Worst idea of the day: For the right bid, you can have lunch with neocon mastermind "Dumb Dougie" Feith, or Paulie Wolfshit, or "Slick Dickie" Perle

Where's Dougie? Not at Wednesday's hearing of the
House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution

This stomach-upsetting news comes to us from our pal Al Kamen's Washington Post "In the Loop" column today. The good news is that since it's a silent auction, with e-mail bids accepted, to bid on one of these, er, prizes you don't even have to attend tonight's fundraiser for Young Professionals in Foreign Policy at the City Tavern Club in Georgetown. (Until 5pm you can buy tickets online for only $35. Tickets at the door are $40.)

YPFP describes itself as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to fostering the next generation of America's foreign policy leadership."

Indeed you can lunch with a Democrat if you prefer. Like Norm Mineta, who served briefly as commerce secretary at the end of the Clinton administration and as far as I know is still the only Democrat to serve in the Bush regime cabinet, as secretary of transportation. Okay, the roster also includes former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton and onetime Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta.


If we read the YPFP Silent Auction information correctly, five people will get to lunch with each of the hosts, "more than 20 of DC's best young professionals." (Uh, we're not suggesting a check of birth certificates. "Youngness" is after all a somewhat subjective quality. But according to Wikipedia, Young Paulie Wolfshit -- to pick a random example -- turned 65 in December. We're just saying.)

Bidding is likely to be especially stiff for "Dumb Dougie" Feith in the wake of his no-show Wednesday at Rep. Jerrold Nadler's Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing. (His lawyer, you'll recall, explained that Dougie was touchy about testifying alongside "the likes of" that meanie Larry Wilkerson, who as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell said of him in 2005, "Seldom have I met a dumber man." In another item today Al Kamen points out that Wilkerson "was simply agreeing with Gen. Tommy Franks, who famously called Feith 'the [expletive] stupidest guy on the face of the earth.'")

December 6, 2005: Chimpy the Prez thanks Iraq Study Group co-chairs Jim Baker (right) and Lee Hamilton (left) for their report, promising not to read it and to ignore every word of it, and adding, "Ya like my red tie?" It would cost you those big GOP campaign or corruption bucks to lunch with one of the Repubs, but Dem Lee is up for bid tonight.

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In the matter of Tenet vs. Feith: Is Georgetown U. running some sort of welfare program for has-been butt-kissing bureaucrats and hooligan ideologues?

"Tenet and Feith [right] are teaching rival versions of recent history and taking their disagreements public. Each is teaching a class that reflects his own worldview and experience in institutions--the Defense Department and the CIA--that saw the world in starkly different terms. "
--from the article "Teaching Recent History From Opposite Perspectives" in today's Washington Post

In her Post piece, Dafna Linzer offers us a glimpse at a pair of presumably graduate-level seminars recently completed by a pair of pustules currently disfiguring the butt of the Georgetown University faculty:

* former Director of Central Intelligence George "I'm Spinning As Fast As I Can" Tenet, who as head of the CIA perfected the transformation of intelligence gathering and analysis into a jolly game of "Just Tell Me What You Want"

* "Devil Dog" Dougie Feith, the man who--as under secretary of defense (no. 3 man in the Pentagon) and head of Dapper Donnie Rumsfeld's private Defense Department "alternative intelligence" factory--took whatever shards of information, movement-serving factoid, and sheer fantasy he could gather in his grubby mitts and hammered them into psychotic fabrications for use as jerk-off material in his Neocon Wet Dreams of World Domination

Oh, there are cute anecdotes about their either cordial or frosty relationship (depending who you listen to), and earnest interview tidbits with one of only two students admitted both to Tenet's seminar, which I imagine was called something like Advanced Bureaucratic Ass Tonguery 401, and to Feith's lie-o-rama, "If You Believe Your Megalomaniacal Delusions Hard Enough, It's Almost Like They're True."

And there is a sincere effort to describe the course matter (with complete reading lists) of the two "rival" courses. As reporter Linzer would have it, "The tale of the two professors is shaping up as a reproduction in miniature of the Bush administration's titanic struggle over Iraq."

And yet, and yet. Isn't there something surreal about a major university fobbing off not one but two such schmucks as people qualified to teach? Qualified, that is, to teach something other than how to bring about the seemingly permanent quagmirification of the U.S. in Iraq.

Take that snot-nose kid who took both classes. Let's say he's as skilled a brown-noser as his Post quotes suggest and comes away with "A"s in both. Does that put him at the top of the list of up-and-coming bureaucratic nonentities fit to lead us into our next foreign-policy debacle?

WOLFOWITZ & FEITH ENGAGED IN A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE AMERICAN PUBLIC TO GIVE BUSH COVER TO ATTACK IRAQ. THEY'RE NOT IN PRISON

I woke up this morning to hear the recently fired-- but not yet removed-- non-Soledad O'Brien on CNN braying out some insulting and sexist Republican talking points about how Speaker Pelosi had screwed up in Syria and should have stayed "closer to home." I wasn't quite awake and thought I had Fox on by mistake and O'Brien had already found a new job. But no, it was CNN, reading the Bush Regime version of the "news." Will they ever learn? Clearly, the answer to that is no.

Today's Washington Post-- on the day after Cheney was lying his ass off on the Rush Limbaugh Radio Circus both about Speaker Pelosi and about Saddam's "connections" to al-Qaeda-- has the scoop on an official Defense Department report that confirms there was no cooperation between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda. "The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February."

Although Saddam and al-Qaeda were virtually at war with each, other today's L.A. Times paints a picture of Bush Regime Neocon operatives Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz conspiring to lead the American public into accepting war by creating this lie-- still clung to by their patron Cheney-- that Saddam and al-Qaeda were in cahoots.

Just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dashed off a memo to a senior Pentagon colleague, demanding action to identify connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda.

"We don't seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Wolfowitz wrote in the Jan. 22, 2002, memo to Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official.

Using Pentagon jargon for the secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, he added: "We owe SecDef some analysis of this subject. Please give me a recommendation on how best to proceed. Appreciate the short turn-around."

Wolfowitz's memo, released Thursday, is included in a recently declassified report by the Pentagon's inspector general. The memo marked the beginnings of what would become a controversial yearlong Pentagon project supervised by Feith to convince the most senior members of the Bush administration that Hussein and Al Qaeda were linked — a conclusion that was hotly disputed by U.S. intelligence agencies at the time and has been discredited in the years since.

In excerpts released in February, Thomas F. Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, criticized the project as an alternative intelligence assessment that was improper. However, Gimble said, the operation was not illegal or unauthorized, because Pentagon directives allowed Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to assign the work.

In making its case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration cited evidence that Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. An important secondary reason was the belief in connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Though the CIA has been criticized for erroneously gauging Iraq's weapons programs, its assessment of Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda proved more accurate.

There were none. But Cheney had assigned them the job of convincing senior members of the Regime-- mostly in the State Department-- who were skeptical about his harebrained rush to attack Iraq that there was a connection. "Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office-- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith-- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed. The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was 'mature' and 'symbiotic,' marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics." This was a huge pack of lies manufactured by Feith, Wolfowitz and Cheney, all of whom should be on trial for their lives. They set out to undercut the CIA's professional, non-political analysis with one based solely on ideology and a pre-accepted conclusion that they needed to rationalize a long-planned attack on Iraq.