Editor & Publisher is previewing an article from next Sunday’s New York Times to be titled “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Michael Crowley evidently concludes that blogs on the Right do a better job of using their on-line soap-boxes to influence the public debate, while liberal blogs primarily just talk to liberal audiences. We knew that already.

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Ho, ho! The contemptible Atrios is blogging indignantly, in his usual foul-mouthed manner, and in extreme looney-tune-leftist paranoid mode about how it wouldn’t even matter

If all the wingnut blogs disappeared tomorrow it really wouldn’t have any impact on the national discourse. Sure they’re there and the Right is better at using them but they don’t really *need* them

Because we’ve got on our side, according to the addled Atrios,

both the massive right wing media

(Let’s see: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News [sort of], and the Manchester Union-Leader]

and the mainstream media.

Welcome NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, 5000 other papers, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, HBO and Showtime, Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the NY Review of Books, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and these days, Fly Rod & Reel and Field & Stream, all former leftist MSM stalwarts to the Right!

Poor Little Atrios alone on the barricades with only, what? the Daily Worker? Mother Jones? CounterPunch? on his side.

Since the late 1960s, Vermont, home of Calvin Coolidge and other rock-ribbed Republicans, has found its natural beauty a mixed blessing. The Granite State’s bucolic charms, its green mountains and Christmas card village greens, have attracted a major wave of immigration from the flatlands, bringing to Vermont the equivalent of an invasion of Californians. Vermonter Stephen Morris reports on a recent florescence of exotic political life forms.

observes James Lileks:

The Democrats have convinced most Americans that they’d have left Saddam chuckling in his palaces after 9/11, that they’d oppose any war against a sworn enemy of the United States unless Richard Clarke personally saw its president give a ticking nuke to terrorists and lead them in a stirring rendition of “New York, New York.”

Worst of all, they seem to want it to be 1973 again — as if the nation yearned to bob for horse-apples in the vat of shame.

Granted, the loss of Vietnam was great for the Democrats. But it really wasn’t very good for the rest of the country, to say nothing of the Vietnamese.

There’s a curious nostalgia for the ’70s among the old-guard institutional left; America had been humbled, which was good for humanity, and we were facing a future of scarcity and decline, which was good for the planet.

Beneath it all runs a rushing river of adolescent nihilism, roiling with contempt for that vast human stain known as Western Civilization. If it hasn’t given us universal health care, gay marriage and the replacement of Wal-Marts with local co-ops by 2007, well, to hell with it. And those co-ops had better offer reusable bags for our groceries. Hemp bags.

This strain of American defeatism never died; it just slank away and chewed its tongue until the time was right. And that’s now!

Senator Joe Lieberman called today for the creation of a bipartisan War Cabinet.

Lieberman, whom the Bush administration has praised repeatedly for his war stance, defended the president. “It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he’ll be commander-in-chief for three more years,” the senator said. “We undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Lieberman’s responsible behavior is commendable, but where could we find other responsible democrats beyond himself and Zell Miller, short of contacting Scoop Jackson by Ouija board?

Rick Moran is critical of the CIA.

How many times can one agency be so wrong about so many things while at the same time selectively leaking classified data in order to put themselves in the best possible light and engage in partisan back stabbing?

The list of events and trends that the CIA has failed to either alert the government to or analyzed incorrectly in their capacity as the nation’s foreign watch dogs is astonishing. Over the past quarter century, they have proven themselves to be not just inept but also foolish, arrogant, corrupt, and incompetent as the forces of history and the machinations of evil men escaped their myopic gaze resulting in the injury and death of thousands of United States citizens. Their mistakes have also cost the US in the arena of diplomacy as faulty — sometimes ludicrous — analysis regarding both our friends and enemies has placed our diplomats and negotiators on unsound footing.

Those pouting spooks and their MSM friends have, in the opinion of this writer, gone too far this time. They’ve gotten carried away by breathing in too much of the oxygen-deprived atmosphere of high-mindedness prevailing within their rarified liberal elite circles, and have lost all touch with reality, specifically the reality of what normal people are going to think of all the recent “Gotcha! You are sooo mean to the poor widdle terrorists” stories.

ABC news informs the world, sternly wagging its finger under the nose of the Bush Administration, that though the wounded-in-capture

Abu Zubaydah was given proper care… Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

Can you imagine? Not only grabbed, but actually slapped! And then the poor lamb had his face immersed in water for a soul-shattering 31 seconds before this brave soldier of the Prophet crumbled and began singing like a canary.

Face it, gentlemen. Abu Zubaydah was not really some bird-watching tourist erroneously scooped up in a random police sweep. He was a very major figure in Al Qaeda, its chief of military operations and its chief recruiter. Infoplease says:

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian long believed to be one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants. Experts think Abu Zubaydah became al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations after Muhammed Atef was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on Afghanistan in Nov. 2001. Early in 2002, intelligence experts said Abu Zubaydah was reorganizing the far-flung remnants of the al-Qaeda network to plan further terrorist actions. He is suspected of helping plan a wave of incidents that was to have taken place after Sept. 11, 2001, including attacks on the American embassies in Paris and Sarajevo.

Abu Zubaydah has a long history of involvement with al-Qaeda. In 1999, a Jordanian military court sentenced Abu Zubaydah in absentia to death for plotting to attack tourist sites in Jordan around the millennium.

Abu Zubaydah also organized terrorist attacks on the millennium celebrations in the Los Angeles in Dec. 1999, according Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian convicted of involvement in that plan. During his trial Ressam also said Abu Zubaydah directed Afghan terrorist camps and recruitment for al-Qaeda. Ressam indicated that Abu Zubaydah told him to obtain Canadian passports so others could carry out attacks against the U.S.

There is reason to believe that grabbing Mr. Zubaydah, shaking him, and giving him a good slap, may very well have saved a great many innocent American lives by thwarting a project he had been working on in his spare time, involving the detonation of a dirty bomb somewhere in the United States:

AP 11 Jun 2002:

Jose Padilla, the alleged American al-Qaida operative, became a protege of top Osama bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah late last year, even as the war on terrorism raged around them in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.

But Abu Zubaydah fell into U.S. hands in late March, before Padilla could carry out any attacks, officials said. The prisoner became one of several sources of information that led U.S. authorities to Padilla.

While left-wing members of the urban chattering classes may get their knickers in a twist over “secret renditions” and the occasional grabbing and slapping of terrorist fanatics plotting mass-murder attacks on innocent people, ordinary normal Americans are only too well aware that they themselves might just one day happen to be the very same innocent people targeted by these monsters for cruel and untimely death. Most Americans do not live in the same privileged dreamworld as our liberal elite, and consequently do not subscribe to the same kind of ultra-scrupulous moral philosophies dictating that one must love thine enemy and get him an ACLU attorney. Most Americans really wouldn’t mind one tiny bit, if rough men charged with protecting their lives found it desirable to chop the likes of Mr. Zubaydah into a fine minced pate, and proceeded to serve him on toast, if that is what it took to keep innocent people at home safe from Mr. Zubaydah’s friends’ murderous plots.

My guess is that the great majority of Americans are not going to like this kind of leaking, and they are not going to like the leakers or the MSM which irrresponsibly publishes information jeopardizing this country’s efforts in the War on Terror, and that the cries of indignation drawn from the American public by the publication of this improperly disclosed intelligence information, are not going to be cries demanding the heads of leading figures in the Bush Administration or that of the fellow who gave Mr. Zubaydah a good slap. What the American public is really going to want are the heads of the pouting-spook leakers and those of the reporters assisting them.

Left-wing author & journalist Robert Dreyfuss published an attack on Porter Goss a few weeks ago (10/Nov/2005) in the liberal American Prospect , which, nonetheless, supplies excellent backgound (and plenty of insider gossip) on the war inside the CIA:

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball… Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated (sic).

CIA doves were accustomed to looking upon themselves as an enlightened guild of mandarins, the permanent professionals who advised unsophisticated and temporarily-elected executive administrations on the realities of international affairs, of how it really was, and on what was done and not done, old boy. The Bush administration was determined to govern, and the willingness of some of its conservatives to challenge the hegemony of entrenched liberal bureaucracies in the State Department and the CIA was revolutionary. Establishment members of the notoriously liberal CIA mandarinate found themselves being ignored by a bunch of arriviste Republicans, and they were absolutely furious. Like many liberal academics, they had resided for so long in a self-reinforcing community of the like-minded, in which their own viewpoint and prejudices flourished unchallenged, that they firmly believed in their own intellectual superiority and privileged access to objective truth. Unwelcome conservative dissent, particularly dissent arriving from positions of superior authority accompanied by demands for re-evaluations of cherished liberal articles of policy faith were perceived as outside pressure tampering with Agency process :

The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis.

Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn’t want to hear the truth. “How do you think they feel?” asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. “They’re watching a ****ing idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!”

This outrage at the perceived slighting of professional expertise and interference with analytic process is what has led some very angry CIA officers and analysts to apply their skills and connections as participants in an organized operation aimed at destroying and removing specific adversaries including the Vice President, and at crippling an elected administration.

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Not everyone with a CIA background shares Dreyfuss’ view of the Goss revolution as unmitigated disaster. Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA operations officer and Intelligence author, who has a recently created blog writes:

Goss is doing what George Tenet could not and would not do, shedding the organization of the “old think” that led the Agency into playing it safe in the 1990s. After the Iran-Contra and Ames spying scandals, the Agency lost so much political standing that it began to implode organizationally and philosophically. Afraid to take risks that might offend Washington politicos and European allies after overstepping its legal bounds in the Iran-Contra era, gutted of the clandestine operators who knew how to run secret wars, exhausted from reform whiplash, and demoralized by criticism and poor performance, the CIA simply became unable and unwilling to get down and dirty to do the hard part to fight a real war on terrorism.

The CIA senior leaders today are those who came of age as managers during the 1990s and many unfortunately bring with them the mind-set of caution and political correctness. The culture of the Agency, particularly that of the Directorate of Operations, places a premium on organizational loyalty. The “old boy” network sticks together and resists changes that might alter its collective power and influence. The upheaval at Langley is a direct result of DCI Goss challenging the status quo, breaking some china and hitting the cultural brick wall.

Hat tip to Tom Maguire.

MSM Anti-Bush Administration Intel Operation collaborator Dana Priest, author of the Washington Post’s earlier “secret prisons” CIA leak story, has a new one this morning, based on “new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials.”

In other words, leaked by the cabal of disgruntled State Department and Intelligence Community doves, referred to felicitously by William Safire as “a flock of pouting spooks,” who vigorously supported John Kerry in the last election, and who have since been waging an active Intelligence operation seeking to bring down the Bush Administration, whose greatest success, so far, has been achieved in connection with L’Affair Plame by the indictment of one of their key opponents: Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby.

It seems that in May of 2004 the CIA released (those dastards!) a German citizen previously detained for five months, and then had the unmitigated gall to request the German government to cooperate by keeping secret informnation shared in relation to the case. (How dare they!)

Some might consider the release by US authorities to evidence the existence of fair and rational process in the secret US battle against terrorism, of proof that allegations are investigated, and suspects established to be innocent released, but not Dana Priest. To La Priest, the release:

offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

How stupid does Ms. Priest think Washington Post readers are exactly? It would be a lot fairer too, let me suggest, if Priest also operated openly, and told the world just who it is that planted this story, including savory tidbits of inside gossip about “a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC’s al Qaeda unit,” who it is who is recklessly prepared to discredit and compromise US efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on large Western civilian population targets in order to avenge in-house slights, bring down rivals, and gain partisan political advantage.

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Some earlier related posts are linked here.

Scott Johnson of Power-Line quotes Peter Mulherin on the political circumstances of the president’s opponents:

The Democrat Party has just entered the McGovern Zone. The nation is at war against deadly enemies and the Democrats are going into an election committed to capitulation. They are gambling everything on failure in Iraq. If, in six months, successful elections have been held in Iraq and we have begun reducing our troop levels there, only a few hardcore nutjobs will still cling to the idea that Iraq is a hopeless quagmire. That idea is all the Democrats have to offer and when it dies the Democrat Party itself will be teetering on the edge of extinction.

and recommends statesmanship:

After entering the McGovern Zone in 1972, however, the Democrats had a field day courtesy of Watergate in 1974. The recurring CIA leaks, pseudo-scandals and media hostility undermining the Bush administration are also reminiscent of the forces with which Nixon contended following his landslide reelection. Under the circumstances, it seems to me that the statesmanship of President Bush’s Naval Academy speech represents the best course for him to take and to persist in.

We disagree. In political contests, as in war, either you are on the offensive, or you are on the defensive. If President Bush is going to avoid repeating the history of Nixon’s second term, if he is going to avoid being reduced to impotence, and possibly even destroyed, by an endless series of leaks, opportunistic charges, and trumped-up prosecutions, fanned by the opposition media sooner or later successfully into a major scandal, what he needs to do is to pursue not the way of the statesman, but –as we previously suggested– the Chicago Way. What he needs to do is to take to heart the advice provided by Sean Connery’s Jim Malone to Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987):

Connery: lf you open the ball on these people, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won’t give up the fight until one of you is dead.

Costner: l want to get Capone. l don’t know how.

Connery: Here’s how you get Capone: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?

The way to avoid being destroyed by leaks and pseudo-scandals in endless succession is to prosecute the leakers, to identify the organized campaign against the administration by disaffected active and retired government employees as the scandal and criminal conspiracy it is, to fight it in the public debate arena, and to identify laws which have been broken and prosecute the guilty parties.

Anti-Republican elements in the Justice Department (could those be the same ones who picked Fitzgerald as special prosecutor?) have leaked a 2003 memo “endorsed” by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, which opines that the Texas legislature’s redistricting plan, since upheld twice by a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, may violate the Voting Rights Act, to the Washington Post.

Post staff writer Dan Egger artfully mixes generous helpings of inflammatory charges by democrat partisans, conceptually promoting an internal staff memo advancing one point of view to the level of statutory law, with the minimum essential inconvenient facts, and reference to the (partisan) indictment of Representative Delay, topped by the censorious conclusion of a purportedly objective outside expert,

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law (as an adjunct) at American University (who) said it was ‘highly unusual’ for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.”

And voila! we have a brand-new Bush Administration Conspiracy to Violate the Law.

Armando over at Daily Kos is gloating, and has overnight collected some 122 moonbat comments remarking gleefully on the Bush Administration’s “arrogance and contempt for democracy.”

Liberals don’t want to lose the battle of ideas among the pre-school set, and have hurried to respond with their own entry in the contest to sway young opinion: Why Mommy is a Democrat, a “28-page paperback depicting the Democratic principles of fairness, tolerance, peace, and concern for the well-being of others.”

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The conservative provocation.

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Liberals are pretty unhappy about Katharine DeBrecht’s recently-published children’s book Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed.

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The democrat response.