Dear Leaders
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas - Nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question
about Susan B. Ralston, former administrative assistant to Jack Abramoff
and, until last week, assistant to Karl Rove. She got hired by Rove at
$64,700 after the 2004 election and then received a raise to $122,000.
Why?
I've never gotten a 100 percent raise. Did you? Is this common?
I know next to nothing about North Korea, but I know how to find
out.
People who do know the weird country have been worrying about it in print
for six years now. (See articles in The New York Review of Books.) Eric
Alterman picked this bit up in "The Book on Bush": "The tone of [Colin]
Powell's tenure was set early in the administration, when he announced
that
he planned 'to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off' in
trying to secure the peace between North and South Korea, while
negotiating
with the North to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The
president
not only repudiated his secretary of state in public, announcing, 'We're
not
certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements,'
he did so during a joint appearance with South Korean President (and Nobel
laureate for peace for his own efforts with the North) Kim Dae-Jung,
thereby
humiliating his honored guest, as well.
"A day later, Powell backpedaled. 'The president forcefully made the
point that we are undertaking a full review of our relation****p with North
Korea,' Powell said. 'There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations
are about to begin-that is not the case.' "
This was pre-9/11, when Bush's entire foreign policy consisted in
not
doing whatever Clinton had done, and vice versa. Also from "The Book on
Bush": "As former Ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and James Laney warned at
the moment of Bush's carelessly worded 'Axis of Evil' address, 'Besides
putting another knife in the dimini****ng South Korean president,' the
speech
would likely cause 'dangerous escalatory consequences, (including) ...
renewed tensions on the peninsula and continued ex****t of missiles to the
Mideast.' ... North Korea called the Bush bluff, and the result, notes
(Wa****ngton Post) columnist Richard Cohen, was 'a stumble, a fumble, an
error compounded by a blooper ... as appalling a display of diplomacy as
anyone has seen since a shooting in Sarajevo turned into World War I.' "
Remember Bush's diplomatic interview with Bob Woodward in which he
said, "I loathe Kim Jong Il!" Waving his finger, he added, "I've got a
visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people." Bush
also
said he wanted to "topple him" and called him a "pygmy." How old were you
when you learned not to antagonize and infuriate the local crazy bully?
Always a top diplomat. But I warn you, when Bush makes reference of
this, as in "my gut tells me," we are in big trouble. By any measure,
North
Korea continued to be more dangerous than Iraq.
I don't see how this mess can be blamed on anyone but Bush, but I
notice that a few Republicans have dragged out the shade of Bill Clinton
because he tried to deal with North Korea. I would have thought there
wasn't
much water left in that bogeyman, but I guess he is the straw man for all
seasons among Republicans. Why doesn't someone on Fox News ask him about
it?
Meanwhile, our fiendishly clever president has dragged his daddy's
old
family consigliore, James Baker, out of retirement to think of something
to
do about Iraq. A three-part partition is mentioned. History Professor Juan
Cole on his blog explains why that's a disaster, but I suspect that's
where
the poor Iraqis end up anyway, followed by war with Turkey and Saudi
Arabia.
Molly Ivins is from Houston, Texas, graduated from Smith College in
1966, attended Columbia University's School of Journalism and studied for
a
year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris. Her first newspaper
job was at the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She rapidly
worked her way up to the position of sewer editor, where she wrote a
number
of gripping articles about street closings. She went on to the Minneapolis
Tribune and was the first woman police re****ter in that city. In the late
1960s, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change,"
covering angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley
assortment of other misfits and troublemakers. Ivins counts as her highest
honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her,
and
that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.
###
If Bush has to drag out decrepit assholes from the Raygoon era for
answers,
Bush is worse off than America thought or the republicans will admit.
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