Why it's Bush's fault

Lifelong bureaucrat Rand Beers c. 2001 and Hillary! as First Lady c. 1998

It's beginning to look like Newt Gingrich had it right from the start about everybody's favorite counterterrism czar, Richard Clarke, and his fawning admirers in politics and the press, blogged here the other day:

A giant ego in a small job . . . People on the left want to beat George Bush so badly that they would embrace almost anything or anybody that they think would hurt the President.

Two opinions in the blogosphere today, when taken together, flesh out Gingrich's insight:

1. FBI files.

-- Lucianne commenter wrytaway, commenting on Rich Lowry's "Present at the Self-Immolation" piece in the New York Post.

2. Still, it's hard not to believe that Clarke's evaluation of presidential performance is directly correlated with how well those presidents treated Clarke.

-- Daniel W. Drezner, who is actually reading the book and notes "in Clarke's account, three Republicans [including GW] dropped the ball on terrorism, while the lone Democrat [Clinton] fought the good fight but failed to achieve anything because of Republican attacks."

Now here's the Grand Conspiracy Theory that draws these loose threads together:

Clarke's old friend and colleague Rand Beers, with whom Clarke is currently co-teaching a course at the Kennedy School, got to him. Beers, who quit his NSC job as special assistant to GW for combatting terrorism because he thought Iraq was a distraction in the "true" War on Terror, is now working as an adviser to John Kerry. You will have noticed that Clarke has made a big point of trashing the Iraq part of the President's anti-terrorism "strategery." Clarke was primed to become a fellow traveler for two reasons: First, the Drezner Factor: spite towards GW's administration for not paying enough attention to him; and second (we acknowledge this is pure, wishful speculation), closet skeletons in his FBI files. You remember the hundreds of sensitive FBI background files on previous White House employees that "accidently" turned up in the Clinton White House and may or may not have been inadvertently downloaded into Hillary's computer?

Comments

[chuck]

Don't you mean "Richard Clarke", who's Robert?
let's not be partisan idiots!

[Sissy Willis]

I do, indeed, mean Richard and have fixed it. Thanks for noticing, Chuck.