FDR liked his martinis

Timothy Egan makes the connection between consumption of adult beverages in the White House and the competency of the first resident.

Another Oval Office abstainer was William Howard Taft, who made such a mess of his single term that he came in third when he tried to get re-elected in 1912. Food was Taft’s vice; he ballooned to nearly 350 pounds at one point.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was a martini drinker, much to Eleanor’s displeasure, and an extraordinary president. Again, was there a connection? Solving a Great Depression and crushing the Nazi war machine — aided by the oft-besotted Winston Churchill — is a pretty strong brief.
In his younger days, F.D.R. knew how to plan ahead. He had four cases of Old Reserve delivered to his town house on East 65th Street just before Prohibition went into effect.
Which brings us to the Great Experiment, 1920 to 1933, when fanatics outlawed an accepted public behavior that had existed since well before Jesus changed water into wine to keep a wedding party going at Cana. Prohibition, W. C. Fields recalled, was a time “when I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”
According to Daniel Okrent, author of “Last Call,” Herbert Hoover once had a large wine cellar. His wife gave it all away before Hoover’s disastrous single term. Hmmm.

 The connection between Hoover, Carter, and Bush the younger is clear.

Marc Thiessen, evil chicken shit

That's basically today's shorter Thomas Ricks.

The warrantless wiretap decision

A judge's decision to declare the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping illegal poses a huge challenge for Eric Holder and Barack Obama.

There are some reasons that the administration might appeal, legal specialists said. Among them, it may not want Judge Walker’s narrow interpretation of the state secrets privilege to stand because it might influence other cases, and appealing on those narrow grounds would allow the administration to still avoid engaging on whether the program was legal.

In addition, the administration may fear political attacks from the right if it agrees to pay damages to the plaintiffs, which include an Islamic charity in Oregon, Al Haramain, which the government has said had links to Al Qaeda. (The charity is defunct and its assets are frozen, however.)

But several legal specialists said that the administration may instead want to let the ruling stand. That would terminate a case that has been a political headache for the administration since the month after Mr. Obama took office, when the Justice Department’s decision to keep pressing forward with the Bush administration’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in the matter created an uproar among liberals.

A decision not to appeal would also ensure that the ruling against the government went no higher than a district court judge’s decision, which — unlike one by an appeals court — would not set a binding precedent.

“This is a very hard decision for them,” said John P. Elwood, a Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration. “The thing that makes it hard to appeal is that they apparently are of two minds about it and don’t want to be pinned down on what they think of it now, but also the fact that they might end up with just as bad a precedent from the court one rung up.”

Still, if the administration lets the judgment stand, Mr. Holder — who in 2008 said Mr. Bush had authorized the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program in “direct defiance of federal law” — would be left with a ruling from a federal judge that such warrantless wiretapping by government officials was illegal. That could prompt calls to begin a criminal investigation. It is a felony to violate the surveillance law requiring warrants.

On the campaign trail, Obama declared that the Bush's surveillance of U.S. citizens without a warrant was "unconstitutional and illegal." Holder, before becoming the AG, said more or less the same thing. Now they have to decide if they still want to hold those positions.

There is no easy answer here now. Another fetid mess left over from the Bush administration. All we can do is stay tuned. But I will point out something that I hope is painfully obvious to the administration already, they will face "political attacks from the right" regardless of what they decide to do.

Satiricy

Remember when a White House's idea of a good joke was a video about Barney the dog looking for WMD? Good times.

Shilling for shell

Oh, government investigators, be serious. How can you accuse Gail Norton of thinking about working for an oil industry giant when she was the secretary of interior and in charge of granting drilling leases? She never stopped working for the industry when she was named to the post.

I mean, get real.

Schadenfreude

The wiki page for that most savory of emotions includes a reference to The Three Stooges. Seems fitting.

Some event in Washington

Ah, The Corner.

4. I thought Obama did the minimum about Bush — the barest minimum: “I thank him for his service,” or something. He could have done a lot more: not with more words, but with better, truer, more gracious words. Bush has certainly done a lot. For one thing, he is passing on to his successor the means with which to fight the War on Terror.

Obama should, of course, have vowed to "stay the course."

But then, Obama did call out Bush with "truer" words, and Jay Nordlinger doesn't like it a bit.

7. Obama talked about “restoring science to its rightful place.” I thought that was a cheap, stupid shot. The opinion-makers will love it, of course.

8. He suggested — more like said — that Bush had jettisoned American ideals in order to pursue security. That is a slander, pure and simple. Slandering your predecessor is not a good way to start a presidency.

But in between there is this little walk down memory lane.

5. Obama said something like, “It’s time to quit putting off the unpleasant decisions.” Geez: Making unpleasant decisions, in both the domestic and foreign spheres, was Bush’s specialty. In fact, he sacrificed a good deal of political popularity because of it.

Funny, that's not how I'll remember his administration.

To understand this link between today's financial crisis and Bush's wider national security decisions, we need to go back to 9/11 itself. From the very outset, the president described the "war on terror" as a vast undertaking of paramount importance. But he simultaneously urged Americans to carry on as if there were no war. "Get down to Disney World in Florida," he urged just over two weeks after 9/11. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Bush certainly wanted citizens to support his war -- he just wasn't going to require them actually to do anything. The support he sought was not active but passive. It entailed not popular engagement but popular deference. Bush simply wanted citizens (and Congress) to go along without asking too many questions.

"Mistakes, I've made a few..."

It seems that the only mistakes Bush seems to admit to are those related to "sending the wrong message."

But it was in that area that he also acknowledged mistakes. He said that "not finding weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment." The accusation that Saddam had and was pursuing weapons of mass destruction was Bush's main initial justification for going to war.

He also cited the abuses found to have been committed by members of the U.S. military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as "a huge disappointment."

"I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were — things didn't go according to plan, let's put it that way," Bush said.

And he admitted another miscalculation: Eager to report quick progress after U.S. troops ousted Saddam's government, he declared less than two months after the war started that "in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed," a claim made under a "Mission Accomplished" banner that turned out to be wildly optimistic. "Clearly, putting `Mission Accomplished' on an aircraft carrier was a mistake," he said Monday. "It sent the wrong message."

He also defended his decision in 2007 to send an additional 30,000 American troops to Iraq to knock down violence levels and stabilize life there.

"The question is, in the long run, will this democracy survive, and that's going to be a question for future presidents," he said.

On another issue destined to figure prominently in his legacy, Bush said he has "thought long and hard about Katrina — you know could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge." Bush was criticized for flying over the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and waiting until four days after it hit to visit the scene.

The White House never was more than a vast Public Relations organization for the man.

Wise leadership?

The timing of this story is certainly interesting, coming just over a week before a new administration takes over. Did Bush really make the decision to not permit Israel to bomb Iran?

WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.

This account of the expanded American covert program and the Bush administration’s efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on Iran emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear inspectors and European and Israeli officials. None would speak on the record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence developed on Iran.

Because giving the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt is a fool's game, this has the feel of the Bush Legacy Project. Why else give away these details? Nevertheless, if true, it's a rare instance when the Bush administration opted for restraint, knowing that if Israel used Iraq air space to hit Iran, the U.S. would be seen as complicit in another attack on a Muslim country.

The decider

Steve Benen has already remarked on the cluelessness of Josh Bolten and Steve Hadley in their interview with The Post. They seem to think that if only the American public knew George W. Bush like they know George W. Bush, then his popularity would be sky high, but in reality, it isn't Bush's personality that turned 67% of the country against him, it was his policies and actions.

But this is just unintentionally hilarious.

"One of the mythologies," Hadley said, "is that it was the vice president that somehow was pulling the strings on foreign policy in the first term and made it very ideologically driven and that somehow in the second term, the vice president's influence is in decline and, therefore, somehow the real Bush has come forward, and we have a more pragmatic foreign policy."

"That's just hooey -- it's just hooey," the ever-polite Hadley concluded, with the strongest language he would muster for print. (Bolten chuckled and suggested earthier epithets, such as "bunk.")

But at the same time, Bolten said that one of his goals when he took over as chief of staff in the spring of 2006 was to put Bush back at the center of decision-making. From both officials' perspective, the administration got into trouble when aides tried to make big decisions without involving the president.

"He's a good decision-maker," Bolten said. "If it's important enough to be a presidential issue, we ought to expose the president to more information and more views, and we ought to let him decide."

The Post's Abramowitz fails to ask the obvious follow-up: if big decisions were being made without the involvement of the president, who was making them?

Multiple choice answers

A U.S. diplomat says Russia plans to "test" the new Obama administration.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Russia has become more rigid in dealing with the United States on issues like the Bush administration’s plans for a missile shield in Europe, and it looks ready to test the administration of President-elect Barack Obama, a senior American diplomat said Wednesday.

The diplomat, John Rood, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, said that talks in Moscow this week had failed to narrow differences between Russia and the United States on the missile shield plan and suggested that Russia was pausing to take stock of the Obama team.

“They have paused with the election of a new administration in the United States, and they are looking carefully at the position of the new team,” Mr. Rood told reporters.

“My assessment is that the Russians intend to test the mettle of the new administration and the new president,” he said.

Russia’s stance on the missile shield and other issues was less flexible, Mr. Rood said, than it had been in previous talks.

Russia rejects the American position that it needs to place interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic to shield Europe and the United States from potential missile strikes from Iran.

Except...there has been no indication that Obama supports such a "missile shield," has there? Seems to me that it is Rood who is "testing" the incoming administration. Or, actually, trying to put Obama in a position in which he'll look like he's backing down from a bullying Russia if he fails to wholeheartedly support a missile shield which may or may not even work (seems the stuff of fantasy to me).

Doesn't anyone here know how to handle a bailout?

In a season of mind-boggling events, this seems particularly boggling.

It’s a $138 billion mystery.

In the early hours of Sept. 15, after the government refused to rescue the foundering Lehman Brothers, something odd happened. The Federal Reserve lent tens of billions of dollars to a subsidiary of the newly bankrupt bank.

In other words, government officials who had refused to risk taxpayers’ money on Lehman before it collapsed did just that after it collapsed.

On Monday the Fed lent the Lehman unit $87 billion through JPMorgan Chase. After being repaid on Tuesday, it lent another $51 billion — putting the bailout, arguably, in the same league as the initial $85 billion bailout for the American International Group.

This mystery loan is just one piece of the larger Lehman puzzle. Who lost Lehman? Why, and how? Three months later, those questions still nag.

Transparency. Trust. Remember those?

A prediction and a memory

Soon, very soon, I predict some columnist or pundit will loudly bemoan the fact that there has been no outrage within the Obamasotted "netroots" over the pres-elect's pragmatic, competent Cabinet choices.

Speaking of which, I had forgotten that one of Bush II's first picks was John Ashcroft for AG. A man who was available for the job because he'd lost his Senate seat to a dead man. Heckuva job.

The self-absorption administration

From Ron's Suskind's apparent stream of conscious observations on the transition.

Not every president gets an era. Bush 41 didn’t. Reagan did, F.D.R. certainly did and L.B.J. did, too, by virtue of having presided during havoc. Clinton yearns for his eight years to be called an era but knows he fell short, and often says that a president needs to have governed during crisis to be considered great. Or at least consequential. Much like Lyndon Johnson’s, George W. Bush’s tenure was the drama of a president devoured by titanic events — forces that overwhelmed best-laid plans and even the soundest of intentions, and magnified errors.

"The best-laid plans?" And what, pray tell, were those?

And is he implying Democrats are still the party of acid?

Of course, the roots took hold in Iowa and spread state to state. And now, the day before Election Day, Team Obama was running though fields of tall grass, city to city, in the final day of a kind of electoral mystery tour.

But Suskind's overall conclusion on the failed presidency of George W. Bush is a sound one: for Bush it was always just about him.

Oh yeah, those guys

It is truly incredible. More than seven years into the Bush administration, and they still have the ability to amaze and disgust me. Whether it's for his lordship's legacy or to buoy the electoral chances of a man he once shredded, Congress should ask loudly and often, "Why now?" And, "What if we had done this seven years ago instead of focusing these same resources on the frantic effort to find the WMD in Iraq that never got found?"

NPR has learned that the raid by helicopter-borne U.S. Special Operations forces in Pakistan last week was not an isolated incident but part of a three-phase plan, approved by President Bush, to strike at Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida leadership.

The plan calls for a much more aggressive military campaign, said one source, familiar with the presidential order, which gives the green light for the military to take part in the operations. The plan represents an 11th-hour effort by the Bush administration to hammer al-Qaida before the November election, two government officials told NPR.

"Definitely, the gloves have come off," said a source who has been briefed on the plan. "This was only Phase 1 of three phases."

Pentagon and White House officials have declined to discuss the new plan.

The intelligence community already had approval from the president to carry out operations inside Pakistan, which included attacks by Predator drones, which can carry 100-pound Hellfire missiles.

Additional authority came from the president just recently that allowed incursions by U.S. Special Operations forces, the source said.

A second source said that lawmakers on Capitol Hill were briefed on the new plan shortly before The New York Times broke the story this week about the Special Operations raid from Afghanistan into Pakistan. The source also said that CIA personnel from around the world were being pulled into the Afghan-Pakistan border area, an intelligence-community "surge" to go after bin Laden and other al-Qaida figures.

There was concern by some lawmakers about the political ramifications in Pakistan. The Pakistan government is offering some cooperation in halting the cross-border attacks by Islamist fighters from the tribal areas into Afghanistan. And Pakistan is a key logistics route for U.S. equipment heading into Afghanistan.

Should the U.S. raids continue on Pakistani soil, there is fear that the Pakistani government may halt — or at least curtail — its cooperation with American counterterrorist efforts in the border area. A military source says that the Pakistani government side is given little prior notice of the American military activity.

There have been some complaints within the military that the Pakistanis, even before last week's raid, were not doing enough to stop the cross-border attacks. And the nation's leaders are balking at allowing more Special Operations forces inside Pakistan to train the country's security forces. Currently, the Pentagon does some limited training of short duration, defense sources say.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress this week that he is drafting a new military strategy for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. And he mentioned that he continues to press Pakistani military and government leaders to do more to curtail the activities of Islamist extremists in the tribal lands.

The raid last week by an elite U.S. Navy SEAL team was a planned operation that took place miles inside Pakistan and led to the deaths of at least nine and as many as 20 individuals — some of them civilians. Sources say the raid was part of a "snatch and grab" operation aimed at Taliban or al-Qaida figures.

A powerful AC-130 gunship, essentially a flying battleship, was used in the operation. The SEAL team members were flown out of Pakistan by helicopter into Afghanistan. A western military source says a SEAL team remains on standby for similar missions on short notice.

"They were definitely after al-Qaida forces," said one of the sources. "But the bleedover between those two," he added, referring to the Taliban, "is significant."

Both sources say those in the intelligence community and on Capitol Hill are raising questions about the political intent of this new aggressive stance.

"The question is," said one of the sources, "Why wasn't this done a year ago?"

I would also suggest there's another factor behind the timing of this sudden push to pound al Qaeda: Musharraf is gone. Now that George Bush is no longer playing the shopkeeper in this sketch as Musharraf's authority died, and new actors are have entered the scene in Pakistan with whom Bush has no interest in having a useful relationship, he doesn't give a shit about the long term consequences of what incursions into Pakistan will do for the fight against al Qaeda leadership and Talibanism.

Yes, I know, Obama stressed -- to McCain's derision -- that he would not hesitate to go into Pakistan uninvited if he had actionable intelligence. But, with less than two months before the election, Bush should have given the next president the opportunity to make this "push." Since the next president will have to deal with the results.

I'm sure this latest effort to burnish the Bush shining legacy will tarnish America's once again.

Interiors

Big oil = big fun.

WASHINGTON — As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

[...]

In addition, the report alleges that eight royalty-program officials accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

The investigation separately found that the program’s manager mixed official and personal business, and took money from a technical services firm in exchange for urging oil companies to hire the firm. In sometimes lurid detail, the report accuses him of having intimate relations with two subordinates, one of whom regularly sold him cocaine.

The culture of the organization “appeared to be devoid of both the ethical standards and internal controls sufficient to protect the integrity of this vital revenue-producing program,” one report said.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, referred inquiries to the Minerals Management Service. The service’s director, Randall Luthi, released a preliminary statement on Wednesday morning saying he had not yet seen the reports but had scheduled a mid-afternoon conference call with reporters.

I'm sure we can expect change from the "Drill here. Drill now." crowd.

Oxleyed

From Krugman's blog:

One-finger salute

Mike Oxley, we hardly knew ye. An amazing report from the FT:

The Ohio Republican who headed the House financial services committee until his retirement after mid-term elections last year, blames the mess [at Fannie and Freddie] on ideologues within the White House as well as Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The critics have forgotten that the House passed a GSE reform bill in 2005 that could well have prevented the current crisis, says Mr Oxley, now vice-chairman of Nasdaq.

He fumes about the criticism of his House colleagues. “All the handwringing and bedwetting is going on without remembering how the House stepped up on this,” he says. “What did we get from the White House? We got a one-finger salute.”

In this chapter our Hero ponders the benefits of cutting off His Nose to spite His Face

As Dan Froomking writes, "That'll show 'em."

Daniel Dombey writes in the Financial Times: "The Bush administration is set to put a high-profile nuclear deal with Russia on hold, according to US diplomats.

"Officials expect Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, to recommend that George W. Bush, president, recall the civil nuclear co-operation agreement from Congress in the wake of Russia's conflict with Georgia. . . .

"The move to put the nuclear agreement on ice would darken prospects for bilateral co-operation between the two countries in the area of nuclear safety."

Brilliant! Shorter Bush administration: I see your incursion into Georgia and raise you a nuclear standoff.

The real crime

A lack of candor, worse than manslaughter?

"Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake. But in reflecting on all that happened during the Bush administration, I've come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made -- a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Hysteria

A coordinated attack on NBC and MSNBC by the White House and its house organ Fox News? Can such a thing be possible?

Here is the particular exchange that Gillespie complained about at some length:

Engel: "You said that negotiating with Iran is pointless, and then you went further. You said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama?"

Bush: "You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. . . . And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you got to take those words seriously."

What NBC cut out was these two sentences: "People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously."

NBC also omitted the rest of Bush's response: "And if you don't take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn't take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolph Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon."

If Bush had actually explained what he thought Engel got wrong, then the editing might have come in for legitimate criticism. But all Bush did was vaguely and confusingly suggest that what he was calling appeasement was "not taking the words [of enemies like Iran -- or Hitler --] seriously." By no accepted definition does that amount to appeasement. But regardless, Bush's point was dutifully noted in what NBC aired.

The White House's outsized reaction instead appears to be about two other things entirely.

It doesn't take a trained psychologist to observe that Bush got angrier and angrier as the Engel interview went on. That obviously had nothing to do with the editing; it had to do with Engel's questions.

Bush typically sits down with interviewers from Fox News -- or, more recently, Politico-- where he can count on more than his share of ingratiating softballs. But Engel, a fluent Arabic speaker who has logged more time in Iraq than any other television correspondent, assertively confronted Bush with the ramifications of his actions in the Middle East.

For instance, Engel noted: "A lot of Iran's empowerment is a result of the war in Iraq." He questioned Bush about his lack of an exit strategy in Iraq: "So it doesn't sound like there's an end anytime soon." He clearly upset Bush by saying that "on the ground," the situation in Iraq "looks very bleak." (Bush replied: "Well, that's interesting you said that -- that's a little different from the surveys I've seen and a little different from the attitude of the actual Iraqis I've talked to, but you're entitled to your opinion.")

He also challenged Bush on his legacy: "[I]f you look back over the last several years, the Middle East that you'll be handing over to the next President is deeply problematic: You have Hamas in power; Hezbollah empowered, taking to the streets, more -- stronger than the government; Iran empowered, Iraq still at war. What region are you handing over?"

And Bush seemed positively furious by the end of the interview, when Engel had this to say: "The war on terrorism has been the centerpiece of your presidency. Many people say that it has not made the world safer, that it has created more radicals. That there are more people in this part of the world who want to attack the United States."

So is it a stretch to suspect that Bush told his counselor to get a little revenge?

The other essential bit of context is the ferocious, high-profile campaign being orchestrated by Fox News star Bill O'Reilly, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch against NBC and its cable channel, MSNBC. Just in case that had escaped the White House's attention before, a front-page Washington Post story by Howard Kurtz yesterday noted, among other things, that O'Reilly "routinely assails NBC . . . as an organization that 'spews out far-left propaganda,' is 'the most aggressive anti-Bush network' and is 'in the tank' for Barack Obama."

[...]

On Fox News's O'Reilly Factor last night, guest host Laura Ingraham and her guest, Karl Rove, applauded Gillespie's attack.

Laura Ingraham: "As you know, there has been a lot of criticism of NBC made by Bill that the news agency has gone far left. And this is just another piece of that evidence. . . .

Rove: "[T]his was either a very sloppy job of editing, or it was an example of bias. Either one of those doesn't speak well of NBC News. I mean, they deliberately edited out the president correcting Engel's depiction of what his speech was about. They deliberately left that on the cutting floor. . . .

"Look, NBC has got a real problem because we're now in a position where we are starting to see the journalistic standards of MSNBC, which are really no standards at all, creep into NBC, which is a respected news organization.

Like the polar bear, the First Amendment finds itself on thinner and thinner ice. That the metaphorical melting of that ice is abetted by the publisher of The Wall Street Journal is disturbing to say the least.