Tme Magazine’s not exactly a part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, but they’re not at all impressed with Richard Clarke’s increasingly shrill shilling for his book:
While Clarke claims that he is “an independent” not driven by partisan motives, it’s hard not to read some passages in his book as anything but shrill broadsides. In his descriptions of Bush aides, he discerns their true ideological beliefs not in their words but in their body language: “As I briefed Rice on al-Qaeda, her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term before.” When the cabinet met to discuss al-Qaeda on Sept. 4, Rumsfeld “looked distracted throughout the session.” As for the President, Clarke doesn’t even try to read Bush’s body language; he just makes the encounters up. “I have a disturbing image of him sitting by a warm White House fireplace drawing a dozen red Xs on the faces of the former al-Qaeda corporate board…..while the new clones of al-Qaeda….are recruiting thousands whose names we will never know, whose faces will never be on President Bush’s little charts, not until it is again too late.” Clarke conjured up this chilling scene again on 60 Minutes. Only in this version he also manages to read Bush’s mind, and “he’s thinking that he’s got most of them and therefore he’s taken care of the problem.” The only things missing are the black winged chair and white cat.
Leaving aside the fact that Bush never fails to insist that the terror threat is as great today as it was on 9/11, these passages reveal the polemical, partisan mean-spiritedness that lies at the heart of Clarke’s book, and to an even greater degree, his television appearances flacking it.
The man obviously has an axe to grind, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that his main beef isn’t that the Admistration failed to take Osama seriously as much as they failed to take him — and his quirky obsession with cyber-terrorism — seriously and to treat him with the respect that he alone thought he deserved.
The Administration didn’t need yes-men after Sept. 11th, they needed serious policy advisers, and that’s the reason Clarke had to go.