Monthly Archives: March 2004

I am told that the Mirage Hotel in Vegas just took down the huge Siegfried and Roy illuminated sign out front. On the other hand, I'm also told that Roy's condition is improving at a more rapid clip than expected, and that a huge "welcome back" TV special will be scheduled soon.

Frank Rich on how today's supposed journalists aren't all that different from the ones who are inarguable frauds.

Sometimes called "the perfect musical," My Fair Lady was staged on Broadway with a cast of thirty. If you pick up any book on staging regional productions, you will usually see the advice that the Lerner-and-Loewe classic is not something that can be mounted on a shoestring; that if you don't have the budget to afford all those actors and sets and costumes and especially a full orchestra, you shouldn't mess with My Fair Lady. And that always sounded like good advice to me.

But now I'm reading good reviews (like this one or this one) of a production in Florida that is being staged with ten (10) actors and only two musicians, both playing pianos. It's at the Palm Beach Playhouse in Jupiter, which was formerly known as the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater. When Burt's name was up there, it was famous for productions of widely-varying quality that ranged from Broadway-quality tryouts to sloppy vanity productions starring outta-work sitcom stars. Hearing that a ten-player My Fair Lady was being done in those halls made me shudder but apparently, it's pretty good and I'm sorry I can't get down there to take in a performance.

It's interesting to figure how the ten actors are deployed. The ones playing Higgins, Eliza, Doolittle, Pickering and Freddie only play those roles. Five other actors cover all the other parts, which means that the Ascot isn't particularly crowded and when Liza comes out at the ball, she impresses a pretty small assemblage. Still, I can see how it could be done, and I wish I could see how it is done. It's a touring company so maybe it'll tour in my direction.

I don't know what it is but certain phrases seem to suddenly pop up on my TV whenever politicians are giving speeches or pundits are discussing politics. During the impeachment mess, there was a sudden flurry of sentences that began with "At the end of the day…" At the end of the day, I was sick of hearing about the end of the day.

The one I'm noticing a lot lately is "It's been an amazing journey" used by people who haven't physically gone anywhere. Every process, every event is now a journey and most of them are amazing. The ones that aren't amazing are incredible or exciting. John Kerry is the worst offender I've noticed. Everything he does is now a journey unless he actually goes someplace.

One of these days, I'm going to hear someone say, "You know, at the end of the day, it's been an amazing journey." You'll know when this happens because you'll hear the sound of a paperweight going through the screen of my TV.

Julia Turner gives us a summary of Richard Clarke's book.

Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind? That feels wrong to me. Franz ought to have that quality in his eyes that suggests he's crazy and not in a cute way. Will Ferrell always strikes me as crazy in a cute way. It might work but I'd have tried for someone like Jack Black or Dan Aykroyd. And maybe they did.

Two folks wrote to ask me if I really thought the Bush forces would be using Richard Clarke's testimony to defend their boss. Well, maybe not his testimony, though it was nowhere near as negative about Bush as the news briefs indicated. But the excerpts I read from Clarke's book were generally supportive of Bush's actions on 9/11, and that's probably the next firestorm. Bush's foes are starting to charge that on that morning, Bush was no leader; that he was confused and not in control, and that a lot of his subsequent accounts of his day are simply fiction.

The Wall Street Journal (not exactly a liberal paper) recently ran an article that made Bush look pretty bad. One cannot link directly to the piece on the WSJ site but some of the anti-Bush sites are reusing it (here's one) and columnists like Gene Lyons are starting to cite it.

Back when Al Gore was running, every factual discrepancy in his statements was seized upon by his enemies as proof that the man was a pathological liar. Now you have this case where Bush has claimed he was watching live TV and saw the first plane crash into the World Trade Center…but it wasn't televised. So now we'll see all the folks who defended Gore for "understandable mistakes" say that this proves Bush is a congenital fibber…and all the folks who attacked Gore four years ago say, "Oh, come on…like you never misspoke?" If you follow politics long enough, you eventually see everyone switch sides.

Through the magic of TiVo, I'm watching Richard Clarke's interview last night on Larry King Live. Here, he pretty much says what I said he should have said in his testimony…

I didn't praise them. What you're referring to is this background briefing that the White House leaked today in violation of the rules on background briefings. When I was a special assistant to the president — here's what happened. Time Magazine came out with a very explosive story saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn't done everything it could have done. That in fact, that the administration had been handed a plan by me at the beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the cover story on Time and said they had a plan.

Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help them out. I was working for the president of the United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I'm not going to lie. And they said, look, can't you at least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize the positive? Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There are three things you can do. You can resign rather than do it, you can lie and say the administration did all these things it didn't do. Or, if you want to stay inside the government and try to continue to change it from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to do, give a background briefing to the press and emphasize those things which they had done. And I chose to do that.

But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what the White House is sort of saying is they don't understand why I, as a special assistant to the president of the United States, didn't criticize the president to the press. If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant, I would have been fired within an hour. They know that.

The whole interview (transcript here) is pretty good, given that it's being conducted by Larry "I don't prepare" King. Also, for those of you who don't want to sit through the video of Clarke's testimony, here's a transcript of the whole session.

I have to get back to a deadline but here's a thought I need to write down here in order to get it out of my mind for a while…

One of the tricks I learned when I was on a couple of Debate Teams back in the sixties was to seize on one of your opponent's errors — or even something that could be sold as an error through artful interpretation. Everyone gets something wrong…some trivial statistic or arguable fact. So if they're hammering you on 23 points you can't refute, you seize on this little anomaly and you say, "Well, if my opponent can't tell the difference between Oscar Mayer Bologna and Oscar Mayer Salami, we obviously can't believe a word he says about these other 23 points so I won't waste your time discussing them." The idea is to dismiss the entire person rather than address points you don't want to address.

Richard Clarke is a smart guy and given his years of service to multiple presidents, I don't think what he says about terrorism can be quickly dismissed…or should be. Is he right? I dunno. I'd like to hear an actual counter-argument to his charges rather than a wholesale attack on his character. If Clarke was out of the loop, who was in it? I'd also like to see folks stop trying to define this controversy down to "Bush good" or "Bush bad." Right now on CNN, as people talk about Clarke's testimony, the superimposed blurb reads, "Fmr. Bush, Clinton Terror Czar Claims Bush Failed to Stop 9/11." That's an unfair oversimplification of Mr. Clarke's position, and that kind of thinking is not going to help anyone.

It's getting harder and harder to tell the real world apart from a Monty Python sketch. Take a look.

I watched about 25% of Richard Clarke's testimony Wednesday afternoon and made a mental note to try and catch the whole thing on some C-Span replay. On the evening's Daily Show, Jon Stewart raved about how fascinating it was, so I flipped over to C-Span, caught some more of it, then watched a little more on the C-Span website. (It's the file titled "September 11 Commission Hearing – Day 2, Afternoon Session" and it'll probably be there for at least a few weeks, if not longer. The whole video is three and a half hours but Clarke only speaks for about the first two hours and fifteen minutes.)

I still haven't seen it all but Mr. Stewart's right: It's a fascinating look at our government, complete with real world examples of how the bureaucracy prevents a lot of important things from being done. Clarke is cool and smart and very much in control most of the time. There was what struck me as a slightly disingenuous reply to a question about reconciling his current statements with that 2002 interview. He explained that as an officer of the Bush (or any) administration speaking to the press, it is his job to attempt to interpret the administration's actions and policies in the most favorable light. I'm paraphrasing here but that was the essence of what sounded to me like an attempt to not say, "Hey, if I'd said what I really felt then, they'd either have fired me or it would have been even harder to get anything accomplished." Other than that, he sounded pretty credible and he was also a lot more positive about the Bush administration than the advance hype might have led you to expect, or that the few quotes cited in this morn's press reports might indicate. I suspect that if and when the Bush administration is under fire for certain 9/11-related actions or inactions, they'll take to citing items in Richard Clarke's testimony as absolving them.

You should not bother watching the testimony if all you're looking for is to hear him trash Bush because he doesn't do that much of it, at least not in the parts I've seen. You should also not watch if you can't cope with someone saying that the Bush administration has made errors, because he does cite a number. I notice on some political sites this evening a drive to either interpret everything he says in the worst possible way for the White House, or to dismiss him as a partisan, lying low-life whose every utterance must be disbelieved. I think both those views are wrong. If you can tear yourself away from them, you might find his testimony quite interesting. This is a smart man and his overriding message today seemed to be not pro-Bush or anti-Bush but critical of a system that, he feels, did not allow a lot to be done that might have made us safer from terrorism. One hopes there's at least someone in Washington who cares about that more than they care about who wins in November.

So I'm taking a walk in my neighborhood earlier this evening and — BAM! — I get sideswiped by a guy on a bicycle. He's a young guy, maybe in his twenties, wearing a helmet and the kind of togs I associate with competitive racing…only there's no race, nor is it the kind of area where they'd have a bicycle race. People are trying to walk there.

The guy's zooming down the sidewalk in a business area, going as fast as he can go, not stopping for anything — not cross-traffic, not stop lights. I don't hear him coming up behind me. One second, I'm walking along. The next, he slams into my left side, almost knocking me to the sidewalk, but keeps on going. Way down the street, he yells, "Sor-ry" and he says it in two long syllables, the way you say it when your parents force you to apologize for something you don't want to be bothered apologizing about. And as he says it, he's zipping across a street, ignoring a "Don't Walk" sign, forcing a motorist to put on the brakes and lay rubber. The guy's just bicycling as fast as humanly possible, expecting the rest of the world to get out of his way.

I suffer no specific injury but my whole body aches from the shock. The pains had better go away by tomorrow morning, 'cause I have things to do. I have to finish an article. I have to go to the market. And on the way to the market, I have to run over a bicycle rider. I hope I get the right one…but if I don't, I'll just yell, "Sor-ry!"

If your satellite or cable company gets The Travel Channel, you might enjoy a silly little show called Fun Food Factories that takes you on tours of the plants that manufacture things like Pez, Charms Blo-pops, Skippy peanut butter, Goldfish crackers, Snapple, Gummi Bears, Marshmallow Peeps and See's Candy. This installment airs again Thursday night at 10 PM (Eastern time) and reruns three hours later and if nothing else, you can count the number of times they mention "High Fructose Corn Syrup."

Daniel Petrie Jr., the newly-appointed President of the Writers Guild of America, west has sent out this letter to all members. Its summary of what has occurred appears accurate to me. Its optimistic tone about the negotiations (and presumption that challenges to the Guild's last election will go away) seem a bit too hopeful to me.

I don't quite know what to make of this report that Richard Clarke, in August of '02, was telling reporters that Bush had ordered the vigorous pursuit of Osama bin Laden. On the one hand, if you're in his job and not planning to quit soon, that's the kind of thing you have to say, especially in this administration. On the other hand, if you give two differing accounts of something, it's reasonable for folks to wonder which time you were telling the truth and which time you were fibbing. (The frustrating part, of course, is that they'll believe whichever one better serves their purpose.)

I wish the Bush administration had defended itself not by portraying Clarke as some kind of lower life form but by offering up documentation…say, copies of presidential briefings or minutes (even redacted) of meetings. The line of response is too much about Clarke's character and not enough about what anyone actually did or didn't do.

For what it's worth, I don't believe killing or capturing Osama would have done (or will do) much to cripple al-Qaeda. His martyrdom might even embolden them. I also don't think there's much value in finger-pointing with regard to pre-9/11 actions. If someone comes forth with proof that either the Bush or Clinton administrations had hard information of the plot, that would be a different matter. But otherwise, the blame-casting — faulting officials for not foreseeing the unforeseeable — seems to me just a matter of "Gotcha" politics. Yes, of course, we now wish more had been done. I was amazed and maybe even impressed that Clarke did say the following during his testimony today…

I welcome these hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the victims of 9-11 and their loved ones. Our government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard but that doesn't matter because we failed.

That's an extraordinary thing for someone in his position to say. Perhaps he just said it because he thought it would make people more likely to believe his current account, I don't know. But I was somewhat stunned by the moment. If anyone sees an online source of a video clip, let me know. The way he said it…and the silence in the room after he said it…were chilling.

[UPDATE, a few minutes later: Here's a link which may or may not work to the clip on the MSNBC site, and if it does work, you'll have to sit through an ad first. It may not be worth it. The way they shot it and chopped it off at the end, it doesn't have the impact that I felt when I saw it live today. In fact, it sounds like a guy sending out for pizza. Just trust me that it was chilling when presented such that it felt like people were actually listening to the man.]