Save NPR's Bob Edwards (Morning Edition)

Save Bob Edwards Petition

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NPR's senior management dumped Bob Edwards -- so the affiliates can better compete with commercial talk radio.

This is so insane. NPR has been sliding into the commercial space for years. Maybe they need to cut back on some executive salaries. Sign the petition!

My hobby site -- 3GB of monthly traffic?!

Faughnan's HomePage

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I received a bit of a shock today. I recently "upgraded" my web site from a legacy myhosting.com account to their new system. It gave me more space, but also a bandwidth cap of 5GB/month. Since my personal site is made up of dry textual material with few images, I wasn't much concerned about the bandwidth.

Until today, when, by chance, I happened to visit at the end of the month. My creaky, old, dry, dull site saw almost 3GB of traffic in March. That's the entire site -- downloaded 75 times. My average web page is 4KB in size; 3GB is around 750,000 such page views.

I don't think there are that many people reading my old web pages. Is all that traffic just indexing robots, hitting my pages because they've been up for so long that the robots are "obliged" to visit? (One odd feature of my site -- all the URLs are static, and they've not changed for years.)

Odd.

It does make me wonder, though, how many people read these blogs. I'd kind of assumed my readership consisted of my mother, my wife, and my wife's sisters.

Salon.com News | Creepier than Nixon - John Dean on Bush/Cheney

Salon.com News | Creepier than Nixon

The man who brought down Richard Nixon says Bush and 'co-president' Cheney are an even greater threat to the country.

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John Dean writes about Bush/Cheney/Rove. It's clear he thinks they are the greatest threat to American democracy since at least the beginning of the 20th century, if not since the civil war (aka the revolt of the south).

He divides them up this way:

1. Bush: masterful and utterly ruthless political operator, but disinterested in policy.
2. Cheney: Hobbesian brutality, loves policy and power. Tutors Bush and serves him.
3. Roves: Viscious and ruthless, loves personal power. Serves Bush.

Dean doesn't like these guys.

My sense is that our democracy is pretty frail. Another 9/11 attack and the American people will trade democracy for security -- as Hobbes would have predicted. It won't even take a mass bioweapons attack or a true nuclear weapon detonation.

Sadly the professional's analysis favors Bush winning by a pretty good margin. Kerry knows that too, so I wonder what he's planning ...

Should the United Nations run the Internet? | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Should the United Nations run the Internet? | Perspectives | CNET News.com

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I started out thinking this was incredibly silly, since by historical standards there's about a probability of 0% that the UN would ever have significant clout over the true Internet.

On second thought, alas, it's not like the US government, for tragically good reasons, will tolerate the freewheeling and open Internet of old. The age of open information has passed, we are entering the age of ever greater manacles upon knowledge. In this new world the US government shares a common interest with China, Cuba and North Korea in eliminating anonymity and restricting the flow of information.

Another gift to the world from al Qaeda et al.

What drove Clarke mad: the insane Clinton impeachment

The Washington Monthly:

... So what was it that seemingly turned him [Clarke] into a Democratic partisan? Oddly enough, it appears that the turning point came in August 1998 and was a combination of two things: the Monica Lewinsky scandal and al-Qaeda's attacks on two American embassies. It was only a couple of years earlier that the CIA had finally connected the dots and figured out that the al-Qaeda organization even existed, and the embassy bombings were their first major attack since then. Unfortunately, Republican opportunism made it hard to fight back. Although Clarke says he was 'beyond mad' at Clinton for failing to keep his zipper shut, he became flatly infuriated with the recklessness of his conservative opposition:

I was angrier, almost incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton's enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to hurt not just Clinton but the country by turning the President's personal problem into a global, public circus for their own political ends. Now I feared that the timing of the President's interrogation about the scandal, August 17, would get in the way of our hitting the al Qaeda meeting.

....Our response to two deadly terroist attacks was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.

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This is what is driving the Republican right berserk. The growing horror of realizing just what they did when they paralyzed the Clinton administration.

Bush is in no danger of impeachment, but despite my belief that he and his partisans are a very bad news for the US and the world, I would not want Bush hounded the way Clinton was. It will suffice to retire him calmly and completely.

Star Telegram | 03/28/2004 | Molly Ivins and the Hart-Rudman report of 1/31/2001

Molly Ivins - Star Telegram | 03/28/2004 | A brief, shining moment amid the mud storm

... This thesis is born out by the eerily prescient and tragically ignored Hart-Rudman report on terrorism, presented on Jan. 31, 2001. (And let me point out that the media deserve much blame here, as well: All the networks ignored it entirely save for CNN, which did it justice. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal never printed a line about it, though The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both did thorough jobs.)

That commission concluded, "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." It recommended a series of practical and effective steps.

Of the various institutions, Congress deserves some credit for trying to pick up on the report, which clearly would have moved us ahead by six months on terrorism planning. Donald Rumsfeld, not one of my favorites, also deserves credit for vigorously backing the report.

Congress scheduled a hearing on the Hart-Rudman report for May 7, 2001, but according to reports at the time, the White House stifled the move because it did not want Congress out in front on the issue.

True, the report was initiated by Clinton, but the commission was bipartisan and included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republicans. On May 5, the White House announced that rather than adopt Hart-Rudman, it was forming its own committee on terrorism headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. That group never met.

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Odd that Rumsfeld was an advocate, but Cheney dropped the ball. What was going on there?

It does seem like yet another validation of Clarke's thesis.

The CNN article Molly Ivins mentions is still online. That's good, because on reading it one can see the problems with it. The focus on science and engineering education as a crisis may have blunted its impact. This is in the good old days, when the now almost forgotten Oklahoma strike (remember when the nation thought it was an Iraqi attack?) was still on people's minds ...

CNNfyi.com - Guarding against an attack - February 1, 2001

New steps needed to prevent terrorism in U.S., panel says

The guilty verdict in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and the scheduled execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh have renewed awareness of the perils and possibilities of terrorism. An expert panel, convened by the U.S. Defense Department, said this week that America is vulnerable to a "catastrophic attack," recommending a reorganization of several government agencies to combat terrorism and increased investment in education and scientific research. While few officials doubt the group's research, some question whether these suggestions are possible and necessary.

WASHINGTON -- A "catastrophic attack" is likely to strike the United States in the next 25 years, and the National Guard should be retrained as America's main protector against such an assault, an advisory commission on national security said this week.

In its report issued Wednesday, the panel recommended a reorganization of the State and Defense departments and more investment in education and scientific research.

Additionally, the commission recommended the creation of an independent Cabinet-level National Homeland Security Agency to coordinate a national strategy against terrorism.

"If we have a disaster, and we think it is quite probable in the next 20 to 25 years, we're not prepared to deal with it," former U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman, R-New Hampshire, and co-chairman of the commission, told CNN.

The bipartisan U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century was headed by Rudman and former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colorado, and includes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, among its 14 members.

The panel, commissioned by the Defense Department, spent more than two years making its evaluations, which included hundreds of interviews with national security experts.

The second-biggest threat is inadequate scientific research and education, something the panel said poses "a greater threat to U.S. national security ... than any potential conventional war that we might imagine."

The United States is presently not prepared to deal with terrorism on its home soil, says former U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman

The commission said the United States will lose its technical edge upon which national security is based if dramatic steps are not taken soon to increase the number of Americans studying advanced science, math and engineering.

As a result, the report recommends a "science and technical education act" offering loans to college students studying science, math and engineering, with the loans being forgiven if the student agrees to work for the government for a given number of years.


"We put science, and science and math education, second ... because we believe it's second only to the threat of a weapon of mass destruction (hitting) one of our cities," Gingrich said.

"The national security establishment has to look seriously at how much" is spent on such programs, Gingrich added.

The proposed security agency would take over the Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the FBI counterterrorism center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among others. The proposed agency also would assume responsibility for cyber security from the Commerce Department and the FBI.

"Some serious gaps presently exist," said Hart, noting that more than 40 agencies currently respond to various threats or attacks. "They are not presently coordinated either to protect, prevent or respond to a major terrorist attack."

Added Rudman: "We're not talking about creating a new bureaucracy. We're talking about taking a number of bureaucracies and consolidating them into one streamlined organization."

Rudman said the nation needs to be able to respond adequately to potential terrorists who could use chemical, biological or even small nuclear devices to cause destruction in the United States.

State National Guard units would take on homeland security as their primary task under the commission's proposals. The commission also recommended a series of upgrades of U.S. intelligence gathering against potential terrorists.

Giving the Guard an elevated role is not a new idea. The Clinton administration, for instance, had planned for the Guard to operate a national missile defense system, should one be deployed.

While the commission does have strong backing, many of its recommendations are likely to face stiff opposition due to the magnitude of some of the changes.

The panel also advised higher pay and better benefits for military personnel, particularly captains and majors, where attrition rates are highest.

Federal agencies are poorly coordinated to respond to terrorism, says former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart

On another front, the report argues that the National Security Council at the White House has too much power and should be strictly limited to giving the president advice on policy.

"Ever since (former Secretary of State Henry) Kissinger, it has become more and more operational," said one commission member, "because they don't have any congressional oversight to speak of so they can do whatever the president wants them to do -- à la Oliver North."

The operational power should be returned to the State Department, the commission report argued.

Bush administration officials said they will look closely at the commission's recommendations. But the proposal for a National Homeland Security Agency is sure to stir controversy, because it will take resources away from some well-entrenched agencies.

And critics such as James Steinberg, who was former President Bill Clinton's deputy national security adviser, said agencies simply need better cooperation in the fight against terrorism, not another new agency.

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The 2001 concern about science and engineering deficits as a threat to national security is interesting -- especially in light of today's outsourcing impact. US students are starting to avoid those domains; they may be right -- trade theory predicts outsourcing will have a devastating effect on many engineering and knowledge domains.

Jared Bernstein & Brad DeLong on "Outsourcing": a dialog with interesting discussions

Note: Jared Bernstein on "Outsourcing": Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Very interesting posting from Bernstein. DeLong gives an uncharacteristically very weak response, but the comment threads are very interesting. Very much in line with what I've written about for years (mostly personal correspondences). Neo-feudalism beckons!

JK Galbraith junior has a related article in Salon pummeling the Economist. Alas, the Economist is not what it was 10 years ago. It's been infected by rejects from the WSJ.

It's good that we're starting on these topics. Again, I think we need to sever benefits from employment, have mandatory-contribution 529 like plans for use during periods of underemployment, subsidize education and retraining, initiate consumption taxation and estate taxes, etc. etc.

How and why the Neocons missed 9/11, and why they may still be clueless

Peter R. Neumann, NYT OpEd: Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming

I love it when someone like this lays it all out in a way that's clear and convincing. The author is a research fellow in international terrorism at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. He combines a military with the tradition of clear minded UK thinking. I'm sure he didn't write the title however -- it's clearly untrue and contradicts his writing. Shame on the NYT headline writers!

The only criticism I'd make of this article is that he fails to fully emphasize the critical role of technologic progress and the dissemination of education in the growth of non-state terrorism.

LONDON — Did the Bush administration, before the 9/11 attacks, fail to take terrorism seriously enough? At first the contention seems unlikely. Isn't this the most hawkish administration in living memory?...

... there is something to these accusations — although perhaps not in the sense that the people making them intend. The administration's early failures on terrorism cannot be pinned down to individual instances of "neglect." To understand what really went wrong, we need to go back to the last decades of the cold war, when people like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney first started to make sense of terrorism.

In the 1970's and 80's, the predominant view among Washington hawks was that none of the various terrorist groups that operated in Western Europe and the Middle East was truly independent. They were all connected through a vast terrorist network, which was created and supported by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The Communists' aim, the hawks believed, was to destabilize the Western societies without being directly linked to violence.

It all seemed to make perfect sense, and books like "The Terror Network" by Claire Sterling [1981, she later followed up with a 1994 book on organized crime], which argued the network hypothesis with considerable force and conviction, became essential reading for anyone who wanted to make his way in the Reagan White House.

...According to the classically "realist" mindset, only states can pose a significant threat to the national security of other states, because lesser actors simply do not have the capacity, sophistication and resources to do so... it was only by tackling the state sponsors (in this case, the Soviet bloc), that you could root out the terrorists.

With the end of the cold war, however, things changed. While there was no longer a prime state sponsor for any "terror network," there was also no longer any need for one. It became easy to travel from one country to another. Money could be collected and transferred around the globe. Cell phones and the Internet made it possible to maintain tight control of an elusive group that could move its "headquarters" across continents. In fact, by the end of the decade, it seemed as if the model of state-sponsored terrorism had effectively been reversed: Al Qaeda was now in charge of a state — Afghanistan under the Taliban — rather than vice versa.

But the Washington hawks failed to see what was happening. The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real movers and shakers in the international system, and any serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only come from an established nation.

Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled "Campaign 2000 — Promoting the National Interest." Ms. Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush White House, argued that after years of drift under the Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security. This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships" with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of non-state terrorism was a secondary problem — in her to do list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of hostile powers."

...Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge. According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that there must be an "axis of evil" — a group of states critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established paradigm of state sponsorship.

In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed agents, failed communications between government departments and lack of resources. But it was also a failure of vision — one for which the current administration must take responsibility.

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There have been two consistent themes in analyses of the Bush administration thus far:

1. Bush likes simple answers. He's not stupid, but his reasoning is heavily faith-based. He has tremendous confidence in his intuition.

2. Rumsfeld, Cheney et al were mired in a world that had passed them by. Remember the missile defense initiative? Many editorials asked how this was supposed to protect us from backpack nukes.

The idea that only states could threaten states was true once. But the cost of weaponry falls much faster than the costs of defense. That trendline continues.

The Rice Foreign Affairs article validates Clarke's testimony. Rice is not stupid, but she was wrong. She knows better than to admit that, but she was simply wrong.

This isn't merely academic, or even about historical justice. The Bush administration STILL doesn't get it.

If Clinton had not been impeached, or if Gore had won ... would 9/11 have been prevented? The conclusion Bush is running from ...

Could We Have Prevented 9/11? - Slate tells you what Richard Clarke's book reveals about the Bush and Clinton administrations' war on terror. By Julia Turner

Although the book amounts to a chronicle of what many in the present Bush administration did wrong (and what Clarke and Clinton did right), it is neither shrill nor overly self-congratulatory. Unlike some of the books Slate has diced and julienned in this space, this one's worth reading, mostly for Clarke's informed account of al-Qaida's rise and the U.S. government's awareness of the threat. But since you may not have time to read the whole thing, Slate presents Clarke's most salient pieces of criticism and praise.

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Bottom line, the Clinton administration did a good job and they'd have done an even better job if the hell-hounds of the Republican party had not been striving to destroy Clinton.

It's not so much that the Bush cronies did a bad job. Yes, they were arrogant and stupidly dismissive of the Clinton administration. Yes, they had severe misconceptions that caused critical delays. Yes, they were obsessed with Iraq and missed the bigger picture. Yes, Bush is not a strong thinker. BUT, despite their myriad failings, they were heading in the right direction. They're arrogant, foolish, irrational and often wrong -- but they're not dumb.

No, what really enrages Bush et al is how well the Clinton administration comes across. They are left with two terrible, unthinkable and thus far unspoken conclusions:

1. Gore might well have done better than Bush at preventing 9/11.
2. If Clinton had not been impeached, 9/11 might have been stopped.

No, we really can't diagnose abuse by physical exam

BBC NEWS | Health | Doubt over shaken baby diagnosis: "Scientists have cast doubt over the theory that certain eye injuries are a sign a baby has been violently shaken.

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This whole business is a much greater scandal than physician over-enthusiasm for estrogen replacement.

In the 80s we thought certain vaginal findings were proof of abuse. Until recently in the UK a second case of SIDS in a family was considered proof of murder. Some have thought that retinal bleeds were a sure sign of shaken baby syndrome. Before we understood von-willebrand's disorder I'm sure bruises in affected children led to abuse cases. At one time certain warts were felt to guarantee child abuse (that may still appear in textbooks, but I wonder how good the science is).

Crappy science, crappy logic. There's something about the horror of infant abuse that drives people to nutty conclusions, and drives thoughtful researchers far from the domain. There is no good, reliable, test for child abuse short of the most extreme findings. I doubt we'll ever have one -- unless we research in advanced "lie detection" actually works out. We'll either err towards removing children from loving and trustworthy homes, or err towards leaving them to be hurt and abused. There are no perfect solutions, which is why child-protective services is such a terribly hard business.

BBC NEWS | Health | Aids risk reduced SIX-FOLD by circumcision?!!

BBC NEWS | Health | Aids risk 'cut by circumcision'

en who have been circumcised may be six times less likely to contract the HIV virus than uncircumcised men, research carried out in India suggests.

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SIX TIMES?!!

If we had a vaccine that reduced infection 6-fold we'd be singing in the streets. This is damned amazing -- if true. It seems too great an effect to be real.

But if it is ...

Whack 'em off. (ouch!)

PS. I've circumcised lots of (male) babies. It's pretty barbaric, though nowadays we at least use anaesthetics. I hated it, but figured it was an American cultural tradition I just had to put up with. Now it looks like there might be an amazingly good reason to lose the foreskin. Circumcising adults is more challenging.

BBC NEWS | Europe | The EU has a terror plan. Now.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Key elements of EU terror action plan

The European Union's summit in Brussels is being dominated by the need to co-ordinate and co-operate in countering terrorism.

This was drawn up by EU interior ministers on 19 March - a week after the Madrid bombings - and then adopted by foreign ministers on 22 March.

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In the days when I chaired a (small) hospital "quality assurance" committee, I was frustrated because I could only effect change in response to serious patient injury rather than before bad things happened.

I was young then. I figured it was just the group I was with; that a more forward thinking group would be proactive, not reactive.

It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that humans are hardly ever proactive. It's simply not in us. We can only react to what's happened, not what is likely to happen.

If some alien species writes our obituary, it will read -- "reactive, not proactive".

Clarke Humilitates his interrogators, GWB gets help from Fox/Pravda (WaPo

Clarke Stays Cool as Partisanship Heats Up (washingtonpost.com)

The Sept. 11 commission shed its bipartisan spirit and turned a Senate hearing room into a courtroom yesterday for the testimony of Richard A. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief-turned-Bush administration whistle-blower.

... Shortly before the hearing, the White House violated its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002. The White House press secretary read passages from the 2002 remarks at his televised briefing...

Back at the hearing, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, a Republican member of the commission, took up the cause, waving the Fox News transcript with one hand and Clarke's critical book in the other. "Which is true?" Thompson demanded, folding his arms and glowering down at the witness.

Clarke, appearing unfazed by the apparent contradiction between his current criticism and previous praise, spoke to Thompson as if addressing a slow student.

"I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done, and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done," he explained. "I've done it for several presidents."

With each effort by Thompson to highlight Clarke's inconsistency -- "the policy on Uzbekistan, was it changed?" -- Clarke tutored the commissioner about the obligations of a White House aide. Thompson, who had far exceeded his allotted time, frowned contemptuously. "I think a lot of things beyond the tenor and the tone bother me about this," he said. During a second round of questioning, Thompson returned to the subject, questioning Clarke's "standard of candor and morality."

"I don't think it's a question of morality at all; I think it's a question of politics," Clarke snapped.

Thompson had to wait for Sept. 11, 2001, victims' relatives in the gallery to stop applauding before he pleaded ignorance of the ways of Washington. "I'm from the Midwest, so I think I'll leave it there," he said. Moments later, Thompson left the hearing room and did not return.

... Republican commissioners labored to change that reputation. Fred F. Fielding implied that Clarke may have perjured himself when he spoke to a congressional investigation into the attacks but did not raise complaints about Bush's Iraq policy then. Clarke, though the back of his neck and head were a burning red, replied coolly: "I wasn't asked, sir."

The gallery drew quiet when Lehman questioned Clarke. "I have genuinely been a fan of yours," he began, and then he said how he had hoped Clarke would be "the Rosetta Stone" for the commission. "But now we have the book," Lehman said, suggesting it was a partisan tract.

Clarke was ready for that challenge. "Let me talk about partisanship here, since you raised it," he said, noting that he registered as a Republican in 2000 and served President Ronald Reagan. "The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign," Clarke said. "So let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one."

When Clarke finished his answer, there was a long pause, and the gallery was silent. Lehman smiled slightly and nodded. He had no further questions.

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The gray bureaucrat outguns the pompous senators. Lovely. Washington veterans are tough bastards.

Fox once again plays its role as the American Pravda. In this case, however, they probably didn't do anything wrong. They did earn themselves some political favors, which they'll use wisely. Bush may be corrupt, but he keeps his promises -- to his donors.

In retrospect, even distracted by the insane assaults of the republican right, the Clinton administration comes out well head of the early GWB administration in defending the nation. That must so enrage Bush.

How nice that Kerry didn't have to spend money on attack ads this week.

Wapo is very confused about Microsoft

Regulators, Rivals React (TechNews.com)

The European Union's decision yesterday to fine Microsoft Corp. and require it to make alternate versions of its Windows operating system is a tougher and more far-reaching approach than the one taken by the Justice Department in a similar U.S. case.

When that happens, legal experts said yesterday, it can be hard for companies to know how to behave, which is why regulators on both sides of the Atlantic work to minimize such disagreements.

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Idiot. The US court that found Microsoft to be a monopoly, and in breach of antitrust law, advocated splitting the company in two. That's MUCH tougher and more appropriate than the relatively limp wristed EU judgment.

Gates made the appropriate donations every businessman has to make, and GWB accepted them. Being an honorable crook, GWB had his administration effectively drop the case.

There's a very intersting case playing out in the Minnesota courts, far from the limelight. This case is exposing how Gates and Co crushed the "Go Corporation" in the 1980s/90s. They were only then emerging into full power, and were relatively crude about destroying perceived threats.

The EU decision is to weak to really impact Microsoft. In any case it will be appealed and more donations will be made along the way. I don't expect much impact.

The only threat to Microsoft is China and India deciding they can't trust their inftrastructure to a US company and instead funding Linux development. I think that's rather a longshot.

Kaplan on Clarke: it's as bad as it looks

Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth - Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism. By Fred Kaplan

Interesting tidbit from Kaplan. After Clarke came another exit, this one voluntary.:

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded."

Kaplan's review is dead-on and devastating. I hadn't imagined the Bush situation was this bad. He concludes:

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

The consistent pattern is that Bush is confident in his own vision. He sees the world not as it is, but as he thinks it is.

Psychotic schizophrenics have similar attributes -- delusions are all about confidence and decisiveness. Bush is more mystical than rational, more intuitive than logical, and maybe even a bit delusional. These are good traits in a religious leader, bad traits in a modern president. Bush should have been an evangelist.