THIS is the interview the Bushes claim show Richard Clarke is a liar?!

The Bush administration is in a real panic over former counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke's revelation of how clueless they have been in dealing with terrorism. As part of their flailing, desperate attempts to smear and discredit him, they gave permission to Fox News and other media outlets to disclose Clarke as the 'anonymous administration official' who gave a background briefing in 2002.

They claim that in that interview, Clarke praised the Bush administrations anti-terror policies.

Well, I've read the transcript of that backgrounder, and I certainly wouldn't call it a ringing defense, even though at the time he was still working for Bush and dutifully trying to put the best face on things. As you read it, you can sense his struggling, complete with umms and uhhhs, to make it sound like the Bushies were actually doing something.

Helpful hint to the Bush crowd: you may hope people will see Clarke's words back in 2002 as praise, but in truth, any intelligent person can see that they are in fact damning with faint praise.

Of course, the most laughable part of the Bush smear campaign is still their decision to send Vice Presdient Cheney to sit in on Rush Limbaugh's show to badmouth Clarke. (Read that transcript HERE) Rush Limbaugh? Sheesh! What next? Condi Rice appearing on The Simpsons?

A Little Too Truthful

The Philadelphia Inquirer last Thursday started out an article about the continuing attacks in Iraq with a sentence that perhaps conveyed a bit more truth than intended:

"As military analysts see it, yesterday's car bombing of a downtown Baghdad hotel is the latest in a surge of attacks on "soft targets" - poorly protected civilians - in the shadowy war to disrupt Iraq's march toward pro-U.S. democracy."

Oops. Usually we're told that we're fighting for just plain old democracy in Iraq, but here someone forgot to delete the modifier 'pro-U.S.' It seems that some democracies are more equal that others. Should Iraq dare to ever democratically elect an Islamist government that isn't sufficiently "pro-U.S.," I guess it will be regime change time all over again.

In the meantime, we've probably got a division of troops readying an invasion of Spain now that their voters have democratically turned out their pro-U.S. prime minister.

Let's make this clear to the world: democracy doesn't mean you get to vote for what YOU want; it means you get to vote in favor of what the United States says you can have.