Prometheus 6

McClellan's book, titled "What Happened," isn't due out until next spring. But his publisher, Public Affairs, gave us the juiciest of advance tidbits: McClellan is still angry that his bosses sent him out to swear that Rove or Libby were not involved in the Valerie Plame leak, even though they knew that was a lie. Here's the money quote: "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

Do not write stories about upcoming political books by Conservative authors and Bushista insiders until you have the book in your hands.

What Holiday from History?
By Kurt Campbell

...This contemporary conservative myth-making is one of the essential features of modern Republicanism, and pains have beentaken to devote sufficient resources not simply to shape future debates but to rewrite old ones.

Take for instance the president’s characterization of the 1990’s during his second inaugural address, just as the hopes of a new bipartisan approach to the new global challenges were fading in the wind: “After the shipwreck of communism,” Bush declared, “came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical – and then there came a day of fire.” The language perfectly captures the Bushist critique of the Democrats; elitist in their university cocoons or trial lawyer firms, fundamentally lazy, and lucky too. Thank God Republicans were finally back in power when things got serious on 9/11.

Yet this picture of being lost in the 1990’s, of a Gatsby-like holiday from history during a fun-filled and frolicking interwar period, ignores all of the drama that played out almost exclusively in America’s favor during this supposedly relaxed decade. Indeed, the 1990’s involved enormous and important good works internationally and helped set the scene for continued American power on the global stage. Increasingly, the first Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration can be seen in retrospect as essentially fitting together to complete a decade of accomplishment that paints President George W. Bush’s subsequent term in office as an outlier.

Together, Bush 41 and Clinton labored to create a new Europe through three essential efforts, notably the multifaceted elements associated with the unification of Germany, the creation of new institutions like the Partnership for Progress (PFP) and NATO expansion that knitted the newly free states of Central and Eastern Europe into the security mechanisms of the West, and the belated but ultimately successful efforts to stand up to ethnic cleansing and Balkan outrages in Bosnia and Kosovo. North Korean nuclear efforts were at least delayed and largely stymied. The United States deployed aircraft carriers to the western Pacific to send a clear message of resolve and resolution to the Chinese leadership in the midst of their military saber-rattling against Taiwan.