CLINTON & ARMITAGE


Bill Clinton and Richard Armitage: two peas in a pod.

Two inveterate, congenital liars who have never made a mistake in their lives - and who love to blame any and everybody but themselves.

Bill Clinton’s performance on Sunday morning’s Fox newscast was a rare look into the mean, defensive and small man who was - and still is - a total fraud as President. Dick Morris - a long-time pal of Bill Clinton - says in private that Bill Clinton knows he is a total phony - and lives in mortal fear of “being found out.”

Everything about him is a fraud: his “compassion,” his “marriage,” and his “devotion to helping people.”

In effect, Bill Clinton remains what he has always been: a smart-ass, attention-starved motor-mouth who is never wrong.

Blaming the CIA and the FBI and the military for his failure to get Osama Bin Laden is ridiculous: as President of the United States, the CIA and FBI and Joint Chiefs of Staff report to him! He has the power to either convince or order them to do what he wants on retaliating for terrorist attacks on American forces and territories( US Embassy attacks and the USS Cole). So to see Clinton blaming them for his failure to even attack Osama Bin Laden is a peek into how this man’s mind works.

“That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” was - before this sure-to-be-notorious Fox interview - the perfect example of Clinton’s hair-splitting. But now it is his portrayal of his utter powerless-ness to get his subordinates to attack Osama. If he truly wanted to get Osama, he could have gotten those attacks done. The head of the Bin Laden Desk at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, has made it clear that his unit (since disbanded by the Bush Administration) was ready and willing to go into Afghanistan and hit Osama’s camps. But the order never came from above.

Clinton is clearly stung by ABC’s PATH TO 9/11 - and his inability to get Hollywood to change something to his liking. It must have been a huge shock to him that his base - the Hollywood Left - couldn’t or wouldn’t bend to his demands and scrap the movie.

Instead, the PATH TO 9/11 correctly showed Clinton as ‘out to lunch’ and distracted by Monica. Oh, by the way, why doesn’t someone ask Clinton this question: Why did Monical Lewinsky spend more time in the Oval Office with Clinton than did the Director of Central Intelligence?

What does that say about his commitment to national security?


Now, while Clinton is trying to refurbish his damaged image, we have the spectacle of another long-time DC Insider who seems to be at the epicenter of two of the biggest stories of our time: former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

First, Armitage comes forward with crocodile tears and apologizes for inadvertently leaking Valerie Plame’s name in the CIA leak case. He claims to have leaked it ‘innocently’ and in an off-handed manner to columnist Robert Novak.

The so-called Mainstream Media reports this - with nary a jaundiced eye. But, then, Novak comes forward and totally contradicts Armitage’s recollection of the entire episode.

Then this past week it is revealed tha Armitage allegedly threatened the Pakistani government after 9/11 that the US “would bomb them back to the Stone Age” if they didn’t cooperate with us.

Armitage now denies using the “bomb you back to the Stone Age” language; but the Pakistani Government is certain of it - and was offended by it.

Two huge stories - the post-9/11 War plan in Afghanistan and the intelligence leading to the war in Iraq - and Armitage is smack dab in the middle of both. And his ‘take’ does not fit the memory of anyone else.

Curious, isn’t it?

Either he is right and everyone else is wrong or mistaken - or he indeed is a dissembler of the first degree.

I have dealt with Armitage on the POW issue in Vietnam and Laos. He is one of the most devious, duplicitous and dishonest people I have ever met.

The FBI agent in charge of his 1989-1990 nominations for Navy Secretary and two other posts told me, “Armitage has the thickest file of any nominee we have ever seen.” That means there was more dirt and controversy over Armitage than anyone else.

Isn’t it amazing how someone like Armitage just remains involved in every big story - in multiple administrations?

Many believe he is a career CIA officer who is ‘planted’ in other posts to work secretly for the agency.

Many have also speculated that Bill Clinton was a CIA plant - going all the way back to his Oxford days when he traveled around communist Europe.

Whatever the case may be - and we will probably never know - both Clinton and Armitage are good examples of all that is wrong with our government: they are both self-serving, lying egomaniacs who can’t tell the truth even when it helps them.

Oh how we need some new blood in DC.

2008: MAKES NO SENSE



Here we are seven weeks away from the November Congressional elections and all the Sunday morning shows talk about is the 2008 presidential race!!!

And all those inside-the-beltway hosts and talking heads agree on two things: the likely GOP nominee is John McCain and the likely Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton.

Not only that, these self-chosen ‘experts’ - who are almost always wrong - actually are rooting for McCain and Hillary! You can hear it and see it when you watch them fall all over themselves analyzing a race - before this year’s crucial elections have even happened!

McCain vs. Hillary. Hmmmm... How much do you want to bet that at least one if not both of these candidacies does not make it to their party’s nomination?

The mood of the electorate is angry and disconsolate about the direction we are taking. Yes, there has been a slight up-tick for the GOP and President Bush lately undoubtedly due to the 9/11 anniversary and lower gas prices.

But, overall, the American people are restless - and it seems unlikely that today’s status quo of McCain and Hillary as the front-runners will stay that way for another 18-23 months.

For McCain, the path to the GOP nomination is tougher than his media acolytes understand: McCain is at odds with GOP primary voters over so many issue - especially immigration. How can Teddy Kennedy’s pro-amnesty partner get the GOP voter to support him? It just makes no sense!

And McCain is wrong on other things, too, such as campaign finance reform. Plus, he is a rude, condescending, arrogant little man who revels in insulting people who dare to disagree with him.

Along the way he has gone to great extremes to insult conservatives - the very people he is now wooing for the nomination.

Now, in order to defeat McCain for the Republican nomination, a dynamite conservative challenger has to emerge. And he has not so far. George Allen, even when he is re-elected in Virginia, is now damaged goods and exposed as a light-weight; he isn’t the man to take on McCain.

As of today, that leaves us with Governor Mitt Romney. A very attractive candidate, it is still to be determined if he can grab the title of Mr. Conservative and take on McCain and rip him apart. He wants to, that’s for sure. But will his Mormonsim hurt him among GOP faithful? We don’t know.

Or, perhaps another conservative challenger will emerge to take on McCain.

Rudy Giuliani’s name scores well in polls, too. But he is way to the left of McCain and it makes no sense that he can be the Right’s man to take on McCain.

As for Hillary, the Democrats must be terminally stupid to nominate another Northeast liberal (see Dukakis and Kerry). And she is a liberal - no matter if she is from Illinois or Arkansas (see McGovern and Gore).

If the Democrats want to win the White House, they need to look at Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton: both southern moderate governors.

But the media - rife with 1960's social leftists - wants this “first woman president” campaign so badly they can taste it. As if that issue has anything to do with what is ailing our country.

Hillary may win her party’s nomination. But maybe saner heads (if they have any left over there) will realize that she is another Kerry or Dean or Dukakis waiting to be diced and spliced by the GOP. Maybe they’re so desperate to win the White House back that they’ll come to their senses and coalesce behind another candidate who could win in a general election.

Whatever happens, we can all count on many, many changes of direction in the next weeks and months.

The odds of McCain vs. Clinton in 2008 are less than these TV Talking Heads think.

Maybe the American people should - and will - have some say in who our next president is.

EMPTY WORDS



The President’s 9/11 speech commemorating the fifth anniversary of that tragic day points out why a solid majority of Americans no longer trust him - and believe his is already a ‘failed presidency.’

His pledge - dragged out of a dark, musty closet after several years of silence on the topic - to “get” Osama Bin Laden no matter how difficult it is - is no longer believable. And that is why GW Bush is not considered “honest and trust-worthy” by 58% of the American people in the most recent polling.

After Bill Clinton’s direct, finger-pointing lies to the American people, GW Bush had promised to “restore honor and dignity to the White House.”

In the view of many, he, too, has repeatedly lied to the American people about Iraq and WMD - and especially about how hard we are really trying to get Osama Bin Laden.

This Administration says one thing - and then does another. Case in point: while the President of the United States pledges to do everything possible to kill or capture Osama Bin Lden, his CIA disbanded the Bin Laden Unit which was created exclusively to hunt him down!

Yes, the White House tried to put a band-aid on that embarrassing revelation a few weeks ago by muttering some typical bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo about “shifting assets” and “changing lines of authority.”

But the facts speak for themselves: five years ago the president told the American people his administration would do everything possible to get Osama.

Five years later it is a fair question to ask: do you believe the President has woken up every day with getting Osama as his top priority? Even one of his top priorities? Or how about this question: which excited GW Bush, son of G HW Bush, more: getting Osama or getting Saddam?

Here is something we all need to remember: the President of the United States sets priorities and those priorities quickly filter down the bureaucracy and the chain of command. Everyone underneath the President wants to please him. So his top priority quicky becomes their top priority.

Two examples:

1) When he got focused on Iraq in the summer of 2002, every single event and statement from all his subordinates was also focused on Iraq. Every speech, TV appearance, radio show - everything - was centered on toppling Saddam. Suddenly, Osama was the Forgotten Enemy. No mention of him...many months went by, measured by reporters, when Osama’s name was not even mentioned by GW Bush. Indeed, Mr. Bush had pivoted away from Osama and became obsessed with getting Saddam.

Bush’s own indifference to really bagging Osama filtered down and is reflected in the closing of the Osama CIA desk.

So Mr. Bush’s words in Monday night’s speech are indeed empty words - meaningless, useless statements.


2) Another example of this is Mr. Bush’s empty words on illegal immigration: while repeatedly offering de-facto amnesty to those who have broken the law and crossed our borders illegally, Mr. Bush says, “This is not amnesty.”

He undermines his own credibility by such a brazen lie.

The same applies to border security. After much political pressure forced him to back down and dispatch the National Guard to the Mexican border, we read in the fine print that these few thousand Guardsmen would be unarmed!!!

Most Americans have ‘tuned out’ GW Bush. They don’t care what he says, they don’t believe him - and they can’t wait to get to the next presidency.

Rarely has a President of the United State squandered such an opportunity to change the world and our country for the better. 9/11 was a watershed event in our history. Instead of changing so many things, Mr. Bush basically changed nothing. Instead, he used it to scare the American people into a new war in Iraq. And everything he told us to justify that pre-emptive invasion has proven to be knowingly false at the time.

So here we are five years later.

And once again we have a President with a huge ‘credibility gap’ as he rides out his lame duck years.

When you begin to focus on who you want in 2008, pay close attention to their words - and see if they, too, say thing they truly believe or things to pander to you. If you hear more ‘empty words,’ then don’t vote for them.

America is too great a country to be led any longer by people like these.

COURIC DEBUT


My quick thoughts jotted down right after Katie Couric’s debut as host and - the key title - Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric:

Managing Editor means Katie Couric decides which stories get on the news - and which ones do not. And that is a key element of the success or failure of a news show.

This debut was - at best - inauspicious. Boring, too. To open with Lara Logan and the Taliban was a bore...nothing new other than the fact that they are still waging a guerilla war over in Afghanistan.

Then a quick run-down of news stories followed by a Today Show-like mini taped interview with New York Times writer Tom Friedman - pre-taped and edited and aimed to showcase her legs.

Then an utterly idiotic FreeSpeech segment with film-maker Morlan Spurlock that would put anyone to sleep.

Then, to end the debut show, a long piece on portraits of poor kids in Nicaragua.

All in all, this was a complete flop of an opening show.

CBS had four months to get this opening show right - and the best they came up with is the Taliban and poor Nicaraguan kids?

Awful decisions. Just awful.

As famed TV journalist Liz Trotta said, “These were decisions made by a Politically Correct liberal woman - Couric - and they are not the right choices for the evening news audience.”

So true. Does Katie really think the evening news audience wants to hear the idiotic rantings of a loser movie-maker? Or do we care about portraits of Nicaraguan kids?

We are at war with Radical Islam and we are in the home stretch of a crucial Congressional Election. Shouldn’t that have been the focus of this highly-hyped debut show?

If the best they could come up with is this show - with 4 months of prep - what are they going to do from now on?

All in all, CBS is again - in trouble.

They just don’t get it.

Yes, she’ll get a ton of semi-positive reviews in the Wednesday newspapers...but in the long run Katie is not going to beat NBC and ABC. Not with shows like this.

COURIC, IRAN AND ISRAEL



1) Katie Couric’s big debut this week as the new anchor of the CBS News has received more hype than the Super Bowl and World Series combined. The latest news is that all sorts of celebrities will ‘grace’ her show this opening week - stars from the President to the former President (Clinton) to Walter Cronkite to - of all people - Rush Limbaugh!

What does any of this have to do with delivering the news each evening?

Is CBS trying to re-create the TODAY SHOW at 6:30 PM?

Or is their thinking that they need a melange of celebrity/political people to ‘juice’ up her initial ratings?

This isn’t a political campaign which needs endorsements; it is the home of Edward R. Morrow and the aforementioned Cronkite - the place where we all used to go to get that day’s news. But not anymore; the ratings for all three network newscasts are steadily declining while those of the three cable news networks are increasing. Plus, the Internet is rapidly becoming the source of news for most people - especially the young. (CBS, NBC and ABC news shows are watched by an older audience averaging 61 years old.)

The hype for Katie is unprecedented; when Rather replaced Uncle Walter or Brokaw took over for John Chancellor we never had TV ads, bus and billboard signs, hype on the US Open tennis tournament on CBS and a Hillary-like ‘listening tour’ around the country to ‘learn’ what kind of news people actually want!

Katie and CBS have renounced the previous “too-pessimistic” versions of the nightly news and instead said they are going to offer ‘solutions’ to problems and air-time for differing points of view.

We’ll see if this will work.

Or if it will be yet another nail in the coffin of the three network news divisions.

2) Iran and their nuke program: they aren’t dumb, those Persians. They talk a good game and meet with that sap from the UN, Koffi Annan, and all the while their scientists are working ‘round-the-clock to develop a usable nuclear device.

Iran wants ‘into’ the Nuclear Club ASAP because they know that once they’re in the exclusive club, they are not going to be attacked/invaded by the US or any other country.

Having the Big One is the best deterrent. Period.

They learned from our pre-emptive invasion of next-door neighbor Iraq: if you have the bomb you are immune from an invasion; if you don’t have it, you may get hit to prevent the development of those weapons.

The shame of it all is that our Iraqi campaign has so weakened us - militarily, financially, politically and especially credibility-wise - that we cannot lead the world campaign against this Tehran regime. Simply stated, Bush shot his wad on Saddam and is no longer credible to sound the alarm bells again about ‘regime change’ or WMDs in another Mid-Eastern country.

And, boy, do the Iranians know it! Not only did President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cite Bush’s falling approval ratings on CBS’ SIXTY MINUTES two weeks ago, but their former President Khatami, touring the US this week, repeatedly cites “Bush’s declining popularity” as a sign that our campaign against Tehran is not working.

All of this has come about because GW Bush did not think through the long-term ramifications of our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. It was - and is - inevitable that the removal of a strongman (Saddam) would result in not only civil strife but a vacuum into which Iran has gleefully stepped.

Furthermore, it was foreseeable that an emboldened Iran would exploit a weakened US.

All of this is happening now - and nothing will change until after our 2008 presidential elections when we and the world will see what is the will of the American people.

3) The political establishment in Israel is in a shambles because of their pathetic conflict with Hezbollah. Utter turmoil has taken over.

Whoever would have ‘thunk’ that Israel would be caught flat-footed by an Arab guerilla group?

But they were - and this once-great military and intelligence establishment has grown fat and too-happy-to-rely on high tech equipment which by itself will not root out motivated, well-trained Arab fighters.

Make no mistake about it: Israel is in serious trouble. That country’s future is indeed endangered by a growing nuclear capability in Iran and in the precarious position of the Pakistani government.

Wiping Israel “off the map” - as many Muslim leaders have said - is their ultimate goal.

Could yet another ‘Holocaust’ really happen?

Yes, it could.

Israel better get its act in gear - and soon.