Posted 10:28 AM by Robert

Mickey Weighs In, and This Time He’s Naming Names and Taking Off The Gloves!

UPDATE: Mr. Adranga says that he's "through debating Mr. 'Musil'..." This before Mickey Kaus had even had his say and while the Man Without Qualities was very clear that urgent Cub Scout matters had taken precedence over all but the most preliminary response to Mr. Adragna's prior post!

But I won't be taking Mr. Adranga's pre-emptive refusal to respond into account, since the issues are significant and it's not as if my reply will be changing my standards, or be inconsistent with what I've posted previously on the same subject or be what the Federal Rules of Evidence call "cumulative" in nature - or extend an inappropriate prior post. But, in any event, now Mr. Adranga has Mr. Kaus to play with - so he can take his ball and go over to Mickey's yard.

Mickey Kaus weighs in on the question of September 11 intelligence failure culpability, and he’s nobody’s sweetheart:

“Instead of trying to silence Democratic critics as per se unpatriotic, why don't the Bushies forcefully point out how misguided leftish ideology -- supported over the years mainly by Democrats and the media --contributed greatly to the 9/11 failure. Exhibit A: The FBI appears to have been actually deterred by the prospect that it would have been accused of ethnic profiling if it had searched all U.S. flight schools for Arab terrorists. In particular, it seems to have been stung by Wen Ho Lee's highly-publicized charges that he was singled out for prosecution because of his ethnicity. Exhibit B: Dukakis-like civil-libertarian concern with the privacy rights of non-citizens produced a statute with what now seems an excessively high standard of "probable cause" the FBI had to meet before it could obtain the Moussaoui search warrant. Why do I suspect that some of the alien-defending, privacy-protecting statements of .. oh, let's say Senator Leahy on this subject might prove embarrassing if publicized today? Again, the FBI can be faulted in large part for actually (and unexpectedly) internalizing the ACLU's values.”

And just what is that makes Mr. Kaus suspect that the "alien-defending, privacy-protecting statements" of Senator Leahy might prove embarrassing? Just what might have stimulated that Kaussian thought? Could it be anything that's appeared in this little parsec of the Galaxy?

To propose an answer to Mr. Kaus' question: It has long been the belief of the Man Without Qualities that the Bushies have not attacked the record of both the Congressional Democrats and prior Democratic Administrations because the Bushies think that the best way to defend America and fulfill the obligations of the office of the President is to avoid partisan fighting on topics of national security - especially in connection with September 11. This is a variation on one of the worst mistakes of his father's administration: thinking the Democrats would act responsibly to protect the interests of the nation. The President should really know a lot better than that. But, then, maybe he does know - and is counting on the voters to figure it out, too.

Kausfiiles makes lots of excellent new observations and also cites to the interesting ultraspin effort by Seymour Hersh and William Safire’s current column on the topic.

Read! Enjoy! Send letters of protest to Senator Leahy!