The acknowledgment came after the State Department had earlier insisted nominee John Bolton's "answer was truthful" when he said he had not been questioned or provided information to jury or government investigations in the past five years.

"When Mr. Bolton completed his form during the Senate confirmation process he did not recall being interviewed by the State Department inspector general. Therefore his form as submitted was inaccurate in this regard and he will correct the form," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Lordy, people in Washington sure do have awful memories, don't they? Must be somethin' in the water. Or else they all live in Bizarro Faux Nooz World, in which everything is just the opposite of what it is here.

It does make one wonder why the White House is so determined to send a loser like Bolton to the UN. According to the Knight Ridder report, Bush mouthpieces Norm Coleman and Condi Rice insist that upcoming UN conferences make it imperative that the U.S. have their "permanent" ambassador in place. But if appointed, Bolton wouldn't be "permanent," but "interim," and could serve only until January 2007 when a new Congress is sworn in. Plus, Bolton would arrive at the UN as damaged goods.

"I think we're dealing with trouble having a recess-appointment U.N. ambassador," said Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff under President Clinton, who made more than 56 recess appointments during his two terms. "To have someone who doesn't even enjoy the confidence of the U.S. Senate is not going to instill confidence or lend credibility."

[Sen. Trent] Lott said Bolton would be "weakened and temporary."

"He could serve what, 17 months, unless he was subsequently confirmed, which I don't see any chance of," Lott said.

Plus, if we find out this fall that Bolton really was a player in the Rove-Plame leaks, it would set the White House up for even greater embarrassment.

Surely Bush could find a less odious toadie than Bolton that the Senate would confirm quickly. Perhaps (dare I say it?) they might find someone who would be, unlike Bolton, competent at something. But this is the Bush White House we're talking about, so that's unlikely.

So what's the deal? Trent Lott says of Bush appointing Bolton,

"I suspect he will, but I do think it's a little bit of a thumbing of the nose at the Senate, which will cause you more problems down the road," Lott said. "We are a co-equal branch; he doesn't get to make his choices in a vacuum."

Little Georgie is trying to get back at the Senate for rejecting his nominee? George seems pissed off about a lot of things these days, doesn't he? And a Bolton recess appointment would mightily please the extremist Right base.

 

Plus, there may be all sorts of reasons the Bushies want a capo at the UN--someone loyal and already committed to other Bush family, um, business.

 

[UPDATE: The Paul Hackett campaign still needs donations! And the word is that we've got a shot at winning! Let's do it! DONATE NOW!] 

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American vets from Iraq war not qualified to serve in public office, GOP US House candidate says in Ohio
by John in DC - 7/28/2005 06:10:00 PM

This is bad, seriously. Paul Hackett is running as the first Iraq war vet to run for Congress, and now his GOP opponent, Jean Schmidt, just said that being an American vet from the Iraq war is the wrong kind of experience for a member of Congress. I kid you not.

The Swift Boaters started it last year with Kerry, and Bush did the same thing to McCain in 2000. Slur a guy because he's a vet. And now we have a GOP candidate for Congress saying that service in the Iraq war apparently disqualifies you for being a member of Congress.

Any US service members watching? This is what I'm talking about. You think the Republicans are automatically your friends? Ask yourself why the only ones upset about all of you guys getting killed, maimed, sent to war based on a lie, not being given any plan to win the war, not even being given body armor three years after hostilities commenced - why the only people upset about all of that are Democrats? Then listen to this woman.

Any questions?

Today, the farm girl from a traditional German Catholic family who was told early on women could only go so far could very soon become the first woman to represent southern Ohio in Congress.

"In our very German family, boys were held in higher esteem,'' said the 53-year-old Republican candidate for the 2nd Congressional District seat. "I never really understood it, but that's the way it was.''

She was the daughter of Gus Hoffman, a man born in poverty who worked his way to success in business and to almost legendary status as the owner of a car racing team that ruled the region's sprint car circuit for decades and ran in the ultimate race, the Indianapolis 500.

Gus and Jeanette Hoffman, both of whom are deceased, raised four children on the family's Miami Township farm in Clermont County - two sons, Jean and her twin sister Jennifer, all of whom still live within a mile of one another.

Never before has a president suddenly discarded his self-proclaimed "mission." But after declaring himself the commander in chief in the "global war on terror," President Bush has tossed the catchphrase aside in an elusive search for a new one. The "global war on terror" was his slogan to link the war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq, the battle supposedly being one and the same. The quest for a new slogan is more than a public relations gesture. It reflects not only the failure but also the vacuum of his strategy.

Since Bush's speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., on June 28, for which the White House asked for and received national television coverage, and in which Bush reaffirmed "fighting the global war on terrorism," mentioned "terror" or "terrorism" 23 more times, and compared this "global war on terrorism" with the Civil War and World War II, his administration has simply dropped the words that more than any others Bush has identified as the reason for his presidency.

Throughout July, administration officials have substituted new words for the old. Instead of trumpeting the "global war on terrorism," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have sounded the call to "a global struggle against violent extremism." Medals have been awarded to brave U.S. soldiers stamped "Global War on Terror." Will new medals now be minted?

Myers' change in language involves considerable historical and policy revisionism. He had gone along with Rumsfeld in policies opposed by senior military figures such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly derided by then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz for worrying about invading Iraq with a light force. But now Myers presents himself as a secret dissident. In a speech before the National Press Club on Monday, he claimed he "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution."

Mr. Bush, speaking to a crowd of about 15,000 in this heavily Democratic northeast corner of Pennsylvania, aggressively painted Mr. Kerry as unable to take the actions necessary to protect Americans from another catastrophic terrorist attack.

    "His top foreign policy adviser has questioned whether it's even a war at all, saying that's just a metaphor, like the war on poverty," Mr. Bush said. "I've got news: Anyone who thinks we are fighting a metaphor does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to win the war and keep America secure."

It has not just dawned on the Bush national security apparatus that a "war on terror" described a never-ending battle against a tactic. Dropping the signature phrase of the Bush presidency is part of an effort to cobble together some sort of expedient political solution that will allow U.S. troops to be drawn down before disaster strikes the Republicans in the midterm elections of 2006. "Shock and awe" has been replaced by stunned and confused. By stuffing the old slogan down the memory hole, the Bush administration has withdrawn credibility from its neoconservative policy. Unfortunately, ideology has consequences.

The new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has arrived on the bloody scene to warn of impending civil war. But U.S. intelligence does not have an accurate sense of either the number of insurgents or their composition. "That would not be a worthwhile metric," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said recently. Thus Rumsfeld's assistant secretary for public affairs acknowledges that he doesn't know precisely who the enemy is.

I take it this is because they have finally realized that if they are fighting a war on terror, the enemy is four guys in a gymn in Leeds. It isn't going to take very long for people to realize that a) you don't actually need to pay the Pentagon $400 billion a year if that is the problem and b) whoever is in charge of such a war isn't actually doing a very good job at stopping the bombs from going off.

The undermining of democracy by sacrificing credibility to justify endless war was early described by the historian Thucydides in his "History of the Peloponnesian War": "The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man."

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The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.

...Mr. Pincus has not identified his source to the public. But a review of Mr. Pincus's own accounts and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed.

Mr. Pincus's most recent account, in the current issue of Nieman Reports, a journal of the Nieman Foundation, makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him, something that people close to both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.

(Nieman Reports doesn't seem to be available online in html format, but you can download PDFs of issues to read. Be my guest.)

I was glad to read Mr. Jehl's article, because I've been worried that I'm becoming obsessive-compulsive about combing through news stories looking for any new hints about what Patrick Fitzgerald might be investigating. But now New York Times reporters are doing this, too.

And may I say that, if Mr. Jehl jazzed up his rhetoric a bit and tossed in some WTF?s and LOLs, he might have a future in blogging.

Then Mr. Jehl discusses his imprisoned colleague, Judy Miller:

Ms. Miller never wrote a story about the matter. She has refused to testify in response to a court order directing her to testify in response to a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald seeking her testimony about a conversation with a specified government official between June 6, 2003, and June 13, 2003.

During that period, Ms. Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.

In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of the newspaper, declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson.

The Times stonewalls its own reporter. Weird.

Mark Kleiman points to more weirdness:  "Second-weirdest item in the story: Pincus, who has testified to the grand jury about his conversation, after his source had testified about it, still refuses to make public the name of the source."

I'm starting to wonder what I will do with myself when all the names are named. Maybe there will be a new Deep Throat; someone central to the story whose identity can be speculated about for years to come. One can hope.

More Traitorgate: Kevin Drum writes, 

Arianna Huffington says that hallway gossip at the New York Times places Judith Miller at the center of Plamegate. Her story: after Joe Wilson's op-ed appeared on July 6, Miller went ballistic, checked out Wilson with her CIA contacts, found out about his wife, and then passed along the information to Scooter Libby in the White House.

Hmm. Is Miller, as Avedon speculates, pleading the First because she doesn't want to plead the Fifth?

And in the How Pathetic Can They Get? department, Natasha at Pacific Views (via Daou Report) writes,

Man, they got nothing. Fox News is having to resort to looking at at Valerie Plame's 2004 political contrib