My New America Foundation colleague Daniel Levy scores a great article in Ha’aretz suggesting that Condoleezza Rice is now a believer in and delivering on construction of “a horizon” for Palestinian-Israeli negotiated peace.
George Soros’s piece, if you have not yet read it, on “Israel, America and AIPAC,” deserves another read by this blogger.
For a laugh, watch this recruitment video for Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces. I had seen it a couple of years ago but someone sent the link recently from YouTube.
As if we needed one, here’s yet another reason to get rid of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is the “anti rule-of-law Attorney General.”
And a strong partner article to that of George Soros was written by Gary Kamiya at Salon.com titled “Can American Jews Unplug the Israel Lobby”
And then. . .Wow. . .David Ignatius wallops the Bush administration for its disdain of America’s hard-working, solid civil servants. Here’s the whole piece, but after reporting a short roster of obituaries of career civil servants in the Post op-ed pages, Ignatius writes:
What infuriates me about the Bush administration is its disdain for people like these. You sense that scorn reading the e-mails that have surfaced in the flap over the firings of U.S. attorneys. I don’t think the story is much of a scandal. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and he can fire whomever he wants. What interests me about the Justice e-mails is that they are a piece of sociology, documenting the mind-set of the young hotshots and ideologues who populate the Bush administration.
Here’s Kyle Sampson, now-deposed chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, griping about a U.S. attorney in Phoenix who had the effrontery to want to make his case personally: “In the ‘you won’t believe this category,’ Paul Charlton would like a few minutes of the AG’s time.” And here’s Brent Ward, the director of a Justice Department task force who made his name as an anti-pornography crusader grumbling that he doesn’t want to deal with the U.S. attorney in Las Vegas: “To go out to LV and sit and listen to the lame excuses of a defiant U.S. attorney is only going to move this whole enterprise closer to catastrophe.”
The Bush political operatives have become the people the Republicans once warned the country against — a club of insiders who seem to think that they’re better than other folks. They are so contemptuous of government and the public servants who populate it that they have been unable to govern effectively. They are a smug, inward-looking elite that thinks it knows who the good guys are by the political labels they wear.
More later.
— Steve Clemons
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