MICKEY KAUS on why the Kerry camp’s self-important Vietnam analogies don’t work:

The difference, of course, is that the war Johnson fought using the Gulf of Tonkin incident produced very little except massive carnage and a Communist government in South Vietnam. The Beirut attack was a total loss. But American soldiers in Iraq–whether or not there were WMDs–are in the process of freeing a nation from a dictator. This accomplishment survives the Kay report. It doesn’t “cheapen the sacrifice” American soldiers made achieving this goal to admit the truth about the WMDs. Does Kerry think the troops haven’t achieved this?

Kaus also has some advice for Bush that the Bush people ought to read.

HERE’S A NEW POST ON AUTHOR JOHN GRAY’S rather lame legal threat aimed at a blogger. (More on the threat, and on John Gray’s rather unimpressive credentials at this link. Did Gray insist on this against his lawyer’s advice? Or did his lawyer fail to advise him against this rather self-defeating conduct?)

I had never given Gray, or his credentials, much thought before. But this threat, and the information it has brought forth, has convinced me that he’s a poser and a bully.

NICK SCHULZ has thoughts on the French, who are not our allies.

C.D. HARRIS ON RICHARD CLARKE AND HIS DEFENDERS:

Let no man say that Josh Marshall is not a master craftsman of the art of spin.

Not even Marshall’s considerable talents, however, can save Clarke and his book from the fact that the transcript completely and utterly contradicts what he’s saying now. As such, it is anything but an ‘attack on Clarke’s character.’ It is proof – dispositive proof, from the man’s own mouth – that his recent accusations are patently false. “The best they can do”? Indeed.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Roll Call notes that more people are questioning Clarke’s truthfulness. Here’s an excerpt that’s not on the free page:

House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that former White House anti-terror czar Richard Clarke, the author of a new book critical of President Bush’s handling of the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, may have lied in testimony to his committee, and said he plans to explore whether Congressional action on the matter is warranted.

Clarke’s “testimony to our committee is 180 degrees out of line with what he is saying in his book,” Goss said. “He’s either lying in his book or he lied to our committee. It’s one or the other.”

Yes, a number of us have been pointing this out.

“THE TOTAL COLLAPSE OF RICHARD CLARKE:” Does Karl Rove pay these guys, or is Bush just preternaturally lucky where his critics are concerned?

UPDATE: More here:

Defenders of Clarke (and even some of his opponents) say that he is extremely knowledgeable about the war on terror. That may be true; I don’t have the specialized knowledge of the subject to judge. But, it is more than a little troubling that even his defenders don’t tell us about his victories in that war, though it is easy to find examples of his blunders. If he is a great anti-terrorist warrior, one would think he would have some wins on his record, as well as all these losses.

Indeed.

TIME: “Richard Clarke, at War With Himself.”

I was hoping he’d be at war with the terrorists.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY has interesting thoughts on markets and politics.

WINDS OF CHANGE has its war news roundup posted. And there are lots of other interesting posts — just keep scrolling.

CABLENEWSER wonders about media silence and the 2002 Clarke interview.

UPDATE: Answer here.

TOM MAGUIRE NOTES that the Kerry assassination story is working its way up the media food chain, with the Boston Globe getting involved (though it’s still nibbling around the edges). There’s more Kerrry hedging, too, on the question of whether American troops “murdered” 200,000 Vietnamese. (He said yes back then; now he regards the word “murdered” as “inappropriate.”)

UPDATE: Okay, okay, here’s the link to the Globe story, and here’s the lede:

WASHINGTON — In a question-and-answer session before a Senate committee in 1971, John F. Kerry, who was a leading antiwar activist at the time, asserted that 200,000 Vietnamese per year were being “murdered by the United States of America” and said he had gone to Paris and “talked with both delegations at the peace talks” and met with communist representatives.

Maguire has more, and additional links.

JEFF JARVIS, a survivor of the WTC attacks, is unsatisfied with Richard Clarke’s “apology” — and he’s not the only one.

I’VE JUST STARTED READING Alan Shipnuck’s book, The Battle for Augusta National: Hootie, Martha and the Masters of the Universe, and so far it’s pretty good. I’m sure it’ll be better than Howell Raines’ autobiography, which Jack Shafer eviscerates. The real connection between the two, though, is that the Martha Burk / Augusta National brouhaha underscored the New York Times’ growing irrelevance. As Mark Steyn noted:

In the last nine months, the New York Times has run 95 stories on Martha Burk and Augusta. So, aside from being outnumbered by police and reporters, Burk’s 40 supporters were outnumbered more than two to one by New York Times stories on Burk. Every time the Times mentioned this allegedly raging furor, it attracted approximately another 0.4 of a supporter to her cause. . . .

The Times’ carpet bombing of Augusta has proved a pathetic bunker-bust. This is supposed to be the most influential newspaper in America, the one whose front page all but dictates the agenda of the network news shows. And its most fiercely sustained campaign can’t fill a single school bus?

That is Raines’ legacy, and it appears to be in no danger from his successors.

GARY SILBERBERG looks at Bruce Ackerman’s latest proposal and asks: “Do we need a clever way of bribing fifty million Americans to enroll in a politically correct university?”

But Ackerman is winning over others:

Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School, received the Insignia of Commander of the French Order of Merit from the Republic of France at a ceremony at Yale Law School on March 1.

The award was presented by Madame Noelle Lenoir, France’s Minister for European Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It’s well-deserved.

UPDATE: D’oh! It’s actually a guest comment at Gary Silberberg’s blog. Sorry. No Order of Merit for me!

EVAN COYNE MALONEY has a new video up. Don’t miss it!

UPDATE: Yes, he does deserve a network gig.

CHRIS MUIR’S Day By Day really deserves to be syndicated.

I NEED TO DO A BLOGROLL UPDATE SOON: If you notice any out-of-date items, please let me know, with the subject line “blogroll.” Thanks!

UPDATE: Sheesh! I’ve gotten nearly a hundred of these already. Thanks, but no more, please. This is all I can handle.

GOOD NEWS FROM MICHIGAN, whose concealed-carry law is relatively recent, I believe:

Police Chief William Dwyer said the woman, whose name was not released, was in the parking lot of a business at 12 Mile and Drake, where she worked in the accounting department, when a man confronted her Friday morning.

When he came within about 10 feet, Dwyer said, the woman calmly pulled the gun out of her purse and pointed it at the man — identified as Carl Walker, 21, of Detroit.

Walker did not draw his weapon, police said. Instead, he ran to a nearby car and the woman called 911. Police later arrested Walker and recovered a pistol. Two companions, Monique Bell, 26, of Detroit and Daphne Patterson, 28, of Southfield, also were arrested.

Dwyer said the incident is making him rethink his opposition to the state law that eased concealed weapons permit regulations. . . .

Two other men — a father-son team accused of trying to rob a 65-year-old retiree — are expected to be arraigned this morning in St. Clair County.

The men already had robbed one woman before being stopped by the home owner’s bullet on Friday, police said.

The Ft. Gratiot Township home owner answered his door on Keewahdin Road about 8 p.m. and was accosted by a 20-year-old Worth Township man armed with a handgun. When the young man’s attention was diverted, police said the home owner grabbed his own .38-caliber handgun and fired.

“The round ended up coming out of his buttocks, so I’m sure he’ll be thinking about that old man every time he sits down for a while,” said Detective Lt. Mike Bloomfield of the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department.

A pack, not a herd. Sadly, not everyone has caught on:

State Sen. Gilda Jacobs, D-Huntington Woods, reacted guardedly to the two self-defense cases.

“We have to be careful we don’t end up having the wild, wild west,” she said.

“People should feel able to protect themselves in their own homes, there’s some argument there,” said Jacobs, who as a state representative voted against the concealed weapons law in 2002. “But do we want a bunch of vigilantes running around with guns to do the police’s work?”

Absurd, disconnected from the actual facts, and cliche-filled. But also the wave of the past.

RICH LOWRY WRITES ON CLARKE’S COLLAPSE. And Greg Djerejian observes that the New York Times and Washington Post have been forced to spin pretty hard to maintain their predetermined storyline. (“The bottom line on W. 43rd St. is thus: Clinton took al–Q seriously, Bush didn’t. And, frankly, I just can’t take that spin seriously.” Hard to, when Clarke himself said Bush increased the Clinton efforts dramatically — but of course, now Clarke says he was lying to make his boss look good back then, but that now he’s telling the disinterested truth!)

UPDATE: Reader Ted Gideon thinks I’m too hard on Clarke:

[H]asn’t it occurred yet to you or your linkees that the so-called contradictory statements largely were made as an employee/appointee of the administration, and that part of his JOB was to say what the administration wanted said? When you were in private practice did you make it a habit to file briefs or argue in court that even though your client was liable/guilty, that was no reason not to dismiss? Of course not, nor would any thinking person expect an administration official to say words to the effect of, “We couldn’t be bothered to attach any urgency to this issue because we were too busy working on tax cuts or whatever.” If an official of an administration wishes to say the emperor has no clothes, the official should resign first.

Well, leaving aside the question of whether legal ethics are an appropriate analogy here (though in fact I never presented evidence that I thought was false), Clarke wasn’t just spinning: he made specific assertions of fact back in 2002 which (1) are inconsistent with what he’s saying now; and (2) that as far as I know no one has said are false. And although I mentioned them below, let’s revisit them here:

JIM ANGLE: You’re saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that’s correct.

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you’re saying is that there was no — one, there was no [Clinton] plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of ’98 were made in the spring months just after the [Bush] administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That’s right.

Now Clarke’s saying that they were too busy with tax cuts, or whatever. But — leaving aside the problems with the “of course I was lying then, but you can trust me now!” flavor of his explanations for the discrepancy, I don’t see any evidence that those earlier statements were actually untrue. Which makes his current statements even more troubling.

It’s certainly true that if Clarke thought the Bush Administration was endangering the nation in 2002, he should have resigned. But he didn’t, did he?

Powerline has more — just keep scrolling.

Finally, Daniel Drezner offers a clue as to what’s really going on: “it’s hard not to believe that Clarke’s evaluation of presidential performance is directly correlated with how well those presidents treated Clarke.”

MORE: Some interesting thoughts on Clinton and Bush antiterror strategy.

STILL MORE: An important followup comment from Rich Lowry:

Let me be clear about this: it would have been theoretically possible for Clarke to give reporters that August 2002 briefing, emphasizing the positive aspects of the administration’s anti-terror record, and then go and write a critical book, giving what he considers a more complete view. In fact, I think Clarke could have written a very interesting and honest book criticizing the failures in both the Clinton and Bush administrations. But that is not what he has done. There is no way to square what he said in August 2002 with the actual book he has written, because it is such a totalist critique of the Bush administration that leaves out or skates over important facts he recounted in 2002. The Clarke who said in 2002 that nothing important had moved in U.S. counterterrorism policy since the end of 1998 simply cannot be squared with the Clarke of Against All Enemies.

Indeed. A good critique would be a service. This isn’t.

VIA ROLL CALL, INTERESTING POLL DATA: “A Year after Iraq War, Most Americans Say Stay the Course.” Read the whole thing.

PHILOSOPHICAL DIVISIONS IN THE WAR ON TERROR: Donald Sensing offers a must-read post on the big picture:

Yet asking the question, “What causes Islamist terrorism?” does not make one a de facto leftist by any means. In fact, that was exactly the question that the Bush administration started asking on Sept. 12, 2001. And its framing and answering points out the sharp divide between those who claim the Iraq campaign was a diversion from the War on Terror and those who claim – as I do – that the Iraq war was absolutely essential to succeeding in the WOT.

Read the whole thing.

APPALLING IGNORANCE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT — on the part of college students and, far more appallingly, of administrators.

THERE’S A SAVE BOB EDWARDS COALITION?

A GENUINE HERO: Tomorrow is the birthday of Norman Borlaug, who unlike many recent winners of the Nobel Peace Prize has actually done something significant to help humanity.

Here’s a wonderful article about Borlaug — and his rather unsavory critics — from The Atlantic Monthly. Why did Borlaug win the prize? He “may have prevented a billion deaths.” Strangely, some people don’t admire that.

RICHARD CLARKE — NOT JUST FLIP-FLOPPING, BUT WRONG, as Michael Young writes in Reason:

By intervening in the relationship between the brutish Iraqi regime and its long-suffering subjects, the US adopted a policy of enforced democratization. As far as the Bush administration was concerned, a democratic Iraq at the heart of the Arab world could become a liberal beacon in the region, prompting demands for openness and real reform inside neighboring states. Ridiculous you say? The Syrian regime, faced in the past two weeks with protests by individuals seeking greater freedom and a revolt by disgruntled Kurds, would surely disagree.

This is where Clarke’s allegations, and those of critics who see a disconnect between Al Qaeda and Iraq, are misleading. Iraq always was essential to the anti-terrorism battle precisely because victory there was regarded as necessary to transform societies from where terrorists, spawned by suffocating regimes, had emerged. One can disagree with the practicability of such a strategy, but it is difficult to fault its logic. . . .

Lest some find this argument—that autocracy breeds terrorism—deceptive, it is worth recalling it was one that America’s most vociferous critics floated after Sept. 11. But that was before they realized that such an opinion placed them in the same boat as Bush administration hawks. Once they did, they preferred to backtrack, on the assumption that anti-Americanism is always more rewarding than consistency.

Indeed. The good news is that — used as a plan for action, rather than a formula for hair-shirted American inaction — this approach is actually working.

UPDATE: This story has more examples of Clarke flip-flops. Clarke’s current explanation — he was lying then, not now:

“When you are special assistant to the president and you’re asked to explain something that is potentially embarrassing to the administration, because the administration didn’t do enough or didn’t do it in a timely manner and is taking political heat for it, as was the case there, you have a choice,” he said.

One “choice that one has is to put the best face you can for the administration on the facts as they were, and that is what I did.”

This guy’s working for Rove. By the time he’s done imploding, Bush will have discredited the media and all his critics. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

The other possibility is that Clarke held an important national security job for years while being dumb as a post, so dumb that he would write a book making explosive accusations against the White House while knowing — or forgetting? — that all sorts of contradictory evidence was on the record and bound to come out. Otherwise, wouldn’t he at least have tried to explain this stuff up front?

As I’ve said before, I think there’s a lot to complain about regarding pre-9/11 antiterror policy, by both Clinton and Bush. (Read this piece by Gerald Posner). And a lot of people probably should have been fired. But Clarke is now saying that his real problem is with the invasion of Iraq, even as he focuses on pre-9/11 events.

A useful critique would be nice, but Clarke seems to be producing incoherent grandstanding.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It just gets worse. Here’s a report that Clarke was linking Iraqi WMDs and Al Qaeda back in 1999:

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa’s current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

There’s a lengthy excerpt from the Washington Post story (it’s pay only now) at the link above. I looked at the whole thing on NEXIS just to be sure it was in context. The excerpt does omit this passage, which perhaps weakens the Al Qaeda WMD point (but not the Iraqi connection) a bit:

Clarke said the U.S. does not believe that bin Laden has been able to acquire chemical agents, biological toxins or nuclear weapons. If evidence of such an acquisition existed, he said, “we would be in the process of doing something.”

On the other hand, it’s followed immediately by this howler:

Assessing U.S. counterterrorism policy to date, Clarke said it’s no accident that there have been so few terrorist attacks on American soil.

“The fact that we got seven out of the eight people from the World Trade Center [bombing], and we found them in five countries around the world and brought them back here, the fact we can demonstrate repeatedly that the slogan, ‘There’s nowhere to hide,’ is more than a slogan, the fact that we don’t forget, we’re persistent — we get them — has deterred terrorism,” he said.

Clarke thought our limp response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was scaring Al Qaeda?

We know better today. He should have known better then. Or maybe he was just trying to make his boss look good, which he’s admitted is a major consideration in his public statements.

So who’s his boss now?

MORE: Not Rep. Christopher Shays, who writes: “Clarke was part of the problem before September 11, because he took too narrow a view of the terrorism threat. His approach was reactive and limited to swatting at the visible elements of Al Qe’eda, not the hidden global network and its state sponsors. ” That description certainly fits with Clarke’s comments about the 1993 bombing response! Read the whole thing, along with the attachments, dating back to 2000. (Via Poliblog).

STILL MORE: Stephen Green observes:

Surely, there’s enough blame for 9/11 to go around the Washington Beltway once or twice at least. (How many times do I have to say George Tenet and John Ashcroft needed to be fired on September 12, before the usual fools stop accusing me of being a low-rent shill for the Bush Administration? Ugh. Anyway.) But to claim that Clarke was some kind of maven is just a desperate attempt to keep the blame all in one little pile.

And we all know how those stink.

Indeed. Meanwhile Eric Scheie looks at Clarke’s Y2K record and observes, “hype is nothing new to Richard Clarke.” Read the whole thing, which offers the kind of interesting background you seldom find in newspaper accounts.

A MAJOR CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY in Ohio:

West Toledo resident Barb Korn grinned yesterday as she picked up a silver Smith & Wesson revolver – holding it with both hands and aiming it.
“I like this,” she said, staring down the gun’s sights.

Ms. Korn, 60, was among nearly 25 people taking a 12-hour class at Cleland’s Outdoor World on Airport Highway. The training is required in order to carry a firearm under Ohio’s new concealed weapons law.

“I was mugged previously and I want to be able to defend myself,” she said. “I will feel safer.”

The law, which goes into effect April 8, requires sheriffs to approve a concealed-handgun license if the applicant completes 10 hours of classroom training and two hours of live-fire training, pays a fee, and passes an exam.

Unfortunately, an essential human right — self-defense — is being denied elsewhere:

A man who stabbed to death an armed intruder at his home was jailed for eight years today.

Carl Lindsay, 25, answered a knock at his door in Salford, Greater Manchester, to find four men armed with a gun.

When the gang tried to rob him he grabbed a samurai sword and stabbed one of them, 37-year-old Stephen Swindells, four times.

I’m deeply disappointed at this barbaric infringement of human rights.

UPDATE: Several readers send a link to this story, which unlike the report above says that the defendant was a pot dealer. I’m not sure why that makes a difference in terms of self-defense. The wounds are from behind, which could make a difference, but the facts recited are otherwise largely consistent with the account above.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Rustler notes that while the English shooting may have been good or not, it’s not clearly a bad call based on the additional available evidence. [LATER: Er, stabbing, not shooting.]