throughout the region. In this chaos, oil supplies could be threatened, sending the price of oil well above $100 a barrel. Turkey, Iran and Jordan would intervene to protect their interests. James Fallows titled his collection of prescient essays warning about the Iraq War “Blind into Baghdad.” We shouldn’t compound the error by being “blind out of Baghdad,” too.

If the Democrats take the position that they will do what it takes to fix Iraq, their base will shatter. The hardcore anti-war left has a stranglehold on Democratic Party politics — just look at what they did with Hillary Clinton when she had the audacity to speak the truth. If they advocate a pullout, they prove once again that they are the party of weakness on national security issues. It’s a major Catch-22.

Ultimately, the Democrats should repudiate their own extremist elements. They may lose their MoveOn.org base in the process, but there aren’t enough of them in terms of the general electorate to make a difference, and their only hope of relevance is to show that they’re tougher on national security. If the Democrats came out as the party that would finish the job in Iraq, they might be able to pull a sufficient number of security voters away from the GOP flock to make up for the loss of their radical fringe.

However, that would be a great political risk, and political daring is not one of the hallmarks of the Democratic Party today. The Democratic position on Iraq will continue to be schizophrenic and the Democrats will still be perceived as the party of weakness on national security. The Democrats aren’t interested the right question: how do we win in Iraq? Instead, they’re trying to ask how far they can go in appeasing the anti-war base without looking feckless on national security? That isn’t the right question, and if the Democrats can’t ask the right question they have no hope of finding the right answer.

The NIE: Not Much New

The Director of National Intelligence has released the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism, and as expected the media spin was both a selective reading of the conclusions and a distortion of its actual position. The actual conclusion was:

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep
resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

That’s a fair assessment. Leaving Iraq half-finished (as the Democrats would have us do) would signal to the jihadi community that the US is a paper tiger that can be defeated by a vastly inferior force as well a signaling to the Muslim world that our support for pluralism and democracy is essentially a sham. That isn’t acceptable to us on any level. The price of success in Iraq was always going to be high — successfully transitioning from autocracy to democracy is not a project that can be done on the cheap or on a set timetable. However, the price of the status quo was already too high, and Iraq presented the best possible way to deal with a perceived security threat and advance a new agenda for the Middle East that would draw out the oxygen that was feeding the fires of terrorism.

The NIE is quite honest in its assessment of how well we’re doing: al-Qaeda the organization has been severely disrupted, but we’re not doing nearly enough to fight the jihadi ideology at its core. The NIE indicates that the ultimate goal in Iraq of a tolerant and pluralist society would have profound implications for the jihadi ideology, but that the pace of reforms in Iraq and elsewhere are still so slow that it’s encouraging more resentment.

If anything, the biggest problem with the Bush Administration is that we’re being too timid in advancing our ends. We should be putting more pressure on governments like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to enact democratic reforms. We should be spending far more on public diplomacy, including covert funding of democratic opposition groups across the region. The NIE makes it clear that the military strategy has worked, but that it is insufficient on its own for defeating this ideologically-based movement.

There’s not much particularly new in the NIE to those who have been paying attention — but what this does show is that the media is more interested in showing off their biases than in casting light on the single most crucial issue in today’s world. Victory in this war requires a strong and bipartisan commitment to win — and when unelected members of the bureaucracy begin a covert campaign to undermine the public policy of elected decision-makers, then there is a critical problem that must be addressed. The bureaucracy should not be setting our national security policy — that’s one of the biggest reasons why the Clinton Administration’s anti-terrorism policies were so feckless. President Bush needs to use this leak as a moment to strongly push back against intelligent leaks and ensure that the CIA acts as an instrument of policy, not as an unelected branch of government unto itself.

Bush To Declassify NIE

Calling the media’s bluff, President Bush has announced that he will declassify the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iraq, portions of which were leaked to the press by anonymous intelligence community sources. The full text of the NIE is rumored to be much more “fair and balanced” than the material that was leaked.

Once again, the media gets caught spinning, and the intelligence community gets caught trying to leak classified information to influence elections. Sooner or later this madness comes to an end, and President Bush and DNI Negroponte need to follow through by ensuring that the CIA’s secrets remain secret.

Spinning The NIE

Jack Kelly has a piece on the politically-motivated leak of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The CIA has long been trying to act as an unelected branch of government, and the incomplete and misleading way in which only a few of its conclusions were leaked to the press is another example of a bureaucracy gone out of control. As Kelly writes:

Mr. Mazzetti indicated he hasn’t seen the NIE himself, but is reporting on what his sources have told him is in it. But people who leak classified information have agendas, and that agenda rarely is to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Alas, that rarely is the agenda of New York Times reporters either, when they have a story they think will embarrass the Bush administration.

“The New York Times characterization of the NIE is not representative of the complete document,” said Peter Watkins, a White House spokesman.

“Several officials I’ve spoken with who worked on…the final assessment actually reached a different conclusion than what is being reported,” said “Mac Ranger,” a former Army intelligence officer.

Powerline also finds someone who has seen the complete NIE and how the media is distorting its conclusions. The media, once again, is trying to use their contacts in the national intelligence community to shift an election they know they have a strong chance of losing — this is no different than the al-Qaaqaa story which appeared right before the elections in 2004 only to disappear once again when the media no longer had any political interest in pursuing the story.

Furthermore, Robert Kagan writes in The Washington Post that the assertion that the war in Iraq has “increased terrorism” is unprovable:

As a poor substitute for actual figures, The Post notes that, according to the NIE, members of terrorist cells post messages on their Web sites depicting the Iraq war as “a Western attempt to conquer Islam.” No doubt they do. But to move from that observation to the conclusion that the Iraq war has increased the terrorist threat requires answering a few additional questions: How many new terrorists are there? How many of the new terrorists became terrorists because they read the messages on the Web sites? And of those, how many were motivated by the Iraq war as opposed to, say, the war in Afghanistan, or the Danish cartoons, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, or their dislike for the Saudi royal family or Hosni Mubarak, or, more recently, the comments of the pope? Perhaps our intelligence agencies have discovered a way to examine, measure and then rank the motives that drive people to become terrorists, though I tend to doubt it. But any serious and useful assessment of the effect of the Iraq war would, at a minimum, try to isolate the effect of the war from everything else that is and has been going on to stir Muslim anger. Did the NIE attempt to make that calculation?

What is going on here is a rogue CIA trying to selectively release classified information in violation of federal law. Patrick Fitzgerald spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a futile attempt to prove a crime that likely never happened — why in the world isn’t the Justice Department being sent down to Langley with a boatload of subpoenas in an effort to clean house? DNI Negroponte needs to make it quite clear that any CIA employee caught leaking to a reporter will be summarily dismissed and subject to the full penalty of law. This kind of behavior is not only illegal and unethical, but leaks of classified information can get people killed.

Not only that, but The New York Times is once again demonstrating their abject partisan hypocrisy. When it was revealed that President Bush had allowed portions of a pre-war National Intelligence Estimate to be revealed to reporters by Scooter Libby, The New York Times wrote a harshly-worded editorial condemning such actions — but when anonymous sources hand them selective quotations from another NIE, they’re the first to run with it. This sort of blatant hypocrisy is sadly par for the course from the increasingly partisan mainstream media.

President Bush should make it clear that business as usual from the CIA is no longer tolerable. The CIA seems better at leaking secrets than keeping them, and they seem better at trying to overthrow elected governments at home than dangerous ones abroad. The President should ask the Director of National Intelligence to begin a comprehensive set of reform initiatives to ensure that the CIA does its job.

Furthermore, the President should order the declassification of all segments of the full NIE which do not contain information that would compromise national security. The American people are only getting the side of the story that the left wants them to get when the full story is vastly different. A release of the full NIE would show the full context of these statements and provide yet another demonstration of the dishonesty and duplicity of the mainstream media.

Narcissus Unbound

As Glenn Reynolds observes everyone’s talking about Bill Clinton again after his snit during a Chris Wallace interview for Fox News. Wallace had the audacity to actually ask a tough question, which apparently gave good old Bill a serious case of the vapors.

Former President Clinton recommended that everyone read former White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke’s book Against All Enemies which supposedly shows how the Clinton Administration didn’t really drop the ball on terrorism, and especially al-Qaeda. The problem with that is that Clarke’s book directly contradicts Clinton’s attempts to argue that he was proactive on terrorism. Clarke paints Clinton has being interested in how things polled rather than what the results actually were and deferential to members of his Cabinet who argued against a strong response to al-Qaeda’s attacks against US interests.

If that weren’t enough, Clinton outright lied when he said that Richard Clarke was “fired” by the Bush Administration — Clarke states in his book that he resigned from the White House voluntarily. But Clinton has always played fast and loose with the facts, and there’s no reason why he’s likely to stop now.

Clinton’s sense of self-aggrandizement and incredibly thin skin are another manifestation of the character flaws he brought to his term in office — and the last thing this country needs now is a repeat of the sordid history of the Clinton Administration. Clinton had eight years to deal with the threat of al-Qaeda, and he scored a few wins and made several key mistakes. It’s not all that likely that anyone else would have done much differently under similar circumstances. What is certain is that the always-egocentric ex-President can’t stomach even a modicum of criticism — and when Wallace actually dared to throw more than a slow-pitch softball, Clinton threw a temper tantrum.

Once again, Clinton proves that behind the slick exterior, he has some of the thinnest skin in politics.

UPDATE: Powerline has some relevant quotations from Clarke’s book which contradict Clinton’s tirade.

Keeping (False) Hope Alive

Tom Maguire takes a look at the New York Times‘ piece on the Democrats 2006 chances and finds it more than a little lacking. The Democrats’ hope of capturing the House seem to be slipping day by day as the Republican base comes back home and the Democrats still can’t elucidate a message other than “we hate Bush” and “really, we’re not that crazy.”

Maguire does a great job of analyzing the political forecasts, which show that the pro-Democratic tide of recent weeks appears to have receded. Both TradeSports and the Iowa Electronic Markets are predicting a GOP hold on both houses. Polls have shown the President’s approval ratings hitting above the 40% mark. Gas prices are falling. Interestingly enough, support for the war in Iraq appears to have increased. Trends can change in the next few weeks before Election Day, but the idea that the Democrats will take control of the House has gone from assuredly to only possibly.

Maguire has a good analysis of why this is:

Following their 2002 debacle the Democrats were criticized for trying to beat something with nothing. I’ll reiterate – here we go again. To win this election the Democrats need to run against George Bush and run away from their base; it’s hard to do both.

Indeed it is hard to do both, and the Democrats are running into the problem that they have to bring forth some kind of policy proposal as a counter to the Republican agenda, but they can’t really do so because if they did what they want to do they’d alienate too much of the electorate to win. The Democrats have essentially become a party that can’t appeal beyond their own base. While the Republicans have done quite a lot to manage to alienate their base and everyone else as well, that only means that the GOP will squeak by rather than wipe the floor with the Democrats.

The Democrats never got a message together other than “we really hate Bush.” They’ve made every possible effort to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, especially when they deep-sixed one of their own to replace him with a vapid empty suit to be filled with the hot air of liberal bloggers. They continue to be utterly tone deaf on issues of national security, their economic plan is more of the same, and there’s no leadership or coherent message at the top of the party.

Then again, given the way in which the Democrats are willfully blind on crucial matters of national security, perhaps we should be thankful that their chances are on the decline. Were this the vacation from history we got in the 1990s the childish partisanship coming out of Washington would be an amusement. At a time in which we find ourselves at the precipice of disaster and a devastating clash of civilizations, it is intolerable to have the childish and the self-obsessed in power.