Mojo - April, 2008

Former American Enterprise Institute Iraq hand Laurie Mylroie wrote a book alleging that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was really behind the 1993 Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. In the wake of 9/11, Mylroie's book and theories were highly influential on the thinking especially of then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and former CIA director James Woolsey, who wrote a blurb for her book. Indeed, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Woolsey was reportedly dispatched to the UK to pursue one of Mylroie's theories.

Now, the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, the authorized biographer of Vice President Dick Cheney and like both the Veep and Mylroie, a proponent of the theory that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda worked closely together, tries to throw Mylroie overboard:

Mylroie comes up In several of the books written about the Iraq War as a terrorism analyst who led the Bush Administration into making questionable claims about Iraq and al Qaeda. (George Packer, the New Yorker writer and author of the otherwise well-reported book, "The Assassin's Gate," makes this mistake.) This vastly overstates her role. Although her emails may have occasionally made their way to Bush administration officials, no one I know took her arguments very seriously. For good reason. Mylroie has seen an Iraqi hand behind virtually every terrorist attack on American interests. Indeed, in our one brief conversation, she faulted me for failing to understand that al Qaeda is little more than an Iraqi "front group." That's crazy. Iraq was an active state sponsor of terror and, as the recent Pentagon report confirms, a willing sponsor of al Qaeda leaders, their terrorist associates, and a wide variety of jihadist groups.

Hey, at least the hawks are still loyal to Chalabi.

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Lately, Hillary Clinton has been calling for a "Lincoln-Douglas style" debate, in which she and Barack Obama would speak directly to one another without moderators, in response to the Obama campaign's refusal to do any further televised debates.

Of course, the reference is to the famous series of debates held between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas when both men were campaigning for an Illinois senate seat in 1858.

Fox News apparently didn't get the memo.

I suspect a debate between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln wouldn't be all that exciting.

Douglass: We should abolish slavery.
Lincoln: I dunno.
Douglass: It's the only way to save the Union.
Lincoln: Okay.

And scene.

Update: Oh, I almost forgot. More Fox hilarity here.

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Everybody who knows anything about energy policy and/or tax policy is calling the gas tax holiday a cynical political pander by Senators McCain and Clinton. Here's the usually Clinton-friendly Paul Krugman:

John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no.

Why doesn't cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It's Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Here's economist Dean Baker:

...almost all economists would agree that the tax cut proposed by Senators Clinton and McCain would save consumers nothing. With the supply of gas largely fixed by the capacity of the oil industry (they claim to be running their refineries at full capacity), the price will not change in response to the elimination of the tax. The only difference will be that money that used to go to the government in tax revenues will instead go to the oil industry as higher profits.

Tom Friedman:

[The idea] is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer's travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

Here are the Washington Post, Robert Reich, and the Los Angeles Times. Here are Grist and Vanity Fair. Here's Newsweek, maybe the best of the bunch.

At worst, the gax tax holiday pads the pockets of the oil industry (McCain's version). At best, it accomplishes nothing at all (Clinton's version). So why propose it? Because voters are struggling with gas prices and by suggesting we chop 18 cents off the price of every gallon, a candidate sounds like a populist champion. But it's nonsense and a pander and the candidates know it.

Hillary Clinton has TV ads up in Indiana and North Carolina that attack Barack Obama for saying no to the idea. Awesome.

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Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who used to be the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay and a defender of the Bush Administration's military tribunal system, took the stand Monday on behalf of a man alleged to be Osama bin Laden's former driver in order to disseminate the truth about Guantanamo.

Davis was cross-examined by the Army officer who replaced him after his resignation last October, Col. Lawrence Morris, in one of the most dramatic challenges to the first American war-crimes tribunals since World War II...

Davis said he resigned hours after he was put in a chain of command beneath Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes, one of several officials who had encouraged the use of evidence even if it was gathered through waterboarding... "The guy who said waterboarding is A-OK I was not going to take orders from. I quit," Davis said.

More after the jump...

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