READER BEN DOLFIN sends this bit of perspective regarding Bush’s press conference:

If last year before the war started someone told me Bush was going to be
complaining about the poor quality of Iraqi troops by April 13, 2004 I’d
have been overjoyed!

Indeed.

MITCH BERG:

John Ashcroft shredded the 9/11 commission yesterday, all but dragging Jamie Gorelick from behind the rostrum by her hair and yelling “This woman wrote part of the policy that erected the wall between intelligence and prosecution”, even declassifying one of Gorelick’s memos (read: “smoking gun”) which called for, as Ashcroft put it, “Draconian barriers” between the two parts of government most responsible for fighting the war before it became a military war.

So what did the media report? If anything, variations on “Ashcroft on the defensive”, and “The FBI blew it”.

Never – not in one account I’ve read so far, and I’ve read a bunch – did they read “One of the inquisitors on the 9/11 commission was a key architect of the system that made the FBI and CIA’s job completely impossible.” Not one example of “This commission’s work is fatally compromised” – as they would if Gorelick had been a Republican, and the President a Democrat.

For more on Gorelick’s multiple conflicts of interest, including unfortunate Saudi ties, go here and follow the links. I agree that the press is giving her a pass — as I wrote last summer, she shouldn’t have been on the Commission at all. She should resign now, but she won’t.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey is surprised that media, beyond the New York Times, are ignoring this story:

It appears that the primary culprit of the intelligence failure will be the structural hurdles placed recklessly in our counterterrorism efforts by a string of people, which neither starts nor ends with Gorelick, but certainly deeply involves her. Under those circumstances, the American public can have no confidence in any report in which she plays a significant part in shaping. No other member of the commission had this much impact on such a critical flaw. The public should demand the withdrawal of Gorelick from the 9/11 Commission, and they probably would if the media actually reported the story of the day anywhere near as well as the New York Times.

He’s got a survey of how other outlets are spinning the story, and it’s not pretty.

ANOTHER UPDATE: For an example of totally dropping the ball, read this piece by Fred Kaplan, which actually lionizes Gorelick (and, coincidentally, numerous other Clinton appointees) while completely ignoring this issue. Of course, he’s not alone, but it’s interesting that the Times coverage — which usually sets the tone for other outlets — is being ignored here. Why?

MORE: By the way, I think I should stress that the “wall” wasn’t necessarily a bad idea at the time — at least, the purpose of separating law enforcement and intelligence reflected a longstanding tradition. In hindsight, we wish it had been different, but it’s not fair to employ hindsight that way. But if this is true for Gorelick, it’s true for Bush, too, and Gorelick — and the other anti-Bush partisans on the Commission — want to have it both ways on the hindsight front.

What bothers me is that Gorelick is accusing Bush of living in a pre-9/11 mindset before 9/11 when she was occupying that mindset too. And her complicity in this sort of thing — coupled with her obvious motive to deflect blame, and her less-than-forthcoming treatment of these issues — makes her, in my opinion, unfit to serve on the Commission. (And that’s leaving the Saudi issue aside). That’s not because she authored the “wall” policy to begin with, but because of her behavior since.

SOME THOUGHTS ON PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT, in my TechCentralStation column today.

I PRAISE JOHN KERRY: Over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Others disagree.

“THE VIOLENCE IN IRAQ IS A POWER GRAB by ruthless extremists. It is not a civil war, or a popular uprising.” Part of Bush’s opening.

Bush will never be Clinton when it comes to speechifying, but it seems to me that he did a pretty good job by Bush standards. He was focused and specific, stressed — wisely, I think — that the June 30 transfer-of-sovereignty date is firm, but made clear that the transfer doesn’t mean the end of our commitment. There was a lot of stuff (prompted by Kerry’s oped today?) on international cooperation. (Mentioning Kosovo may have been bad salesmanship, though).

“The enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world.” He connected the mentality behind the Iraqi insurgencies with bombings in Madrid, and Bali, and the murder of Daniel Pearl, along with the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. “None of these acts is the work of a religion. All are the work of a fanatical political ideology. The servants of this ideology seek tyranny in the Middle East and beyond. . . . They seek to intimidate America into panic and retreat, and to set free nations against one another. . . We’ve seen that any concession or retreat on our part will only embolden our enemy and lead to more bloodshed.”

“The terrorists have lost the shelter of the Taliban and the training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They lost an ally in Baghdad, and Libya has turned its back on terror.”

Bush said that there’s no safe alternative to resolute action, and stressed that the terrorists fear democracy and freedom in the Arab world.

Overall, a pretty good opening speech — though he probably should have given it weeks ago. The first question was a “quagmire” question. “How do you answer the Vietnam question?”

I think Bush handled that pretty well, and he looked confident and quick on his feet (for Bush). More importantly, he seemed sincere, and determined (“tough” was an oft-repeated word), while admitting problems. And he stayed on message. [I’ve moved my liveblogging to the “extended entry” area. I don’t know why I bothered liveblogging something that was on TV — I just made a few notes and it turned into a blog entry. (All quotes are approximate — I’m not a transcriptionist).]

How will it play? I don’t know how many people watched it, but I think it will reassure a lot of people who haven’t paid a lot of attention day to day, and who wanted evidence that Bush is serious, has a plan, and is on top of things. Lots of talk about cooperation, to deflect claims of unilateralism. He was pretty good, and I wonder why he doesn’t do this more often. Ultimately, though, the issue isn’t the communication, but the way things work out. It’s not the talk, but the results.

UPDATE: Bush’s tie comes in for criticism. (Related tie post here, in case you care where Bush and Kerry get their ties.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge liked the speech less:

I just don’t think this speech did it. One did not come away with the dominant impression being one of fire and brimstone, that we’re going to kick butt and take names, that messing with America is a fatal mistake.

I don’t think that was the speech Bush was trying to give, and I don’t think that’s the speech we needed right now. I think that would have come across as overly bellicose, and maybe even insecure. But I could be wrong.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: The press is getting a bad review, with this as the best line: “It’s less than unimportant. It’s press corps important. And it’s why I find myself listening to the press less and less these days.”

I thought that the press was better than usual, too, actually — by, again, its own not very exacting standard. But maybe I’m just in a mellow mood tonight.

MORE: Roger Simon (he’s a Hollywood guy, so he should know) liked the speech:

I think Bush did very well and helped himself with this press conference. Most of all, he comes off as sincere and passionately committed–and I think on the War on Terror he is. . . .

I also think he should give more press conferences because, although he certainly does not have the verbal skill of a Clinton, he does not seem as if he is trying to gull anyone either. Against the media, which is populated with people desperate to stand out from the crowd to make themselves known, he automatically looks good.

I think that was the White House strategy. Click “read more” and scroll to the bottom for the Don Gonyea question to see what I mean.

Donald Sensing says that Bush and Kerry are sounding more alike on Iraq. And Jeff Jarvis observes that the President seems to have listened to Jay Rosen, and adds:

Just amazing that the reporters keep harping on wanting Bush to say that he made a “mistake” or “failed” or should “apologize.”

Jeesh, do they think this is Oprah and they’re all Dr. Phil?

They hope.

STILL MORE: Jack O’Toole gives a mixed review: the speech was “quite good,” the press conference “disappointing.” Meanwhile reader Eric Hall emails:

One thing I noticed besides Bush’s excellent closing (“change the world, our responsibility, make America safe”) is that the press is trying to define Bush for the election. They touched on “inability to communicate”, “needs to apologize” and “failed to act”. Get ready for seven months of that.

Nonsense. That would be partisanship, and they’re professionals.

Lily Malcolm: “I agree with Glenn that the President did a good job, certainly relative to some of his other extemporaneous public speaking performances. There wasn’t too much of that cringe-inducing nervous cockiness we’ve seen from him in the past.” High praise!

BlackFive: “Overall, he didn’t do so well. . . . He did better the longer it went on.”

Rene: “Bush doesn’t have the polish and command of facts that Clinton had nor does he have the stage presence and comforting voice of Reagan. However, as I see it, he exudes resolve.”

Here’s an online transcript of the press conference, which makes my liveblogging pointless except for a few interspersed comments.

Andrew Sullivan: “I found the president clear, forceful, impassioned, determined, real. This was not an average performance.”

Virginia Postrel: “George W. Bush is not the most articulate of men, but he is really good at one kind of speech: laying out in simple language the way he’s thought through a policy decision.”

Neal Boortz: “We started this orgy of apologies during the Clintonista era. They are little more than moral exhibitionism.”

Another roundup of blog-reactions here. And Porphyrogenitus finds evidence that the Bush playbook looks a lot like the Den Beste playbook.

Spoons didn’t like it much: “Well, it wasn’t universally horrible, but it wasn’t good.”

Tom Maguire: “The speech was strong (we are no longer surprised by this); the press conference was not weak (yes, this is a bit surprising).”

Glittering Eye: “Adequate but lackluster. . . . What did impress me was the palpable disdain the press had for the President and the clear sense that they were gunning for a useable sound-bite.”

Finally (it’s my bedtime) here’s Charles Austin’s observation on the dog that didn’t bark:

There weren’t any questions from Big Media about the state of the economy. Hard to imagine a clearer signal that the economy is strong and probably getting stronger.

Several readers sent this kind of thought, but I think the White House let it be known that the topic was the war. Then again, if the press thought they could nail Bush on the economy, somebody probably would have asked anyway.

FINAL UPDATE: On Don Gonyea’s question, reader Jonathan Miller emails:

Good God, what was that? The only hope he has of not losing all credibility is if the networks didn’t identify him as an NPR reporter. [Oops!]

A side note: Gonyea has been the WH correspondent for the past five years or so. I ferociously dislike his wafer-thin reporting (and his Shatner-esque delivery). That question confirmed what I thought of him. Ugh.

“Shatner-esque?” That’s not my take on Gonyea’s reporting, but I’ll certainly listen to him in a new light, next time.

(more…)

JAMES LILEKS:

I think April will be my month off from marinating in the news 24-7, if only to get my blood-pressure down from hummingbird levels.

I think it may be May for me. I gave a talk on blogs last night to a community group, and once again when someone asked the hardest part of blogging I responded “having to pay attention to the news.” I said over a year ago that if I ever quit blogging it would be because I got tired of that. I’m not ready to quit, yet, but whenever I take a few days off and live in blissful ignorance of the minutiae of developments around the world, I feel, well, a whole lot better. I think that blogging is worse than other work for that, because it’s an immersive experience, and you don’t have an organization, or a formal role, to interpose. (It is, as I’ve said before, like being a stand-up comic rather than a member of a band.)

I’ve seen a lot of studies showing that people who follow the news closely are more stressed,depressed, and unhappy than people who don’t — and I suspect that nobody in those studies followed the news as closely as serious bloggers do. It’s the main downside of an otherwise delightful avocation.

JAY ROSEN THINKS that Bush should be delivering a speech to the nation instead of holding a press conference:

Let me see if I’ve got it. In tough times, the moment calls for a rough grilling by a special interest group eager to see your standing with voters sink. This will permit you to re-gain control of the national agenda and the election campaign– far more effectively than a leader speaking directly to hearts and minds of the American people.

Make a lot of sense to you? . . .

Read the whole thing, which offers a somewhat more sophisticated take than the above suggests.

UPDATE: He might as well have given a speech. The Washington Post has already posted a past-tense report of the press conference before it’s happened:

President Bush sought support for his embattled Iraq policy Tuesday in the face of rising casualties and growing doubts, holding his first prime-time news conference since before the war.

The president also faced questions about whether he ignored warning signs about the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and botched opportunities to eliminate the al-Qaeda network. A memo given to Bush a month before the attacks said Osama bin Laden’s supporters were in the United States planning attacks with explosives.

Heh. It’s like they’ve already decided on the storyline or something. . . .

FROM SADDAM TO SCOTT RITTER, via the United Nations:

A Detroit-based businessman of Iraqi origin who financed a film by Scott Ritter, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector, has admitted for the first time being awarded oil allocations during the UN oil-for-food programme.

Shakir Khafaji, who had close contacts with Saddam Hussein’s regime, made $400,000 available for Mr Ritter to make In Shifting Sands, a film in which the ex-inspector claimed Iraq had been “defanged” after a decade of UN weapons inspections.

The disclosure is likely to raise further questions about the operation of the oil-for-food programme, which is already the subject of Congressional investigations and a separate high-level UN inquiry.

The Sheik claims he financed Ritter’s film with, er, other money. Yeah, it’s not fungible or anything.

I rather doubt that the UN inquiry will produce much, but I think that this raises the question of just how many apologists for Saddam will turn out to have been getting Saddam’s money, and whose hands it passed through along the way.

UPDATE: A reader points out that Ritter appears to have been right about the “defanged” part, based on evidence to date. True enough, but Ritter went beyond that one item to serve as a sort of junior Baghdad-Bob by the time it was all over.

JOHN ASHCROFT SLAMMED JAMIE GORELICK TODAY:

Attorney General John Ashcroft strongly defended the Bush administration and himself today before the 9/11 commission, laying the blame for intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks squarely on the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Mr. Ashcroft said Al Qaeda was able to plan and carry out the attacks that killed some 3,000 people in large part because of policies of the Clinton administration and its deliberate neglect of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s computer technology. . . .

The attorney general sounded almost contemptuous as he spoke of a “legal wall” put into effect in 1995 to separate criminal investigators from intelligence agents in an effort to safeguard individual rights.

Far from protecting individual rights, Mr. Ashcroft asserted, the wall has been an obstacle to protecting the American people.

Referring to the 1995 document that constructed the figurative wall, Mr. Ashcroft went on to say, “Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission.”

Mr. Ashcroft was a referring to Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic member of the independent, bipartisan, 10-member commission, who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: The Northern Alliance folks on Hugh Hewitt (I’m listening online) say that the response from Democrats and the press is “spin, spin, spin.”

Meanwhile here’s the text of the Gorelick Memo. (If you can get it to open — I’m still waiting).

So how can Gorelick be sitting on this commission when her own decisions are at issue? I’m pretty flexible about conflicts of interest, but this seems pretty dramatic. More on that here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More Gorelick conflicts of interest here and here. (Earlier InstaPundit posts on this subject here, here, and here, with links to lots of other stuff.) She seems to have been a poor choice for the Commission all along.

MORE: Here’s a link to the transcript from the 9/11 Commission hearings.

STILL MORE: Ethan Wallison of Roll Call says that Jamie Gorelick is on the wrong side of the table in this inquiry.

THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE BLOGGERS will be guest-hosting the Hugh Hewitt show tonight, starting right now. Follow the link and click “listen online” to, er, listen online.

BRUCE SCHNEIER WRITES that a national ID card won’t make us safer. “In fact, everything I’ve learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.”

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN’S “middle class misery index” is making Gregg Easterbrook unhappy. Or maybe not: “Kerry’s index can make you giggle.”

DOCUMENTING THE MOONBAT SWARM: It’s all in the name of science! Or something.

MS. GORELICK, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL! Or at least, explain why you didn’t:

Commissioner Gorelick, as deputy attorney general — the number two official in the Department of Justice — for three years beginning in 1994, was an architect of the government’s self-imposed procedural wall, intentionally erected to prevent intelligence agents from pooling information with their law-enforcement counterparts. That is not partisan carping. That is a matter of objective fact. That wall was not only a deliberate and unnecessary impediment to information sharing; it bred a culture of intelligence dysfunction. It told national-security agents in the field that there were other values, higher interests, that transcended connecting the dots and getting it right. It set them up to fail. To hear Gorelick lecture witnesses about intelligence lapses is breathtaking.

No CYA here.

UPDATE: Background here.

GERHARD SCHROEDER CONTINUES TO PLUMMET: “Gerhard would kill for Dubya’s poll numbers, but according to the German media it’s Bush who is under pressure…go figure.”

BOY, THAT JEFF GOLDSTEIN sure knows how to work variations on a theme. Each bit’s different, but it keeps coming back to the chorus with a sense of perfect inevitability.

MICKEY KAUS has a number of interesting thoughts on the political situation in Iraq, which as I noted below is probably more uncertain than the military situation. Mickey thinks that delaying elections is a bad idea and that accelerating them may be a good idea.

There’s some support for this view in the Zarqawi memo, which subsequent events appear to suggest is genuine. Zarqawi expressed concern that a transition to Iraqi self-rule and democracy would doom the insurgency. And there’s also some evidence that the adoption of the Afghan constitution had a dampening effect on opposition there.

UPDATE: Interestingly, a reader emails that the BBC is reporting that Zarqawi is in Fallujah now. [LATER: Here’s a web report.]

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a respectful Fisking of Kerry’s Washington Post oped, from someone whose website design is, um, a bit derivative.

Meanwhile Tacitus has some interesting observations on the difference between the political and the military where insurgencies are concerned. Conclusion: “This war will continue. Changing presidents won’t change that. It will be on your headlines and your television for years to come. The question before you as an American, then, is whether, how, and by whom you want it won. In that order.” Read the whole thing.

And Patrick Belton at OxBlog has more thoughts on the Kerry oped.

MORE: Roger Simon takes a charitable look at the Kerry op-ed.

MISS USA PLANS TO USE HER POSITION to defend U.S. involvement in Iraq. (“A Republican, she told Reuters she would use her position to help explain America’s involvement in Iraq. ‘What needed to be done had to be done,’ she said.”) Joshua Claybourn has some doubts as to whether this will get much big-media attention. I don’t.

SOME GOOD NEWS ON THE SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL FRONT: Here’s one bit:

The company, Cyberkinetics Inc., plans to implant a tiny chip in the brains of five paralyzed people in an effort to enable them to operate a computer by thought alone.

The Food and Drug Administration has given approval for a clinical trial of the implants, according to the company.

The implants, part of what Cyberkinetics calls its BrainGate system, could eventually help people with spinal cord injuries, strokes, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other ailments to communicate better or even to operate lights and other devices through a kind of neural remote control.

And here’s another:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — A dwarf mouse named Yoda has celebrated his fourth birthday, making him the oldest of his kind and far beyond 100 in human years, the University of Michigan Medical School says.

Yoda owes his longevity to genetic modifications that affected his pituitary and thyroid glands and reduced insulin production — and which left him a third smaller than an average mouse and very sensitive to cold.

On the other hand, at the human equivalent of about 136 years, Yoda is still mobile, sexually active and “looking good,” said Dr. Richard A. Miller, associate director of research at the school’s geriatrics center.

Keep working, guys.

SOME HAVE MADE MUCH of the reluctance of some Iraqi security forces to fight. But as Capt. Ed notes, there’s a lot of that going around in Iraq:

Sheikh Hazem al-Aaraji, a representative of Mr Sadr in the Iraqi capital, was seized as he attended a meeting of tribal leaders at the Sheraton Hotel, one day after the US military vowed to “kill or capture” Mr Sadr himself.

Mr Aaraji’s bodyguards stepped aside when confronted by US soldiers, who arrested Mr Aaraji and drove him away in a Bradley fighting vehicle according to the Associated Press.

This strikes me as a good thing.

UPDATE: Bill Herbert emails this story, noting that some Iraqi special forces have done quite well indeed. True enough, but they’re the exception. That’s probably not a surprise — you don’t build a firstrate army or police force from scratch in less than a year — but it’s still the case. The article also underscores the importance of a June 30 transfer of sovereignty, as these soldiers say they will quit if that doesn’t happen.

AFTER SPAIN, WILL TERRORISTS TRY TO TOPPLE TONY BLAIR, so as to install more pliable and pacifistic socialist types?

If so, they’d better watch out for London Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone, who was recently heard remarking:

I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lampposts.

Response: “And you thought these neo-cons were bad.”

That should give them pause. Now if we could just get John Kerry to call for nuclear strikes on Tehran. . . .

UPDATE: Er, one reader, who I won’t embarrass by naming, thinks that I’m advocating nuclear strikes on Tehran above. No, I’m pointing out the benefits in terms of deterring terror of having an opposition that’s not more appealing to terrorists than the incumbent. I doubt that many people missed that, but just in case. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Gerald Hanner emails:

Rational readers didn’t think that; your point was obvious. There are, however, those who go into lunar orbit at the mere mention of the word “nuclear.”

Yes. I just got another from someone who blamed all Americans for being quick on the nuclear trigger. Er, but if that were true, the world would be a very different place. But perhaps people who take Ken Livingstone seriously (there are some, right?) perceive reality differently. . . .

A SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE? Maureen Dowd finally corrects an error.

THE MOSCOW TIMES OF ALL PLACES, feels the need to tell us that Iraq isn’t Vietnam — or Chechnya:

The Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah outnumbered the Marines and were armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles, RPG-7 antitank grenade launchers and mortars. Chechen fighters used the same weapons in Grozny in 1995, 1996 and 2000, killing thousands of Russian soldiers and destroying hundreds of armored vehicles.

Just like the Russians in Grozny, the Marines last week were supported by tanks and attack helicopters, but the end result was entirely different. U.S. forces did not bomb the city indiscriminately. The Iraqis fought well but were massacred. According to the latest body count, some 600 Iraqis died and another 1,000 were wounded. The Marines lost some 20 men.

Read the whole thing. The reader sending the link observes that it’s interesting that a Russian military analyst notices differences that the American media keep glossing over.

PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST JOURNALISTS? Belmont Club notes suspicious similarities in treatment of journalists taken hostage, and in the resulting stories: “It is definitely a special forces operation. The question is: whose special forces?”

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

ED CONE: “Kos and Atrios are fighting the last war. The issue for the Democrats should be that Bush has mismanaged Iraq, not that we shouldn’t have invaded in the first place.”

That’s certainly what the Democrats should be arguing — except that then they’d have to come up with a plan. Despite Ed’s urgings, Kerry has shown no sign of one beyond obviously empty platitudes about “more international cooperation” and the like.

Did the Administration have a good plan going in? I don’t know — but whatever plan they might have had was overtaken by events. As I noted a while back, it seems clear that the rapid collapse of Saddam’s forces surprised the Administration and the military, who expected months of fighting, far more casualties than we had (or have had to date) and a more or less orderly advance that gradually incorporated conquered territory under our administration. Maybe they had a great plan for that eventuality, but things didn’t break that way. Instead, we were in Baghdad in three weeks, with the entire country falling into our hands and without inflicting especially heavy casualties (which may have made a psychological difference).

The real question is what we do now, not what was done before. (As this DefenseTech post notes, the issues are really political, not military).

To the Democrats, well, “we’d all love to see the plan.” Where is it?

UPDATE: Michele Catalano: “It’s not the war being waged in Fallujah and Sadr City that scares me the most, though. It’s the war being played out against America – by Americans.” N.Z. Bear has related thoughts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Kerry:

Past events, such as the conflicts in the U.N. and NATO over the policies towards Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo, demonstrate the inability of the international community to put aside their own interests for the good of a nation in peril. President Clinton, perhaps the most loved of American presidents in the international community, could not build a consensus amongst the U.N. to resolve these problems. Perhaps Senator Kerry believes he will have more success in convincing foreign governments unwilling to cooperate in the stabilization of Iraq. He should outline his plan to create this international harmony. And he also should outline his plan in case his effort to internationalize Iraq fails.

As it almost certainly would.