Day: July 6, 2005

Just hours before Time Magazine’s Matt Cooper was to be sentenced to jail for not revealing his source to a grand jury in the Plame case, the source gives Matt permission to reveal his name – but only to the grand jury.

If Cooper’s source is the same as Judith Miller’s at the New York Times, then why didn’t he or she (or Karl) give Judy permission to spill the beans too? As it is, Miller refused to budge and is either in prison now or headed that way.

Doubly odd – Judy Miller was a notorious White House stenographer during the run-up to the war.

And where is Bob Novak? The speculation is, he already turned over the identity of the person at the White House who told him Plame’s identity. The White House reportedly unmasked Plame as a CIA secret agent in order to punish Wilson for calling them on their lie that Saddam had acquired nuclear ingredients from Niger – and as a shot across the bow at other CIA agents who weren’t toeing the Administration line on the war.

Today is the Dalai Lama’s 70th birthday. Send a peaceful thought into the cosmos.

Newsweek’s Periscope column this week considers what George W. Bush’s autobiography will be like. And who will write it. In the wake of “A Charge to Keep,” a slim tome written by Bush’s former communications chief Karen Hughes and rushed to press in time for the 2000 election, expectations are generally low.

But I disagree. There would seem to be plenty of opportunities for Bush to rise to the occasion and produce a work (or have someone produce it) that would explore his place in history and establish his legacy as U.S. president. Of course, as the Newsweek column notes, Bush neither keeps a journal like his father or records his thoughts like Bill Clinton, and he writes thank-you notes with a black Sharpie pen, so any autobio from his camp is likely to be a work of fiction.

With that in mind, here are a few speculative titles I suggest for a George W. Bush (auto)biography:
• Myth and Metaphor in The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• An Encyclopedia of Lies I Told Leading Up to the Invasion of Iraq (Vol. 1)
• Cheney Made Me Do It
• How Condi Got Her Groove Back
• Me ‘n’ Jesus — Just a Couple of Good Old Boys with an Agenda
• Pennies from Heaven — An Investment Guide for Political Capital
• The Kids are All Right, or How I Packed the Supreme Court with Wingnuts
• Dustbowl Dreams: Environmental Policies to Make the Whole World Look Like South Texas
• Serving as the Leader of the Free World and Commander and Chief of the Most Powerful Army on Earth with Your Finger on the Nucular Button for Dummies

Update: Keep those suggestions coming in. Here are a few more:
• Staying the Course: It’s Not About Principle, It’s About Lack of Ideas
• I’ve Never, Even Been Wrong: Being George Bush
• My Life, by George W. Bush and Karl Rove
• Winning the War on Terror Using the War on Logic
• How to Raise Perfect Daughters Even When Their Mother is a Manslaughterer

From Comments: Love this one:
• George W Bush: Nepotism Gone Wrong.

If you have a title to suggest for President Bush’s autobiography, send it to News Desk at Pensito Review Dot Com.

The New York Times is reporting that GOP Senate and White House aides have been calling Christian Talibani leaders who make up their party’s base, warning them to back off their extreme rhetoric demanding that President Bush nominate a whack job to fill the vacancy of retiring rightwing Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Beseeching them to pipe down, the GOP aides tell the party’s mullahs that polls say the public wants a “fair and dignified” confirmation process. Continued agitation from the ultraright will only stir up their opponents, they say.

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