OxBlog

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

# Posted 7:46 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

TPM SPIN CONTROL: This Slate column says that Wes Clark puts his foot in his mouth no less often than Howard Dean. Josh Marshall tries to defend Clark by arguing that he's telling the uncomfortable (for the Bush administration) truth, rather than making constant gaffes.

Personally, I think Marshall would look a lot smarter if he just admitted that Clark said a bunch of dumb, slightly offensive things that are nowhere near as dumb as the kind of things Dean often says. (Of course, the Slate column doesn't include this howler that Clark gave us a few days ago.)

On the brighter side (for TPM), Josh gets a good shot in at the Bush administration's peculiar attitude toward releasing classified documents:
Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days.

Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day.

Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons ... priceless.
Josh really should've stopped before that last sentence. It's that sort of snide, overwrought remark which often makes reading TPM a chore. Besides, by Josh's standard, even the saintly Jimmy Carter was a hypocritical goon.

While no one should tolerate the kind of double standards that the Bush administration has clearly employed, going for the jugular every time only results in making Beltway politics ever more cutthroat. (Yet as Mr. Marshall would surely remind us, it's the Republicans who were cutthroat first.)

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