Paula--
If I understand it you have in your possession:
1) A DVD of Ultimate from the dual boot (boxed retail version from MSFT)
with of course a corresponding DVD from MSFT
2) Laptop with preinstalled Vista Home Premium (OEM preinstalled and OEM
licensed Home premium with no corresponding DVD)
3) New computer with preinstalled Vista Ultimate OEM licensed and no
corresponding DVD
One thing I notice in this mix is that the new computer you buy is an OEM
manufacturer's computer with preinstalled Vista Ultimate on it. That'd be
this one:
"I buy a new computer with Vista Ultimate on it."
[OEM licensenced Vista Ultimate and you didn't get a DVD with it most likely
since Dell is one of the few exceptions to the 300 OEM partners who bucked
MSFT and shipped a Vista DVD with the purchase of a new box that costs
between one grand and four unless you bought a Dell so that leaves you with
one Vista preinstalled without a DVD that is OEM licensed..]
I assume your other laptop with Home Premium is preinstalled and in the same
boat. It wasn't clear from your post but it seems that's the case. So you
want to upgrade that Home Premium that is an OEM license with a Vista
Ultimate DVD from MSFT. I know you could do an inplace upgrade with Vista,
but it seems you will mix an OEM license already on the box (a Home Premium
on the laptop preinstalled) with one from MSFT unless I misunderstand this.
How will you take the ultimate off the old computer by formatting it if you
don't have a DVD to match, and then install it? How will you mix a Home
Premium that is OEM licensed with a Vista DVD licensed from MSFT?
CH
As to Mr. Chambers' quote it's clear to me that the Americans are giving up
all their liberty for the illusion that the Republicans are doing anything
to protect them when the Republicans (Rudy and Bush) laid the groundwork for
911 to become sucessful and to repeat itself very soon by their destructive,
deadly and costly presence in Iraq.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
FRANK RICH: Failed Presidents Ain't What They Used to Be
A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a
tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.
That's in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a
Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in "Frost/Nixon" next Sunday while
everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. "Frost/Nixon," a
fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president's 1977 television
interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon's record. But Mr.
Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his
exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is
so shocking that it's hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you've
left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for
George W. Bush?
Perhaps not. It's hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to
hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than
an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element
of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from
nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to
dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is
far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc
he's inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse
president than Nixon - some already have - at the personal level his is not
a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella's
talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew
McConaughey's).
This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in
the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what
the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a
sizable American majority just wished that his "presidency was over." This
flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the
deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can't wait
for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page
and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon's larger-than-life
villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did
after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.
The rage is already omnipresent, and it's bipartisan. The last New York
Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans felt their
country was "seriously off on the wrong track," the highest figure since
that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan)
is the hypertension of the parties' two angry bases. Democrats and
Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be
escalating in vitriol by the hour.
On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress's failure to
instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. After it sent
Mr. Bush a war-spending bill stripped of troop-withdrawal deadlines 10 days
ago, the cries of betrayal were shrill, and not just from bloggers. John
Edwards, once one of the more bellicose Democratic cheerleaders for the war
("I believe that the risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of
action," he thundered on the Senate floor in September 2002), is now equally
bellicose toward his former colleagues. He chastises them for not sending
the president the same withdrawal bill he vetoed "again and again" so that
Mr. Bush would be forced to realize "he has no choice" but to end the war.
It's not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this
feat when the president's obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats' lack
of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.
Among Republicans the right's revolt against the Bush-endorsed immigration
bill is also in temper-tantrum territory, moving from rational debate about
complex policy questions to plain old nativism, reminiscent of the
19th-century Know-Nothings. Even the G.O.P. base's traditional gripes -
knee-jerk wailing about the "tragedy" of Mary Cheney's baby - can't be heard
above the din.
"White America is in flight" is how Pat Buchanan sounds the immigration
alarm. "All they have to do is go to Bank of Amigo and pay the fine with a
credit card" is how Rush Limbaugh mocks the bill's punitive measures for
illegal immigrants. Bill O'Reilly, while "reluctantly" supporting Mr. Bush's
plan, illustrates how immigration is "drastically" altering the country by
pointing out that America is "now one-third minority." (Do Jews make the
cut?) The rupture is so deep that National Review, a fierce opponent of the
bill, is challenging its usual conservative ally, the Wall Street Journal
editorial board, to a debate that sounds more like "Fight Club."
What the angriest proselytizers on the left and right have in common is a
conviction that their political parties will commit hara-kiri if they don't
adhere to their bases' strict ideological orders. "If Democrats do not stick
to their guns on Iraq," a blogger at TalkLeft.com warns, there will be
"serious political consequences in 2008." In an echo of his ideological
opposite, Mr. Limbaugh labels the immigration bill the "Comprehensive
Destroy the Republican Party Act."
But there's a strange paradox here. The decibel level of the fin-de-Bush
rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus among
Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The same May poll
that found the country so wildly off-track showed agreement on much else.
Sixty-one percent believe that we should have stayed out of Iraq, and 63
percent believe we should withdraw by 2008. Majorities above 60 percent also
buy broad provisions of the immigration bill - including the 66 percent of
Republicans (versus 72 percent of Democrats) who support its creation of a
guest-worker program.
What these figures suggest is that change is on its way, no matter how
gridlocked Washington may look now. However much the G.O.P. base hollers,
America is not going to round up and deport 12 million illegal immigrants,
or build a multibillion-dollar fence on the Mexican border - despite Lou
Dobbs's hoax blaming immigrants for a nonexistent rise in leprosy. A new
president unburdened by a disastrous war may well fashion the immigration
compromise that is likely to elude Mr. Bush.
Withdrawal from Iraq is also on its way. Contrary to Mr. Edwards, only
Republicans in Congress can overcome presidential vetoes and in so doing
force Mr. Bush's hand on the war. As the bottom drops out of Iraq and the
polls, those G.O.P. votes are starting to line up. The latest example came
last Sunday, when the most hawkish of former Rumsfeld worshipers, Senator
Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined his party's Congressional leaders, Mitch
McConnell and John Boehner, in talking about drawing down troops if
something "extraordinary" doesn't happen in Iraq by the time Gen. David
Petraeus gives his September report on the "surge." No doubt Mr. Sessions,
who is up for re-election in 2008, saw a May 12 survey in The Birmingham
News showing that even in his reddest of states, nearly half the voters want
America out of Iraq within a year and favor candidates who agree.
This relatively unified America can't be compared with that of the second
Nixon term, when the violent cultural and political upheavals of the late
1960s were still fresh. But in at least one way there may be a precise
political parallel in the aftermaths of two failed presidencies rent by
catastrophic wars: Americans are exhausted by anger itself and are praying
for the mood pendulum to swing.
Gerald Ford implicitly captured that sentiment when he described himself as
a healer; his elected successor, Jimmy Carter, was (to a fault, as it turned
out) a seeming paragon of serenity. We can see this equation at work now in
Mitt Romney's unflappable game-show-host persona, in John McCain's
unconvincing efforts to emulate a Reagan grin and in the unlikely spectacle
of Rudy Giuliani trading in his congenital scowl for a sunny disposition.
Hillary Clinton's camp is doing everything it can to deflect new books
reminding voters of the vicious Washington warfare during her husband's
presidency. Then again, even Michael Moore is rolling out a kinder, gentler
persona in his media blitz for his first film since "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Edgy is out; easy listening is in; style, not content, can be king. In this
climate, it's hardly happenstance that many Republicans are looking in
desperation to Fred Thompson. Robert Novak pointedly welcomed his candidacy
last week because, in his view, Mr. Thompson is "less harsh" in tone than
his often ideologically indistinguishable rivals and "a real-life version of
the avuncular fictional D.A. he plays on TV." The Democratic boomlet for
Barack Obama is the flip side of the same coin: his views don't differ
radically from those of most of his rivals, but his conciliatory personality
is the essence of calm, the antithesis of anger.
If it was a relief to the nation to see a president as grandly villainous as
Richard Nixon supplanted by a Ford, not a Lincoln, maybe even a used Hoover
would do this time.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
FRANK RICH: Earth to G.O.P: The Gipper Is Dead
OF course you didn't watch the first Republican presidential debate on
MSNBC. Even the party's most loyal base didn't abandon Fox News, where Bill
O'Reilly, interviewing the already overexposed George Tenet, drew far more
viewers. Yet the few telling video scraps that entered the 24/7 mediasphere
did turn the event into an instant "Saturday Night Live" parody without
"SNL" having to lift a finger. The row of 10 middle-aged white candidates,
David Letterman said, looked like "guys waiting to tee off at a restricted
country club."
Since then, panicked Republicans have been either blaming the "Let's Make a
Deal" debate format or praying for salvation-by-celebrity in the form of
another middle-aged white guy who might enter the race, Fred Thompson. They
don't seem to get that there is not another major brand in the country - not
Wal-Mart, not G.E., not even Denny's nowadays - that would try to sell a
mass product with such a demographically homogeneous sales force. And that's
only half the problem. The other half is that the Republicans don't have a
product to sell. Aside from tax cuts and a wall on the Mexican border, the
only issue that energized the presidential contenders was Ronald Reagan. The
debate's most animated moments by far came as they clamored to lip-sync his
"optimism," his "morning in America," his "shining city on the hill" and
even, in a bizarre John McCain moment out of a Chucky movie, his grin.
The candidates mentioned Reagan's name 19 times, the current White House
occupant's once. Much as the Republicans hope that the Gipper can still be a
panacea for all their political ills, so they want to believe that if only
President Bush would just go away and take his rock-bottom approval rating
and equally unpopular war with him, all of their problems would be solved.
But it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American
interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this
presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in
particular.
By my rough, conservative calculation - feel free to add - there have been
corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these
cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland
Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban
Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of
abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a
prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being
investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican
Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget,
whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff
fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of
the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official
watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are
themselves under investigation simultaneously - an all-time record.
Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not
necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When
corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing
philosophy. That's the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the
common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein
creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the
Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until
courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it.
It's not the philosophy Mr. Bush campaigned on. Remember the candidate who
billed himself as a "different kind of Republican" and a "compassionate
conservative"? Karl Rove wanted to build a lasting Republican majority by
emulating the tactics of the 1896 candidate, William McKinley, whose victory
ushered in G.O.P. dominance that would last until the New Deal some 35 years
later. The Rove plan was to add to the party's base, much as McKinley had at
the dawn of the industrial era, by attracting new un-Republican-like
demographic groups, including Hispanics and African-Americans. Hence, No
Child Left Behind, an education program pitched particularly to urban
Americans, and a 2000 nominating convention that starred break dancers,
gospel singers, Colin Powell and, as an M.C., the only black Republican
member of Congress, J. C. Watts.
As always, the salesmanship was brilliant. One smitten liberal columnist
imagined in 1999 that Mr. Bush could redefine his party: "If compassion and
inclusion are his talismans, education his centerpiece and national unity
his promise, we may say a final, welcome goodbye to the wedge issues that
have divided Americans by race, ethnicity and religious conviction." Or not.
As Matthew Dowd, the disaffected Bush pollster, concluded this spring, the
uniter he had so eagerly helped elect turned out to be "not the person" he
thought, but instead a divider who wanted to appeal to the "51 percent of
the people" who would ensure his hold on power.
But it isn't just the divisive Bush-Rove partisanship that led to scandal.
The corruption grew out of the White House's insistence that partisanship -
the maintenance of that 51 percent - dictate every governmental action no
matter what the effect on the common good. And so the first M.B.A. president
ignored every rule of sound management. Loyal ideologues or flunkies were
put in crucial positions regardless of their ethics or competence.
Government business was outsourced to campaign contributors regardless of
their ethics or competence. Even orthodox Republican fiscal prudence was
tossed aside so Congressional allies could be bought off with bridges to
nowhere.
This was true way before many, let alone Matthew Dowd, were willing to see
it. It was true before the Iraq war. In retrospect, the first unimpeachable
evidence of the White House's modus operandi was reported by the journalist
Ron Suskind, for Esquire, at the end of 2002. Mr. Suskind interviewed an
illustrious Bush appointee, the University of Pennsylvania political
scientist John DiIulio, who had run the administration's
compassionate-conservative flagship, the Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives. Bemoaning an unprecedented "lack of a policy apparatus" in the
White House, Mr. DiIulio said: "What you've got is everything - and I mean
everything - being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry
Machiavellis."
His words have been borne out repeatedly: by the unqualified political hacks
and well-connected no-bid contractors who sabotaged the occupation and
reconstruction of Iraq; the politicization of science at the Food and Drug
Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency; the outsourcing of
veterans' care to a crony company at Walter Reed; and the purge of
independent United States attorneys at Alberto Gonzales's Justice
Department. But even more pertinent, perhaps, to the Republican future is
how the Mayberry Machiavellis alienated the precise groups that Mr. Bush had
promised to add to his party's base.
By installing a political hack, his 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, at
the top of FEMA, the president foreordained the hiring of Brownie and the
disastrous response to Katrina. At the Education Department, the signature
No Child Left Behind program, Reading First, is turning out to be a cesspool
of contracting conflicts of interest. It's also at that department that Bush
loyalists stood passively by while the student-loan industry scandal
exploded; at its center is Nelnet, the single largest corporate campaign
contributor to the 2006 G.O.P. Congressional campaign committee. Back at Mr.
Gonzales's operation, where revelations of politicization and cover-ups
mount daily, it turns out that no black lawyers have been hired in the
nearly all-white criminal section of the civil rights division since 2003.
The sole piece of compassionate conservatism that Mr. Bush has tried not to
sacrifice to political expedience - nondraconian immigration reform - is
also on the ropes, done in by a wave of xenophobia that he has failed to
combat. Just how knee-jerk this strain has become could be seen in the MSNBC
debate when Chris Matthews asked the candidates if they would consider a
constitutional amendment to allow presidential runs by naturalized citizens
like their party's star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (an American since
1983), and its national chairman, Senator Mel Martinez of Florida. Seven out
of 10 said no.
We've certainly come a long way from that 2000 Philadelphia convention, with
its dream of forging an inclusive, long-lasting G.O.P. majority. Instead of
break dancers and a black Republican congressman (there are none now), we've
had YouTube classics like Mr. Rove's impersonation of a rapper at a
Washington journalists' banquet and George Allen's "macaca" meltdown.
Simultaneously, the once-reliable evangelical base is starting to drift as
some of its leaders join the battle against global warming and others
recognize that they've been played for fools on "family values" by the
G.O.P. establishment that covered up for Mark Foley.
Meanwhile, most of the pressing matters that the public cares passionately
about - Iraq, health care, the environment and energy independence - belong
for now to the Democrats. Though that party's first debate wasn't exactly an
intellectual feast either, actual issues were engaged by presidential
hopefuls representing a cross section of American demographics. You don't
see Democratic candidates changing the subject to J.F.K. and F.D.R. They are
free to start wrestling with the future while the men inheriting the
Bush-Rove brand of Republicanism are reduced to harking back to a morning in
America on which the sun set in 1989.
posted by Total Kaos Inc at 7:11 PM 1 comments
Saturday, May 05, 2007
FRANK RICH: Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?
IF, as J.F.K. had it, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,
the defeat in Iraq is the most pitiful orphan imaginable. Its parents have
not only tossed it to the wolves but are also trying to pin its mutant DNA
on any patsy they can find.
George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more
than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient
Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's
intelligence bozo, was the "stupidest guy on the face of the earth" (that's
the expurgated version). Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader
who foresaw a "cakewalk" in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General
Franks and Paul Bremer were "three of the most incompetent people who've
ever served in such key spots." Richard Perle chimed in that the "huge
mistakes" were "not made by neoconservatives" and instead took a shot at
President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons' former darling, told Dexter
Filkins of The Times "the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz."
And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.
This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges. The
good news is that Mr. Tenet's book rollout may be the last gasp of this
farcical round robin of recrimination. Republicans and Democrats have at
last found some common ground by condemning his effort to position himself
as the war's innocent scapegoat. Some former C.I.A. colleagues are rougher
still. Michael Scheuer, who ran the agency's bin Laden unit, has accused Mr.
Tenet of lacking "the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try
to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss." Even
after Mr. Tenet did leave office, he maintained a Robert McNamara silence
until he cashed in.
Satisfying though it is to watch a circular firing squad of the war's
enablers, unfinished business awaits. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is not in the
past: the war escalates even as all this finger-pointing continues. Very
little has changed between the fourth anniversary of "Mission Accomplished"
this year and the last. Back then, President Bush cheered an Iraqi "turning
point" precipitated by "the emergence of a unity government." Since then,
what's emerged is more Iraqi disunity and a major leap in the death toll.
That's why Americans voted in November to get out.
The only White House figure to take any responsibility for the fiasco is the
former Bush-Cheney pollster Matthew Dowd, who in March expressed remorse for
furthering a war he now deems a mistake. For his belated act of conscience,
he was promptly patronized as an incipient basket case by an administration
flack, who attributed Mr. Dowd's defection to "personal turmoil." If that is
what this vicious gang would do to a pollster, imagine what would befall
Colin Powell if he spoke out. Nonetheless, Mr. Powell should summon the guts
to do so. Until there is accountability for the major architects and
perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this
scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.
That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell's successor, Condoleezza
Rice. Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and
vice president at the war's creation, she is the highest still in power and
still on the taxpayers' payroll. She is also the only one who can still get
a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it
that the secretary of state's recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent
shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance
that rode America into a ditch.
Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away
Mr. Tenet's book before "60 Minutes" broadcast its interview with him that
night. But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they
answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record
as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a
higher standard - a k a the truth - before she too jumps ship.
It's now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq
war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of "we don't want the
smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Yet there she was last Sunday on ABC,
claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent
threat. "The question of imminence isn't whether or not somebody is going to
strike tomorrow" is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up
the war's origins. On CBS's "Face the Nation," she claimed that intelligence
errors before the war were "worldwide" even though the International Atomic
Energy Agency's Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was "no evidence" of
an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany's intelligence service sent
strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.'s principal informant on Saddam's
supposed biological weapons was a fraud.
Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the
jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms.
Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she
claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence
before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling
a guest a liar. "But that statement wasn't true," Mr. Stephanopoulos said.
Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo
raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months
before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his
State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos
as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.
Apologists for Ms. Rice, particularly those in the press who are embarrassed
by their own early cheerleading for the war, like to say that this is
ancient history, just as they said of the C.I.A. leak case. We're all
supposed to move on and just worry about what happens next. Try telling that
to families whose children went to Iraq to stop Saddam's nukes. Besides,
there's a continuum between past deceptions and present ones, as the
secretary of state seamlessly demonstrated last Sunday.
On ABC, she pushed the administration's line portraying Iraq's current
violence as a Qaeda plot hatched by the Samarra bombing of February 2006.
But that Qaeda isn't the Qaeda of 9/11; it's a largely Iraqi group fighting
on one side of a civil war. And by February 2006, sectarian violence had
already been gathering steam for 15 months - in part because Ms. Rice and
company ignored the genuine imminence of that civil war just as they had
ignored the alarms about bin Laden's Qaeda in August 2001.
Ms. Rice's latest canard wasn't an improvisation; it was a scripted set-up
for the president's outrageous statement three days later. "The decision we
face in Iraq," Mr. Bush said Wednesday, "is not whether we ought to take
sides in a civil war, it's whether we stay in the fight against the same
international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11." Such statements
about the present in Iraq are no less deceptive - and no less damaging to
our national interest - than the lies about uranium and Qaeda- 9/11
connections told in 2002-3. This country needs facts, not fiction, to make
its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn't
get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to
make the same tragic error twice.
That Ms. Rice feels scant responsibility for any of this was evident in her
repeated assertions on Sunday that all the questions about prewar
intelligence had been answered by the Robb-Silberman and Senate committee
inquiries, neither of which even addressed how the administration used the
intelligence it received. Now she risks being held in contempt of Congress
by ducking a subpoena authorized by the House's Oversight Committee, whose
chairman, Henry Waxman, has been trying to get direct answers from her about
the uranium hoax since 2003.
Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation
of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to
Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005.
If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger,
Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress
without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator
Levin's questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn't
recall or didn't know.
No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice's Sunday spin was her aside to
Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues "when I
have a chance to write my book." Another book! As long as American troops
are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer
questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is
ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on "60
Minutes" but under oath.
