I really wasn't going to syndicate this report by the Washington Monthly, because it's stomach-turning. Bless you, Gert Clark. I hope you and Alma Powell can find time to catch up. When you get to the part about how all this came about, remember that what your tax dollars don't buy with the Patriot Act, George Bush will buy with his campaign chest. Could the candidate of "honesty and integrity" actually be funding a "Committee to Re-Elect the President" (CREEP) this early in the campaign? Or has it always existed? That said, this allegation needs more meticulous sourcing.
Thanks to Jillian Johnson for bringing it to my attention.
The outing by senior administration officials of Valerie Plame, an undercover C.I.A. counter-terrorism expert and wife of Bush critic and former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is undoubtedly the signature example of contemporary GOP vindictiveness.But there are others. For instance, there is Eric Massa, until recently on the majority staff of the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). Massa was a lifelong Republican whose first taste of politics was serving as a page to candidate Ronald Reagan during the 1976 presidential race. But before joining the committee staff, Massa had served in the armed forces, where, among other things, he was a top aide to Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.) during Clark's tenure as NATO supreme commander.
The two were close, so when Clark came to Washington in early October to meet with Democratic congressional ! leaders at a private residence a few blocks from the Capitol, Massa walked over to say hello. But as the former comrades-in-arms greeted each other warmly on the street just outside the event--Massa never went inside, say other attendees--Republican operatives stationed nearby noticed his presence, and reported back to his staff director, Robert Rangel.
Soon after, sources tell "Who's Who," Hunter and Rangel repeatedly told Massa that, given his friendship with Clark, he could no longer work at the committee, but when reporters from a few big-name newspapers heard the story and began calling around, Hunter claimed that Massa had never actually been fired. Fed-up, Massa resigned. No one from Hunter's office was available for comment.
Contacted by WW, Massa commented, "I don't hold ill will for anybody. This is about issues, and Clark the man, and I'm going to do everything I can to get him elected."
Two new streaming videos in multi-bandwidth RealVideo format. First Lou Dobbs speaks with Gen. Clark on Iraq, his proposal to roll back tax cuts for the highest earners, and most interestingly, citizenship for illegal immigrants, a subject which Dobbs rightly points out "has garnered extraordinarily little attention on the part of any candidate, Democratic candidate, running for president, and certainly it has not garnered the impression or the attention of this administration." (The issue was raised at the Arizona debate on October 9, though Woodruff and Crowley of CNN were too busy piling on Clark for his stand on the Iraq resolution to get his views on very much else.)
DOBBS: . . . Ten million illegal aliens in this country. We have a border that, despite all the concerns about national security, homeland security, that is absolutely porous. What would you do about a national immigration policy? What would you do about the 10 million illegal aliens now in this country?Entire transcript from "Lou Dobbs Tonight," broadcast on CNN 10/27/03 is here.CLARK: Well, first of all, I think we need to really put leadership into homeland security. We're just now getting started on homeland security. It's been over two years. Jim Moore (ph), I think, has done a great job of working airline security. But we've got a long way to go on the borders. And there's no excuse that we're seeing dozens of Mexicans and Hispanics dying in the Arizona desert each summer.
I think we need to set up a system for guest workers in this country. I think we need to encourage legal immigration. I think we need to discourage illegal immigration. For those undocumented aliens that are here, for those that have been good citizens that hold responsible jobs, I think we ought to have a procedure where they can work their way into citizenship.
DOBBS: And those illegal aliens that are in this country, those 10 million, you're basically saying amnesty?
CLARK: Well, I'm saying that you need a program where people who are here and lack the documentation can one way or another work their way into citizenship. It's not a general amnesty. It's dependent on their performance and what kind of citizens they'll be.
DOBBS: You use the word "undocumented" and "those who don't have papers." The immigration service itself uses the expression "illegal alien." Is there some reason that you would not use that expression?
CLARK: Well, I think it is a question of whether you're talking about the act of crossing the border or people inside the country. There's a wide variety of offenses against the immigration laws. And what I'm interested in are the people.
Next, Elizabeth Drew, author of a new piece in the New York Review of Books investigating the controversy surrounding WKC's military career, tells Judy Woodruff on CNN's Inside Politics 10/31/03 that "an awful lot of the media were passing on these, if I may say so, smears, rumors, without looking into what's going on here."
". . . Various reporters have gone to [former head of the Joint Chiefs] Shelton and said, What do you mean? And he won't respond. That is a smear. And John McCain said to me, If he is going to say that, he should say what he means."
More on the New York Review of Books article in a separate post. Find a transcript of Ms. Drew's conversation with Judy Woodruff here.
Bonus multimedia! Hear Clark fans and foes from his years in the military debate his record and character on NPR's "All Things Considered" from 10/16/03 (streaming RealAudio).
Permanent links to all of the above streams can be found in the Links section to the right under "Multimedia," sorted in descending order of date.