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Senate Panel Approves Defense Nominee
from www.nytimes.com
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — President Bush’s nominee to be defense secretary won a key Senate committee endorsement today, hours after testifying that the United States was not winning the war in Iraq, and that an American failure there could help to ignite “a regional conflagration” in the Middle East.
The candor shown by Gates was appreciated by the panel, but their eagerness to confirm the nominee appeared to stem at least in part from their desire to ensure that there was someone who could be blamed for the ongoing debacle in Iraq. The mood was perhaps summed up by the statement of the Chairman upon announcing the vote: "We hereby approve this nomination by a vote of 21 to zero. No tagbacks, no givebacks."
Gates, for hispart, promised to give America's Iraqi allies "two for flinching" if they did not show pogress in taking responsibility for their own security. Asked how he would deal with the problem of Iranian and Syrian involvement in regional instability, Gates replied replied the best response was to call them out on the grounds that 'Simon didn't say 'destabilize your neighbor state.'"
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LINE OF THE DAY
Cold War Missiles target of Blackout
By Christopher LeeWashington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 21, 2006; Page A01
The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
The information includes the fact that in 1971, the U.S. possessed 54 Titan ICBMs and 1,000 Minuteman ICBMs. Asked how such data could possibly cause any harm to U.S. interests here in 2006, a Pentagon spokesman “They redacted what?!? Those [Redacted] idiots! I’m going to go down there and [Redact] them a new [Redacted].”
Nonetheless, others believe the move is part of a larger effort. “Look, this administration is getting tired of being nailed time after time with their own words from 2002-2003 about WMD, being greeted as liberators, and Iraq’s supposed support for al-Qaeda,” said Lockbox Slipstream of the Hermitage Foundation. “The day will come when they’re going to need to be able to redact from the historical record pretty much everything Bush has ever said. But they know they can’t start with something so obvious. So they start by re-classifying staggeringly obvious and unimportant data that is at least in a field where some secrecy is legitimate. Then they just need to keep expanding the list of classified items until they get to the point they can claim the President’s 2003 State of the Union Address is now classified.”
The Pentagon denied any such move was afoot, then announced the following items of data were also classified:
–The mean average rainfall in Topeka
–The capacity, in cubic feet per hour per hour, of the Metro-North natural gas pipeline in Illinois
–The china pattern used in the White House
–The number of dog bites reported to the CDC in 1982
–The latitude and longitude of Baghdad
Warning! The Line of the Day is not an authorized infotainment product! It contains material not previously cleared/authored by Karl Rove. By definition, therefore, it is a farrago of lies and pretentious word choices. Only the part in bold is stolen from actual news sources.