I guess we should be glad that Richard Clarke’s wife is not an undercover CIA agent. The smear machine is in full gear and there’s no telling what Bush’s lackeys might do next.
The fact that the White House has to defend itself from criticism from former aides is not unpredecented, but the reaction this time is certainly more dramatic. The White House has been forced, for example, to deal with a handful of former officials leaving the administration and criticizing their former colleagues — John DiIulio, Paul O’Neill, Rand Beers, etc. — but the reaction has never been so intense.
Clarke has hit the Bush team where it hurts at the worst possible time. If the campaign ads are any indication, Bush will more or less ignore domestic accomplishments (presumably, they’re having trouble finding any to talk about) and focus exclusively on Bush’s strength as a “leader” against terrorism. Clarke’s experiences and first-hand knowledge not only undermine Bush’s claims, they expose the president as a fraud.
I think Kevin Drum’s observation about the White House in “panic mode” is spot on.
There’s no telling if Richard Clarke’s charges will end up making much difference in the long run, but the White House is sure acting like they have the potential to do some serious damage.
The White House runs the risk of, if you’ll pardon the expression, protesting too much. They’re acting like Clarke’s charges are incredibly damaging, reminding everyone that they are. Pretty soon, their viciousness suffers under the pressure of diminishing returns.
In fact, over the last 24 hours or so, Cheney, McClellan, Rice, and others have been spinning so furiously against Clarke, they can’t even keep their stories straight. On the one hand, Clarke is to blame for 9/11 because he was in charge of counterterrorism; on the other, Clarke was out of the loop so he wasn’t in a position of knowing how great the White House was responding to the terrorist threat. On the one hand, Clarke didn’t speak out while serving as Bush’s counterterrorism czar; on the other, Clarke spoke out so much he became something of a crank who was widely ignored. None of this is coherent, better yet persuasive.
The indispensable Center for American Progress prepared an incredibly helpful “claim vs. fact” sheet comparing White House attacks on Clarke against reality. I’d run the whole thing here, but it’s a little long. Go read it anyway.
One more thing. I know others have addressed this at other blogs, but the one White House claim that jumps out as truly insane was the notion that Clarke was “out of the loop.” Dick Cheney was parroting this nonsense with Rush Limbaugh yesterday.
Limbaugh: All right, let’s get straight to what the news is all about now, before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?
Cheney: Well, I wasn’t directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cyber security side of things, that is he was given a new assignment at some point here. I don’t recall the exact time frame.
Limbaugh: Cyber security, meaning Internet security?
Cheney: Yes, worried about attacks on the computer systems and the sophisticated information technology systems we have these days that an adversary would use or try to the system against us.
Limbaugh: Well, now that explains a lot, that answer right there explains — (Laughter.)
Cheney: Well, he wasn’t — he wasn’t in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff.
This is so stupid and breathtakingly dishonest, it’s hard to know where to start.
Cheney said Clarke was “moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cyber security side of things.” What he doesn’t mention is that this occurred after 9/11. When the terrorists struck, Clarke was still the principal advisor to the president on counterterrorism, and had been urging the White House for months to take his concerns more seriously. They chose not to.
Which bring us to the entire notion of Clarke being “out of the loop” and thus uninformed. This is sheer lunacy. As the White House’s top official on counterterrorism, Clarke was the loop.
In fact, Cheney doesn’t seem to appreciate just how damaging his own words are to the Bush administration. The White House clearly hasn’t thought this line of attack through. As Moe Blues noted:
It’s amazing that Cheney does not seem to realize what he is actually saying: That the Bush administration’s top expert on terrorism was not consulted about their counter-terrorism efforts. This presents several unpalatable choices:
1. Cheney is lying for political gain. If the public picks up on this, the backlash could be out of all proportion to the damage Cheney is trying to control.
2. The administration deliberately ignored its in-house expert, with September 11 being the result. This eliminates one more scapegoat, since the White House cannot simultaneously blame Clarke for failing to stop 9/11 while claiming he was “out of the loop” on counter-terrorism.
3. Assuming Cheney speaks the truth, it actually bolsters Clarke’s claim to Cassandra-hood. Cut out of the loop, his warnings went nowhere and were ignored. That, too, is pretty damning of the administration.
No wonder the White House is panicking.