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Bob Dole Rips Scott McClellan Apart

The Politico reports on a letter that Bob Dole sent yesterday to Scott McClellan just eviscerating the guy (Bob Dole unloads on McClellan). They took the additional (smart) step of authenticating the validity of the letter with Dole's office before writing about it:

"There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues," Dole wrote in a message sent yesterday morning. "No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique."

Michael Marshall, Dole's spokesman and colleague at the Alston Bird law firm, confirms the message came from the former senator and presidential candidate.   "Yes, it is authentic," Marshall wrote in an email.

"In my nearly 36 years of public service I've known of a few like you," Dole writes, recounting his years representing Kansas in the House and Senate.  "No doubt you will 'clean up' as the liberal anti-Bush press will promote your belated concerns with wild enthusiasm. When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, 'Biting The Hand That Fed Me.' Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years"

Dole assures McClellan that he won't read the book --  "because if all these awful things were happening, and perhaps some may have been, you should have spoken up publicly like a man, or quit your cushy, high profile job"

"That would have taken integrity and courage but then you would have had credibility and your complaints could have been aired objectively," Dole concludes.  "You’re a hot ticket now but don’t you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?"

He signs the email simply: "BOB DOLE"

Heh...

Media Celebrates Armed Forces Suicide Rate

The mainstream media is again playing with numbers to attack the war effort and the troops, bringing out an alarmist article about record high suicide rates in the Armed Forces (Soldier suicides hit highest rate, 115 last year). Any suicide, either civilian or military, is a tragedy - it's shameful to attack the war effort in such a transparent way. I say that it's an intentional attack because of the way the article is formated - it leaves out very important statistics that put the military numbers into context until well into the story (the very end in the version that showed up in my paper, the Providence Journal), and does so in a sly way in order to question the legitimacy of the statistic ("The Army said..."). It also doesn't give you enough demographic information to allow readers to do a little investigating by themselves. Here's the lede:

WASHINGTON - Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007 at the highest rate on record, and the toll is climbing ever higher this year as long war deployments stretch on. At least 115 soldiers killed themselves last year, up from 102 the previous year, the Army said Thursday.

Nearly a third of them died at the battlefront — 32 in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. But 26 percent had never deployed to either conflict.

Here are paragraphs 8 and 9:

Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice ending this year.

The 115 confirmed suicides among active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated amounted to a rate of 18.8 per 100,000 troops — the highest since the Army began keeping records in 1980. Two other deaths are suspected suicides but still under investigation.

And here's paragraphs 15 and 16, which puts everything into perspective. Even with the increased number, the suicide rate for the Armed Forces appears to be slightly lower than that of rate for the general population in the same demographic group. In addition, the military suicide rate rise since 1980 isn't unique to that group - it's also been rising in the general population. Also note that the author leads the relevant statistics with a much lower statistic revealing suicide rates of the overall population. That's bound to be much lower, since the demographic group for the highest suicide rates, in or out of the military, is younger adults - especially males. They do that to heighten the drama, apparently:

Suicides have been rising nearly each year of the five-year-old war in Iraq and the nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan. The 115 deaths last year and 102 in 2006 followed 85 in 2005 and 67 in 2004. The rate of 18.8 per 100,000 last year compared to a rate of 17.5 in 2006 and 9.8 in 2002 — the first full year after the start of the war in Afghanistan.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the suicide rate for U.S. society overall was about 11 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest year for which the agency has figures. The Army said that when civilian rates are adjusted to cover the same age and gender mix that exists in the Army, the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000.

Even those paragraphs are not accurate. The last year that we have national suicide numbers for is 2005, as even a cursory search on the Internet will show. And we don't know the demographics used, which would be helpful.

Unfortunately, I have close personal experiences with suicides and suicide attempts, which is why I take this stuff so seriously. You'd be surprised at how many suicides occur even in your own neighborhoods. Also, I have close police friends who sometimes share with me their first respondent stories. That's why whenever I see an obituary, particularly one of a younger person, that starts off with "so-and-so died unexpectedly at home" I say an extra prayer - often those are the suicides. Not publishing it as such is not really a cover-up - it's done to protect the survivors and friends, and the appropriate authorities know what happened. Parents, in particular, don't need the fact that a child committed suicide plastered all over the news.

Suicide is a terrible, terrible thing. The media shouldn't play politics with it.

 

The Existential Scott McClellan

Two more great columns on Scott McClellan. The first is by George Neumayr over at The American Spectator, Scott on the Rocks.

The talking point du jour from the White House regarding Scott McClellan's surprisingly non-bland memoir is that "this is not the Scott we knew." Actually, it is.

What's likely is that just as the White House pushed him to make statements he couldn't cobble together on his own, so too did the editor for this book, What Happened.

At least that's what I deduced from Ari Fleischer's Wednesday night interview with CNN's Campbell Brown. Fleischer said that he asked McClellan if he had worked with a ghostwriter on the book. McClellan said no, according to Fleischer, but allowed that his editor had "tweaked" some of his copy.

"Tweaked" probably means massively rewrote. And if so, why should this surprise the White House? Why is the White House surprised that a dullard they manipulated could also be manipulated by a book editor?

Exhibit A of the thesis of McClellan's guided book is McClellan himself. Why did Bush hire him in the first place?

Some of these defections are due to caginess; this is one probably just due to cluelessness. A sharp and opportunistic book editor probably saw in McClellan an effective puppet and McClellan went along with it.

The next is an insightful piece by Peter Wehner over at NRO, Scott’s Truth vs. Reality. Wehner actually has the book in his hands, and notes that McClellan used a bit of post-modern parsing when describing what happened while he 'wrote' his memoir:

I want to draw particular attention to a paragraph that appears in his preface:

"Writing it wasn’t easy. Some of the best advice I received as I began came from a senior editor at a publishing house that expressed interest in my book. He said the hardest challenge for me would be to keep questioning my own beliefs and perceptions throughout the writing process. His advice was prescient. I’ve found myself continually questioning my own thinking, my assumptions, my interpretations of events. Many of the conclusions I’ve reached are quite different from those I would have embraced at the start of the process. The quest for truth has been a struggle for me, but a rewarding one. I don’t claim a monopoly on truth. But after wrestling with my experiences over the past several months, I’ve come much closer to my truth than ever before." (p. xi)

[Emphasis in original.]

This is a very postmodern outlook that subordinates actual truth for “my” truth. And the validation for “my truth” is not anything objective; it is, rather, based on sentiments which — we see clearly in the case of Scott — can shift like the wind. But what appears to be Scott’s existential journey has led him to make sweeping and reckless allegations that are at odds with reality. He would have us believe that the Bush administration was, at bottom, massively and deeply deceitful and corrupt — but this has only dawned on Scott since he started writing his book, years after the fact. Let’s just say that for these revelations to spring forth as if truth were like a time-released capsule, in which things magically get clearer with the passage of time (and the signing of book contracts), is, well, suspicious. And my former colleagues are absolutely right to point out that Scott not only never raised any objections contemporaneously, in meetings or with his superiors; in fact, he said almost nothing at all, at any time, about anything of consequence.

Ah yes, Scott talks about "my truth", as opposed to the more familiar "truth" that the rest of humanity is familiar with - a "truth" that doesn't contain qualifiers. Scott's subjective rather than our objective truth.

McClellan's turning out to be more delusional than I thought. I predict that when other occurrences like this happen in the future to someone else - when someone fails miserably at his or her job and goes on to publicly fabricate an alternate reality to justify his or her failings, it will be known as "pulling a McClellan".

Oil Prices: Speculation and "Peak Oil Theory"

Investors Business Daily has an interesting editorial this morning on some of the causes of the present high oil prices, Peak Oil: An Idea Whose Time Is Up.

Some analysts believe that investors who have swallowed the peak oil theory are pricing oil higher because they fear the world is running out of crude and permanent shortages are nigh. They shouldn't believe it.

The peak oil theory was popularized by Shell Oil geophysicist M. King Hubbert. He predicted in a 1956 paper that U.S. oil production would peak by the early 1970s and then decline sharply. The peak oilers — many of whom quietly want the world to run out of oil — say he was right. But they're missing some key points.

Yes, domestic output has peaked. But it peaked at a level 13% above what Hubbert predicted. And the peak wasn't followed by a falling-off-the-table decline. Output rose after a temporary slide.

The problem with "peak oil" is that it assumes that oil output would be down because oil is running out. That's not the case, especially with U.S. oil production. We have plenty of domestic oil - we're just not allowed to tap into it.

U.S. production is trending down again, but it's not because there's no oil. It's due to shortsighted policies that prevent the industry from drilling for the almost 100 billion barrels of crude known to be under Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and beneath the oceans just off of America's coasts. It's because politics and political correctness block the development of Big Sky state oil shale fields, where as much as 2 trillion barrels of crude, by some estimates, sit idle.

It's possible that rather than falling for the peak oil theory, investors simply are considering the reality that Congress has done nothing to increase crude output, and that continuing on that foolish path will indeed bring shortages.

And total world output is actually growing - the International Energy Agency estimates that output will grow from a present 85 million barrels a day to 115 million barrels a day in the next seven years. And what about the question of just how much untapped known oil reserves are left?

Cambridge Energy Research Associates argues that the remaining global oil resource base is 3.74 trillion barrels. That's more than triple the peak oil estimate of 1.2 trillion barrels. CERA also has noted that output will not fall as quickly as peak oil alarmists think.

...By the way, this estimate doesn't even consider undiscovered and untapped oil fields. Nor are unconventional sources, such as shale oil, part of the equation.

The bottom line - high oil prices are being caused by our own self-limitation on pursuing domestic oil resources, coupled with commodity price speculation that drives prices higher and higher.

I wonder when Congress is going to investigate itself - and hedge fund oil commodity speculators like George Soros?

While The Dems in Congress Stall, Pentagon and Troops Go Begs

The Politico reports that the Pentagon is now begging Congress for the authority to shift money around to pay for our troops in the field. Why? Because the Democrats haven't passed the Emergency War Supplemental yet.

The Department of Defense asked Congress on Wednesday for the authority to transfer $9.7 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Congress continues to debate a massive war supplemental spending bill.

The Pentagon said the emergency request to borrow or transfer funds from other areas was necessary because Congress has not yet finished its work on the massive bill, which would provide over $160 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through next year.

“Congressional approval of this $9.7 billion reprogramming [request] will only allow another few weeks of operations until the department as a whole runs out of critical funding,” read a statement posted Thursday on the Department of Defense website.

“Should Congress fail to pass the [war supplemental] by mid-July, the department will have exhausted all military personnel and operations funding and will, at minimum, be unable to make payroll for both military and civilian personnel throughout the department.

That's nice. No soldiers get paid after the 15th of July, because the Democrats are more interested in scoring election year political points than they are in supporting the troops. How sweet of the Democrats to show their support this way.

I'm sure that this story will be on the front pages of all of the newspapers this morning...

Interesting Background on Scott McClellan's Book

Brent Bozell's Media Research Center did a little bit of investigating on the people behind Scott McClellan's new memoir, and found that 1) a reliably far-left writer and publisher, Peter Osnos, worked closely with McClellan and McClellan's editor (Lisa Kaufman) on the book, and 2) the liberal publishing house of McClellan's book, PublicAffairs, is under the same publishing umbrella as Nation Books, a subsidiary of The Nation Institute - the publisher of the far-Left The Nation magazine. Public Affairs also seems to be George Soros' de facto house publisher.

With creative associations like that, it's no wonder how the book turned out the way it did. The simple fact of the matter is that PublicAffairs bought Scott McClellan. I'm not sure if it took much - Scotty was such a terrible Press Secretary that his memoirs probably didn't get much interest from any of the respectable publishing houses. Here's some of what MRC and Brent Bozell found:

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he "worked very closely" with Scott McClellan on McClellan's new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros. On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Ari Fleischer related that "Scott told me that his editor did 'tweak,' in Scott's word, a lot of the writing, especially in the last few months." In an "Eat the Press" blog entry Wednesday, Rachel Sklar asked Osnos: "Did you work directly on the book with McClellan? (Who was his editor?)" Osnos replied: "The editor was Lisa Kaufman and yes, I worked very closely with them."

A reporter and editor at the Washington Post during the 1970s and 1980s before going into book publishing, Osnos pens a weekly column for the left of center The Century Foundation. In a March column he denounced Rush Limbaugh as "bombastic, aggressive, and mean," bemoaning how the late William F. Buckley Jr. left behind "a right-wing culture that tends to be as coarse and leaden as his demeanor could be buoyant," charging Buckley provided "unfortunate cover to others who followed with a spirit that was distinctly and consistently malevolent."

In contrast, he hailed the late left-wing columnist Molly Ivins and wished she had more impact: "In the contest for power in America, Molly Ivins had a good perch in her column, nearly perfect pitch, and, alas, too little influence." Ruminating this week about the Kennedy family's legacy in the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy's cancer diagnosis, Osnos asserted that "we are a distinctly better country for the message" which "Ted conveyed about our priorities as a people."

Amongst the authors Osnos has worked with at PublicAffairs and previously at Random House: Wesley Clark, Vernon Jordan, Robert McNamara, Andy Rooney, George Soros, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Rosalyn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Sam Donaldson, Morley Safer, Molly Ivins and William Greider. Hard to find more than a few conservative names in the PublicAffairs list of authors: www.publicaffairsbooks.com

At the moment, a George Soros book is displayed alongside the McClellan tome at the top of the PublicAffairs home page.

PublicAffairs is part of the Perseus Books Group, which also owns Nation Books, "a project of The Nation Institute" which publishes the magazine of the same name, and Vanguard Press, whose home page now features The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, a new book by Vincent Bugliosi that "presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq."

To get a fair idea of exactly where McClellan is coming from, thoughtful thinkers should read all of the MRC report. It's a nice circle of friends that McClellan now surrounds himself with.

Scott McClellan used the President as his very own rich uncle, lashing himself to Bush's coattails early on in Texas. McClellan's performance as Press Secretary was below miserable - and he knew it. After losing both his job and his sugar daddy, he needed to find a replacement. He discovered one in the political far-left, and sold his soul to seal the deal.

By writing, or allowing to be written, this particular type of book, McClellan has also put his cowardice on public display. If what he writes is true, he was obligated by his position to make others aware of his concerns - and to resign if the situation did not resolve itself to his liking. Other Press Secretaries have done so.

McClellan's claims of being "sandbagged" by Scooter Libby and Karl Rove in the "outing" of Valerie Plame seem particularly silly, since the resulting investigation showed that it was not the White House, but the Secretary of State's office, who first leaked the Plame-Wilson connection - and that no crime had been committed by doing so. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (no friend of Libby or Rove) was the gossip spreading around the Plame info. Later testimony showed that Karl Rove merely said to Bob Novak that "oh, you know that", and Libby mentioned the same in passing during a discussion about the ineptitude of the CIA's overall performance to journalist Judith Miller. Miller later stated under oath that she didn't believe that Plame's name originally came from Libby! In addition, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald ordered witnesses and potential witnesses in Plamaquiddick not to discuss the case at all, under threat of tampering charges - a felony.

So McClellan learns that Libby and Rove were not Novak's source, which we now know is true. Then Scotty's supposedly upset that White House employees didn't discuss the matter more fully with him - although they were ordered not to by the Special Prosecutor. McClellan then alleges that Rove, Libby and others had secret meetings about Plame, although he wasn't at those meetings nor can he provide any details about them actually taking place. This is well into dementia/Moveon.org territory!

Political and financial opportunism do not make for lasting relationships. Just ask Cindy Sheehan - she was used by the Left and the media for a while, but was discarded like a used tissue when she was no longer needed - no political party, no family, no friends. Such will be the fate of Scott McClellan, for he no longer has a real home anywhere - he just doesn't realize it yet.

Oh, and I hope McClellan has fun testifying before Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler's committee. Better not perjure yourself, Scotty...

Conservatives and McCain

I've noted previously that it's astounding that in many of the respected national polls, such as Gallup and Rasmussen, John McCain is either within the margin of error or leading over both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the national race for President. But that's more a function of both Democrats being flawed candidates, rather than McCain being a great one.

Bob Novak has some interesting things to say about that in his latest "Evans-Novak Report" over at Human Events.

Sen. John McCain, however, still does not appear organized to take advantage of Democratic disarray. His biggest problem may be failure to realize that the Republican coalition is not fully united behind him. The most recent defectors are lobbyists expelled from his campaign who are not happy about their treatment. We continue to hear complaints from evangelicals, economic conservatives, and other critics of McCain. The refrain continues from conservatives that maybe the country and the GOP need four years of Obama.

...While national polls garner attention, they have no direct bearing on choosing our next President. A state-by-state count of electoral votes is the key to analyzing the presidential race.

For the first time this year, we run through all 50 states plus the District of Columbia in order to handicap the presidential race. Outlook: If the election were held today, we see a McCain victory by the narrowest of margins.

The electoral map looks nearly identical to 2004, with Iowa and Colorado swinging into the Democratic camp. Beneath the surface, however, we see Michigan and Pennsylvania becoming more competitive for Republicans.

The election will hinge on two regions: Lake Erie and the Mountain West. An Obama win in New Mexico or Nevada would be enough to tip the scales, but a McCain win in Pennsylvania could put the race out of reach. In the end, as always, it comes down to Ohio, where Obama’s weakness among rural whites could send McCain to the White House. McCain 270, Obama 268.

It's a long time until election day, and the Democrats haven't even settled on a candidate yet. I'd note that the Electoral College calculations are a best-case scenario for the Democrats, anticipating no mass defections of their base. I'm not sure that's going to be the case. If Hillary pulls a fast one, she'll lose most of the black vote. If Obama wins, he'll lose a good part of the traditional white (especially female) Democratic vote. In either case, the possibility of a big win for McCain looms large - unless the Democratic Party does a lot of healing between now and election day.

On the other side, McCain's still having problems with conservatives, for good reason. But I think Novak's dreaming if he thinks that most conservatives will sit out this election, even though that does have some appeal. Novak's been against the war since the beginning and hates Bush, and there's nothing that he'd like better than to see Bush saddled with a huge loss in the Middle East that would hurt the US and Israel. But that's not the view of most conservatives, at least other than the "paleo" variety. The war, and McCain's vow to continue winning it, might be the thing that causes most other brands of conservative to hold their noses and vote Republican for President, even if he's not an ideal choice.

Unlike Novak, they'd put love of country over love of winning an argument.

Obama's Law "Experience"

Over at NRO's Bench Memos blog, there's a discussion going on between Matthew Franck and Gerard V. Bradley about an article in the New York Times by Neil A. Lewis, Stark Contrasts Between McCain and Obama in Judicial Wars. It's really an opinion column by Lewis masquerading as an article, as Franck and Bradley both point out. Franck in particular points out an unintentionally hilarious line in Lewis' piece on the author's appreciation of Barack Obama's legal qualifications. Here's Lewis' ode to Obama, quoting a man who is angling to be one of Obama's Supreme Court nominees:

Mr. Obama, on the other hand, is a lawyer and has had a long and deep interest in the courts and the law. Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and an Obama adviser, said in an interview that because Mr. Obama had taught constitutional law for 10 years at Chicago, “he is immersed in these issues.”

“The first thing to know,” Professor Sunstein said, “is that he knows this stuff inside and out, and he has the credentials to be easily appointed to the court himself.”

For a look at the substance of those qualifications, here's Franck:

Perhaps Sunstein wants to change the subject from the ongoing discussion whether Obama has the credentials to be president.  But this is ridiculous.  For about a decade Obama taught part-time at the U. of Chicago law school, a class or two each year in constitutional law subjects, winding up with the wildly misleading title "senior lecturer," one shared by really accomplished faculty such as Judge Richard Posner.  Obama has published exactly nothing on the subject.  Even when he was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review he published nothing at all, perhaps the first of the modern student editors to remain silent in print throughout his tenure.  When he does speak on the subject he betrays no hidden depths of knowledge about the law.  (To Planned Parenthood last summer he opined, predictably, that "a woman's right to make a decision about how many children she wants to have and when—without government interference—is one of the most fundamental freedoms we have in this country"—this in criticism of the Supreme Court's deference to Congress in Gonzales v. Carhart earlier last year.)  I can confidently say that no recent Democratic president, nor any of the rivals Obama has vanquished in this year's race for the party's nomination, would ever have thought for one minute of appointing Barack Obama to the Supreme Court.  The suspicion strongly arises that Cass Sunstein would dearly love such an appointment himself, else why butter up the candidate so unctuously?

Does Barack Obama really want us to look at his tenure as a professor and lawyer? He was too busy laying the groundwork for his political career to do much of either.

As with most of Obama, there's not much there, there...

Gallup Poll 5/28/08: McCain 46% - Obama 45%

The latest daily Presidential tracking poll from Gallup shows Republican John McCain with a one point lead over Democrat Barack Obama, 46%-45%. To further complicate matters for the Democratic Party this weekend, the same poll shows Hillary Clinton beating McCain, 48%-44%.

The latest update, based on May 22-25 and May 27 Gallup Poll Daily tracking, shows Clinton with a four percentage point advantage (48% to 44%) over McCain, while Obama has gained slightly and now trails McCain by just one point. Obama has trailed McCain by as much as three points in recent days, although from a longer range perspective, the two candidates have traded the lead throughout the month. Clinton, by contrast, has held at least a small lead over McCain for most of May.

As the end to Democratic primary and caucus voting draws near (the Puerto Rico primary on June 1 and the Montana and South Dakota primaries on June 3 will be the last), Gallup Poll Daily tracking for May 24-25 and May 27 shows that Barack Obama maintains a relatively slim 6-point lead over Hillary Clinton, 50% to 44%.

With everything going on in the rudderless Republican Party these days, why both of these Democratic candidates don't have huge leads over McCain is a mystery to me.

Unless, of course, both Dems are so deeply flawed that neither can beat McCain in the fall...

From 2004: Scott McClellan on Richard Clarke

In an eerie case of self-prediction, here's a statement from a White House press conference on March 22, 2004 conducted by then Press Secretary Scott McClellan. The question refers to Richard Clarke's just released book, which told of Clarke's supposedly single-handed and heroic attempt to get the 230 day old Bush Administration to take Al Qaeda seriously before 9/11:

Q Scott, you didn't answer my question, which is, by listing all those things that he was here for, is it the President's view that, in fact, he was part of the problem, not part of the solution?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, he was this administration's counterterrorism expert up until -- well, the time that the job was separated into a cyber security position and counterterrorism position, which was something that he had suggested happen.

Q But you still didn't answer the question, it doesn't seem to me, does it?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry?

Q Does that answer the question?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think it does. He was part of our efforts to go after al Qaeda. He was a member of this team for some two years, and we appreciate the service that he provided. But --

Q Why do you think he's doing this?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let's look at the politics of it. His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy advisor to Senator Kerry's campaign. The Kerry campaign went out and immediately put these comments up on their website that Mr. Clarke made.

Et tu, Scotty? I wonder how quickly excerpts from McClellan's book will be up on the DNC, Obama, and other left wing and Democrat websites?

Oh wait, perhaps Bush made him say it!