Don's Snowflakes

You know that guy at the office, Mr. Passive-Aggressive? Never says what he thinks in a meeting but then sends e-mails around dissing everybody and taking credit for their ideas? What if he's running the Pentagon? Condi Rice, President Bush's first-term national security adviser, wastes little time in her new memoir, No Higher Honor, before getting to the nub of her and and Secretary of State Colin Powell's problems with Don Rumsfeld:

Don would send memos (snowflakes, we called them) that implicitly -- and sometimes explicitly -- criticized what State or the NSC was doing. Often those memos reflected discussions that had already taken place, but they left the impression that it was Don imparting new wisdom or making an important recommendation. In meetings, he would ask Socratic questions rather than take a position.

Hawks' Follies

At the "American Conservative," Daniel Larison rebuts those who say President Obama is on a foreign policy roll but saves his sternest words for the prior regime:

[T]he Bush administration oversaw setback after failure after defeat for American influence and power. Iran has become a far more influential regional power thanks to the folly of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, democracy fetishists helped to strengthen the hold of Hamas in Gaza to the detriment of Palestinians and Israelis, and Russophobes helped to encourage Saakashvili’s recklessness with talk of NATO membership and provoked Russian ire with the recognition of Kosovo that led to the de facto permanent partition of an American ally. Hawks have routinely unleashed forces they do not understand, cannot control and are unwilling to contain, and they still have the gall to shout “Appeasement!” when someone else tries to repair some small measure of the damage they have done. Compared to this partial list of Bush’s major failures, Obama has done reasonably well simply by not persisting in some of his predecessor’s errors, but it is far too early to speak of success or payoff and it is a mistake to measure Obama’s success in the way that his supporters wish to do.

Hat tip to the "Daily Dish"

The New Knitters

While it's always dangerous to speculate about motives, Michael Barone's assessment of why some people want Bush officials prosecuted rings true:

Whence cometh the fury of these people? I think it arises less from revulsion at interrogation techniques -- who thinks that captured al-Qaida leaders should be treated politely and will then tell the full truth? -- than it does from a desire to see George W. Bush and Bush administration officials publicly humiliated and repudiated. Just as Madame Defarge relished watching the condemned walk from the tumbrel to the guillotine, our contemporary Defarges want to see the people they hate condemned and destroyed.

Bush critics may well respond that their anger over torture isn't opportunistic. Instead, they'd say, the alleged abuses were the inevitable consequence of a mentality of lawlessness typifying the Bush administration from the beginning -- the original sin, of course, being the allegedly stolen 2000 election. In the same way, for many of Richard Nixon's most entrenched antagonists, the narrative that began with the Alger Hiss case was perfected in Watergate. It was in his nature, the argument goes. We should've known from the beginning. Why didn't they listen to us? As I've learned in a half-lifetime promoting the pro-Nixon nuances, it's almost impossible to dissuade those who have such fixed attitudes. Whether they should determine the structure and course of a sober national debate on torture is one of President Obama's many difficult tactical challenges.

The Only Fair Bushwacking

Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder invite us to read carefully what Obama adviser David Axelrod says about the possibility of prosecuting those who may have broken the law in authorizing interrogation techniques that could be construed as torture. I think they're reading too much into it. Axelrod's comment sounds like a boilerplate anchor to windward. But if they're right, and he is hinting at war crimes trials for Bush administration officials, will we also have the opportunity to learn the details of all the terrorist plots foiled on their watch?

Besides:

President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.

Different Memes Entirely

Andrew Sullivan suggests that conservative bloggers are being hypocritical for savaging the Obama administration's alarmist though unverifiable statements about right-wing extremism while ignoring reports that during the Bush administration the NSA may have broken the law by collecting too much electronic data.

I'm all for political ironies, but this one doesn't wash. There's no question that some in the Bush administration lost perspective after Sept. 11. We need thorough investigations by journalists and historians of how we ended up in Iraq and probably by a government commission of the administration's dalliance with torture. But I never felt threatened by electronic eavesdropping, because I never had the remotest suspicion that Bush was interested in anything besides possible terrorist connections. If Bush and his team overreached, it was to protect the interests of the United States and the lives of innocent Americans.

I do feel threatened (offended is a better word) by the Obama administration's suggestion that if I want lower federal income taxes, I'm a potential Timothy McVeigh. President Obama and his advocates might say that it somehow helps the country to stigmatize the right, but it really has to do with the appropriations debates and the 2010 elections. So in the end, when comparing memes, motives may matter most.