Durant's The Reformation, page 201
Miles Walked: 136.2
Fossilfreak index: +.43
Rosaries: 397
rain
March 25: Up To Our Necks In Alligators

Attention, Palestinian public relations agents: exquisite timing, guys. You get a nice little bump when Sauroman gets converted into a pavement stain, and all the crocodiles who lead the nations of the world get out their pre-moistened towelettes and pretend to squeeze out a few tears. So how do you capitalize on this moment? The �world community� is outraged that Israel smoked a guy who sent men to kill children, so naturally: you send a child to kill men.

Job security for the engineers of Hell. Ordinary Hell isn�t enough for the guys who send out these kids; they�re going to have to open a new wing of Extra Special Ultra Hell, aka Satan's Playroom.---Lileks.

Ha! Lileks saw Yassin = Saruman too.

Donald Sensing mentions an old saying I'd forgotten about, but it's right on the money:

"It's hard to remember that your job is to drain the swamp when you're up to your waist in alligators." The "it was a diversion" side wants to do nothing, really, except kill alligators, as long as they appear. The other side says that killing alligators must be done, but it's urgent to remove the gators' nesting places unless you want to fight alligators down to the fortieth generation.

We're still up to our waists, but used to be up to our necks. Hamas now says they don't want to kill Americans (gee, must be a coincidence, just like Qaddafi and the nukes and the slight warming in Syria... nothing to do with Saddam's capture no, nothing at all.) They have more financial worries than they had when Saddam ruled, too.

One summer day in the late 1990s I had a long talk with an elected official who was a friend and longtime political supporter of President Clinton. I asked him why, if Bill Clinton cared so much about his legacy, he didn't take steps to make America safer from terrorism. Why didn't he make it one of his big issues? We were at lunch in a New York restaurant, and I gestured toward the tables of happy people drinking golden-colored wine in gleaming glasses. They're all going to get sick when we get nuked, I said; they'd honor your guy for having warned and prepared. Yes, the official said, but you have to understand that Clinton is purely a poll driven politician, and if the numbers aren't there he won't move.

Too bad, I thought, because the numbers will someday be there.
...
It was a failure of imagination, a failure to envision that a terrible thing could happen, that a particular terrorist group meant to do what it said it would do. There was a sunny and empty-headed assumption that America would stay lucky; after all, we'd been lucky since terrorists hit the World Trade Center in 1993, and that wasn't so bad--just a handful killed. It was a failure to take our enemies seriously. All of us each day have so much we want to do, but the terrorists each day wanted to do one thing: get America. That was an advantage. There was a pass-the-buck mentality that prevails in government, with everyone quick to go on record warning of a threat and then letting the warning itself act as a replacement for action.

And to make it all worse we had, from 1993 to 2001, an essentially unserious president who had no clue what to do with the power he had accrued, or even the popularity, and who squandered both in a need for personal drama and trauma. He had eight solid years to move, but he did not do the hard things he had to do. He left it for the next guy.
---Peggy Noonan. At the hearings Sandy Berger and others pointed out the 1998 missiles as proof they were serious. Nobody at the hearings called them "Monica missiles," but of course they were.

Michael Young on why Clarke is wrong: "Lest some find this argument�that autocracy breeds terrorism�deceptive, it is worth recalling it was one that America's most vociferous critics floated after Sept. 11. But that was before they realized that such an opinion placed them in the same boat as Bush administration hawks. Once they did, they preferred to backtrack, on the assumption that anti-Americanism is always more rewarding than consistency."

Greg Djerejian:

The bottom line on W. 43rd St. is thus: Clinton took al--Q seriously, Bush didn't. And, frankly, I just can't take that spin seriously.

Daniel Drezner:

it's hard not to believe that Clarke's evaluation of presidential performance is directly correlated with how well those presidents treated Clarke

(both from Glenn, who is all over Clarke.a href = See also this.

Sissy says Clarke has a credibility problem. Polipundit isn't even bothering.

Why the Media isn't reporting this. Jarvis on the "apology."

Zell Miller has formed Democrats for Bush. Comment:

Interesting how this contrasts to today's endorsement of Kerry by Dean.

What a telling difference! Bush is endorsed by a man of Zell's stature and character, while Kerry is endorsed by crazy Dean.

In fact, just by being endorsed by Dean, Kerry is taking another hit.
Another Thought | 03.25.04 - 7:16 am |


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