Bill Clinton in Iowa.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

About twice a year I find myself re-reading a short, entertaining and insightful piece from March 2004 in The Washington Monthly by Bruce Reed titled “Bush’s War Against Wonks: Why the President’s Policies are Falling Apart.”

Bruce Reed served as domestic policy advisor for Clinton. He writes semi-regularly for Slate in a column called The Has-Been. He’s recently expanded on some of his ideas in a book co-authored with Rahm Emanuel titled The Plan: Big Ideas for America.

Here’s a teaser from the article:

Strip away the job titles and party labels, and you will find two kinds of people in Washington: political hacks and policy wonks. Hacks come to Washington because anywhere else they’d be bored to death. Wonks come here because nowhere else could we bore so many to death. These divisions extend far beyond the hack havens of political campaigns and consulting firms and the wonk ghettos of think tanks on Dupont Circle. Some journalists are wonks, but most are hacks. Some columnists are hacks, but most are wonks. All members of Congress pass themselves off as wonks, but many got elected as hacks. Lobbyists are hacks who make money pretending to be wonks. The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the entire political blogosphere consist largely of wonks pretending to be hacks. “The Hotline” is for hacks; National Journal is for wonks. “The West Wing” is for wonks; “K Street” was for hacks.

After two decades in Washington as a wonk working among hacks, I have come to the conclusion that the gap between Republicans and Democrats is as nothing compared to the one between these two tribes. We wonks think we’re smarter than hacks. Hacks think that if being smart makes someone a wonk, they’d rather be stupid. Wonks think all hacks are creatures from another planet, like James Carville. Hacks share Paul Begala’s view that wonks are all “propeller heads,” like Elroy on “The Jetsons.” Wonks think the differences between hacks and wonks are as irreconcilable as the Hutus and the Tutsis. Hacks think it’s just like wonks to bring up the Hutus and the Tutsis.

In every administration, wonks and hacks fight it out. The measure of a great president is his ability to make sense of them both. A president must know the real problems on Americans’ minds. For that he needs hacks. But ultimately, he needs policies that will actually solve those problems. For that he needs wonks.

Reed proceeds to delve into Ron Suskind’s journalism on the Bush White House, among other things. The phrase “reality-based community” had not entered the lexicon yet, but Reed’s piece is clearly aimed not only at wonks, but at reality-based hacks. Sadly, they seem to be a rare breed these days.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)

At times, it seems as if there are no mysteries left in life, or that the mysteries are just too slight.

For instance, to any sane, well-informed adult reading the AP headline Rice challenges statements by Clinton on terror: Secretary says administration aggressively pursued al-Qaida before 9/11″ it’s obvious Condoleezza Rice is lying.

And when one reads the AP headline “Intel report: Iraq a A-cause célèbre- for extremists: President says NIE leak was political, denies war has worsened terrorism” President Bush is clearly either lying or delusional.

The only real mysteries are how the media will cover it, how the Bush cheerleaders will spin it, and how blatantly and aggressively Bush and Rice will insist that black is white and that they-re not lying through their teeth.

Rice’s lies were prompted by the now (in)famous interview of Bill Clinton by Chris Wallace at Fox News. The AP reports that the YouTube version has been downloaded over 800,000 times and earned “the show its best ratings in nearly three years.” (The video can be seen here and a previous post is here.) In addition to Rice calling Clinton’s charges that the Bush administration did little to stop al-Qaeda before 9/11 “flatly false,”

Rice also took exception to Clinton’s statement that he “left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy” for incoming officials when he left office.

“We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida,” she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., the same company that owns Fox News Channel.

Ah. those Bushies. They-re good at lying from plenty of practice, but at times they get sloppy and move from technically true if delusional assertions such as “I firmly believe we-re winning the war on terror” to demonstratively false statements. The Raw Story very rapidly exposed Rice’s lie:
Read more »

Keith Olbermann comments on Bill Clinton’s Fox News interview

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, ‘Countdown‘
MSNBC
Updated: 8:29 p.m. ET Sept. 25, 2006

The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong.

It is not essential that a past president, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.

It is not important that the current President’s portable public chorus has described his predecessor’s tone as “crazed.”

Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nation’s marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would-ve quit.

Nonetheless. The headline is this:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

“At least I tried,” he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. “That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried.”

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.”

The Bush Administration did not try.

Read more »

President Clinton refered to Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, several times on the Chris Wallace show. I have to say, it did my heart good to see President Clinton smack down Chris Wallace and the neocons false claims that he didn’t do enough to catch Bin Laden. You can watch the interview here. I haven’t read Clarke’s book yet, but ordered it. According to Clinton, this is the most accurate account of America’s war on terror.

Buy Richard Clarke’s book here

In Maine and parts of Canada, McDonald’s seasonally offers a sandwich called the “McLobster.” I kid you not. While these days they apparently advertise it sometimes as a “lobster roll” and “100% real lobster” (I would be shocked if that claim was not misleading in some fashion), back when I first saw it advertised in 1988, McDonald’s proudly claimed - again, I kid you not - that the McLobster was “made with flecks of real lobster!” Yes, that’s right, “flecks.” The only person I know who actually admitted to trying it was, shall we say, underwhelmed.

There’s a lot of buzz currently about Chris Wallace’s interview with Bill Clinton, where Wallace sandbagged the former President - namely, Clinton was told he was going to be asked about his Global Policy Initiative, and Wallace pulled a bait-and’switch by asking Clinton about his record on catching or killing bin Laden. Is Clinton’s terrorism record a fair subject? Of course. But it’s completely dishonest to misrepresent an interview to one’s subject beforehand. It’s also standard practice for Fox News.

The Washington Post has a brief write-up here (and Howard Kurtz is sure to cover it tomorrow). Questiongirl has the video posted here. ThinkProgress has a full transcript here.

While the Post article notes that Wallace is “not usually accused of being part of the network’s conservative commentariat” at Fox News, and he in fact spoke out against the distortions of ABC’s propaganda piece The Path to 9/11, there’s little question of what this segment was about. Besides being a typical Fox News sandbag job, its other goal is of course trying to rewrite history and paint the Democrats as weak and Bush as responsible on national security before the election.

Of course Fox has a commercial agenda as well a rightwing one - they-ve been selling this interview as “Clinton Gets Crazed!” - not far off from “Presidents Gone Wild!”

But just imagine if Clinton hadn-t responded so forcefully? Conservatives will doubtlessly sell this as “Clinton gets defensive about his lousy record on terrorism.” But I think Chris Wallace has gotten so used to Faux Dems (”I-m not a liberal, but I play one on Fox News!”) he forgot what it was like to try to sandbag someone who would fight back. (Imagine if Kerry has responded to the Swifites with this sort of fire!)

Hmm… I just caught the tail end of Wallace on Fox with Brit Hume and the gang. Wallace lifts two quotations from Clarke’s book - the second one could be used to criticize Clinton’s critics, but is used to criticize only Clinton. (I-ll try to get some more links up later.)

Almost all of them talk about how “touchy” Clinton was, and speculate it’s because he’s “sensitive” about his legacy. No one points out that Clinton was sandbagged, with Wallace misrepresenting the interview before hand! NPR’s Juan Williams and Mara Liasson make a few points, but they know what Fox is paying them for - and again, why the hell do you have non-partisan, neutral reporters representing the left on a talk show? Hume trots out some standard GOP talking points about Clinton after cutting him a little slack - basically, he and the other GOP folk acknowledge Clinton was dealt a tough hand, but also imply had he been a real man he’d still have done precisely what they were arguing against him to do at the time!

This is Fox News- typical seasonal offering for imminent elections; same BS as usual, but piled higher and deeper. Fox News is the McLobster of journalism - if you dig through it you can find “flecks” of real news in there, but overall, it’s an over-processed, artificial sham that-ll have you rushing for the toilet.

Bill Clinton on Fox News Sunday with Chris WallacePART I

PART II

Al Gore and Richard Branson on CNN discussing Branson’s $3B pledge to fight global warming at Clinton’s Global Initative yesterday in New York. Way to go Branson!!!