Robert Novak died today at age 78 after losing a battle with Brain Cancer. It is not known how long he suffered from brain cancer, but I would speculate that this was a long term condition that was undiagnosed until last year when his diagnosis became public.
May he RIP…
The Washington Post reports:
Four months after he was sworn in, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta learned of an intelligence program that had been hidden from Congress since 2001, a revelation that prompted him to immediately cancel the initiative and schedule a pair of closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill.
The next day, June 24, Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees of the program and the action he had taken, according to Democratic and Republican members of the panels.
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“Instructions were given not to brief Congress,” Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in an interview.
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CIA officials brought the program to Panetta’s attention, and when he realized it potentially conflicted with what the committees had been told, he immediately went to Capitol Hill, according to officials who discussed classified material on the condition of anonymity.
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Reactions to the Panetta briefing split along partisan lines.
Wow… split along party lines. Shocking…
Read all about it here.
And for some excellent commentary on this story, read John Nichols’ article in The Nation. Excerpt:
Pelosi said the Central Intelligence Agency had failed to inform her about the character and extent of the harsh interrogations.
Pelosi accused the CIA of “misleading the Congress of the United States.”
Republican senators screamed.
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No matter what anyone thinks of Pelosi or waterboarding, there is a clear case for dramatically expanding congressional oversight of the CIA. Of course, more House and Senate members should have access to briefings — and should have the authority to hold CIA officials (and their White House overseers) to account for deliberate deceptions. But that ought not be the first response to the latest news.
Step one must be to get to the bottom of exactly what the CIA was lying about.
That would be nice, but I think it’s going to be a while before we uncover all the misdeeds of Bush’s only successful endeavor: Mendacity, Inc.
Paul Krugman’s column “Blizzard of Lies“ focuses on what I’ve ranted about over the last few days and, more importantly, why it matters:
…how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
Read it all here.
More evidence that that McCain’s campaign machine is run by mean, nasty, dishonest brutes who are utterly devoid of consciences.
From yesterday’s AP wire:
John McCain’s presidential campaign released a new television ad Tuesday that says Barack Obama is bad for families because he supports sex education for kindergartners. Obama’s campaign called the ad a “shameful” distortion.
The ad says Obama has a weak record on education and that his only accomplishment was legislation to teach sex education to kindergartners.
“Learning about sex before learning to read?” the ad says. “Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.”
But the legislation was not Obama’s, it never became law and it would have required age-appropriate information in schools. Obama has said that means warning young children about sexual predators and explaining concepts like “good touch and bad touch.”
“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.
If you want to watch this bullshit ad, go here.
And yes, at the end of the ad John McCain approves of the message.
Burton noted that in a recent interview with Time magazine, McCain refused to define ‘honor.’ “Now we know why,” Burton said.
UPDATE: Even Bill O’Reilly has called a foul on the McCain campaign. He says: “But the Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mongers. Don’t they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness?”
And James Carville gives McCain the benefit of the doubt?
Here we go down the rabbit hole…