Tuesday Morning Quick Hits

by Steve

So how involved was Tim Russert in the White House’s smear campaign against Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame? So involved, it turns out, that even after Scooter Libby released him from maintaining confidentiality about their conversations, Russert still didn’t want to cooperate with Patrick Fitzgerald because it would supposedly harm Russert’s relationship with other sources. Oh please, make him stop. Does anyone believe that a concern for sources was the real reason Russert resisted? It is more likely that Timmy was more concerned that he would lose access to the White House spin operation if he told Fitzgerald what he wanted to know and would be exposed as just another mouthpiece in the media for the White House.

Jack Abramoff’s indictment and plea deal just brought down the Alexander Strategy Group, which announced yesterday that the attention directed towards their firm for their association with Abramoff and Tom DeLay has killed their business. Boo hoo.

It only took the Dow four and a half years to finally crawl back to where it was in Bush’s first six months in office, and yet the press wants you to think that the last time the Dow exceeded 11,000 it was less legitimately grounded in market fundamentals than now. These same media analysts want you to think that a market propped up on borrowed money from overseas and deficit spending is better than the market we had at the close of the Clinton Administration. Sure it is.

We are reaping the seeds planted by Bush’s decision to invade Iraq instead of dealing with real threats. While Bush let Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, he missed a chance in the months after the fall of the Taliban to turn the world’s attention and pressure towards the real threat in the region: a nuclear Iran. And now we are paying the price for that pathetic and negligent policy mistake.