A stopped clock is right twice a day
FRANK RICH: Don’t Laugh at Michael Chertoff
MICHAEL CHERTOFF, President Bush's fallback choice for secretary of Homeland Security after Bernard Kerik, is best remembered for his tragicomic performance during Hurricane Katrina. He gave his underling, the woeful Brownie, a run for the gold.
It was Mr. Chertoff who announced that the Superdome in New Orleans was "secure" even as the other half of the split screen offered graphic evidence otherwise. It was Mr. Chertoff who told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who do not have food and water," even after his fellow citizens had been inundated with such reports all day long.
With Brownie as the designated fall guy, Mr. Chertoff kept his job. Since then he has attracted notice only when lavishing pork on terrorist targets like an Alabama petting zoo while reducing grants to New York City. Though Mr. Chertoff may be the man standing between us and Armageddon, he is seen as a leader of stature only when standing next to his cabinet mate Gonzo.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Last week, as the Bush administration frantically tried to counter Republican defections from the war in Iraq, Mr. Chertoff alone departed from the administration's script to talk about the enemy that actually did attack America on 9/11, Al Qaeda, rather than Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the jihad-come-lately gang Mr. Bush is fond of talking about instead. In this White House, the occasional official who strays off script is in all likelihood inadvertently coughing up the truth.
(Continued here.)
MICHAEL CHERTOFF, President Bush's fallback choice for secretary of Homeland Security after Bernard Kerik, is best remembered for his tragicomic performance during Hurricane Katrina. He gave his underling, the woeful Brownie, a run for the gold.
It was Mr. Chertoff who announced that the Superdome in New Orleans was "secure" even as the other half of the split screen offered graphic evidence otherwise. It was Mr. Chertoff who told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who do not have food and water," even after his fellow citizens had been inundated with such reports all day long.
With Brownie as the designated fall guy, Mr. Chertoff kept his job. Since then he has attracted notice only when lavishing pork on terrorist targets like an Alabama petting zoo while reducing grants to New York City. Though Mr. Chertoff may be the man standing between us and Armageddon, he is seen as a leader of stature only when standing next to his cabinet mate Gonzo.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Last week, as the Bush administration frantically tried to counter Republican defections from the war in Iraq, Mr. Chertoff alone departed from the administration's script to talk about the enemy that actually did attack America on 9/11, Al Qaeda, rather than Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the jihad-come-lately gang Mr. Bush is fond of talking about instead. In this White House, the occasional official who strays off script is in all likelihood inadvertently coughing up the truth.
(Continued here.)
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Why is it that so few recognize the Media's failure?
Michael Moore on the July 12th edition of Countdown with Keith Olbermann :
Here we are in the fifth year of this thing and I‘ve seen very few media outlets issue an apology for not doing the job they should have done, because in some ways I feel the media is more responsible for this war than Mr. Bush.
I mean, on some level you can say, you know, Bush doesn‘t know any better. But the media does. And if the media had done its job and really demanded the answers from these people, the public might not have gotten so behind it and we could have prevented it. So there‘s a complicity involved here with our media and I‘m still, after all these years with the war still going on, still very upset about the fact we‘ve lost so many lives. And people simply won‘t take responsibility for their actions.
Except for the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage for his work on President Bush use of "signing statements" and his exposure of 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's lowly rated Regent University in the Bush Administration; and Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo on Duke Cunningham and the fired Federal Prosecuters, very few in the Media can count on more than one good story.
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