Sandblasting in Washington

Maybe it’s because she wasn’t invited to the pre-SOTU blowfest with Noonan and all the rest of the girls (Kelly, Thomas, Novak, etc.), but Mo Dowd comes off as pretty pissed off at the Bush White House:

When Mr. Bush wanted to sway opinion on Iraq before his State of the Union speech last week, he invited columnists to the White House. But he invited only conservative columnists, who went from gushing about the president to gushing more about the president.

The columnists did not use Mr. Bush’s name, writing about him as “a senior administration official,” even though the White House had announced the meeting in advance.

They quoted “the official” about the president’s determination on war. That’s just silly.

Calling in only like-minded journalists is like campaigning for a war only in the red states that Mr. Bush won in 2000, and not the blue states won by Al Gore.

This may be Dowd’s most critical column on Bush yet. I’m sure Andy Sullivan will award her one of his inane “awards” in a fit of stunted wit, but there isn’t a thing that he can refute in the piece.

…and speaking of Andy, looks like he has more in common with Orwell than he could ever dream of. Check this out:

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW WE DON’T KNOW: I’m not sure why Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest superb piece in the New Yorker hasn’t made more of a splash. yes, he has some mini-scoops on Saddam’s links with al Qaeda. But its real merit is in helping us understand what levels of empirical evidence are required in the matter of espionage and intelligence. Or to put it another way: the question to be asked of Saddam and al Qaeda is not do we have clear evidence of their connections; but why wouldn’t they be connected? You can look at intellgience entirely inferentially, looking through the myriads of signals and signs and hints and guesses to find hard evidence of, say, a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. Or you can use your common sense, assume such a link and then go back to the intelligence data to see if such an assumption is backed up or disproven.

Or you can keep pretending one is there until after you go in and kill a half million Iraqi’s and then say “My bad. Sorry.”