I know that Ed Morrissey and the Powerline Boys like her but Geez Louise this is loony:

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann claims to know of a plan, already worked out with a line drawn on the map, for the partition of Iraq in which Iran will control half of the country and set it up as a “a terrorist safe haven zone” and a staging area for attacks around the Middle East and on the United States.

She said this in a taped interview with St. Cloud Times reporter Lawrence Schumacher, which is available as a podcast…

Here’s the extended excerpt:

“Iran is the trouble maker, trying to tip over apple carts all over Baghdad right now because they want America to pull out. And do you know why? It’s because they’ve already decided that they’re going to partition Iraq.

And half of Iraq, the western, northern portion of Iraq, is going to be called…. the Iraq State of Islam, something like that. And I’m sorry, I don’t have the official name, but it’s meant to be the training ground for the terrorists. There’s already an agreement made.

They are going to get half of Iraq and that is going to be a terrorist safe haven zone where they can go ahead and bring about more terrorist attacks in the Middle East region and then to come against the United States because we are their avowed enemy.”

This is pure fantasy, of course. She doesn’t say where she heard it or, more importantly, who made the agreement. Is it the Iraqi government? The Bush Administration? The tooth fairy?

Congress Critters have a tendency to spout when you stick a mic in front of their face. They trust that whatever comes out of their mouths is earth shaking and profound. It rarely is, of course. In fact, more often it is puerile and stupid. But many Congressmen are so in love with the sound of their own voice that sometimes they figure they can say just about anything and no one will challenge them on it.

Is it possible that she was talking about a worst case scenario for Iraq and just forgot to mention that she was positing a hypothetical?

Sure hope so. If not, I would suggest a long vacation in a nice quiet room at a facility that offers a dose of reality therapy.

UPDATE: THE RETRACTION

Think Progress thought to call the Congresswoman’s office and get a clarifying statement.

What they got was even more mystifying:

ThinkProgress contacted Bachmann about her remarks, and received a statement from her office stating that coverage of her Iran statement was “misconstrued.” Bachmann claims she was actually talking about widely-discussed plans to partition Iraq among the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, and her fear that Iran would overtake the Shiite region.

Bachmann is no stranger to conspiracy theories. She continues to insist that there is a link between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Iraq, despite the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that there was “no credible evidence” of any connection.

Here’s a link to the original podcast. You tell me if anyone can possibly construe what she says on tape as anything but what was quoted above. Besides, that “widely discussed plan” to partition Iraq has the Shia state in the south, not the “western and northern” portions as she claims in her original statement.

I wonder if she got a briefing of some kind from the Pentagon and is just all bollixed up about what she heard and what was being speculated on. One thing for sure, her “clarifying statement” did nothing but muddy the waters even more.

It appears that the CIA, who experimented with psychics and “remote viewing” back in the 1950’s and 60’s didn’t share their experimental data with the British Ministry of Defense.

If they had, the could have saved British taxpayers around $40,000 and the MoD a heap of embarrassment:

Psychics were recruited by the Ministry of Defence to locate Osama Bin Laden’s secret lair, it was claimed yesterday.

Newly declassified documents revealed that the MoD conducted an experiment to see if volunteers could ‘see’ objects hidden inside an envelope.

It is claimed the ministry hoped positive results would allow it to use psychics to ‘remotely view’ Bin Laden’s base and also to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

However, after running up a bill of £18,000 of taxpayers’ money, defence chiefs concluded there was ‘little value’ in using psychic powers in the defence of the nation and the research was taken no further.

What makes this stupidity even more hilarious was that the MoD couldn’t get any “real” psychics and had to settle for “novices:”

The MoD tried to recruit 12 ‘known’ psychics who advertised their abilities on the Internet, but when they all refused they were forced to use ‘novice’ volunteers.

The report, released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows 28 per cent of those tested managed to guess the contents of the envelopes, which included pictures of a knife, Mother Teresa and an ‘Asian individual’.

But most subjects, who were holed up in a secret location for the study, were hopelessly off the mark. One even fell asleep while he tried to focus on the envelope’s content.

A former MoD employee who received a copy of the report said the timing of the study must have been related to military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You know you’re pulling apples from the bottom of the barrel when even “internet psychics” refuse to help you out.”

It’s a shame. Just think if one of those “novices” had actually been able to prove “remote viewing” was actually true. The psychic who can prove it stands to make a helluva lot of money by winning the “James Randi Challenge:”

The Foundation is committed to providing reliable information about paranormal claims. It both supports and conducts original research into such claims.
At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the “applicant” becomes a “claimant.”

To date, no one has ever passed the preliminary tests.

I’m not surprised.

So how do you defend the indefensible? If you’re a Brit, you add a little humor:

The MoD last night defended its decision to fund the secret tests despite the questionable use of taxpayers’ money.

And Mr Pope said: “I don’t think this was a waste of public money. Many people will say so, but I think it is marvellous that the Government is prepared to think outside the box.

“And this is as outside the box as it gets.”

Mr. Pope should be hired by the Democratic National Committee where he can put his talent for finding the humorous in the sublimely silly to good use.

Saw this in the Daily Star of Lebanon – a somewhat pro-western (but by no means pro-Bush) publication. The writer asks the question: “Are things coming together for George W. Bush in Iraq?”

One key factor is that, for the first time since the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, Arab Sunni leaders are backing a US military plan for that country. These Sunni leaders live in abject fear of the geopolitical earthquake that any disintegration of political authority in Baghdad would bring. They believe that all-out civil war would invariably follow – a war that would not respect international borders.

Of course, America has been encouraging Sunni leaders in this belief. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent tour of Middle East capitals helped spread the word to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states that any US failure and sudden withdrawal would be certain to destabilize them. Given the fragile grip that these leaders have over their societies, America’s warnings have been taken to heart.

But the truly curious factor that might bring success to Bush is that those who have opposed or resented America’s presence in Iraq, such as the Iranian-backed Shiite parties, now also appear to want Bush’s new strategy to succeed. They are for it because they believe it will defang Moqtada al-Sadr, the rogue Shiite cleric whose power has mushroomed over the past three years – to the point that he now dominates much of Baghdad and holds the allegiance of countless angry young Shiite men.

This makes the Administration resistance to a regional conference on Iraq all the more troubling. I actually thought the conference idea was one of the only real positive proposals put forth by the Baker Commission. It seems to me that other players in the region who would be directly affected by the kind of pullout envisioned by the Democrats are eager to explore ways to tamp down the violence and help make the Iraqi state viable.

This must hold true especially for Syria and Jordan who are being drowned by a human tidal wave of Sunni refugees from Iraq – more than 2.3 million so far. This doesn’t include the more than half a million displaced Sunnis inside Iraq already – a number that Maliki absolutely must bring down dramatically if our surge policy is to succeed.

But what about the Shias?

Of course, attacking Sadr’s Mehdi Army in the name of fighting militia death squads has the potential to draw American military forces into a level of urban warfare unseen since the Falluja assaults of 2004 and 2005. Sadr is seen as the protector of the Shiites of Iraq and has an estimated 60,000 fighters in his militia. But he is deeply mistrusted by other Shiite leaders, who fear that they may one day have to take him on by themselves. Better to let the Americans do it, though of course these Shiite leaders prefer a slow strangulation of Sadr to a direct and bloody assault.

But make no mistake: How Sadr is handled is the big test of Bush’s new strategy. Should the US choose to face him and his forces head on, they risk alienating Iraq’s Shiites, adding fuel to the anti-occupation resistance and thus probably dooming Bush to failure.

Of course, we’ve been trying to bring Sadr’s bully boys out into the open for a couple of years. It makes killing them easier as we proved in Najaf and Fallujah Sadr City. And both al-Sistani (who can’t stand the upstart Sadr) as well as al-Hakim (leader of the SCIRI) would love to have us de-horn al-Sadr if only because it would leave them a clear field for supremacy among the Shias.

All depends on how willing the firebrand cleric is in seeking a truly political solution to Iraq’s domestic troubles. Even al-Sadr himself may be secretly urging the Americans on so that the more radical (and disobedient) members of his army will disappear. If that happens, it is possible that Sadr will back Maliki’s reconciliation plan with the Sunnis. This presumes facts not in evidence – that Sadr truly wants to work within the political framework of the Constitution in order to wield power and influence. But at the same time, Sadr has also proved himself quite the practical thug in the past in that he came off the streets in the first place to participate in the elections. Perhaps Sadr will see the writing on the wall and rather than risk all by fighting the Americans, he will slip into his Iraqi statesman costume and cooperate with Maliki.

But Sadr is only one of the pieces of the puzzle. The other is in Anbar. And here this Arab observer thinks that we’ve finally hit upon the right strategy:

The “surge” also opens, perhaps for the first time, a serious possibility of pouring water on the insurgent fires in Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. The US has achieved relative successes in the province through alliances with Sunni tribes. The hope is that such realistic and pragmatic accommodations will be extended to Iraqis who are fighting under the banner of a nationalist and anti-occupation agenda.

So some of the stars have come into alignment for Bush. But to keep them there in the long term, the Iraqi government will need to amend the constitution in a way that appeases the Sunni community. Reassuring Iraq’s Sunnis that they have a place in the new Iraq will also reassure neighboring Sunni governments, which have mostly turned a blind eye to the support for the insurgency that has come from their lands.

We’re still waiting on Maliki to show some leadership on political issues like reconciliation, oil revenue sharing (which is currently in limbo after Sunnis balked at the deal), amnesty, power sharing, and federalism agreements with the Kurds and Sunnis. Embroiled as he is now in these rape allegations, it remains to be seen if all the good work our people do in tamping down most of the violence will bear fruit at the Iraqi conference table when the factions get together to hammer out accommodations they can all live in peace with.

It appears that the “slow bleed the troops” plan of Representative John Murtha (D-Okinawa) has been withdrawn thanks to the Pennsylvania Congressman’s big mouth. If only Murtha had kept quiet about his cowardly plans to make it impossible for the Pentagon to deploy the troops General Petraeus feels are necessary to the mission’s success by throwing a monkey wrench into readiness and rotation requirements, the Democrats would probably have been able to sneak the amendment through in the middle of the night while no one was watching. Once exposed to the light of publicity, many of his fellow Democrats evidently got cold feet, however.

House Democrats have pulled back from efforts to link additional funding for the war to strict troop-readiness standards after the proposal came under withering fire from Republicans and from their party’s own moderates. That strategy was championed by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) and endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

“If you strictly limit a commander’s ability to rotate troops in and out of Iraq, that kind of inflexibility could put some missions and some troops at risk,” said Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.), who personally lodged his concerns with Murtha.

So what’s a cheese eating surrender monkey to do? Too chicken to vote on defunding the war directly and up front. Too stupid to finesse a comatose President by trying to backdoor a withdrawal through fiddling with deployments and readiness. And actually waiting to see what happens in Iraq as a result of the new strategy is just plain unacceptable.

How about jumping in Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and pretending that the vote you cast for military action actually said no such thing?

“I’ve had enough of ‘nonbinding,’ ” said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who is helping to draft the new Democratic proposal. The 2002 war resolution, he said, is an obvious target.

“The authorization that we gave the president back in 2002 is completely, completely outdated, inappropriate to what we’re engaged in today,” he said.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) began calling for a reauthorization of the war early last month and raised it again last week, during a gathering in the office of Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). Participants included Kerry, Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (Mich.), Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), Jack Reed (R.I.) and Russell Feingold (Wis.). Those Democratic senators have emerged as an unofficial war council representing the caucus’s wide range of views.

An “unofficial war council…?” ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Try “The Official Surrender to the Terrorists Caucus.” That would be more accurate.

As far as the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), just what, pray tell, would you replace this “completely, completely” legal resolution with?

While these officials said the precise wording of the measure remains unsettled, one draft would restrict American troops in Iraq to combating al-Qaida, training Iraqi army and police forces, maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity and otherwise proceeding with the withdrawal of combat forces.

The decision to try to limit the military mission marks the next move in what Reid and other Senate war critics have said will be a multistep effort to force a change in Bush’s strategy and eventually force an end to U.S. participation in the nearly four-year-old war.

Hinderaker:

That sounds like a really great idea. If someone plants an IED or shoots at our troops, they can’t fire back until they determine whether the attackers are al Qaeda or garden-variety insurgents.

I have a feeling this trial balloon is not going to get airborne. One good thing, though: the Dems’ Senate leadership is floating this concept in part because they are unhappy with Mad Jack Murtha’s “slow bleed” strategy. Not, of course, because they object to his objective of bringing about defeat; rather, because they think Murtha’s plan could create political liabilities.

In other words, rather than cut our troops off at the knees by defunding the war why not aim the knife slightly higher and castrate the military by saying who they should be fighting and who they should allow to kill them. If a non-authorized enemy fires upon our guys, maybe one of them can call their Representative and get an amendment passed to grant an exception to the new policy.

Yes, yes it’s an exaggeration and wouldn’t really work that way. But can you see our boys landing on Omaha Beach in 1944 and having to get permission to fight Poles, North Koreans, Hungarians, and the other foreign troops the Nazis put into the front lines just because the Declaration of War didn’t mention any of those nationalities?

I agree with John that this is a trial balloon and not a serious proposal. Unless the Dems want to spark a full scale Constitutional crisis, they won’t do it. Ed Morrissey has them pretty well pegged:

Nor are they opting for an honest method of floating this unconstitutional nonsense. The Democrats plan to attach the reworked AUMF as an amendment to a Homeland Security funding bill rather than allow an up-or-down vote on it in the Senate. They want to dare the Republicans to filibuster the spending bill or Bush to veto it if it passes with the new AUMF intact. They’re playing games with the funds necessary to secure the nation during a time of war—and they expect to be taken seriously on how to conduct one?

In the House, the Democrats plan to offer a different plan after the collapse of the Murtha strategy, but it will be just as transparently partisan. They will propose a more straightforward funding bill for the war, but will include a waiver on any deployment readiness restrictions by allowing the Secretary of Defense or the President to certify that unprepared troops will be deployed into battle. It’s a silly and blatantly partisan mechanism, but that matches the Democratic Congress perfectly.

Their entire strategy consists of sneaking around like criminals instead of standing up forcefully and proudly for what they believe. It truly is nauseating.

Fear not, however. Eventually, through the process of elimination, the Democrats will hit upon a strategy that will stop the war, make Bush and the Republicans look even worse than they do now (if that is even possible), while celebrating their “speaking truth to power” by dancing a jig on the Chamber floor…

At the same time that al-Qaeda is dancing a jig in the streets of Baghdad.

DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE MEMBERS DISCUSS THE PARTY’S PLAN TO RETIRE MOST WEAPONS SYSTEMS IN FAVOR OF A “FASTER, SIMPLER, MORE CHEWABLE” OPTION OF BRINGING NEW ARMS TO THE BATTLEFRONT.

Saying that the military’s weapons had become “too expensive and too lethal,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-General Motors) will hold hearings next week on retiring most of the military’s current weapons and outsourcing the construction of their replacements to Senegal:

Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small mammals—the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans.

The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees’ trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of years ago.

The landmark observation also supports the long-debated proposition that females—the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps—tend to be the innovators and creative problem solvers in primate culture.

Levin said that he and other Democratic members were especially interested in studying the new “manufacturing process” for the weapons that promises to save billions and billions of dollars:

The chimps were repeatedly seen using their hands and teeth to tear the side branches off long straight sticks and peeling back the bark and sharpening one end of the sticks with their teeth, the researchers report in Thursday’s online issue of the journal Current Biology. Then, grasping the weapon in a “power grip,” they jabbed into tree-branch hollows where Bush babies — small monkey-like mammals — sleep during the day.

One Senator who asked to be quoted anonymously (for obvious reasons) said another factor in favor of taking contracts away from such defense giants as General Dynamics, Raytheon, and United Technologies was the willingness of the newcomers to test the weapons on “Bush’s babies” – something that would please the online Democratic party activists who refer to themselves as “netroots.”

“One sure way to please the netroots and get them behind this proposal is to get the Bush babies involved in the war,” he said. “And if they happen to get in the way of a hungry arms tester, well…C’est La Guerre!

Claiming that the Senegalese firm would be able to produce weapons “faster, cheaper, and with a lot less backtalk than Lockheed gives us,” Senator Levin also praised the design of the weapons both for their simplicity and the fact that using the arms in combat will dramatically reduce civilian casualties.

“This really is a brilliant design,” he said. “It guarantees many fewer civilian casualties while generating casualties right where they belong – on the men and women in our military who were too stupid to get a job in the private sector in the first place.”

The Carnegie Endowment for Peace agreed, saying in a statement that the new weapons “represent a qualitative step in the right direction for reducing casualties in war.”

Another Committee member, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Negligent Homicide) pointed out that the way that contract payments for the arms would be made could fulfill a dual use purpose.

“The bananas, fruits, and nuts that we use to pay for these new super weapons could also be distributed to the poor in this country,” he said. “This new ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ could also become ‘The Fruitbasket of Democracy.”

National Organization for Women (NOW) President Kim Gandy also issued a statement congratulating the Senate on recognizing the unique role of females in both the invention and manufacture of these new weapons:

Adrienne Zihlman, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said the work supports other evidence that female chimps are more likely than males to use tools, are more proficient at it and are crucial to passing that cultural knowledge to others.

“Females are the teachers,” Zihlman said, noting that juvenile chimps in Senegal were repeatedly seen watching their mothers make and hunt with spears.

Females “are efficient and innovative, they are problem solvers, they are curious,” Zihlman said. And that makes sense, she added.

Gandy said she was “pleased” to see women in combat and hoped that the military would change their mind and allow American females, armed with “weapons made by their sisters in Senegal,” to become part of combat teams throughout the military.

Note: This article is a parody/satire. It is not meant to be taken seriously.

UPDATE

A slightly different take - from the left.

Mark Coffey weighs in on the Joe Wilson angle.

Goodbye, Chuck. Hello, Joe.

The Senate is about to become a revolving door as both Chuck Hagel (R-Ambitious Cuss) and Joe Lieberman (D-Persecuted One) threaten to bolt their respective parties over the war issue.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut told the Politico on Thursday that he has no immediate plans to switch parties but suggested that Democratic opposition to funding the war in Iraq might change his mind.

Lieberman, a self-styled independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has been among the strongest supporters of the war and President Bush’s plan to send an additional 21,500 combat troops into Iraq to help quell the violence there.

“I have no desire to change parties,” Lieberman said in a telephone interview. “If that ever happens, it is because I feel the majority of Democrats have gone in a direction that I don’t feel comfortable with.”

Asked whether that hasn’t already happened with Iraq, Lieberman said: “We will see how that plays out in the coming months,” specifically how the party approaches the issue of continued funding for the war.

Time says the possibility of Lieberman pulling a switcheroo is remote:

Lieberman says leaving the Democratic Party is a “very remote possibility.” But even that slight ambiguity — and all his cross-aisle flirtation — has proved more than enough to position Lieberman as the Senate’s one-man tipping point. If he were to jump ship, the ensuing shift of power to Republicans would scramble the politics of the war in Iraq, undercut the Democrats’ national agenda and potentially weaken their hopes for the White House in 2008. Those stakes are high enough to give Lieberman leverage with both parties no matter how slim the chance of his crossing the aisle. Which means Senate leaders aren’t worrying only about whether Joe Lieberman will switch parties. They’re wondering what, if anything, he plans to do with the power that comes from keeping that possibility alive.

I actually think it’s not very likely that Lieberman will cross the aisle. The Republicans don’t have much to offer him in the way of Committee Chairs – unless one of the senior Republicans were to give up the Chairmanship of Foreign Affairs (Dick Lugar) or Homeland Security (John Sununu). Would Lieberman jump the Democratic ship for anything less?

And I don’t think Lieberman is all that comfortable with the GOP’s economic or trade policies either, although that would be a minor factor in any decision he might make to leave the Democrats. He would go from being too conservative for his own party to being too liberal for the GOP. Either way, he would be in a distinct and uncomfortable minority.

No, Joe is a classic liberal – perhaps the last of what used to be called the internationalist wing of the Democratic party. Strong on national defense, friendly to unions, generous to the welfare state, but an overall belief in the goodness of America and a supporter of an activist foreign policy.

They’re mostly gone now. The Humphreys, the Nunns, the Bentsens. Like Lieberman, they shared an abiding faith that America should stand against the bullies, the thugs, and even a nuclear armed superpower to promote freedom around the world. Also like Lieberman, they were courtly in manner, generous to their foes, reasonable in debate, and when push came to shove, supported Republican Presidents when they sent our military into harms way.

If Lieberman does bolt the Democratic party, would Chuck Hagel cross over and keep the Dems in the majority? Hagel is the most likely of the moderate Republicans to turn. And the Democrats probably have more to offer him in Committee assignments than the GOP could offer Lieberman.

But Hagel should take note of what the netnuts have done to Lieberman before he thinks of crossing over to the other side. The first vote he would cast reflecting his conservative Nebraska roots would set the screaming meanies of the internet off on him and make his life miserable. Besides, Chuck wants to be President and it doesn’t look like there’s much of a chance for that if he would run as a Democrat. A third party run is more in the cards for Hagel.

In the end, unless the Democratic slow bleed the troops plan succeeds in the House, I expect Lieberman will stay right where he is. Chances of that happening are probably not quite as good today as they were last week before Murtha told the world exactly how he was going to undermine the Pentagon and the President of the United States. Such things are best done in the dark of night when no one is looking and the knife can be applied to just the right place in the small of the back so that the victim never knew what hit him. Now that Democrats have to stand up in the light of day and actually face the American people with their cowardly and immoral plan, I would guess that some Democrats who may have been inclined to vote for Murtha’s betrayal as long as it was being done below the radar of public perception are now having second thoughts.

Anything is possible in Washington. And the emotions that are roiling the capitol as a result of our involvement in Iraq are only going to get more intense the closer we get to the 2008 election.

By any stretch of the imagination, we are in for a very rough, very interesting campaign.

I missed last week’s Council vote due to one of the occasional bouts of sleeping sickness to which I am prone from time to time. Not the Tst-Tse fly variety but rather another bug that bit me much earlier in life; pure, unadulterated laziness.

Because of this, I must perform the pennance required by the omnipitent Watcher; a double dose of Watcher Council winners.

Week of 2/9

Council Category

1st Place: “Who Is George Soros?” by American Future.

2nd Place: “Once More, William Arkin, With Feeling!” by The Sundries Shack

Non Council

1st Place: “Media Mischaracterizes Senate Resolution Vote” by The QandO Blog.

2nd Place: “Once in a While a Veterans Thoughts Are Echoed” by Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

Week ending 2/16

Council Category

1st Place: “San Francisco Has Bigger Scandals Than a Debauched Mayor” by Bookworm Room

2nd Place: “What a Tangled Web” by Done With Mirrors

3rd Place: “3 Squeeze Play: How the Palestinian Summit in Mecca Overturned Bush’s Middle East Policy” by Joshuapundit

Non Council Category

1st Plae: “Flagrant Evil” by Gates of Vienna

2nd Place: “Iran’s Obsession with the Jews” by The Weekly Standard

If you’d like to participate in the weekly Council vote, go here and follow instructions.

George Washington
a poem by James Russell Lowell

Soldier and statesman, rarest unison;
High-poised example of great duties done
Simply as breathing, a world’s honors worn
As life’s indifferent gifts to all men born;
Dumb for himself, unless it were to God,
But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent,
Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,
Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content;
Modest, yet firm as Nature’s self; unblamed
Save by the men his nobler temper shamed;
Never seduced through show of present good
By other than unsetting lights to steer
New-trimmed in Heaven, nor than his steadfast mood
More steadfast, far from rashness as from fear,
Rigid, but with himself first, grasping still
In swerveless poise the wave-beat helm of will;
Not honored then or now because he wooed
The popular voice, but that he still withstood;
Broad-minded, higher-souled, there is but one
Who was all this and ours, and all men’s – Washington

July 8, 1775

The poem is a fragment from the ode for the centenary of Washington’s taking command of the American army at Cambridge.

It says something important about George Washington that his influence on American life, politics, and culture would be so profound more than 75 years after his death. Perhaps only FDR, whose dominant personality and management of the two great crisis of the 20th century – depression and war – rivals Washington’s influence on successive generations of Americans.

Washington’s contributions to our history are almost mythic in nature. Indeed, that may be our biggest problem with coming to grips with him as a man. We ask ourselves, is it possible that someone could have refused a crown or dictatorship when it was so easily in his grasp? This is not hyperbole. There was a day – one day – when Washington could have had it all, that if he was less of a patriot and lover of liberty, America would have been changed forever.

Let me take you back to that day. The year was 1783. While formal hostilities had virtually ceased between the Crown and the American colonies, peace talks continued to drag on in London. The Congress was broke and in serious debt even though the Articles of Confederation, which required individual states to contribute funds to the Congress, had been approved two years earlier.

The Continental Army was restless. Many of its officers hadn’t been paid in months. Promises made by Congress at the time of their enlistment regarding reimbursement for food and clothing, pensions, and a pledge to give the officers half pay for life were either not being honored or were rumored to be withdrawn. Petitions by groups of officers to Congress asking them to redress these and other grievances either went unanswered or were brushed aside.

As a result of these indignities, a cabal of officers headed up by Colonel Walter Stewart and Major John Armstrong, an aide to George Washington’s chief rival Horatio Gates, were making plans to march to Philadelphia at the head of their men to force Congress to deal with their demands. The implication was clear; if Congress would not address their concerns, the men would enforce their will at the point of a bayonet.

The plotters believed that General Washington would be forced by their actions to become a reluctant participant in a military coup against the government. They believed that by presenting a united front composed of the senior officers in the army, Washington would have no choice but to back them.

To that end, they scheduled a meeting on March 10 of all general and field officers. With the invitation to the meeting, a fiery letter was circulated calling on the soldiers not to disarm in peace and, if the war were to continue, to disband and leave the country to the tender mercies of the British Army.

Washington got wind of the meeting and was deeply troubled. He issued a General Order canceling the gathering and instead, called for another meeting on March 15 ” of representatives of all the regiments to decide how to attain the just and important object in view.” The next day, another letter was circulated by the plotters that implied by issuing the General Order, Washington agreed with their position.

With the army teetering on the edge of revolt and the future of the United States as a republic in the balance, Washington stood before the assembled officers and began to speak. He started by saying he sympathized with their plight, that he had written countless letters to Congress reminding them of their responsibilities to the soldiers, and begged the officers not to take any action that would “lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained.”

At that point, Washington reached into his pocket and withdrew a letter from a Congressman outlining what the government would do to address the soldiers grievances. But something was wrong. Washington started reading the letter but stopped abruptly. Then, with a sense of the moment and flair for the dramatic not equaled until Ronald Reagan became President, Washington slowly reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a pair of spectacles. There were gasps in the room as most of the officers had never seen their beloved General display such a sign of physical weakness in public. As he put the glasses on, Washington said “Gentlemen, you’ll permit me to put on my spectacles, as I have grown not only old but almost blind in the service of my country.”

Witnesses say that the officers almost to a man began to weep. This powerful reminder of the nearly eight years of service together and their shared sacrifices and hardships won the day. The revolt died then and there.

There were other days, other challenges where Washington showed a self-abnegation so profound as to allow many historians to charge that the General was more concerned about how he would look in the history books than with the kind of virtuous selflessness Washington’s contemporaries ascribed as his motives. In truth, Washington was not without a flair for the dramatic as his speech before Congress resigning his Commission attests:

Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the oppertunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence. A diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our Cause, the support of the supreme Power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven.

Of course, to get the job of Commanding General in the first place, Washington paraded around the Second Continental Congress wearing his Virginia Militia uniform which sort of puts Washington’s claims to “diffidence” about serving in a different light.

And then, the peroration:

Having now finished the work assigned to me, I retire form the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.

There is every indication in both the private correspondence with his wife Martha as well as public pronouncements like this that Washington was dead serious about retiring forever. Only the gravest of crisis could bring him back into the “theater of Action.” And as Scott Johnson points out, it was the Constitutional Convention, convening at a time when the American experiment was in dire straits and the country threatening to fly apart, that Washington once again shouldered the burden of leadership:

Take, for example, Washington’s contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington’s mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that resulted in success. The convention’s first order of business was the election of a presiding officer. Washington was the delegates’ unanimous choice.

Presiding over the convention during that fateful summer, Washington said virtually nothing. In his wonderful book on Washington, Richard Brookhiser notes: “The esteem in which Washington was held affected his fellow delegates first of all…Washington did not wield the power he possessed by speaking. Apart from his lecture on secrecy, Washington did not address the Convention between the first day and the last.”

One other aspect Brookhiser brings out about the Convention was the debates over the powers that would be granted to the President under the brand new Constitution. Once it became clear that there would, in fact, be an executive, delegates could only think of one man who could possibly fill the bill – and he was sitting silently in front of them. As the delegates debated the powers that would be granted the chief executive, they would glance from time to time at Washington to see his reaction. So powerful a presence was Washington that he influenced deliberations simply by being in the room.

Scott calls Washington “The Indispensable Man,” quoting James Flexner whose marvelous 4 volume biography is still considered the seminal work on Washington’s life 30 years after the last volume was published. And the man one discovers in reading Flexner, Brookhiser, Harrison Clark , Richard Norton Smith and others is not a perfect being. A slave owner, a patrician who was distrustful of “the mob” as he called the common folk.

A man who could be vain, petty, ultra sensitive to slights both real and imagined, Washington was most of all a man of his times. He was able to embrace new ideas and had the vision to see America as an independent nation because he was a keen student of the currents of thought that were running through the colonies in the 1760’s as well as pre-Enlightenment Europe. Washington may have been one of the most plugged in of our Founding Fathers. The stream of visitors to Mount Vernon never let up, to the point that poor Martha complained about the constant overnight guests. He also kept in close touch with friends in Europe, gauging the reaction to the unrest in the colonies. While publicly uncommitted to independence, some historians believe Washington recognized the inevitability of a separate nation as early as 1774 with the imposition of the Intolerable Acts.

A man of his times, yes. But also a man for all time.

Christiane Amanpour is one of the most respected foreign correspondents in the business. She has literally been everywhere and done everything – from wars, to famines, to natural disasters, to weighty meetings between world leaders – Amanpour, with a combination of tenacity and courage, has reported on most of the transformational events over the last 25 years. She has received 9 Emmys and numerous other awards recognizing her outstanding achievements in broadcast journalism.

She is also a left wing hack, at times willing to shill for anti-American Europeans as well as promote a clearly biased agenda against Republican Presidents. Some of her less distinguished moments include a fawning interview with former President Bill Clinton and her self-congratulatory rant about the press coverage of hurricane Katrina – since shown to be wildly inaccurate and little better than rumormongering. Some conservatives point to her marriage to former Clinton State Department spokesman James Rubin as proof of her bias but frankly, I find such charges based on who somebody is in love with ludicrous. One need only look at the Carville-Matlin partnership to give the lie to that canard.

When she plays it relatively straight, I find her a truly awesome reporter. Her coverage of the Balkans was searing. Her exposing the plight of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban prior to 9/11 was groundbreaking. I found her reports from Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War heartbreaking. She was, I believe, the first journalist to report on how George Bush 41 abandoned the Kurds and Shias after urging them to overthrow Saddam, a betrayal that haunts US foreign policy to this day. And her reporting of elections in Iraq in 2005 for CNN was, I believe more nuanced and in-depth than any other media outlet. She didn’t downplay the sheer joy of the Iraqis nor the courage of the American and Iraqi soldiers and police who helped protect the voters from terrorists who had vowed to disrupt the vote. I remember thinking at the time that Amanpour is probably at her best in this milieu; great events illustrated by using human interest stories to highlight the magnitude of what was going on.

The point of this short look at Amanpour’s record is to show that she is much more than a journalist with an agenda. Although her bias is certainly part of the total package she brings to her reporting, it shouldn’t blind us to her real accomplishments nor to the reputation she has around the world among friend and foe alike. And she is usually no lackey when interviewing the thugs of the world, challenging them on human rights as well as some of their more outspoken criticisms of the United States.

But what to make of this interview with a “senior Iranian government official,” I just don’t know:

As I sat down recently with a senior Iranian government official, he urgently waved a column by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in my face, one about how the United States and Iran need to engage each other.

‘’Natural allies,’’ this official said.

It was a surprising choice of words considering the barbs Washington and Tehran have been trading of late.

“We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war,” said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But we don’t know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action—war.”

He confided that what he was telling me was not shared by all in the Iranian government, but it was endorsed so high up in the religious leadership that he felt confident spelling out the rationale.

“This view is not off the streets. It’s not the reformist view and it’s not even the view of the whole government,” he replied.

But he insisted he was describing the thinking at the highest levels of the religious leadership—the center of decision-making power in Iran.

I asked whether he meant Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself.

“Yes,” he said.

A couple of things should be noted here, not least of which is that there have been rumors for months coming out of Iran of a deep split between Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad. Khamenei’s criticisms are more related to the President’s style rather than substance but he has also gotten an earful from what western reporters refer to as “moderates” in the regime – the old guard of original revolutionaries who were quite comfortable in their corruption and positions of power. Ahamdinejad blew into office and immediately began to get rid of most of the bureaucratic conduits used by the old guard to siphon money from the ministries, replacing them with men of little or no experience but who had the true faith.

And then last December, Khamenei, with the help of the Odd Couple of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, both former Presidents and Ahmadinejad’s most vocal critics, engineered an electoral set back for the Iranian President as his lists for local and regional office as well as many of his radical candidates for the powerful Assembly of Experts went down to defeat. There have also been moves in the Iranian Majlis to shorten Ahmadinejad’s term of office as well as resistance to some of his more radical appointments to the ministries.

Taken together, all of this points to Khamenei trying to marginalize his outspoken President. But does this automatically mean a change in attitude toward the United States?

John Hinderaker isn’t buying what Khamenei is selling, pointing to recent statements by Iran’s Supreme Leader that are belligerent and threatening. Indeed, Khamenei’s rhetoric and the actions of the Iranian government have been far from friendly toward the United States in recent years. And, as John also points out, Amanpour allows the Iranian to give the impression it’s evil George’s fault:

Amanpour’s breathless report implies that only the belligerence of the President Bush, who unaccountably included Iran in the “Axis of Evil,” frustrates a full alliance between these nations, both of whom, she says, are bitterly opposed to al Qaeda.

Many others, of course, believe that top al Qaeda leaders are now inside Iran. And it is not hard to argue that from 1979 to the present, the foreign power that has most consistently been at war with the U.S. is Iran. Further, what are we to make of the claim that Ayatollah Khamenei considers his country to be a “natural ally” of the U.S.?

We have heard this “natural ally” theme for 25 years from those who wish to engage Iran in dialogue. It is said that the people of Iran have an abiding affection for Americans and wish to re-engage and requite this love affair so that they can benefit from trade and other contacts with the west.

The only problem with pushing this meme is that the Iranian leadership could give a fig what their people think about America and the west. In fact, every move they have made over the last 25 years has been to insulate themselves further from what they see as the degrading, sinful culture and influence that the west has on the third world.

Ahamadinejad is the synthesis of this movement. One need only read his “letter” to President Bush asking him to convert to Islam to realize what this 25 years of insularity has wrought; a leadership so out of touch with the real world that they have no clue how real nations interact with one another. When Ahmadinejad expresses surprise at the fierce opposition to his anti-Semitic rants by western governments, he is genuinely confused that they can’t see the logic and truth of what he is saying. When he suggests that the Jewish state should be lifted from the Middle East and set down someplace in Europe, the Iranian President actually believes that he is doing both Israel and the rest of the world a favor. He is genuinely surprised that people find his proposal monstrously insane.

So the question Amanpour should have asked is why the change of heart? What has happened recently to cause the Iranian government (at least the Khamenei faction) to approach a world-renowned journalist in order to carry a message of peace to President Bush?

I truly believe that the more pragmatic fanatics in the Iranian leadership are frightened of what might transpire in the near term. And it is more than the threatened military action by the United States. Surprisingly, the United Nations sanctions seem to be having a disastrous effect on the Iranian economy, far beyond either their intent or actual impact. Basics like food and fuel have skyrocketed in price in recent months as speculators believe that the current sanctions regime is just the tip of the iceberg. So too, may Khamenei. He is not oblivious to the voices of leaders like Chancellor Merkel of Germany who have made it clear that the west will do almost anything (short of military action one presumes) to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon.

And then there is the apparent stalling of the Iranian uranium enrichment program. After promising that they would have 3,000 centrifuges up and running by the end of February, it appears that the Iranians haven’t even started installing the machines. Given the technological challenges, most experts are not surprised. It may take a year or more for those centrifuges to become operational – and that’s if everything goes fairly well. And then perhaps another year and a half to two years before there is enough Highly Enriched Uranium and a workable bomb design. So, if Ahmadinejad thought that he would have a working nuke by the time the Americans were ready to attack, he’s coming up a little short.

Amanpour tried to draw out the Iranian on what exactly had changed recently to lead the Iranians to extend this olive branch:

When the official waved the column by Friedman in my face at the start of the conversation, his point was this:

That despite disagreement over Iran’s nuclear program, despite accusations that Iran is supporting anti-American killers in Iraq, despite even the 1979 hostage crisis, Iran and America are “natural allies” and the time has come to restore relations.

“We are natural allies. Why?” he said. “Because now the major threat for both Iran and the U.S.A. is al Qaeda…”

I pressed him about Iran’s sudden interest in extending an olive branch. “Why now? What’s motivating you?” I asked.

“Peace for the Iranian people,” he said. “But not only peace, peace with security. Peace based on mutual respect, mutual benefit and mutual security.”

Mindful of the heated rhetoric flying between Tehran and Washington—between both presidents no less—this official said: “If we give the impression that we welcome a battle, this is not because it is our first option. It’s our final option.”

All of this goes unchallenged by Amanpour – at least in the article on CNN’s website. Presumably, more complete answers would be forthcoming if there ever was a low level exchange of views between Americans and Iranians.

And it appears to me that the Iranian is broaching the very thing I wrote about here (and was roundly derided for by many of my friends) regarding a quid pro quo that included a guarantee of sovereignty for the Iranian regime in exchange for “peace with security” – perhaps intrusive and regular inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities?

This would be a non-starter at the present but could signal a real desire (or fear) on the part of the Iranians to talk. This is why I would not dismiss this interview out of hand despite the bias of Amanpour and the recent pronouncements of Khamenei. I respect the view of those who think that talking to Iran is worse than useless, that it would be delusional to believe that any agreement could be reached with the fanatics in Tehran. But does this mean we should close our minds to the possibility that, for the first time perhaps in 25 years, the Iranians have some good reasons to put out feelers to the west?

The so-called overtures made by Iran in 2003 can safely be dismissed for what they represented at the time; an attempt to drive a wedge between the US and our European partners by freezing the EU “Big Three” of Germany, France, and Great Britain out of any bi-lateral talks with the United States and weaken their resolve on the nuclear issue. As our negotiations with North Korea proved, multi-lateral and regional solutions to dealing with rogue states is the way to success – or at least the way to paper over conflict.

But this effort appears to be of an entirely different nature. The Iranians may be asking far more than we would be willing to give up at this point. But given the alternative of bombing and perhaps even military action that would facilitate regime change and the downside that would accrue to American interests in the region as well as our economy and our security, I would hope that the Administration looks upon this unusual demarche seriously and give it careful consideration.

UPDATE

Jules Crittenden doesn’t think much of the offer. This seems to be a pretty universal reaction from my conservative friends putting me once again at odds with the right on Iran. And since the left doesn’t think much of me either, it gets very lonely out on this here limb. I would appreciate it if no one sawed it off.

UPDATE II

Just as I was about to wallow in self-pity and whine about how lonely it is out here, up steps my brave friend Dave Shuler who, while not agreeing with me 100%, at least is a little more flexible than some:

Still, I have no argument with holding talks. I’ve heard Madeleine Albright say that the Iranian regime repeatedly snubbed the advances of the Clinton Administration. I guess that’s ancient history, too.

Talks are good. They don’t necessarily mean that you’re willing to surrender anything nor does it mean that they will be allowed to be used as a stalling tactic.

I might add that I oppose talking simply for the sake of negotiating. There must be an agenda and a framework before we sit down with a regime like the Iranians. Otherwise, Dave’s fears of the Iranians using negotiations as a stalling tactic would almost certainly be realized.

I hear Energizer Corporation is in discussions with Sandy Berger’s attorneys regarding his replacing the bunny as the mascot in its ad campaigns. It makes sense considering that the Sandy Berger Documents Odyssey just keeps going, and going, and going. . .

Today’s drip from the scandal’s faucet comes to us courtesy of the Washington Post and more evidence that the FBI was clueless about the true nature of Berger’s crimes as well as the startling admission by a couple of staff members of the 9/11 Commission that not only weren’t they told of the extent of Berger’s whitewashing expeditions to the National Archives but that they would have been more than eager to ask him under oath exactly what documents he destroyed.

It turns out, that despite what we were told initially about Berger’s crimes not involving the destruction of original, classified documents that in fact, the Archives have no idea how many documents Berger made off with.:

Brachfeld said he was worried that during four visits in 2002 and 2003, Berger had the opportunity to remove more than the five documents he admitted taking. Brachfeld wanted the Justice Department to notify officials of the 9/11 Commission that Berger’s actions—in combination with a bungled Archives response—might have obstructed the commission’s review of Clinton’s terrorism policies.

The Justice Department spurned the advice, and some of Brachfeld’s colleagues at the Archives greeted his warnings with accusations of disloyalty. But more than three years later, as Brachfeld and House lawmakers have pushed new details about Berger’s actions onto the public record—such as Berger’s use of a construction site near the Archives to temporarily hide some of the classified documents—Brachfeld’s contentions have attracted fresh support…

Zelikow (Staff attorney for the 9/11 Commission. ed.) said in an interview last week that “I think all of my colleagues would have wanted to have all the information at the time that we learned from the congressional report, because that would have triggered some additional questions, including questions we could have posed to Berger under oath.”

The commission’s former general counsel, Dan Marcus, now an American University law professor, separately expressed surprise at how little the Justice Department told the commission about Berger and said it was “a little unnerving” to learn from the congressional report exactly what Berger reviewed at the Archives and what he admitted to the FBI —including that he removed and cut up three copies of a classified memo.

“If he took papers out, these were unique records, and highly, highly classified. Had a document not been produced, who would have known?” Brachfeld said in an interview. “I thought [the 9/11 Commission] should know, in current time—in judging Sandy Berger as a witness . . . that there was a risk they did not get the full production of records.”

And to give you an idea of the outright stupidity of the Justice Department in this matter, it appears that rather than, you know, like, investigate Berger’s theft, they relied on what Berger was telling them when they told the Commission that Berger only took 5 documents:

In a letter to House lawmakers last week, Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling did not address the issue of why the department told the commission so little. But Hertling wrote that in numerous interviews, “neither Mr. Berger nor any other witness provided the Department with evidence that Mr. Berger had taken any documents beyond the five.”

Hertling said the department “stands by its investigation” and believes the guilty plea it negotiated with Berger on April 1, 2005, “was the best one possible in light of the available evidence.” He also criticized the Archives staff for failing at the time to confront Berger, search him or contact security officials, saying this failure “had to be weighed against the evidence.”

The “available evidence” was evidently supplied by the perp’s statements about how many documents he stole not on any evidence gleaned from a thorough investigation. But we can’t simply blame the Justice Department in this matter. Clearly, the custodians of our treasured national records must bear a large share of the blame:

In the Hertling letter, the department noted obstacles in its investigation. The FBI was not advised of the case until Oct. 15, 2003, almost two weeks after Smith concluded that Berger had stolen documents. By then, Archives General Counsel Gary Stern had called Berger and former Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey about it and obtained two documents from Berger, who surrendered them at home after first denying they were in his possession.

The letter also said that six months after beginning the probe and well after Berger testified to the commission, “the Department had not yet asked Mr. Berger any questions, as he had not yet agreed to an interview.” Berger’s lawyer, Lanny Breuer, said Berger first spoke to the FBI in March 2005 and was interviewed a second time in July of that year, after his April 1, 2005, guilty plea to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.

Gary Stern, Archives General Counsel, was a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton Administration. In case you might miss the connection, about 70% of the Department of Energy’s budget has to do with the care and feeding of nuclear weapons. I will bet you a dollar to Navy Beans that Berger and Stern were good chums and that Stern wanted to make sure Berger had all his legal ducks in a row before siccing the Feds on him.

Of course, they didn’t talk to Berger for 5 whole months. And when they did, they swallowed his story about not stealing any originals and only taking 5 documents hook, line, and sinker. Not because they’re stupid. But because they didn’t want to know. These kinds of cases are huge embarrassments after all and the less anyone knew about it, the better.

This didn’t sit well with Archives IG Paul Brachfeld who agitated for a deeper investigation as well as informing the 9/11 Commission that Berger should be questioned about what he actually did:

Brachfeld pressed Justice Department officials on six occasions in 2004 to make a fuller statement to the commission about Berger’s actions, to no avail. He also contacted Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, who organized an April 2004 meeting between Brachfeld and Justice officials that convinced him that “these issues had to go before the 9/11 Commission,” according to two people present.

But in a notification to the commission the following month, the department did not mention that Berger had cut up documents, that he reviewed uncatalogued originals or that Brachfeld worried that Berger’s theft was greater.

Incredible.

Even more jaw dropping is that the staff at the Archives is evidently miffed that Brachfeld won’t drop the matter like a good little bureaucrat:

Some of Brachfeld’s colleagues have not been cheered by his new congressional support. An Archives lawyer, who Brachfeld said was one of those involved in the Berger case, this month sent Brachfeld an e-mail accusing him of poor judgment and stating that “I don’t think it comes as a great surprise if I were to venture the opinion that senior management at this agency have serious problems with the manner in which your office conducted itself . . . during the Berger investigation.”

On Friday, Archivist Allen Weinstein assured Brachfeld in writing, however, that this criticism did “not reflect either my views or the views of the overwhelming majority of NARA employees.”

In short, after failing to give adequate security to the documents themselves, violating procedure by allowing Berger to access the documents beyond a secure area, allowing him to take the documents back and forth to the bathroom, not bringing the FBI in on the case immediately, lying to the 9/11 Commission about the extent of Berger’s whitewashing of history, contacting Berger’s lawyer and Berger himself before reporting the incident to authorities, and being unable to say just what documents Berger might have made off with, the lower echelon of employees at the Archives who bear responsibility for all of the above are mad at management because they want to get to the bottom of what happened?

Unbelievable.

This case gets weirder all the time. And you know what? I’ll bet that there wasn’t much in those documents that reflected badly on Clinton at all. But the former President, so obsessed with his place in history and how historians will view his presidency and so vainglorious about his own personal standing, that anything that would reflect badly on his leadership needed to be expunged – especially since historians would be paying close attention to the 9/11 Commission’s final report.

They better find a way to get around double jeopardy as it relates to this crime or what happened at the National Archives when Sandy Berger destroyed a part of American history will never be known.

And in a very large way, that is a much bigger crime than Berger committed by stealing the documents in the first place.

UPDATE

Allah weighs in:

Exit question: What’s the deal? Moran thinks the DOJ is embarrassed by the incident and just wants it to go away, but why? No one would fault them for trusting an ex-cabinet member to behave ethically, even one with the taint of Clinton upon him. I think they’re more worried about sensitive national security information coming to light, either in the form of documents that Berger has or stuff he knows from his time in office. You don’t bring down the hammer on a former NSA, especially one with no compunctions about shenanigans involving state secrets.

Actually, I think they’re embarrassed because they botched the “investigation” from the get go. When two weeks pass between the crime and the reporting of said crime and then months go by before getting the perp to agree to talk, it might be well that no one ask too many questions about what actually transpired. If the IG for the Archives hadn’t been pushing this story over the last few months, we would never have been any the wiser. Those Republican House members who were asking for some explanations were doing so because Brachfeld was frustrated about what he saw as a cop out by Justice in not informing the 9/11 Commission about the extent of Berger’s potential crimes. It was his report that started the House GOP members asking questions back in October (the report was released in December).

Tom Bevan has the jawdropper of the day from Berger’s attorney quoted in the WaPo article:

You have to read all the way to the end of this Washington Post article on the Justice Department’s willful neglect in handling the Sandy Berger case before being confronted with this astonishing quote by Berger’s attorney, Lanny Breuer:

“It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . . . for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake,” Breuer said.
Stealing highly classified documents from the National Archives is “trivial?” You’ve got to be kidding.

Indeed. And more:

Poor Sandy Berger. He had to pay a $50,000 fine and pick up some garbage on the side of the road in Virginia. Meanwhile, Scooter Libby had to face trial and might go to jail for, at worst, telling “a dumb lie” (to use the words of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) about a non-crime.

Just as long as we’ve got our priorities right…