Interviewing DICK (and other tales from the destroyation)

FBI notes from their interview with Cheney in ‘04 show DICK to have been quite hazy on the specifics of his lawbreaking.

Asked whether he personally discussed the couple with any reporter, Cheney said he generally did not “take incoming calls from the media.” He declined to sign a legal waiver entitling reporters to break any promises not to quote him by name. When Cheney brought the interview to a close, he also refused Fitzgerald’s request that he promise not to discuss the case with any other witness.

Not all of Cheney’s replies were opaque. He made several displays of animus toward the CIA and its handling of Iraq’s alleged attempt to buy uranium, an accusation the vice president had placed at the center of his public case for war. He described the CIA’s use of Wilson to explore the charge as unprofessional and three times used the term “amateur hour.” Cheney acknowledged that he jabbed sarcastically at Tenet, when the CIA was stumped on an unrelated question, that he “ought to send Joe Wilson to check it out.”

In many cases, Cheney appeared to leave his chief of staff exposed on damaging admissions that Libby and others had made in the grand jury. Though his memory was hazy on many other things, he said he was certain he had heard no report of Libby’s conversations about Plame with Rove, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer or Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman.

Cheney said he did not know that Libby met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller the week before Plame’s name was leaked and that Libby did not clear every interview with him in advance.

Guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty!

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California: Gavin Newsom drops out just as Jerry Brown’s communications director fesses up to secretly recording phone conversations with reporters.

I think I would like this Gov. Brown much better than the previous Gov. Brown.

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Bob Herbert on the jobs that aren’t out there.

And there’s a lot of them.

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Wasted some time reading the ten finalists in the WaPost’s The Next Great Pundit contest. Like any disinterested asshole (/editor), I graded them:

Burton Richter, C [good points but I don't see a style that I'd care to read on a weekly basis]

Courtney Martin, B [would have gotten a higher grade had she not used the word "befitting"]

Darryl Jackson, B [trite, but better conservative writer than any of the one's they've got, factually errant GWill aside]

Jeremy Haber, B- [all true but I dunno, just bored me, I guess]

Maame Gyamfi, A- [I don't even care about the Balloon Boy, but I like how she wrote about him and Susan Boyle, etc.]

Kevin Huffman, B+ [reads like a real columnist but not sure what he has to add to the national dialogue altho I'm sure he's a killer teacher]

Mark Esper, A [a real newspaper guy with a natural storytelling rhythm and a point to make]

Lydia Khalil, B+/A- [good, just not very interesting, to me at least, but maybe a winner with a more general audience]

Zeba Khan, A- [a little overwritten but reads like someone with genuine potential to crank out columns]

No one who really knocked my socks off, but that’s not surprising. The best writers out there are already writing but, like prospective jurors, have already disqualified themselves by virtue of having shared strong opinions. And no, I’m not patting myself on the back, I’m thinking of folks like Driftglass and Billmon and Digby and Marcy Wheeler and John Cole and Duncan Black — any one of whom would blow away these entrants.

Writing columns is about much more than knowing how to write. It’s about having something to say and a consistent POV and an interesting style that keeps readers coming back.

UPDATE: A writing contest whose winning entries I think I’d really enjoy reading.

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Palin polls like a Quayle.

More from TBogg.

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What keeps us going:

By the time he met Romney for the campaign’s first televised debate, the polls had the race dead even. In his memoir, True Compass, Kennedy recalls his nervousness as he was driven to Boston’s Faneuil Hall, where the debate was to be held. Then, he recounts:

I looked out of the window, and any remaining nervousness vanished. I saw a huge swell of people stretching for blocks. They carried Kennedy signs and chanted, ‘Teddy! Teddy! Teddy!’ It was like the old torchlight parades that Grampa [turn-of-the-century Boston Mayor John F. 'Honey Fitz' Fitzgerald] used to tell me about, and that he loved so much. I rolled down the car window, leaned out, raised my arm, and pumped my fist. My adrenaline was flowing. These were my people. They were working people. They were the people I had been representing for thirty-two years, and we still had work to do.

Harold Meyerson

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Surprising number of RSVPs on the party already. And yes, I know I don’t get to grumble about Wege as a nickname anymore. You go with what you get stuck with. Still, I can’t believe people would prefer Wege to the remarkably apt Mississippifarian (’sippifari to my friends).

[walks off muttering about anti-polysyllabletarians]

Explore posts in the same categories: Democrats, economy, politics

Tags: Bob Herbert, DICK Cheney, Edward M Kennedy, Jerry Brown, jobs, Sarah Palin, WEGESTOCK

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