Slacktivist presents some commentary on an article in the current New Yorker. If you think the war went well there, read it. Actually, read it no matter what you think about the war.

Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite’s column has this to say about the way the Bush Administration has been running things:

One sometimes gets the impression that this administration believes that how it runs the government is its business and no one else’s. It is certainly not the business of Congress. And if it’s not the business of the people’s representatives, it’s certainly no business of yours or mine. But this is a dangerous condition for any representative democracy to find itself in. The tight control of information, as well as the dissemination of misleading information and outright falsehoods, conjures up a disturbing image of a very different kind of society. Democracies are not well-run nor long-preserved with secrecy and lies.

Damned hard to argue with that. Read the whole piece here, or (no doubt) in several other places, as he’s syndicated.

Harold Meyerson’s OpEd (use nogators@nogators.com/nogators to get in) on the deteriorating situation in Iraq from Wednesday’s Post pretty much nails it:

The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone.

Slacktivist has a bit more background on the speech the White House won’t release.

1. Atrios comments on the widening scope of the Plame inquiry; others suggest Rove may well be in legal jeopardy on this.
2. Author Bruce Sterling reproduces comments by Tom Dachle concerning the administration’s abuse of power.
3. Sidney Blumenthal echoes Daschle’s concerns in this Guardian editorial.

Oh, and the White House is also blocking the release of Clinton-era papers requested by the 9/11 commission. Er, why might that be?

A mysterious and shadowy mailing list post sent us off to this blog, which reproduces a bit of the transcript from Clarke’s appearance on NPR‘s Fresh Air. A bit, just to tease:

GROSS: You say in your book that you think invading Iraq actually increased the problem of terrorism. CLARKE: Well, in three ways. First of all, it’s costing us $180 billion in the first two years, and may be even more than that. That money could have been used to reduce our vulnerabilities here at home. […] Well, many things in the United States are not protected. There’s a long list of vulnerabilities which we could reduce. […] But we didn’t do that. And in large part we didn’t do that because the money that would have been necessary is being spent on Iraq. So that’s the first thing: It’s costing us the alternative of reducing our vulnerabilities. Second, actual military and intelligence assets that were in Afghanistan — looking for al Qaeda, looking for bin Laden — were removed and sent to Iraq. Now, in the last few weeks, they’ve been returned. But that’s two years too late. Two years during which al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization with independent organizations and independent cells, and likely the group in Madrid. So we didn’t go after al Qaeda the way that we should have. And we didn’t secure Afghanistan. There are more police in Manhattan — not the city of New York, but just Manhattan — there are more police in Manhattan than the United States put troops into Afghanistan. And yet we were supposed to secure and stabilize the country so that never again would it be a base for terrorism. We were supposed to be draining the swamp. Well, we haven’t. And one of the reasons we haven’t is that we withheld forces that should have been going into Afghanistan. We withheld them for the war in Iraq. […] The third way is that, al Qaeda had been saying, bin Laden had been saying, that the United States is the “new crusader,” the new westerner come to occupy an Arab country, an oil-rich Arab country. And we did exactly that. We did exactly what bin Laden said we would do: We invaded and occupied an oil-rich Arab country that had not been threatening us. And the sights on Arab television of American troops fighting in Iraq, and now occupying Iraq, have infuriated Arab opinion. […] We can’t just arrest and kill terrorists. Even Donald Rumsfeld figured that out. In his internal memo in the Pentagon, which leaked, he said it may be the case that we’re turning out new terrorists faster than we’re killing and arresting them. He’s right; we are. And we have to win the war for ideas. And we can’t do that so long as we are reviled by occupying a country like Iraq.