Howie, in Mali, sends back an online book preview: "George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews"

Has the Medal of Freedom become a badge of infamy?

by Ken

Howie writes: "I just arrived in Mali. Now I'm REALLY in Africa."

And with this he sent back the following nugget from HuffPost:

George Tenet Screamed About Jews In Saudi Prince's Pool: Book

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting excerpt from " World Of Trouble, a forthcoming book by Patrick Tyler on the White House and the Middle East. In this scene, CIA director George Tenet, drunk on scotch at Saudi Prince Bandar's pool, rants about Bush administration "Jews" who are "setting me up" to take the fall for the false WMD claims:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.

"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

and then:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them, with exasperation, as "the Jews."

For the record, Goldberg adds this:

Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.

Also, I have to say that a lot of us Jews have taken frequent -- and public -- note of the dispiriting preponderance of Jews among the hard-core neocon "thinkers," generally linking it to their close ties to the hardest-core elements in Israel's Likud Party. And it's a good guess that none of us have been in Prince Bandar's pool.

Nevertheless, this reminds us of poor George Tenet and his Medal of Freedom. Earlier today, while I was cutting and pasting Harold Meyerson's fine column on the role of the UAW in modern U.S. history, with its attention to longtime union leader Walter Reuther, I tried for a while to work in a reference to Reuther being a recipient of the Medal of Freedom. However, I realized that under the current U.S. regime, the Medal of Freedom has been so debased (as witness the famous photo above -- how many times you have seen it, or variations thereof, often including fellow medalists Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer, just on DWT?) that it comes close to being a badge of infamy.

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Bye-bye, Lurita! Life is unfair. Once upon a time, disgracing yourself and your country the way you did could have earned you a Medal of Freedom

Actually, the Bush-regime rats aren't so much deserting
this sinking ship as shoving one another over the side.

Remember the good old days of the first term of the Bush regime, when there seemed to be no malfeasance a regimist could commit that could get him/her fired? By and large, the more egregious your misdeeds, the likelier you were to find Chimpy the Prez draping a Medal of Freedom around your neck. (Personally, I don't think I would want the world's most maladroit human being getting anywhere close to my neck, especially not when he's wielding an object capable of strangulation. But hey, it was probably better than the shit-canning they deserved.)

Well, those were the old days. Now the steady outflow of regime lackeys being frog-marched out of government service in disgrace is coming to resemble a stampede. The misconduct has become so egregious that instead of the usual image of rats deserting a sinking ship, we've got the rats pushing one another over the side of this leaky tub.

Latest ejectee from this squalid swamp: the unspeakable Lurita Doan, who devoted her time as administrator of the General Services Administration to turning the GSA into just another shameless enclave of the Right-Wing Political (and Money-Siphoning) Machine. Here is the Politico's account:

Lurita Doan Finally Forced Out At GSA

By John Bresnahan

Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, was forced to offer her resignation tonight, according to an e-mail she sent out this evening.

Doan was appointed in late May, 2006, becoming the first woman to serve as GSA Administrator. With 12,000 empioyees and a $20 billion annual budget, GSA has responsibilty for overseeing the thousands of building and properties owned by the federal government.

Doan became the subject of congressional scrutiny last year for allegedly using GSA to help Republican lawmakers win re-election. Doan denied the allegation, but her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was disastrous. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, called on Doan to resign over the allegations, but Doan refused to do so.

Here is the text of the e-mail that Doan sent out earlier this evening announcing her forced resignation:

"Dear Friends and Colleagues at GSA,

Early this evening I was asked to submit my resignation, and I have just done so. It has been a great privilege to serve with all of you and to serve our nation and a great President.

The past twenty-two months have been filled with accomplishments: together, we have regained our clean audit opinion, restored fiscal discipline, re-tooled our ability to respond to emergencies, rekindled entrepreneurial energies, reduced bureaucratic barriers to small companies to get a GSA Schedule, ignited a building boom at our nation's ports of entries, boldly led the nation in an aggressive telework initiative, and improved employee morale so that we were selected as one of the best places to work in the Federal government.

These accomplishments are made even more enjoyable by the fact that there were lots of people who told us they could never be done.

Best of luck to all of you, it has been a true honor."

As fellow flopperoos Gen. Tommy Franks and Iraq-occupation bungler L. Paul Bremer III look on, former CIA director George Tenet is rewarded for his bumbling by Chimpy the Choker.

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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?

Is Bob Woodward the very best person to review George Tenet's book? Or maybe the WORST? (Can you guess which way the Washington Post voted?)

"Because the United States government doesn't work that way. The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security adviser and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they're going to implement."
--former DCI George Tenet, on 60 Minutes, answering Scott Pelley's question as to why he didn't go directly to the president for action on the July 2001 intelligence that an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. could come within weeks or months, as quoted by Bob Woodward in his Washington Post review of Tenet's book

No, I'm not making this up. The Washington Post actually had Bob Woodward review what he calls Tenet's "remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir"!

Well, why not? Maybe the best person to evaluate the insider-outsider obligations of a former member of a U.S. administration is the man who has made a living of conflict of interest, indeed has made it his life's work, spending the whole of the Bush administration, it has appeared, as simultaneously assistant managing editor of a major, or anyway major-ish, newspaper and an honorary member of that administration, gathering information from everybody who would blab--including, it's clear, then-Director Tenet--for his "inside-outsider" (or is it "outside-insider") blabathon books?

Not surprisingly, Woodward devotes most of the review to telling author Tenet what he should have done back when. It's probably just my imagination that there's a suggestion here that all Tenet would have had to do was to ask Woodward what to do during their conversations at the time.

What's not my imagination is that this all seems pretty clear, cut-and-dried to Woodward. So much so that he doesn't actually seem to be listening. When a former director of Central Intelligence says, "The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security adviser and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they're going to implement," might it not be a good idea at least to pause to ponder what he's said?

Is it true? (If it's not true, why would he say it, and what is the significance of his saying it?) If it is true, why is it true? What does it mean for policy-making? Is it a good idea or a bad idea, or perhaps somewhere in between?

Or is Woodward perhaps speaking from his insider's knowledge of this particular president and this particular administration? Surely one common thread running through all the self-serving tales administration members told him all those years was that the "power" players knew how to "play" that simpering fool who happened to have the title of president of the United States, while having no firm idea what his principles and policies were--apart from the God stuff that he seems to think he gets straight from the source--until he had them explained to him, which means that you want to be the last person to talk to him about a policy decision, even if it means doing what you have to to prevent other people from talking to him after you.

Anyway, it's kind of irresistible to read, or at least skim, Woodward on the subject. My biggest problem is that, like so many other commentators, he has plenty to say about Tenet and hardly anything to say about the fairly momentous issues Tenet's revelations seem to raise. Like about how the country got lied into a war that a clutch of administration insiders were determined to make happen, whatever they had to do to make it happen, and the truth be damned.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to share 'em.

Poor George Tenet: When the dust has settled, and the doody's caked dry on the fan, you can often count on our Mo Dowd to get it, er, almost right

"If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security."
--our Mo Dowd, in her NYT column today, "Better Never Than Late"

Maureen Dowd is never sharper or more on-target (or, okay, more obvious) than when she's piling on--when she's, like, the 25th or 87th attack pundit to leap onto the heap, and maybe try to sneak in a punch or two. In the NFL the official throws a penalty flag, and if they see those punches, or see you trying to dig in with your heels, they're apt to march off extra yardage for unsportsmanlike conduct. Not so in the world of punditocracy ("Broderworld"?), though.

Poor George Tenet undoubtedly deserves all the heat he's getting for his George-come-lately tell-sort-of-all book, and sure enough, our Mo almost gets it right as she gives him (and some others) what-for:

May 2, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

Better Never Than Late
By MAUREEN DOWD

Instead of George Tenet teaching at Georgetown University, George Tenet should be taught at Georgetown University.

There should be a course on government called "The Ultimate Staff Guy." A morality saga about how much harm you can do as a go-along, get-along guy, spending so much time trying not to alienate the big cheese so he doesn't can you that you miss the moment where you have to can him or lose your soul.

If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security.

It would certainly have been harder for timid Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, to back up the administration if two members of the Bush inner circle had broken away to tell an increasingly apparent truth: that Dick Cheney, Rummy and the neocons were feverishly pushing a naïve president into invading Iraq with junk facts.

General Powell counted on Slam Dunk--a slender reed--to help him rid the speech of most of the garbage Mr. Cheney's office wanted in it. Slam, of course, tried to have it both ways, helping the skeptical secretary of state and pandering to higher bosses. Afterward, when the speech turned out to be built on a no-legged stool, General Powell was furious at Slam. But they both share blame: they knew better. They put their loyalty to a runaway White House ahead of their loyalty to a fearful public.

Slam Dunk's book tour is mesmerizing, in a horrifying way.

"The irony of the whole situation is, is he was bluffing," Slam said of Saddam on "Larry King Live" on Monday night, adding, "And he didn't know we weren't." Mr. He-Man Tenet didn't understand the basics of poker, much less Arab culture. It never occurred to him that Saddam might feign strength to flex muscles at his foes in the Middle East? Slam couldn't take some of that $40 billion we spend on intelligence annually and get a cultural profile of the dictator before we invaded?

If he was really running around with his hair on fire, knowing the Osama danger, shouldn't he have set off alarms when W. and Vice went after Saddam instead of the real threat?

Many people in Washington snorted at his dramatic cloak-and-dagger description of himself to Larry King: "I worked in the shadows my whole life."

He was not Jason Bourne, lurking in dangerous locales. He risked life and limb on Capitol Hill among the backstabbers and cutthroat bureaucrats--from whom he obviously learned a lot. He spent nine years on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, four as staff director. When Bill Clinton appointed him to run the C.I.A. in 1997, the profile of him in The Times was headlined "A Time to Reap the Rewards of Being Loyal." It observed that old colleagues had said "he had an ability to make many different superiors feel at ease with him."

Six former C.I.A. officials sent Mr. Tenet a letter via his publisher--no wonder we're in trouble if spooks can't figure out the old Head Spook's home address--berating him for pretending he wrote his self-serving book partly to defend the honor of the agency and demanding that "at least half" of the profits be given to wounded soldiers and the families of dead soldiers (there needs to be a Son of Slam law). One of the signers, Larry Johnson [above], told CNN that Slam "is profiting from the blood of American soldiers."

"By your silence you helped build the case for war," the former C.I.A. officials wrote. "You betrayed the C.I.A. officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld."

They also said, "Although C.I.A. officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered Bin Laden an enemy ... you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda. ...

"In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence." They concluded that "your tenure as head of the C.I.A. has helped create a world that is more dangerous. ... It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated."

Thus endeth the lesson in our class on "The Ultimate Staff Guy." If you have something deadly important to say, say it when it matters, or just shut up and slink off.

Of course when it comes to actual thinking, our Mo is kind of out of her element. And on one point--the point that, judging from the column title and the final paragraph, she seems to think is actually her main point--how violently, cosmically, utterly, insanely wrong can a single human being be?

"If you have something deadly important to say, say it when it matters, or just shut up and slink off"?

Confidential to our Mo: You are aware, aren't you, that during the very period in question there were people who not only knew that the Bush gang was lying but jumped up and down saying so. Some of them had inside knowledge. Were you paying attention to them then? Plenty of people pointed out that, just based on general knowledge, Colin Powell's U.N. speech was riddled with known lies. Were you hopping up and down then? If Colin or poor George had resigned back then, would you have paid much attention to them? That's kind of not how I remember it.

"Better never than late"?

Well, if you wanted to legislate a rule saying that, oh, a person can't shout "Bingo" after the next Bingo number has been called, that it's too late--well, that's one for the Bingo community to thrash out.

But the notion that there comes a time when it's too late to tell, or help steer us in the direction of, the truth? That it's too late for one of the inside participants to spill his, or somebody's, guts about the inner workings of a cabal that secretly and ruthlessly and mendaciously engineered us into a war?

Dump on poor George all you want. If there are facts in his confessional that call for questioning or correcting, then by all means let's have people who are in a position to do so question and correct away. But the notion that we're better off without Tenet's book, better off without both (a) his firsthand witness and (b) the occasion it provides to focus on a period and a secret policy-making agenda that still needs to be made understandable to the American people (remember, if not for the book, our Mo would probably be writing another column about what dumb bunnies men are), why, that's just silly, Mo.

Would it be too terribly tacky to suggest that the very principle--"Better never than late"--that you're trying to apply to poor George and Colin might with equal logic be applied to this column?

A NONPARTISAN LOOK AT TENET'S ROLE FROM ANOTHER KEY PLAYER-- AND A COUPLE WHO LOOK AT BUSH'S IRAQ CATASTROPHE TOO

I feel like I know ex-CIA agent Michael Scheuer because of his extraordinary book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. That isn't to say I swallow every single opinion he spouts. But what he's spouting about the so-called "War" on Terror, is a lot better than what Bush and Cheney-- or anyone else for that matter-- have been farting out. His OpEd in today's Washington Post is a crucial companion piece for anyone who hasn't read his books but who plans to read George Tenet's (or even just watch Tenet tonight on 60 Minutes.

He says he likes Tenet but that he let the CIA and the country down, primarily by buying into the ideological spin coming out of the White House. "At a time when clear direction and moral courage were needed, Tenet shifted course to follow the prevailing winds, under President Bill Clinton and then President Bush-- and he provided distraught officers at Langley a shoulder to cry on when his politically expedient tacking sailed the United States into disaster."

Scheuer claims that At the Center of the Storm, many of whose premises were debuted earlier by Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward (courtesy, obviously-- if not directly, of Tenet), is "disingenuous about Tenet's record on al-Qaeda." He points out how Woodward showed Tenet in a very heroic light, "warning national security adviser Condoleezza Rice of pending al-Qaeda strikes during the summer of 2001, only to have his warnings ignored. Tenet was indeed worried during the so-called summer of threat, but one wonders why he did not summon the political courage earlier to accuse Rice of negligence, most notably during his testimony under oath before the 9/11 commission."

Then there's the Iraq war. Tenet is now protesting the use that Rice, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials have made of his notorious pre-war comment that the evidence of Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction programs amounted to a "slam dunk" case. But the only real, knowable pre-war slam dunk was that Iraq was going to turn out to be a nightmare.

Tenet now paints himself as a scapegoat for an administration in which there never was "a serious consideration of the implications of a U.S. invasion," insisting that he warned Bush, Cheney and their Cabinet about the risks of occupying Iraq. Well, fine; the CIA repeatedly warned Tenet of the inevitable disaster an Iraq war would cause-- spreading bin Ladenism, spurring a bloody Sunni-Shiite war and lethally destabilizing the region.


But as with Rice and the warnings in the summer of 2001: Now he tells us. At this late date, the Bush-bashing that Tenet's book will inevitably stir up seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic Party. He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush (who gave Tenet the Medal of Freedom) and former secretary of state Colin L. Powell (who remains the Democrats' ideal Republican). Tenet's attacks focus instead on the walking dead, politically speaking: the glowering and unpopular Cheney; the hapless Rice; the band of irretrievably discredited bumblers who used to run the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith; their neoconservative acolytes such as Richard Perle; and the die-hard geopolitical fantasists at the Weekly Standard and National Review.

They're all culpable, of course. But Tenet's attempts to shift the blame won't wash. At day's end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he's saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.

This morning I drove back from the California Democratic state convention and I was listening to the radio when General William Odom's voice came over the airwaves. Recall that Odom was Director of the National Security Agency and Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer. He is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, just a dyed-in-the-wool patriot who no one-- except of course Cheney and Rove-- could ever accuse of being soft on terror or on any enemy of this country. "To put this in a simple army metaphor," he explained, "the Commander-in-Chief seems to have gone AWOL, that is 'absent without leave.' He neither acts nor talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat games… I hope the President seizes this moment for a basic change in course and signs the bill the Congress has sent him. I will respect him greatly for such a rare act of courage, and so too, I suspect, will most Americans." General Odom makes it clear to anyone who hasn't been paying attention-- or who lacks the analytic facilities to understand-- that the Bush Regime has been "squandering U.S. lives and helping Iran and al-Qaeda" in his badly bungled war in Iraq.

"The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place," he said. "The president has let (the Iraq war) proceed on automatic pilot, making no corrections in the face of accumulating evidence that his strategy is failing and cannot be rescued. He lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies."

And Odom isn't alone among highly decorated and well-respected former military officers urging Bush to sign Congress' plan for winding down the war. Almost unheard of, even an active-duty Army officer, Lt. Colonel Paul Yingling, published a scathing attack on how the war has been run and botched. Like Scheuer, he feels that military officers should be held accountable and that those who see the mendacity in U.S. policies should resign and speak out. Ironically, even Bush's own handpicked pet general, David Petraeus admitted to Congress last week that the occupation in Iraq "would get harder before it gets easier" and warned of the enormous commitment and sacrifice facing the U.S. in Iraq.


PARTISAN CIA OPERATIVES ARE, OF COURSE, SLAMMING TENET AND DEFENDING THE REGIME

Six former CIA officers wrote Tenet a letter describing him as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership." They also said he has "a moral obligation" to return the Medal of Freedom he received from President Bush and to donate most of his book royalties to U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and families of the dead. One of the agents behind this, Larry Johnson, is a right wing hack but others are normal Americans.

The writers said they agree that Bush administration officials took the nation to war "for flimsy reasons," and that it has proved "ill-advised and wrong-headed."

But, they added, "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership.

"You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq."

And Christopher Hitchens apparently crawled out of his bottle to call Tenet's new book a sniveling, self-justifying disgrace.

BUSH REGIME'S ABOUT TO GET SLAMMED BY TENET FOR THE MISUSE OF HIS "SLAM DUNK" COMMENT

I read Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine earlier this year, so it's no surprise to me that George Tenet wasn't likely to go to his grave without speaking his mind about these unspeakable and treacherous criminals who infest the entire Bush Regime. I have a feeling Bush isn't going to want to be sitting in front of the teevee on Sunday evening. Scott Pelley will be interviewing Mr. Tenet on 60 Minutes.

The mass media is all over his anger about the misuse of his "slam dunk" comment, but Tenet's analysis of the Bush Regime is certainly not about one incident. He thinks the Regime is disingenuous and dishonorable but it's not only because they scapegoated him and ruined his reputation in order to deflect the blame for Bush's longed for and long planned for attack on Iraq onto him.

"So a whole decision to go to war, when all of these other things have happened in the run-up to war? You make mobilization decisions, you've looked at war plans," says Tenet. "I'll never believe that what happened that day informed the president's view or belief of the legitimacy or the timing of this war. Never!"

Tenet says what bothers him most is that senior administration officials like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue using "slam dunk" as a talking point.

"And the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the vice president go on 'Meet the Press' on the fifth year [anniversary] of 9/11 and say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam dunk' as if he needed me to say 'slam dunk' to go to war with Iraq," he tells Pelley. "And you listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot [who] told us and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous … Let's everybody just get up and tell the truth. Tell the American people what really happened."

The media? The corporate media? ... what really happened? Does Tenet expect them to tell the unadulterated truth? Odd. Instead of Truth, what we get from the mainstream media is the lunatic ravings of a demented old pusbag and hack like David Broder. Today he did a little hatchet job for Karl Rove, whose employ he's been in more and more frequently lately, drawing attention to himself by likening Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Abu Gonzales.

Broder has been foaming at the mouth these days. A man generally given to soporific prose, Broder has been downright venomous lately. And what has put the Benzedrine in Mr. Broder's Ovaltine? Not the fact that President Bush continues to lie about "progress" in the war in Iraq. Or that Dick Cheney continues to lie about pre-invasion links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Or that the Bush Administration has neglected our wounded warriors, ignored the victims of Katrina, potentially obstructed justice by firing US Attorneys who were pursuing GOP wrongdoing. Not even that the Bush Administration lied to the families of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, cynically using their blood to distract from their own incompetence and dishonesty.

No, none of this raises Dean Broder's hackles.

He reserves his vitriol for Harry Reid.

Why Reid? Because Reid has been one of the few politicians with the courage to speak the plain, unvarnished truth to power, and the hallmark of Mr. Broder's career has been to suck up to power. Reid calls Bush a liar. Broder can't handle the truth.

In a radio interview Monday, Broder blasted Reid, calling him "bumbling," saying he's an embarrassment, and breaking the news that, "at some point down the road the Democrats are gonna have to have a little caucus and decide how much further they want to carry Harry Reid."

Really? And on what did the self-styled dean of the Washington press corps, base this bombshell? Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Broder just made it up. That's not journalism, it's bloviating - aka Broderizing. In fact, real reporters on Capitol Hill chased down the Broder charge, actually interviewing Democratic senators and their staffs. They found universal support for Reid.

... Perhaps Broder's bed-wetting tantrum against Reid was spurred by the certain knowledge that while Harry Reid has been telling hard truths, Mr. Broder has been falling hard for transparent lies.

Whereas Reid called for Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal long ago, Broder vouched for Rummy, writing, "Overall, Rumsfeld left me with the impression that he is aware of the risks of war with Iraq, but confident they can be handled."

While Reid has called for investigations into allegations Karl Rove broke the law, Broder vouches for Rove: "Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove.... I have eaten quail at his table and admired the splendid Hill Country landscape from the porch of [Rove's] historic cabin...." Mighty cozy in Karl's cabin, isn't it, Mr. Broder?

I doubt very seriously that Harry Reid is bothered by Broder's comments. Reid has faced down Vegas mobsters who planted a bomb in his family car. He's unlikely to be intimidated by George W. Bush's housebroken lap-dog.

My guess is that Give 'Em Hell Harry is going to keep telling them the truth, and Mr. Broder is going to keep thinking it's hell. As George Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

The Inside the Beltway press corps seems to have gone out of their collective mind. As David Sirota pointed out today, the Bill Moyers tv piece last night is freaking them all out. It exposes them as the collaborators and enablers they have been on the entire disgraceful Bush agenda. (If you missed Moyers' show, watch it here and you'll see why all the press hacks are in melt down mode.)


SENATE DEMOCRATS DON'T AGREE WITH BRODER'S ASSESSMENT-- NOT EVEN ONE OF THEM

Broder may be trumpeting Rove's propaganda crap for WaPo readers but there sure weren't any buyers in the Democratic Caucus. Every member signed a letter to the Post explaining how Broder had it all wrong. Even one non-Democrat, Bush henchman Joe Lieberman, signed the letter. They were polite enough not to mention exactly where Broder got his (talking) points from.

We, the members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, contest the attack on Sen. Harry Reid's leadership by David S. Broder in his April 26 column, "The Democrats' Gonzales."

In contrast to Mr. Broder's insinuations, we believe Mr. Reid is an extra
ordinary leader who has effectively guided the new Democratic majority through these first few months with skill and aplomb.

The Democratic caucus is diverse, and Mr. Reid has worked tirelessly to make sure that the views of each member are heard and represented. No one ideology dominates the caucus, so that a consensus can be reached and unity achieved. It is hard to imagine a better model for leadership.

Because Mr. Reid has the support of members of the caucus, is a good listener and has an amazing ability to synthesize views and bring people together, the Senate has accomplished a great deal during his time as majority leader. Armed with his years of service in the Senate and with a mastery of procedure, Mr. Reid has led the chamber with a slim majority and a minority that is, at times, determined to stop legislation with which it disagrees.

In the first 100 days alone, we made great strides under his leadership on long-neglected legislation concerning stem cell research, the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations and the minimum wage, to name three. In addition, under Mr. Reid's leadership, we have fulfilled our obligation, left uncompleted by last year's Republican-led Senate, to fund the federal government. He has accomplished all of this in the face of stiff opposition and with a commitment to giving ideas full opportunity for debate.

Finally, in this age of scripted politicians speaking only to their base or claiming that they "don't recall" anything, the fact that Mr. Reid speaks his mind should be applauded, not derided. His brand of straight talk is honest, comes from the heart and speaks directly to the people.

THE MEMBERS
OF THE SENATE
DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS

John Kerry, who is more experienced with the right-wing smear machine than most, went even further.

You all know what's happening-- and once again, you need to let the media gatekeepers know it. Harry Reid is a tough guy and a good fighter, but he can't change the media narrative all by himself. We all need to speak up and protect our leaders when they speak their mind. Minutes after he let loose with a steady stream of pejoratives about Harry Reid, I hit back at Dick Cheney. And I will continue to do so. It's important ... because if we don't stand up for our leaders no one will. This isn't about policy intricacies or a Democrat's syntax, it's about character-- the character of a good man, Harry Reid, and the character of our Party which needs to stand up when one of our own is unfairly attacked.

And the worst part is, the whole attack is based on a completely out-of-context quote. This is what Harry Reid really said, "And as long as we follow the President's path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course-- and we must change course." Any questions? The President's own generals say there is no military solution to the civil war in Iraq, that it requires the political solution the Iraqis have resisted. By the Vice President's standard, are they "uninformed and misleading"?

"Never send to know for whom 'Slam Dunk' Tenet's drum beats; it beats for thee, Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfie and Condi and Feith and . . ."

No, Georgie, just 'cause you're the Decider, that doesn't mean you're
allowed to strangle your old pal George T with his Medal of Freedom.

"History is just one damned thing after another."

--Dr. Henry Chickenkisser, in the early 1970s

Back in the day--a day that included the Nixon presidency--when New York magazine was a whole lot younger and feistier, it regularly featured political "comic-strip episodes" (for want of a better description) by the brilliant cartoonist Robert Grossman, which dealt with both local and national issues. Among the recurring characters was a certain national security adviser, later secretary of state, named Dr. Henry Chickenkisser, a pompously self-important professorial type given to philosophical meditations like the following incontrovertibly timeless truth, uttered at a time when the good doctor was finding himself under siege with bad news and hostile media questions:

"History is just one damned thing after another."

How true, Henry, how true!

(Say, does anyone know if any of those dazzling Grossman "graphic novel" prototypes from New York were ever republished?)

I like to think that even the less philosophical types now holed up in Fortress White House get that feeling most every morning when they turn on their TVs. Even on Fox News, if you're, say, Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales, holed up at the Justice Dept. (presumably with your bags packed), you have to be starting to get that feeling of being a live punching bag.

To which I say: It's about time! I mean, look what the Bush regimists have been getting away with these last six years.

I'm sure you've heard, just as I'm sure they've all heard in the bunkers at the White House and the Pentagon, that former Director of Central Intelligence (and Medal of Freedom awardee) George "Slam Dunk" Tenet has written a book. The early reports were that it wasn't going to make his former fellow freedom-fighers in the Bush regime wildly happy.

With the April 30 publication date approaching ominously, the drumbeat is getting louder. Today Al Kamen reports in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

Tenet's Tell-All Is a Slam Dunk to Provoke Invasion's Architects

The drums have begun sounding for the long-awaited book by former CIA director George Tenet, in which he gives his take on pre-9/11 days and on Saddam's huge cache of weapons of mass destruction.

And the drums are saying that Tenet is not going to get too many Christmas cards from Vice President Cheney's office after they read "At the Center of the Storm." Folks from down the river at the Pentagon, including former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz--a guy who's already going through a rough patch--and former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, might also get some heartburn.

Former secretary of state Colin Powell comes out fine. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was President Bush's key adviser in engineering the Iraq invasion, doesn't come out so fine. Not fine at all.

The White House definitely won't be overjoyed, we're hearing. Tenet even takes some shots at himself and for the first time explains his astute assurance that "it's a slam-dunk case" when Bush asked him how solid the WMD evidence was.

Tenet has never really explained his views on that comment. The 500-page book--or more likely his "60 Minutes" interview on April 29, the day before the book goes on sale--will be the first time he goes over that.

Tenet, who ran the CIA from July 1997 to July 2004, did the first of two days of taping last week at Georgetown University, where he's teaching.

Do you hear those drums, boys and girl?

BUSH'S FILTHY LITTLE HOUSE OF CARDS COLLAPSING? YESTERDAY IT WAS DOWD. TODAY IT IS VIC GOLD. WHO'S NEXT... GEORGE TENET?

As a matter of fact, according to the U.S. News & World Report the next up to spill the beans on Bush's corrupt and incompetent regime will indeed be Medal of Freedom winner George Tenet. But that's a month away and anyone who has read Ron Suskind's chilling The One Percent Doctrine already knows what Tenet thinks of the criminal bunch he threw his lot in with for the sake of misplaced patriotism. Still his own book, At the Center of the Storm is something that "could be the biggest storm yet over who knew what before 9/11 and about those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." U.S. News says he "names names."

Meanwhile, you probably read about Matthew Dowd's duplicitous and self-serving mea culpa in yesterday's NY Times. Dowd is a repulsive character but his turnaround on Bush must be even all the more painful because he really and truly has been one of them, heart and soul. Today's right-wing rat jumping off the sinking ship is Vic Gold, a personal pal of Lynne Cheney's who spills the beans to the Washington Post. Actually all the beans are coming in his soon-to-be-published (this month) book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP.

Until then we'll just have to be satisfied with what Gold, a close associate of Bush's father and a true believer from the Barry Goldwater days of conservatism, had to say to the Post:

"For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times," Gold writes. "Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots."

Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. "A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control."

For Gold, Cheney brings to mind the adage of Swiss writer Madame de Stael, who wrote, "Men do not change, they unmask themselves." Cheney has a deep streak of paranoia and megalomania, Gold suggests -- but he says he did not see it at first.

He was hiding who he really was," Gold says. "He was waiting for an opportunity."

In many ways, Gold's tale of disillusionment is a familiar one. There are plenty of veterans of Reagan and Bush 41 around town who believe Bush and Cheney trashed the institutions and party they helped build from the wreckage of the Goldwater campaign.

But there aren't many who have been on a first-name basis with those they believe are doing the trashing. There aren't many like Vic Gold.

Response from inside the Regime has been... interesting. Lynne Cheney called him yesterday to ask if the stories circulating in Washington like a wildfire was just an April Fool's joke. When Gold told her that it was no joke, she said, "I am sorry to hear that," exactly what Senator Pete "Sneaky Pete" Domenici (R-NM) said to U.S. Attorney David Iglesias before slamming the phone down on him and calling Rove to get him fired. Bush's father's reply when he was informed-- by Gold-- about the book was more gracious: "You always called them like you saw them," the former president told him.

"As a father, he's got to feel torn up because he sees this going on and obviously, obviously he has not been able to influence [the president]," says Gold. "George W. had one of the greatest resources in foreign relations and political experience in the world -- his old man! What if he didn't have this hubris of 'I am going to do it on my own'? If he had listened to his old man in terms of what to do after 9/11 and everything, he wouldn't have been in the mess he is in right now, and the country would not be in the mess it is right now."

Gold says he felt compelled to write his book because what he considers the depredations of the Bush administration -- the war, violations of civil liberties, expansion in government, the politicization of the Justice Department, to name just a few -- have violated his sense of what the Republican Party should stand for.

"Kennedy said sometimes political loyalty, party loyalty asks too much," he says.

Writing the book was hard because of his past associations. But, with a chuckle, Gold borrows the line that Cheney used after cursing at Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on the Senate floor:

"I feel better for having done it."

UPDATE: ANOTHER RAT DESERTS

After Joe Klein, who's next? Cheney? Lieberman?