In his column in The Hill, Josh Marshall examines the ongoing saga of the flying monkeys vs. Richard Clarke. Marshall sees a pattern with this and earlier stories of previous Bush administration counterterrorism experts such as Joe Wilson and Rand Beers.
Marshall offers two theories to explain this pattern:
The first possibility is that the Bush White House is so freewheeling, inattentive and just plain unlucky that it keeps appointing senior counterterrorism aides who actually turn out to be both policy incompetents and closet Democratic partisans. …
The second possibility is that every counterterrorism expert the White House hires who isn’t (a) a hidebound ideologue or (b) a dyed-in-the-wool Bush loyalist eventually becomes so disgusted with the mix of incompetence and mendacity that is the White House’s counterterrorism policy that he eventually quits and then immediately sets about trying to drive the president from office.
Marshall's tone is different, and he's more blunt, but his first option is not an attack on the Bush administration — it's what every White House official who can find a microphone has been arguing all week.
Defenders of the administration this week should read Marshall's version of their case as a helpful reminder of just what it is that they're claiming. They should also realize that this argument — "He's just one person who happens to have decades of experience in counterterror, what does he know?" — becomes more and more of a stretch with each additional defection. And, as Marshall notes elsewhere, it's a whole lot more people than just Clarke, Beers and Wilson.
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