There was a time when there were statesmen among the GOP's elected and appointed officials. Men of academic and intellectual accomplishment, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller and yes, George H.W. Bush. Men and women who didn't brag about not having a passport (the estimable Dick Armey), misunderstand how birth control works or think French kissing was invented in Gaul.

Those were the days.

For the past generation, Republican leaders, talk-show hosts and elected officials have made it their mission to mock anyone of serious intellectual import (liberal elitist!), attack the professional class and wonder aloud about proven science on about as constant a loop as Sex In The City reruns on E!. They have fed at the trough of what the late historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed Anti-intellectualism In American Life.

These decisions have had their consequences. One of the most loyal groups to emerge among what Ruy Teixeira has called The Emerging Democratic Majority are professionals located among "Ideopolis" clusters around the country, usually major cities or college towns and their suburbs. Those who make their living with creativity that requires advanced education, such as software developers, architects and nurses, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves. For some reason, seeing gravity as part of suspiciously Semitic War on Christmas, or the principle of inertia as a left-wing plot to grow welfare rolls, just doesn't hold the same chant-"USA"-three-times-and don-an-American-flag-bikini cache for those post-GED.

So it should be no surprise that if you're conservative and you chew your own food, or are willing to try three syllables on for size, you might just become what Paul Krugman refers to as "a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like."

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Andrea Mitchell steps in it again: (+ defends Bob Woodward)

Imus got wind of her flopping around about her previous statements regarding Joseph and Valerie Wilson on his show 11/12, so he had her back on to clarify. She was fumbling and stumbling throughout the segment. It's "hard work" to carry water for the administration. Whether you like him or not, Don has one of the only shows that is able to get politicians and journalists on and he will ask them some tough questions that other outlets will not. Do you think Chris Matthews would hold her up to any kind of scrutiny?

Download | play -WMP low res-(it's really about the audio) Download | play -QT later

Her answers were ridiculous and she almost steps in it again as Imus asks her about this exchange.

Murray: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

Mitchell: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn't aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.

(Rough transcript. Anyone want to write a transcript?)

Imus: It seems unclear what you said and perhaps you can clear it up about what you said back in Oct. of 2003---

Mitchell: I have been trying to figure out "what-the-heck" I was talking about, frankly. There is confusion because I am confused.

Imus: So when you told Alan Murray of CNBC, that it was widely known that his wife worked for the CIA-(interruption)--what were you drunk?

Mitchell: I don't even remember the deal...

(later)

Imus: His question seems plain...Imus: What this suggests to me is that you knew she worked at the CIA, but you didn't know what she did there. Isn't that fair-did you know that?

Mitchell-(garbled)

Imus: Why did you say that Andrea?

Mitchell: I messed up...(later)

Imus: Russert was a little short with me---almost like he was trying to hide something....

Imus laughing: I realized-well this is an unfair thing to say, I was gonna say- all you folks in Washington are all in bed with one another, but that would be an awful thing to say....

I can't agree with you more on that point. Listen to Andrea discuss Booby. She says Bob Woodward is a great journalist who made one "teenie-weenie" mistake. Notice she spews the beltway company line that they told him casually about Valerie and says that it wasn't "something important until it became important." I agree with Imus, she is drunk.

Andrea: Bob Woodward is a terrific reporter, there is no one like Bob Woodward. He has done extraordinary work---(later) If people make one mistake in the course of a thirty five year career when they have been bullet proof---

Then she says that we don't know if Libby is lying. I'm too tired to go on.....

Public Epistemology Project: The Iraq Intelligence Inquiry Initiative
It's time to shelve the talking points and the soundbites in favor of a serious epistemological discussion of the role of the Bush administration's use of intelligence in making the public case for the invasion Iraq. Today, Philosoraptor launches the The Iraq Intelligence Inquiry Initiative(IIII).

A lot of arguments about the decision to go to war proceed from vague or equivocal understandings of key concepts like "knowlege," "justification," "evidence," and "credibility."

The IIII hopes to raise the level of discussion by bringing these core assumptions into the open.

We have to ask not only what the President knew and when he knew it, but also what we mean by "know." In order to assign responsibility, we have to ask not whether decision-makers were right, but whether they were justified in reaching the conclusions they did based on the evidence available to them.

So, let the discussion begin. Please join us.

--Lindsay Beyerstein from Majikthise

What a fool. When the first question most people ask is why isn't he in a jail cell, I think his credibility is pretty shot. I thought he wasn't going to comment on the story again. Here's his latest column. "What he did say was, as I reported in a previous column, "she probably never again would be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties.'

Larry Johnson replies in No Quarter: ... He admits that he was told revealing Plame's identity would cause "difficulties". CIA spokesmen where in the position of having to protect a sensitive, covert asset and this joke of a journalist did not appreciate that creating difficulties for an intelligence agency in a time of war is a bad thing?...read on

AmericaBlog says" He outs an undercover agent....once again doing the dirty work for Karl Rove and Bush, and somehow he's the victim".

The Booman Trubune has a lenghty diary on Novie and Johnson. No-Yak Novak Yammers; Larry Johnson Replies

Talk Left writes: Novak Breaks His Silence : Note that he says Plame's identity "could be" found in Who's Who. He doesn't say that's where he got it. He acknowledges asking Harlow about her. But from whom did he hear it in the first place? Will Novak's vanity in writing this piece come back to bite him? ...read on

Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6; John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of defence staff. Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington, said “military action was now seen as inevitable . . . the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action”. Straw agreed with Dearlove. He said Bush had “made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin”.

Enough Already Blogenlust

Avedon and Digby are involved in an interesting discussion about the "freakish confidence" recently exhibited by Republicans. The question, first raised by Avedon, is why are they so confident about something that could very easily bite them in the ass at the voting booth? As Digby wrote, "It really does make you have to at least consider the possibility that they know they will not lose elections."

I recently had a conversation with Far East about this very same topic. What crossed my mind in that conversation was how much the Left's relationship with the Right mirrors an abusive relationship. The posturing, policies, and false bravado, in conjunction with the electoral success of this Administration and its political Party is having an adverse effect on the emotional mindset of the Left. Like the abused in an abusive relationship, the Left's first reaction is to buy into the false power and intelligence of the Right, which causes us to cower and freak out about what might come next. The best example of this is the talk about past rigged elections, and the prospects of future rigged elections.

My own opinion is that the Right loves our worries and conspiracies about vote rigging because it reinforces our perception of their dominance and our self-awareness of our feebleness.  Whether we know it or not, talking about rigged elections or wondering whether the Republicans are too confident because they know they're going to win only reinforces our problems and does nothing to rectify the lack of our Party's political power. 

Conservatives have been waging a political psy-op war against us for a generation, and until we realize that our reactions are reinforcing their strategy, nothing will change.  Now I don't have a lot of answers for how to break this cycle, but a good start would be to cease all discussion about how the Republicans control our destiny, and start talking and thinking about how we can establish a political identity that is not a reaction to the Republican Party.

                   Lawyers, Guns and Money

I'm not the sort that reads Powerline with any regularity, but this caught my attention:

It's great to see someone standing up for colonialism, especially British colonialism. I agree wholeheartedly with this observation, for example:

Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon of India might have been avoided.

My own opinion is that the Right loves our worries and conspiracies about vote rigging because it reinforces our perception of their dominance and our self-awareness of our feebleness. Whether we know it or not, talking about rigged elections or wondering whether the Republicans are too confident because they know they're going to win only reinforces our problems and does nothing to rectify the lack of our Party's political power.

Conservatives have been waging a political psy-op war against us for a generation, and until we realize that our reactions are reinforcing their strategy, nothing will change. Now I don't have a lot of answers for how to break this cycle, but a good start would be to cease all discussion about how the Republicans control our destiny, and start talking and thinking about how we can establish a political identity that is not a reaction to the Republican Party.

Bad Intel, Bad Policy democracy arsenal

We should all pay more attention to the recent report of the bipartisan presidential commission chaired by Laurence Silberman and Chuck Robb regarding U.S. intelligence and WMD threats. It got a couple of days of buzz when it was released a few weeks ago -- especially for its no-nonsense conclusion that all the pre-war judgments about Iraq's WMD were "dead wrong" – but has pretty much dropped out of sight since. At over 600 pages, it’s not exactly bedtime reading.

But like the 9-11 commission, this group has produced a rare kind of government report: compelling, hard-hitting, clear, provocative, and actually pretty entertaining. But it is also really scary. The commissioners conclude that there is no greater threat than the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (placing special emphasis on the threat from biological weapons, which they describe as the “greatest intelligence challenge”). Yet they show with great detail that our intelligence community is not sufficiently trained, motivated, equipped, or organized to deal with these threats. Even if we had an Administration intensely focused on the WMD threat, the limits of our intelligence capabilities would leave still leave us fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.

Right now, we have the worst of both worlds: an intelligence community that is not up to the challenge, and an Administration that talks a good game but is still not making counter-proliferation the priority it needs to be.  As Ash Carter points out, until we get the policy right, it really doesn’t matter if intelligence is imperfect.   Folks, I gotta tell you, we should be genuinely worried about getting hit with some sort of WMD device (for a very scary illustration of what this might be like, everyone should watch the recent HBO/BBC film “Dirty War”).  The American people understand the problem – according to the recent SPI/Marttila poll, 3 of the top 5 concerns most American have about the world have something to do with the spread of nuclear weapons.  So where's the outrage?  There’s a lot I really don’t understand about the Bush Administration, but not doing more to address the WMD threat – especially when we know what to do about it – is the most perplexing, and I think its greatest long-term failure. 

Dean leads the troops    Thoughts from Kansas 

Pentagon Failed To Plan For Aftermath of War

via Blogenlust

Yesterday, we learned that the intelligence that led us into the Iraq war was "dead wrong." Today, we learn the shocking news that the Pentagon failed to adequately plan for the aftermath of the war. This is not an April Fool's joke. The Pentagon really did fail to plan for the aftermath. It's hard to believe, but I'm serious:... read on

So please, someone explain to me how you can justify not adequately planning for the aftermath of the war. How can you support the troops, but not be calling for Rumsfeld's resignation? Why is Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, not responsible for this?

Swifties Slime Again

Dowd

Instead of trying to destroy AARP, Republicans should be signing up the seniors' lobby to find Osama.

AARP's super-relentless intelligence network is certainly better than that doddering C.I.A's. Osama has to have turned 50, and AARP somehow knows where everyone who has turned 50 lives.

It began with an almost comically hyperbolic Internet ad that briefly ran on The American Spectator's Web site, painting AARP as pro-gay sex - even though it's tough to think of AARP and steamy lust in the same hot breath - and anti-soldier. It showed a soldier with a red X across him, and two gay men kissing at their nuptuals, with the headline "The REAL AARP Agenda."

(Mr. Jarvis, who used to be executive vice president of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, also urged his Web site readers to "support Mel Gibson's 'The Passion.' " The group's national chairman is Art Linkletter; it seems that aging right-wing trash-talkers say the darndest things.) read on

Minority Rules LiberalOasis

Perhaps the most stunning part of the intel reform debacle is that the Speaker of the House admitted he had the votes to pass it.

Just not enough GOP votes to avoid making the Dems look good.

From the NY Times:

[Speaker Dennis] Hastert did not want to split his caucus and did not want the bill to pass with less than "a majority of the majority," said his spokesman, John Feehery.

"What good is it to pass something," Mr. Feehery said, "where most of our members don't like it?"

Well, there is a little thing called "the public good."

But that requires putting governing ahead of politics.

And that's not how the GOP got to where it is, so why start now?

Of course, saying the bill doesn't have support of the "majority of the majority" is a fancy, self-serving way to say a loud minority is opposed.

And that when a loud minority is opposed, it's important to wait -- as Senate Majority Leader Frist said -- until we "get it right".

Hmm. Does Frist apply the same logic to, say, judicial nominations?

Not exactly. As he said on CBS' Face The Nation this Sunday:

...let's take a nominee from the president, who has majority support in the Senate, and let's deny senators the opportunity to vote. It's wrong.

Any attempt to claim simple majority rule is a consistent principle of the GOP is now shot to hell.

So when the GOP tries to use it later, it should be quickly shoved down their throat.

We all know the Framers wanted the minority to have rights, to prevent a tyranny of the majority.

The question for the public to judge, both with today's intelligence reform and tomorrow's judges, is not if the minority has a right to object. Of course they do.

Instead the question is, what is the quality of the minority's objections?

Is the Pentagon's loss of turf, and lack of unrelated provisions on undocumented immigrant workers enough to warrant delay on the intelligence reform the 9/11 Commission says is "essential"?

And should the Senate roll over for activist right-wing judges who want to turn the clock back on equal rights, labor protections and environmental protections?