This is another in my collection of stories on how the Washington Post beats out the NY Times and the TV networks as far as accuracy. (See my Sandy Burglar story of NY Times vs. Wash.Post.) This one has the nice feature that it originates with the Washington Post. That paper seems to be smart enough to realize that it could eliminate the NY Times as a rival if it shows liberals how much news they miss by reading the NY Times.
This difference came up in my 1999 web study,
"Broaddrick and Hemings" too. There, I do some numerical study of how newspapers reported on Clinton's rape of Juanita Broaddrick compared to their treatment of the rumors about President Bush and some woman (*very* flimy rumors) and how they treated the misreporting of the story of Thomas Jefferson and the slave Sally Hemings (where the DNA discovery actually exonerated him more than anything else).
First, on the question of who leaked Plame's name to Novak we hear on page 345 (I deleted the page number by accident--it is 3 hundred something):
I wonder if Novak's source really was someone in the CIA. If I were working on such a story, I'd call up my CIA contacts before my White House contacts. But I wouldn't use attribute the leak to the CIA in my story-- I'd say (truthfully) that it was a government official. Maybe "senior administration official" is a term of art among Washington journalists, and it isn't suppose to refer to senior CIA officials. But maybe Novak was just telling a white lie to protect his real source.
I have commented before on how strange it is that the CIA would commission Wilson for the Niger mission, when he would obviously sabotage Administration policy. From what Wilson says, it seems the State Department-- another bureaucracy unhappy with Vice-President Cheney and the hardline crowd-- was in on the mission. On page
17, Wilson says he went and told Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner about his Niger trip before he left, and Kansteiner approved it and gave him a little help.
There are some interesting bits on Wilson and Plame that I hadn't heard about before. Page 240 says that the reception at which he met Valerie Plame at the Turkish Embassy was where he and a general were accepting an award from the "American Turkish Council" on behalf of the European Command. His adultery is confirmed (he was still married to wife number two, though she gets very little mention in the book. On page
242 he reports of Valerie Plame," 'Ladies don't date married men,' she announced firmly as I tried to hold her hand," but her qualms didn't seem to last even a few months. "Soon after our return to Washington, we decided to move in together." I guess that doesn't count as dating. Something very surprising was, we learn on page 278, that Valerie
"suffered a bout of postpartum depression". That is very serious stuff-- often more accurately termed "psychosis" than "depression". Sometimes such mothers even kill their children, or never recover. What are the implications of a psychotic CIA employee specializing in weapons of mass destruction?
Finally, on page 240
Wilson relates a weird story about how President Clinton worked a crossword puzzle while Wilson briefed him before a meeting with the President of Mali, "But when his African guest arrived, Clinton was brilliant. He demonstrated an understanding of Mali and a keen interest in his visitor and the issues being raised; it was virtuoso performance." It's not the doing something else while fatuous bureaucrat briefs you that surprises me, but that Clinton was doing a crossword puzzle rather than reading other papers or watching a computer screen. He wouldn't have been intending to insult Wilson; it is hard to imagine that a crossword puzzle is relaxing if you're doing it while being briefed on Mali; he wasn't doing it under a deadline. So why was he doing it? I guess Wilson was lucky Clinton only had a newspaper present instead of an intern.
I decided if I was going to abuse Joe Wilson IV, I ought to buy his book, humorously titled, The Politics of Truth. I was happy to find evidence confirming my predictions about him. It must be kept in mind that he has no qualms about lying, but even liars slip up and let a lot of truth through. That is one reason why I think the lying-to-the-FBI law that caught Martha Stewart is a very bad law. That law says you need not talk to the FBI, but if you do, and lie, you go to jail. A beter law wouldsay that you *do* need to talk the FBI or you go to jail, but you are free to lie if it's just the police and not a court. That way,the police, experts in detecting lying, would get a lot more information.
Anyway, here is noteworthy information from the Wilson book.
If anyone thinks Wilson's has any credibility left to destroy, the book is good for that too, but I focussed on what we might learn about his career, about his motivations, and about the CIA.
In this post: Wilson and his career:
Page 31: Wilson's uncle was mayor of San Francisco from 1912 to 1931 and then governor of California 1931-1934. Another uncle was a U.S. Representative.
Page 33: His family was Episcopalian, though his first wife was Jewish.
Page 34: He spent his high school years in Europe--Nice, Mallorca, Montreuz, and Biarritz.
Page 35: "My only experience with the public sector up to that point had been collecting unemployment insurance during the winters at Lake Tahoe,..."
The prediction of my earlier post is confirmed: Wilson is a classic example of the Limousine Liberal-- Northern California subspecies. Keep in mind that the traditional habitat of this type has been the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, and the traditional enemy is the rest of the Republican Party-- The Old Guard, Southerners, Taftites, Reaganites, Goldwaterites, Southern Californians, traitors to their class such as the Bushes, ethnics of the Slavic, Irish, or southern European varieties, anyone religious, and anyone who shops at K-Mart.
We also learn about his politics:
Page 32: "When in 1967 Muhammed Ali declared he had nothing against the Vietcong, it made sense to me and my friends even as it sent chills down the spines of our parents."
Page 63: When he worked for Al Gore as Foreign Service Fellow, "I saw myself, then as now, as center-left in my outlook on social issues and as a realist in foreign policy."
Page 239: " While I generally voted for the Democratic candidate for president, President Bush had received my vote in the 1992 election that brought Clinton into office. Not surprisingly, my votes generally reflected the political agenda most important to me: foreign policy and national security."
p. 282. Vitriolic comments about Florida 2000: "I had railed against such conduct in flawed elections in Africa , and disliked it just as much in my own country." He claims that the "gutter tactics" of "an out-of-state rabble" stopped the recount in Dade County.
Page 321: ."The Christian Right, with its literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, had become increasingly strident in promoting war in the Middle East as necessary for the return of Jesus and the subsequent "rapture" promised on Judgement Day."
Page 439: "By uncritically favoring Likud, President Bush has done our Israeli friends and allies no favors." Again, as on page 321, he says that the rapture is the goal of American evangelicals.
And we learn about his career:
Page 275: "I had risen about as high as I could in the Foreign Service and decided it was time to retire and try something else in life while I was till young enough to make the transition.
Page 275: "My list of clients was small, as I did not want to overextend myself while learning the ropes,but my geographical reach extended into Africa, Western Europe, and Turkey. The breadth of companies and sectors was already fascinating for me. I had become involved in gold mining in West Africa-- including in Niger, which was just opening up some fields-- as well as telecommunications and the petroleum sector."
Page 341: After his New York Times article attacking the Administration on July 6, 2003, "All that week after the article appeared and the one following, I played as much golf as I possibly could."
What cases should a prosecutor choose to prosecute? Two prime considerations are "1. Should the person whom I think did X really be punished, or is their conduct excusable, even if illegal?" and "2. Even if I think the person did X and should be punished, do I have enough evidence that I have a good chance of convincing a jury?"
Juan non-Volokh at the Volokh conspiracy has a post on the question of whether the leaker of Valerie Plame's employment at the CIA should be prosecuted. I had a thought on this and the Sandy Burglar case.
What cases should a prosecutor choose to prosecute? Two prime considerations are "1. Should the person whom I think did X really be punished, or is their conduct excusable, even if illegal?" and "2. Even if I think the person did X and should be punished, do I have enough evidence that I have a good chance of convincing a jury?"
I won't discuss (1) here, as applied to either the Plame case or the Berger case, despite its importance. What about (2)? Here, I think the Plame case should clearly be abandoned by the prosecutor. It is crazy that he has not dropped it already. Suppose he thinks he can find out who leaked the information. He still has to convince all 12 members of a jury that all of the following things are true beyond a reasonable doubt:
1. The defendant really is the leaker. Whoever the defendant is, his lawyer will argue that the prosecutor was under pressure to find a culprit and that there are political considerations. It will probably be the defendant's word against one or two witnesses who are heavily political people and who have strong motives for shifting blame from one person to another. Reasonable doubt will be hard to overcome.
2. The defendant knew that Plame not only worked for the CIA but was a covert agent within the past five years (if I remember the statute correctly). Note that Novak did not claim she was a covert agent-- that was leaked later by someone else (was it by someone at the CIA itself-- I forget). Note, too, that she is the mother of twins, has been living in America for some time, and was involved enough in CIA administrative affairs to be writing a memo suggesting her husband for the Niger mission. Proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the leaker knew she was a covert operative would be close to impossible.
3. The defendant intended to make the information public. I'm guilty here of not bothering to look at the statute, but would someone be guilty if they told Novak Plame was a CIA agent intending for that to just be background information, not to be published? The defense lawyer could argue that the leaker had not told the world that Plame worked for the CIA, just Novak, and suggest that maybe Novak was the one to blame for actual publication.
Moreover, there is another hurdle: jury nullification. Suppose the judge says that it would be a serious felony for a government employee to reveal Plame's name to Novak even if no harm was done because it was common knowledge in Washington anyway, she hadn't worked covertly for some years, the disclosure was motivated by her misbehavior in pushing her husband for a mission, and the leaker had not intended for the information to be published. Would the jury really vote unanimously to send the leaker to jail? I doubt it.
Thus, I see very little chance that the government could get a conviction. And if I am right, a good prosecutor would say, even before learning the identity of the leaker: prosecuting this case would be a waste of government resources, because we'd lose.
Now switch to Sandy Berger's theft of secret government documents. Again, forget item (1), the item of justice. Could a prosecutor get a conviction? Easily. I'm not sure of the elements of the crime, but at most I expect there are just two (a) Did Berger intentionally take notes and/or take the documents themselves, rather than accidentally dropping certain select documents in his pants on several visits?, and (b) Did Berger know he wasn't supposed to do those things? Both of those seem pretty easy, when we're dealing with a former National Security Advisor. (Probably item (b) is not even a necessary element. You don't have to know that burglary is a crime to be guilty of burglary. But the jury might balk at convicting, say, an ordinary citizen who had never been told that he was viewing secret documents and they weren't free samples he could take home with him.)
The Berger case seems to be a slam-dunk. It might be prudent to appoint a special prosecutor, since the Democrats will scream that the prosecution is politically motivated. But it is actually disgraceful that Berger has not already been indicted, tried, and convicted, since the crime seems to have occurred in the fall of 2003 and it is such a simple case. No wonder people like Berger think they are above the law-- it seems they really are, even when Republicans control the Justice Department!
The Washington Post July 22 story is
"
Archives Staff Was Suspicious of Berger,
Why Documents Were Missing Is Disputed."
Here are the first three paragraphs.
Last Oct. 2, former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger
stayed huddled over papers at the National Archives until 8 p.m.
What he did not know as he labored through that long Thursday was that the same
Archives employees who were solicitously retrieving documents for him were also
watching their important visitor with a suspicious eye.
After Berger's previous visit, in September, Archives officials believed
documents were missing. This time, they specially coded the papers to more
easily tell whether some disappeared, said government officials and legal
sources familiar with the case.
The New York Times July 22 story is
"White House Knew of Inquiry on Aide; Kerry Camp Irked."
It does not actually say what Berger did until the 14th paragraph (up to then,
the story is about his persecution by Republicans) and then only
vaguely:
The Justice Department declined to comment. The department is investigating
whether Mr. Berger broke federal law on the handling of classified material by
removing from a secure government reading room a handful of documents related to
an after-action report on the 1999 millennium plots, as well as notes he took
during his review.
In preparing for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, Mr. Berger viewed
thousands of pages of intelligence documents. He said he removed the documents
by mistake, but Republicans accused him of stashing the material in his clothes
on purpose. They have offered theories about what that
purpose may have been, like an effort to withhold information
that reflected badly on the Clinton administration.
Notice the sentence I put in red. It's not just deceptive writing, but poor
writing that has crept into the Times. In the old days, a Times
reporter would have written They have offered theories about
what that purpose may have been, such as an effort to withhold information
, to at least get the grammar correct, or They
say the purpose may have been to withhold information , to
make it less verbose and clearer. In the old days, if one reporter had written
so badly, his co-author would have caught it and rewritten it. In the old days,
if two reporters had written so badly together, especially on a major story,
their editor would have caught it and rewritten it. Not today, though.
Instapundit has a great post that shows the value of weblogs, in which he
quotes emails from readers.
First, though, the story itself about Berger's
removal of classified documents.
Here's
Byron York's
summary of the Berger affair:
First, Berger has reportedly conceded that he knowingly hid his handwritten
notes in his jacket and pants in order to sneak them out of the Archives. Any
notes made from classified material have to be cleared before they can be
removed from the Archives --- a common method of safeguarding classified
information -- and Berger's admission that he hid the notes in his clothing is a
clear sign of intent to conceal his actions.
Second, although Berger said he reviewed thousands of pages, he apparently homed
in on a single document: the so-called "after-action report" on the Clinton
administration's handling of the millennium plot of 1999/2000. Berger is said to
have taken multiple copies of the same paper. He is also said to have taken
those copies on at least two different days. There have been no reports that he
took any other documents, which suggests that his choice of papers was quite
specific, and not the result of simple carelessness.
Third, it appears that Berger's "inadvertent" actions clearly aroused the
suspicion of the professional staff at the Archives. Staff members there are
said to have seen Berger concealing the papers; they became so concerned that
they set up what was in effect a small sting operation to catch him. And sure
enough, Berger took some more. Those witnesses went to their superiors, who
ultimately went to the Justice Department.
Instapundit, Glenn
Reynolds, has a very good roundup of emails from his readers about whether
what Berger did was common, sloppy practice in government circles, and whether
government workers even know the rules about security. (
Jonah Goldberg at the NRO Corner says he's gotten lots of them too, but, to
my disappointment, he doesn't bother to quote them.) To summarize: everybody
knows the rules, they are taken very seriously, and Berger had to have known he
was breaking the law in a serious way. Here's one example of an email sent
to Reynolds:
Just to back up some of your other correspondents. I spent 27 years total in the
AF - with a Top Secret clearance. I had at times, specific appended code word
clearances, which are controlled on a strict need-to-know basis - because they
often involve sensitive sources (say, you are getting data from a mole in the
Itanian Gov. - that particular data would be graded TS and then given a code
word to further identify it as very sensitive and to restrict access from those
with just general TS clearances). In a nutshell, the security system from least
classified to most classified was: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, Top Secret
codeword). When we worked on Top Secret codeword (it might read something like
Top Secret Fishhook), it was in a vault and our notes were put in burn bags. We
were not allowed to take any notes out -period. We clearly understood that you
didn't screw around with Secret, much less TS or TS codeword. For us a slip-up
meant the slammer. What Berger did is so far removed from accepted security
procedure, that I can only see two possible explanations: dishonesty with an
ulterior motive (political CYA, I would guess) Or he's crazy. There is no way a
veteran in the security business doesn't understand the gravity of walking out
with TS codeword data.
I really do not see how the bumbler theory makes any sense, and I highly object
to the idea that people who work with very highly classified information simply
forget the rules. Only someone who DOES NOT work with very highly classified
information could possibly make that charge.
A first advantage of weblogs is that they allow for instant response-- news
*and*
commentary more quickly than the newspapers and TV can even manage news without
commentary.
A second advantage is unbiasedness, in aggregate. There are so many weblogs and
it is so easy to start one that the liberal establishment cannot suppress
information. Even liberal weblogs will confront awkward facts, because otherwise
the more intelligent of their readers will know it-- competition is just too
tight.
A third advantage is accuracy. Weblogs can publish corrections instantly,and
they can document their claims by linking to other webpages. If they link,
readers can check and do their own analysis of the raw data. If they don't link,
readers can know to be skeptical. Another part of this is that bloggers have
personal reputations to protect. A journalist can jump from one newspaper to
another after writing inaccurate stories, and his impact on the credibility of
the entire newspaper is small anyway. Instapundit is one person. Moreover, that
one person has a real job-- as a law professor-- and if he lies in his weblog
it will hurt him in his real job too.
A fourth advantage-- finally coming to the Instapundit-on-Berger example-- is
reader feedback. Readers who know more than the blogger can email him and give
him information as yet unpublished. Sometimes this will be corrections, going
back to my third advantage, but often it will be supplementary information such
as the answer to the reasonable question, "Does everybody ignore the rules on
removing classified documents, so Berger's offense was not really serious?"
Readers of weblogs will know the answer to this, based on convincing evidence
from government employees who know what they're talking about. Readers of
newspapers will not. Even if a news story purports to answer it, readers will be
properly skeptical of bias. In theory a newspaper could do the same thing as
Instapundit and publish numerous quotes as evidence, but for some reason--space
considerations perhaps-- newspapers don't.
What do Joe Wilson's lies mean? And what does it say about the Democrats and the
media that so many high-ranking figures took him at his word?
First, contrary to what Wilson wrote in the New York Times, Saddam Hussein was
trying to acquire uranium from Niger. In support of that proposition are a
Senate report in Washington, Lord Butler's report in London, MI6, French
intelligence, other European agencies -- and, as we now know, the CIA report,
based on Joe Wilson's original briefing to them. Against that proposition is Joe
Wilson's revised version of events for the Times.
But that's not what Joe Wilson found. Major Wanke's prime minister, among
others, told Ambassador Wilson that he believed Iraq wanted yellowcake. And
Ambassador Wilson told the CIA. And the CIA's report agreed with the British and
the Europeans that "Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa."
...
That's what lying is, by the way: intentional deceit, not unreliable
intelligence. And I'm not usually the sort to bandy the liar-liar-pants-on-fire
charge beloved by so many in our politics today, but I'll make an exception in
the case of Wilson, who's never been shy about the term. He called Bush a "liar"
and he called Cheney a "lying sonofabitch," on stage at a John Kerry rally in
Iowa.
...
The obvious explanation for Wilson's deceit about what he found in Africa is
that his hatred of Bush outweighed everything else. Or as the novelist and
Internet maestro Roger L. Simon put it, "He is a deeply evil human being willing
to lie and obfuscate for temporary political gain about a homicidal dictator's
search for weapons-grade uranium."
"We were used to such things in the communist days."
Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, after watching the Michael Moore
documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. He predicted that the film would have little impact
on public opinion in the nation: "Everybody has open eyes and can understand
that this is propaganda."
The image of Sandy Berger stuffing notes into his socks at the National Archives
conveys the culture of carelessness and corruption under Bill Clinton far better
than anything the 9/11 Commission will report. The Commission fails to see that
the fundamental explanation for America's porous security before 9/11 is not
structural but cultural. Eight years of Clintonian indiscipline exposed America
to attack by disciplined terrorists.
...
Recall when ex-bar bouncer Craig Livingstone, elevated to a security position
in the Clinton White House by Hillary Clinton, "inadvertenly"(Berger's word for
cramming notes into his clothing) lifted 900 FBI files on political appointees
from the Bush Sr. and Reagan administrations.
...
When one of Clinton's CIA directors, John Deutch, inadvertenly took home a
CIA-issued computer with top secret information on it, Sandy Berger rushed to
his defense, and succeeded in persuading Clinton to pardon him. "Berger and
other senior White House officials believed Deutch deserved a pardon even though
his home computer security violations were egregious. They cited his overall
contributions to the government over many years and the fact that there is no
evidence that any of the classified material he mishandled was ever obtained by
unauthorized individuals," reported the Washington Post back then.
...
During the Clinton years, you could always count on a report about something
missing, from laptops White House interns lifted to computers and documents
untraceable at vital agencies. After the State Department lost a computer once,
the Clinton administration explained it away merely as an official forgetting to
close a door to a "secure" conference room. When White House officials walked
off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of presidential souvenirs from Air
Force One at the end of Clinton's term, that was explained away as precedent.
When a spy placed an eavesdropping device in the State Department, that too was
an accidental oversight. Apparently he just walked through the front door. The
FBI reported after the incident that its officials had seen a Russian spy
loitering near the Foggy Bottom entrance.
Hazel O'Leary, Clinton's Energy Secretary, had figured out his security ethos
early on, and just dispensed with security badges for visitors to nuclear labs.
Placing security badges on foreign visitors, she famously explained, was
discriminatory. Then it was learned that nuclear secrets had been nabbed by
Chinese Communists. Sandy Berger's response? "We're talking about breaches of
security that happened in the mid-1980s."
Berger was criticized at the time for being blas� about security lapses and
failing to report Chinese espionage at nuclear labs to Congress, and for having
gone out of his way to interfere with a Justice Department investigation of
Loral Space & Communications Ltd. for an illegal transfer of missile technology
to China. Berger's Loral lobbying (the press reported that Loral chairman
Bernard Schwartz was one of the Democrats' largest soft-money contributors
during 1995-1996, and had hired a former National Security Council spokesman)
was successful.
And what about John F. Kerry? Joe Wilson campaigned with Kerry in at least six states, and claims to have helped with the candidate's speeches. He was said to be a senior foreign policy adviser to the senator. As of Friday, Wilson's Web site, restorehonesty.com, was still wholly paid for by Kerry's presidential campaign.
Some of us are on record as dismissing Wilson in the first bloom of his
unmerited celebrity. But John Kerry was taken in -- to the point where he signed
him up as an adviser and underwrote his Web site. What does that reveal about
Mister Nuance and his superb judgment? He claims to be able to rebuild America's
relationships with France, and to have excellent buddy-to-buddy relations with
French political leaders. Yet anyone who's spent 10 minutes in Europe this last
year knows that virtually every government there believes Iraq was trying to get
uranium from Africa. Is Kerry so uncurious about America's national security he
can't pick up the phone to his Paris pals and get the scoop firsthand? For all
his claims to be Monsieur Sophisticate, there's something hicky and parochial in
his embrace of an obvious nutcake for passing partisan advantage.
For example, I am just working on a paper on optimal parking lot size, and I just
thought of an idea that might be worth mentioning. A classic example in some
branch of mathematics is a hypothetical town in which the opening of a new
connecting road slows down traffic immensely, because of the bottleneck it
creates. But I can't remember the source. Do any of my readers? If I had the
readership of Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, I could probably find a reference.
This is a great advantage of weblogs, because a magazine writer with a
readership of a million would *not* be able to get that kind of help from his
readers.
So, I would like more readers. But at the same time, I want to write about
things that interest me, and not many people have the same interests as I do.
How many people combine conservatism, Calvinism, economistical thinking,
Midwestern pride, and pleasure in statistics? Three, maybe?
So I will try a test. I will set up a second weblog. One weblog will be for
current affairs, and the other will be for everything else. I intend to try
doing some cross-listing, but we'll see how well that works. The original weblog
address at
will be for Everything Else, and a new address at
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/c/
will be for Current Affairs.
The search engine box for each will search both of them (which is why I have the
peculiar URL for the Current Affairs blog).
July 25, 2004
Joe Wilson, Novak, State, CIA, Clinton
Here are some more tidbits from Joe Wilson's book, The Politics of Truth. These pertain to the Plame-Wilson scandal more directly than my earlier excerpts on Joe Wilson's background.
[Of Novak] "He cited not a CIA source, as he had indicated on the phone four days earlier, but rather two senior administration officials."
Joe Wilson, Kerry, and The Commissar Vanishes
Instapundit
says that mention of Joe Wilson has been carefully excised from the Kerry for President website, though he still has a speaking spot at a Nation magazine panel at the Democratic Convention. I wonder if Sandy Berger mentions have been given the same treatment. It reminds me of a very good book, The Commissar Vanishes, about how Stalin kept having to change official documents as he kept on purging Old Bolsheviks. The book has wonderful before and after versions of Soviet pictures. I recall some story-- it must have been just after Stalin died and Beria was killed in the succession fight-- of how all the libraries were sent copies of a new,long, article on the Bering Strait that they were to use to replace the old article on Beria in their encyclopedias.
Wilson-PLame:Evidence from His Book on His WASPiness and Career
I've been hobbling around with two canes the past day as a result of a backache, and so missed blogging yesterday. But I got some reading done.
Again, we have the Liberal Republican, even down to being willing to vote for a preppie Bush against an Arkansas Democrat. Note how he admits to not having anything against the Vietcong. And, of course his knowledge of evangelical Christianity is embarassingly wrong. For those readers of mine who also know little of this (but are, I hope, less willing to show their ignorance in print), the idea of the rapture is unique to "Dispensationalism", a 20th Century school of exegesis that is common but not the mainstream of Evangelicalism. Also, it isn't clear to me what the rapture has to do with support for Israel even for Dispensationalists. More simply, evangelicals support Israel so strongly (more strongly than American Jews) because Israel is an outpost of Western civilization, which evangelicals support, because they feel kinship with Jews, and because Islam is far more hostile to Christianity than religious Judaism (secular Judaism is another matter!).
Page 209:"I had no intention of remaining in the Foreign Service any longer than necessary to qualify for my retirement, which was just a few years off." This, about 1995.
My earlier post had sources suggesting that he left the Foreign Service before he qualified for retirement, and involuntarily. I also wondered whether his "consulting" was actually a real job, or whether he just played a lot of golf. Apparently, he didn't have many clients and he did play golf. Another prediction confirmed?
Maybe tomorrow I'll report more from this book.
July 23, 2004
Recent Posts at My Other Weblog
Here are recent post titles at my other weblog, at http://www.rasmusen.org/x/.
Deduction Thresholds and Tax Recordkeeping
Splitting Infinitives
Topics at the Controversy Weblog
Does the Charitable Deduction Have Impact?
The New South: Desegregation or Air Conditioning
Splitting My Weblog into Two
Joe Wilson's Lies, His CIA Friends
Recent U.N Atrocities in the Congo
Mary and Martha; Hessel Park Church, Champaign
Protestwarrior.Com Poster Images
July 22, 2004
Prosecutorial Discretion: Valerie Plame and Sandy Burglar
Juan non-Volokh at the Volokh conspiracy has a post on the question of whether the leaker of Valerie Plame's employment at the CIA should be prosecuted. I had a thought on this and the Sandy Burglar case.
How to Write Distorted News: NYTimes v. Washington Post
Via Instapundit, I discover that
Belgravia Dispatch
has a wonderful dissection of the amazingly biased New York Times
July 22 story on Sandy Berger. It is a good post to read for two reasons: (1)
To see how a journalist carefully twists facts, and (2) To see yet another
example of the liberal bias at the New York Times has wrecked the paper
while the liberal bias at the Washington Post has not stopped it from
being a reliable news source.
Berger, Instapundit, and Weblog Advantages
Is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor and until recently one of
Kerry's top security advisors, a bumbler, or is he a dangerous criminal?
Those are our two choices, which does not say good things about Clinton and
Kerry. All the evidence points to "dangerous criminal", and what Berger himself
has to say confirms it more than it refutes it.
and here's another:
July 21, 2004
Mark Steyn on Joe Wilson
Mark Steyn
, as usual, writes a situation up with insight and style:
This isn't difficult. In 1999, a senior Iraqi "trade" delegation went to Niger.
Uranium accounts for 75 percent of Niger's exports. The rest is goats, cowpeas
and onions. So who sends senior trade missions to Niger? Maybe Saddam dispatched
his Baathist big shots all the way to the dusty capital of Niamy because he had
a sudden yen for goat and onion stew with a side order of black-eyed peas, and
Major Wanke, the then-president, had offered him a great three-for-one deal.
Vaclav Klaus on Michael Moore
From
World Magazine:
Sandy Berger and Clinton Security Lapses: A History
George Neumayr of The American Spectator
has a nice wrap-up of the numerous security breaches of the
Clintonites, exemplified best and most recently by former National Security
Advisor Sandy Berger's theft of secret documents:
America's elite are too enlightened to notice that lax morality produces lax
security. But America's enemies are happy to notice even if America's elites
won't. Like robbers sizing up a slipshod neighborhood as an easy target, the
terrorists saw from the security lapses America casually accepted during the
Clinton years that a 9/11 attack was possible.
July 20, 2004
Linda Ronstadt and Liberal Hatred of Conservatives
Linda Ronstadt says
This is a good example of an aspect of the "unconstrained vision" that Thomas Sowell noted long ago in A Conflict of Visions: a visceral hatred of opposing views and an unwillingness to tolerate the possibility that people might be wrong for innocent reasons. No conservative singer would say this about having Michael Moore socialists in his audience. He would expect there to be some, but would have the attitude that there are lots of stupid people in the world, many of them quite nice, and all of them worth singing songs for. Even a Communist has the right to live. But for Linda Ronstadt, it is one of the injustices of the world that she has to be in the same room as a Republican for an hour.
Kerry Fooled by Wilson-- Deutsch and Berger Style
Remember: the most important thing about the Plame-Wilson kerfuffle is not those two rascals but their supporters in the CIA, the Press, and the Democratic Party. Mark Steyn
writes well about John Kerry:
Here is the crucial paragraph:
That puts it well: Kerry and his advisors have been fooled and embarassed by an opportunist, because they wanted to make America look bad to help win an election. The thought of a President Kerry is scary. We'll go back to the Clinton days of CIA chiefs and National Security Advisors who care so little about security that they even break federal laws by taking classified materials home with them. (Sandy Berger stole 9-11 documents, and is the subject of a criminal investigation right now.)
July 19, 2004
Splitting My Weblog into Two
I've used this weblog mainly as a commonplace book, a place to record my
thoughts. At the same time, I like having other people see my ideas, especially
if they disseminate them to others. And, I would like to be able to use my
audience to get comments on my ideas and to ask questions.