Profiles in Chutzpah
Add Zbigniew Brzezinski to the list of politically prominent people who’ve lately succumbed to algoreitis simplex, the mysterious brain infection so named for its most obvious manifestation: the eagerness of its victims to indulge in ludicrously exaggerated condemnations of George W. Bush’s war on terrorism. Brzezinski, poor thing, has become symptomatic in the pages of the current New Republic, where our patient presents as a former Carter administration national security adviser who is nevertheless unembarrassed to cite a later administration for unprecedented foreign policy failure.
Under Bush, Brzezinski writes, “America’s credibility has been tarnished among its traditional friends, its prestige has plummeted worldwide, and global hostility to the United States has reached a historical high.” So far as Dr. SCRAPBOOK is concerned, that one sentence alone ought to seal the diagnosis: The man is demented; he can’t remember his own career.
Preliminary investigation suggests that Brzezinski himself has experienced a previous, significant episode of cataclysmic foreign policy incompetence involving: (1) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; (2) Jimmy Carter’s subsequent admission that he’d been surprised by how mean Russian communism turned out to be; (3) the fall of the shah and the Iranian hostage crisis; (4) a humiliating botched effort to rescue those hostages; (5) the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua; (6) the Sandinista regime’s aggressive attempt to export communism elsewhere throughout Latin America, unchecked by the United States; and (7) a great many additional, similar, and infamous fiascos we don’t have room to list.
Our prescription: As a necessary exercise in humility, Brzezinski should have another look at one of those “Weekly Reports” he used to send over to President Carter from the NSC–specifically, Weekly Report #87, on “Islamic Fundamentalism,” from February 2, 1979. That’s the one where Brzezinski advised the president that “Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future.” Oops. Brzezinski also might want to have a look at the note Carter scrawled for him in the margin of Weekly Report #84, on “Iran–The Conventional Wisdom,” from January 12, 1979. “Zbig,” Carter scribbled: “After we make joint decisions, deploring them for the record doesn’t help me.”
Patient’s tendency to extreme and hypocritical self-aggrandizement appears to be chronic.
Post‘s Milbank Shows Unprecedented Bias, Scholars Say
Remember that story Washington Post White House correspondent Dana Milbank wrote (with colleague Mike Allen) about how President Bush took a vacation during the month immediately preceding 9/11? Bush had already been given that now-famous memo elucidating an indeterminate al Qaeda threat, see, but still he went golfing! Overreaching on this pseudo-ironic juxtaposition, Milbank also overreached on the facts of the memo in another article (written with Walter Pincus) in the same edition. And the Post was then forced to run a 900-word ombudsman report addressing readers’ complaints about errors and “political spin” in Milbank’s articles.
Will they now run another correction after last week’s similarly egregious overreach? Probably not, so here’s ours.
At issue is Milbank’s latest piece of attitude-heavy anti-Bush analysis, the mood of which is instantly detectable from the headline: “From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity; Scholars Say Campaign is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks.” And what are those misleading attacks, exactly? In the body of the article Milbank (this time sharing a byline with Jim VandeHei) purports to identify four such Bush campaign claims: (1) that Kerry has, in Dick Cheney’s words, “questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all”; (2) that Kerry would “repeal most of the Bush tax cuts”; (3) that Kerry would scrap anti-terrorist wiretaps authorized by the USA Patriot Act; and (4) that “Kerry wants to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents.” All of these claims, Milbank and VandeHei report, are false.
No they aren’t. (1) On more than one occasion, Kerry has described the war on terror as “fundamentally an intelligence operation and law enforcement operation and a diplomatic operation.” (2) Kerry insists he intends to repeal only those Bush tax cuts that benefit people with annual incomes over $200,000, but Milbank himself has commented on how the rich “heavily” benefit from Bush’s tax cuts. (3) Kerry recently told supporters in Rhode Island that “there are several provisions in the Patriot Act–the sneak-and-peek searches, the roving wiretap, the library pieces, a couple of those–that ought to be changed,” and “if I’m president, I will not allow [the Patriot Act] to go through with those provisions.” (4) Milbank and VandeHei say Bush is claiming that “Kerry wants to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents.” But the relevant Bush ad says merely that Kerry once supported a 50-cent tax on gasoline, a vote Kerry has publicly acknowledged. Milbank and VandeHei report that the ad “implies that the proposal is current,” but they’re wrong; the ad “implies” nothing at all. According to its script, Kerry “supported a 50-cent increase in gas prices,” period. Note the past tense.
Note, too, how feebly the Milbank-VandeHei report manages to support the promise of its headline. Do “scholars say,” in fact, that George W. Bush is running a reelection campaign of “unprecedented negativity” and “misleading attacks”? Maybe, but Milbank and VandeHei haven’t found them. One political scientist they interview says he “anticipates” that “it’s going to be the most negative campaign ever.” Note the future tense. Another political scientist, however, says that Bush’s “distortions” are no worse than those presidential candidates have been making since “the beginning of time.”
Air America Weekly Wrap-Up
On June 3, the Sacramento Bee reported on Al Franken’s public flirtation with a 2008 U.S. Senate run in Minnesota, where he was born and raised–but where he has not lived for decades. Franken admitted that he can name only one member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation. Franken further revealed, apparently without realizing it, that the national Democratic party may not be too keen on this Franken-for-Senate business. “I just talked to Hillary Clinton,” the Bee quoted Franken gushing, “and she said, ‘You know, if this radio show takes off, you could do more good doing the radio show than being a senator.'” Amen to that.
Meanwhile, Billy Kimball, executive producer of Air America’s The O’Franken Factor, has called THE SCRAPBOOK’s voicemail to goodnaturedly complain about a factual detail in our item last week on his recent nuptials. It’s his wife’s father who’s a New Yorker cartoonist, not his own, as we mistakenly wrote. Then, too, Mr. Kimball questions why THE SCRAPBOOK originally extended him its “mostly sincere” wedding congratulations–rather than entirely sincere ones, as is the usual custom. We therefore offer him our mostly sincere apologies for both errors.
Jayson Blair, Explained
Howell Raines, guest columnizing in London’s Guardian, June 2: “As America’s first war-hero candidate since John F. Kennedy, [Kerry] ought to be leading the national discussion on what went wrong in Iraq.”
And as a man who pretends to some sophistication about his nation’s politics, Howell Raines ought to be aware that George McGovern flew daylight bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, that the first President Bush was shot down over the Pacific by the Japanese, and that John McCain spent several noteworthy years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
