Would You Like to Write for the Washington Post? Try Being a Thoroughly Discredited Ex-Bushite
So you know the Washington Post fired lovable liberal-ish White House blogger Dan Froomkin(!). But there is good news: they are still giving column inches to non-journalist Bush appointees!
Today's op-ed page features Iraq architect and Reagan-era friend-to-dictators Paul Wolfowitz, who should never be heard from, ever, ever again, on any topic, because lost any and all foreign policy credibility he might've ever once been thought to possess even before he was forced to resign from the Wold Bank after giving his girlfriend a raise. He would like to talk about Iran. Specifically, the man who probably actually hoped Ahmadinejad would win so that we could go to war with Iran would like President Barack Obama to aid the oppressive regime's claims that the opposition is a foreign-sponsored threat to the nation's independence by making some sort of public statement about it, or something.
What he actually wants Obama to do is unclear. He would like him to be more like Reagan, who didn't know what to do when his buddy Ferdinand Marcos' regime collapsed, but who then eventually decided to let Marcos flee the nation after discouraging him from killing too many protesters. A real profile in courage.
That does not mean that we need to pick sides in an Iranian election or claim to know its result. Obama could send a powerful message simply by placing his enormous personal prestige behind the peaceful conduct of the demonstrators and their demand for reform — exactly the kind of peaceful, democratic change that he praised in his speech in Cairo.
Yes, abandon neutrality, Mr. President, and issue another statement that won't help anyone in Iran politely asking them not to kill any more demonstrators!
And oh, hey, what's this? It is an editorial from former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden! He is famous for things like illegal warrantless domestic wiretapping. He is very sad that Phil Mudd, "a career CIA analyst with superb credentials and extensive experience in the counterterrorism mission," was not allowed to be the undersecretary of homeland security for intelligence and analysis. Because of those damned BLOGGERS.
It will not be. Rather than go through the gantlet that we call the confirmation process, Phil decided to skip what he feared would be a "circus." The blogosphere had already begun to light up with commentary about his unsuitability for the post. His sin? Phil had been the deputy director of CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center and its chief analyst at the height of the agency's counterattack against al-Qaeda — those first years after Sept. 11, 2001, when the agency felt it had to use all the tools at its disposal to learn more about and eventually disrupt follow-on al-Qaeda attacks. Phil's personal involvement in the most controversial tactics was no more than "modest engagement," but he was conscientiously tasking all possible sources of information and faithfully connecting the dots as everyone expected him to do.
The fact that a guy who wanted to be a political appointee in the field of intelligence gathering and who was aware of and "modestly engaged" in fucking torture at the CIA refuses to have to explain to anyone in Congress what his definition of "torture" might be is proof, to Michael Hayden, that the confirmation process is broken, because of the bloggers. Boo hoo!
So yeah it is one thing to fire a perceptive and independent and ridiculously hard-working guy whom you've already ghettoized to your website because the precious print real estate belongs to million-year-old "centrists" and raging right-wingers, but it is actually way more annoying to fire him and then let discredited vile partisans guilty of various crimes against this nation pen viciously dishonest partisan op-eds on whatever pet topics they wish.