C-SPAN TV 9/11 Comm. on Terrorist Attacks hearing schedule

Everbody better watch, and somebody tape it, so we have the words coming out of their mouths as evidence when they start trying to change it later.

And another thing (long rant starts here):

Boy, the squealing from the Right about Richard Clarke's book is getting downright deafening.

Just wait until they get a blast of his testimony before the 9/11 commission on Wednesday!

The noise is bad enough, but when all those porcine bowels let loose... ugh. We're going to need nose plugs.

I think we can safely ignore the nonsense about Clarke being "out of the loop" (how out of the loop was he sitting in Condi's chair in the White House situation room on the morning of 9/11, Mr. Vice President? More out of it than the guy sitting in the second grade classroom in Florida reading The Pet Goat?) That's not dirt, just tripe. You can tell how weak the White House's defenses are by the degree to which they've already turned Scottie McClellan into a crummy nightclub comedian, sneering out one-liners like:



If that's the best they can do, they should hire Dennis Miller to be the White House flack. But it betrays great weakness -- particularly when the guy they're trying to slime is about to testify for two and a half hours before an increasingly hostile investigating commission.

Here's what, by my tally, the Rove Machine has come up with so far:

1.) Clark has written a book, from which presumably he will make some money. This is, by conservative standards, a no-good dirty rotten trick.

2.) Clarke's book is being published by Simon & Schuster, a publishing company owned by Viacom, which in turn owns CBS, which owns 60 Minutes. And since CBS is not part of the News Corp-Fox-TV Guide-Sky TV-Harper Collins media empire, this is also a no-good rotten dirty trick.

3.) Clarke is publishing his book in an election year. As every Republican knows, holding public officials accountable on a matter of vital public policy in an election year is "politics" -- which is to say dirty pool, unless the vital policy matter is the invasion of Iraq, and the election is the 2002 congressional election, in which case it's just "smart marketing." Ask Andy Card.

4.) Clarke had the audacity to spend eight years working for a legitimately elected Democratic president. And he also has had the temerity to suggest that maybe that president showed somewhat more concern about Osama bin Laden than George W. Bush did up until the moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center. (Well, actually up until about seven minutes after the second plane hit, which is when George W. Bush decided to get up off his ass and find a good hiding place. But who's counting?)

All good conservatives know that God gave government officials feet so they can walk away from government service when a Democrat somehow usurps the presidency, and lips so they can tell spill every secret they know to the Weekly Standard and the National Review. But it most emphatically isn't supposed to work the other way around. God is not that perverse.

5.) Clarke teaches a course at the Kennedy School of Government, where many members of the faculty are card-carrying Democrats. And he teaches this course with a man named Rand Beers, another retired career civil servant who has -- so the conservatives argue -- unfairly exercised his constitutional right to engage in partisan politics by becoming a national security advisor to John Kerry.

Conservatives understand that this too is an abomination, since the natural order of things is for former government officials to join Republican campaigns, take chairs at the American Enterprise Institute, or become national security advisors to Israeli prime ministerial candidates.

But to condemn a man as partisan simply because he teaches a course with a former colleague (and fellow faculty member) who also works for John Kerry -- really, I think even Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn would have insisted on a higher standard of proof than that.

6.) Clarke is alleged to have blocked the "extradition" of Osama bin Laden from Sudan to the United States in 1996. Now this would have been a nice trick, since at the time bin Laden was not wanted on any outstanding U.S. warrants. What the attack dogs really mean is that Clarke allegedly advised Clinton not to accept a deal offered by the Islamic extremists in control of the Sudanese goverment to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to us. (Clinton says he tried to get the Saudis to take -- and no doubt execute -- bin Laden. But they refused.)

The primary source for this allegation is a somewhat ambiguous Washington figure (and Fox News consultant) named Mansoor Ijaz.

Now the Smear Brigade may think such a fellow -- a former big-league Democratic donor and Al Gore schmoozer who now rubs elbows with neocon luminaries and right-wing generals -- makes a more credible source than a Reagan appointee who spent 30 years of his life in public service. I doubt anybody else will.

7.) Clarke was demoted by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks (this is an important point, since Weisser Engel falsely claimed in his interview with Rush Limbaugh that Clarke was demoted before 9/11.) This is held to be automatic proof that the former counterterrorism chief bears some personal animus against the administration -- sufficient to turn a career bureaucrat into the Michael Palin character from A Fish Named Wanda ("Revenge! Revenge!")

And yet, the job Clarke was given -- cyber-defense director -- was something he'd been interested in for a number of years. And he remained at the White House for another year and a half, until the President's decision to invade Iraq finally drove him out in disgust.

Well, OK, if people want to believe points 1-7, there's no law against being gullible. But I think it's a thin list of alleged sins for someone who was in public service for three decades under seven different presidents.