This video of Brian Williams addressing the Ad Council needed no introduction but this is the only version readily available. Turn the sound down during the short intro, which misses the point Williams is making, and watch his speech. It’s good.
A new book chronicles the early days after the 9/11 attacks, when Dick Cheney was always reported to be hiding in an underground bunker or a bomb shelter or an orbiting space capsule. Turns out extreme paranoia really did take hold of the vice president.
On Oct. 18, 2001, a White House alarm went off indicating that sensors had detected dangerous levels of radioactive, chemical or biological agents. According to Mayer, anyone who had entered the White House situation room, including Cheney, had been exposed. “They thought Cheney was already lethally infected,” said a former administration officer who had kept the White House secret until now, according to the book.
…It turned out that the detection system had a malfunction and there was no hazard.
But in the days after the incident, Cheney was taking no chances. Eleven days later, Cheney insisted on leaving the White House and retreating to one of his “secure, undisclosed locations,” the book claims.
Cheney and other Cabinet members took turns hunkering down in one of several cold war era bunkers built to survive a nuclear attack. The bunkers, deep underground, were crammed with communications gear and Cheney would stay in what was dubbed the “The Commander in Chief’s Suite,” Mayer writes.
Book: “A sense of constant danger followed Cheney everywhere.”When vice president wasn’t in the bunker, Mayer claims that “a sense of constant danger followed Cheney everywhere.” The route was altered daily during the veep’s commute to his above-ground office. On the back seat next to him would be a duffel bag stuffed with a gas mask and biochemical survival suit. And a doctor nearly always traveled with him, “The Dark Side” claims.
In case, like me, these images make you whoop with amusement, the next part will wipe away the mirth.
Besides naming himself “Commander in Chief,” Cheney showed other signs he was losing it. The book says he forced Alberto Gonzales to go along with torture for suspected terrorists, allowing a variety of punishments never used previously by Americans.
The book also reveals that a Red Cross report submitted to the CIA concluded that the treatment of 9/11 suspects, admitted mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, amounted to torture and war crimes.
The Red Cross made its report after being granted access to the detainees when they were transferred to the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Among the tactics the detainees said they were subjected to: kept naked in a frigid room and doused with water, kept in a small box called the “coffin” for hours at a time, arms shackled over their heads so they had to stand on tiptoes for up to eight hours straight.
Our government has been in the hands of greedy crazies, sadists, and at least one simpleton for nearly eight years. It’s a wonder we are all still here, and that there is any America left to call home.
Former Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, has died on the Fourth of July — just like Jefferson and Adams, although the similarities end there:
Former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican who became an icon to conservatives, died Friday at the age of 86, a senior congressional source said.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, announced on its website that he died at 1:18 a.m. Friday after having been ill in recent years.
Helms retired in 2002 at the end of his fifth term in the Senate.
When the Republicans were the majority party in the Senate, Helms was chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, where he consistently moved U.S. policy toward the right, especially regarding the United Nations and Cuba.
He also held seats on the Agriculture Committee, where he looked out for North Carolina’s extensive tobacco industry, and on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee…
Helms had an operation in 2002, at age 80, to replace a faulty prosthetic heart valve put in place in 1992, when he also had quadruple-bypass surgery.
First on the New York Post and confirmed by CNN and NBC.
Updated at 3:36 p.m.
Tim Russert, NBC journalist and political heavyweight host of “Meet the Press,” has died after collapsing at NBC’s Washington news bureau, a source said. He was 58 years old.
Russert, who rose from the inside world of politics where he was former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s press secretary and one-time chief of staff to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was able to successfully cross over to political journalism and rise to become one of its leading lights.
In his role as host of the seminal Sunday morning political program “Meet the Press” – which he took over in 1991 – he became renowned for his hard-nosed interviews where he frequently cornered some of Washington’s cagiest political figures with tough questions.
Russert joined NBC News in 1984. In April 1985, he supervised the live broadcasts of the Today program from Rome, negotiating and arranging an appearance by Pope John Paul II – a first for American television. In 1986 and 1987 Russert led NBC News weeklong broadcasts from South America, Australia and China.
In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Our condolences to the Russert family.
It’s going to be a long, hot summer, especially if you’re Barack or Michelle Obama. It seems like somebody gave the signal that attacking Mrs. Obama could be the best way to take down her husband. A string of attempts to catch the possibly future first lady saying or implying things outside the so-called mainstream mindset is proof.
Right-wing web sites recently claimed a tape of Mrs. Obama would show her blaming “whitey” for various problems during a panel at Trinity United Church in 2004. They explain that this tape is being held by, alternatively, Karl Rove, the GOP, a major news broadcaster, or Rudy Guiliani. Supposedly, in reference to Pres. Bush she said, “Whitey attack Iraq, whitey let Katrina happen, whitey leave millions of children behind.” Except that since Michelle Obama doesn’t talk like that, the more likely quote — if she said anything at all, was probably — “Why did he attack Iraq? Why’d he let Katrina happen? Why’d he leave millions of children behind?” Whatever the case, more than a week has passed since the tape was supposedly going to be released and during that time, the bloggers changed the story from Michelle appearing on the panel with Louis Farrakhan to her sharing the stage with Mrs. Louis Farrakhan. And The National Review, which originally licked its chops at the prospect of a such a tape, now doubts its existence altogether.
But that doesn’t mean the Obama attacks are ending. No, the wallopers are just getting warmed up. The New York Post’s Cindy Adams warns the Obamas of the next salvo, this one focused on the candidate himself: a “Swift Book.”
Publisher, Regnery. Ships to stores, July. On shelves, August. Price, $37.95. Title, the longest in captivity: “Scorcher. The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate.”
The so-called scorching? That his politics-of-change will be liberal politics as usual. That the Rev. Wright thing reveals a deceitful nature. That his inexperience is more dangerous than any threat we have today. That as commander in chief this non-Republican is a serious threat to our national security.
Their projected p.r. TV lineup includes Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” and “The O’Reilly Factor,” CNN’s Glenn Beck, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Radio: Michael Reagan, Laura Ingraham, G. Gordon Liddy.
So cheesy and yet, so tasteless. But like the heat itself, there’s no way around these machinations and no way to drown out the noise. We’ll just have to go through it, knowing that cooler, quieter times are ahead.
Steven Reynolds at All Spin Zone has a bit of Friday fun going:
Larry Craig is writing a book about energy, but he’s going to discuss those little adventures in airport restrooms as well. I’m thinking this guy needs a catchy title for his book. Maybe our readers can come up with good ones.
My suggestion was “Out of the Stall And into the Closet!” — or maybe it should be the other way around.
I’m sure you can do better. Go over to ASZ and help Larry out.
As has been widely noted, critics of Scott McClellan’s new memoir, “What Happened,” are trashing the book’s author, not his writing, because they can’t dispute his accuracy. Karl Rove hurled a particularly nasty epithet at Scott. He compared him to a “liberal blogger.” Harsh.
After his book was released, Stephanopoulos was called “turncoat,” “backstabber,” “ingrate,” “a self-absorbed opportunist” and even “shorty.”
This was predictable. Bush supporters can’t refute McClellan’s claims about the propaganda campaign before the Iraq invasion, the conspiracy to leak information about a covert CIA anti-WMD program and the rest, so all they’ve got left is killing the messenger.
There is a deja vu aspect to this story. In 1999, a former senior White House official was lambasted for publishing a tell-all while his former boss was still in office.The book was “All Too Human: A Political Education,” and the official was George Stephanopoulos, a former campaign adviser, spokesman and aide to Bill Clinton, and who is now the host of ABC News’ Sunday political hour. The external circumstances are so similar the names of the writers and their bosses are practically interchangeable.
Writing then for Time Magazine, Margaret Carlson (now at Bloomberg) described the criticism Stephanopoulos was encountering:
In a nonstop round of interviews, George has been hit with scathing criticism. On NBC, Katie Couric asked him how it felt to be called a “turncoat” whose take on the President was “kind of creepy.” Over at CBS, Mark McEwen said the author was being called a “backstabber” and an “ingrate.” On CNN former Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald noted that if the President hadn’t given George the “opportunity of a lifetime,” George might still be a Capitol Hill aide, not a “multimillion-dollar book writer and commentator” (inside the White House make that “commentraitor”). And James Carville says Washington has become The Truman Show, broadcasting Clinton’s private life in something approaching real time.
Even George, at one time, wouldn’t have approved of George. Commenting on Dick Morris’ memoirs, George said, “You have a responsibility not to embarrass the President. It hurts the country. It’s just stupidity and weakness.”
From the book, Carlson mentioned this interesting insight into the Clintons’ relationship:
We get a behind-the-scenes look at Hillary feeding Clinton honey-soaked lemon wedges but then the usual, albeit accurate, picture of a paranoid First Lady, responsible for many of the early mistakes. George doesn’t like it that she didn’t trust him. Of course, she may have had good reason, since George goes on to disclose that Whitewater made her cry. Ouch.
Here’s a snippet that has probably come back to bite Jake Tapper on the ass. He was then a freshly minted young writer at Salon.com but is now Stephanopoulos’ colleague at ABC News:
A portent of things to come for Scott McLellan, via the Fox News website:
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday that it’s clear former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is “disgruntled” about his time working in the Bush administration.
Perino was responding to McClellan’s new book, which slams President Bush on domestic and foreign issues, such as Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, and says Bush was not “open and forthright on Iraq” and was slow in his response to Katrina.
“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” Perino said. “For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad — this is not the Scott we knew.”
Nothing about whether his allegations are true — just name-calling, revving up for the full assault of smears and character assassination to come, especially if the book is a big seller.
McClellan should avoid dark alleys for the rest of his life, as should his entire family.
In his new tell-all book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs), former Bush flack Scott McClellan says the first time he caught George Bush lying was during the 2000 campaign when Bush was being accused of having used cocaine:
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
An amateur wedding video shows George Bush obviously quite high in 1992, years after he was supposedly clean and sober.
McClellan tracks Bush’s penchant for self-deception back to an overheard incident on the campaign trail in 1999 when the then-governor was dogged by reports of possible cocaine use in his younger days.
The book recounts an evening in a hotel suite “somewhere in the Midwest.” Bush was on the phone with a supporter and motioned for McClellan to have a seat.
“‘The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.'”
“I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?” McClellan wrote. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Bush, according to McClellan, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie.”
“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” McClellan wrote. “And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”
In the years that followed, McClellan “would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment.” McClellan likened it to a witness who resorts to “I do not recall.”
“Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment,” McClellan wrote, adding, “In other words, being evasive is not the same as lying in Bush’s mind.”
And McClellan linked the tactic to the decision to invade Iraq, a decision based on flawed intelligence.
“It would not be the last time Bush mishandled potential controversy,” he said of the cocaine rumors. “But the cases to come would involve the public trust, and the failure to deal with them early, directly and head-on would lead to far greater suspicion and far more destructive partisan warfare,” he wrote.
In 2004, Eric Boehlert, writing in Salon.com, reported on allegations that Bush was restricted from flying during his time in the Texas Air National Guard because of cocaine use:
Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement, by Carl Oglesby; Scribner; 2008.
OK, I’m a sucker for the 1960s, those halcyon hippie days of political foment, social struggle, free love and good music. I missed them, mostly, being just a kid at the time, though I did my best during late adolescence and early adulthood to live them, at least the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll part.
So, when presented with an opportunity to review a book by one of the major players during some of the most turbulent days of the ’60s, I jumped at the chance. I’m glad I did.
“Ravens in the Storm” is at once an elegiac memoir, a chronicle of the inside workings of the antiwar movement and an apologia. There is a wistfulness about it, a sense of opportunities squandered and chances missed, but also a triumphant air that Carl Oglesby and his cohorts in the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS movement, had actually, in the final analysis, accomplished something not achieved before or since. They made a difference at a critical time in our nation’s history that has eerily familiar parallels to today, as we live through another illegal, ill-advised and unwinnable war.
The similarities to the 1960s Vietnam War era and the current fiasco in Iraq are an undercurrent in “Ravens.” Oglesby never mentions our current conflict, leaving it to the reader to draw the unmistakable conclusions: a nation of sleepwalkers trusting in a corrupt government, a president with an unclear mission and a blank check, and a compliant Congress that failed to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to reign in an out-of-control administration.
Oglesby’s 1960s featured a government that lied to and spied on its citizens, a corrupt, profit-driven military-industrial complex; a country bent on nation-building in a faraway place of which we had and have little cultural or historical understanding, and little sympathy for the millions of lives destroyed in a horrific and pointless war. Sound familiar?
The difference is for Vietnam they had Carl Oglesby and the SDS, and the best we could manage for Iraq was Cindy Sheehan.
The recent news out of Kentucky was just awful,
They found the senator unconscious and horizontal.
And since his hospitalization,
There’s been little news about his condition,
But now everybody’s having a 20-minute conversation with Mitch McConnell.
