From The Sunday Times
June 22, 2008
The more John McCain is right on Iraq, the more he loses
Andrew Sullivan
Mesopotamia has proved treacherous for many western politicians, but few have as much right to be frustrated as John McCain. McCain has supported ousting Saddam Hussein since the first Gulf war; he strongly supported the 2003 Iraq war and lent important weight in the Senate to the plans of the man who defeated him in the 2000 primaries, George W Bush.
McCain supported Bush’s war despite bitterness at the gutter tactics that Bush had used against him in the Republican primaries and long-standing friction with the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and despite having little say over how the war was conducted.
McCain learnt his lesson soon enough, as many of us did. When Rumsfeld’s lack of planning and insouciance towards order in occupied Iraq emerged in the autumn of 2003, McCain was both furious at the incompetence and mortified by the fact that he knew, as a good Republican, he’d nonetheless have to back Bush unreservedly in the 2004 election. Even when Bush slimed the Democrat candidate John Kerry, McCain’s Vietnam war buddy, McCain grinned and bore it. The photo of the old warhorse thrusting his craggy face into Bush’s bosom in the 2004 campaign will haunt him – and the rest of us – for a good while yet.
Then there was the torture issue. The revelations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, Bagram, Camp Cropper, Abu Ghraib and the secret CIA sites in eastern Europe shook McCain to his core. He’d been tortured for five years by the Vietnamese four decades ago. One of the things that enabled him to survive the Hanoi Hilton was the knowledge that America, the country he had fought for and loved, would never do the same to any prisoners in its own custody. And yet President Bush – the man he championed – authorised some of the very stress positions against terror suspects that to this day prevent McCain from being able to lift his arms much above his shoulders.
By 2006 McCain was ready to break completely with the Bush administration, but in keeping with his character, he could not countenance withdrawal from the battlefield. He’s an instinctual military man, a person utterly opposed to anything that could even look like American retreat, and haunted by the Vietnam experience, which he saw as a political failure, not a military one.
And unlike Rumsfeld, and other light-footprint hawks, McCain had no qualms about flooding a foreign country with as many American troops as would be required to restore order. When General David Petraeus emerged with “the surge”, a counter-insurgency plan that promised some kind of reversal of Rumsfeldism, McCain leapt at it. It’s fair to say that no American politician pioneered the surge as passionately or as presciently as McCain. Many of us felt it was too late – and that Petraeus still didn’t have sufficient troops to pull it off. McCain demurred.
And McCain was right. And lucky. I know very few experts who predicted that violence would ebb in Iraq as swiftly as it has – and some of it (such as the Sunni switch against Al-Qaeda and the Sadr militia’s quiescence) coincided with the increase in US troops, rather than being created by it.
Nonetheless, it’s unarguable that the prospects for a noncatastrophe in Iraq have vastly improved over the past 12 months. The Maliki government’s unexpected success in using the Iraqi army to suppress Sadrite militias in Basra and Sadr City has both given new life to the Baghdad government and encouraged some Sunnis to rejoin it. Then there’s oil. As the price has skyrocketed, Baghdad has just announced a no-bid contract with several leading western oil companies for development. The money should be rolling in soon enough.
So McCain is basking in success, right? Vindicated by events, he can present himself as the man who rescued the Iraq occupation and is best positioned to take it forward. Easy as pie, no? Alas for McCain, not at all.
The overwhelming response among Americans to good news from Iraq is a simple question: can we come home now? With a hefty majority still believing the war was a mistake in the first place, the “success” of the surge is less a vindication of the entire enterprise than an opportunity to get the hell out with less blowback than previously feared. Moreover, the less chaotic the situation in Iraq, the easier it is for the Democrats to persuade Americans that the relatively inexperienced Barack Obama is not that big a risk as commander-in-chief.
Withdrawal the right way, moreover, plays to Obama’s strengths, not McCain’s. McCain is a superb fighter and underdog, a man who likes his conflicts clear and his wars epic. He takes strong moral stands and sticks with them. But what is now required is a deft and subtle assessment of future military needs, a hefty dose of canny diplomacy with Iran and Syria and an ability to retain the trust of Americans that an exit is both feasible and imminent. On all these, Obama is obviously a more pragmatic choice.
You can see this in McCain’s biggest gaffe of the primary campaign. He was asked how long American troops would be in Iraq. He said he didn’t care if it were a hundred years or even a thousand years. He meant in a noncombat role, not in active warfare, but his answer revealed a core assumption: that the US will have permanent military bases in Iraq for the indefinite future, and that this is the equivalent of the long-term presence in Germany and South Korea. A pliant Arab state, fortified with US bases for the next century, and a staging post to contain Iran: these are McCain’s obvious best-case scenarios. And as the Bush administration’s plans for up to 60 permanent bases in Iraq are rejected by many Iraqi politicians, McCain’s stance begins, once again, to morph into Bush’s.
For most Americans, this is not a good thing. They have no desire to keep young Americans policing the Sunni-Shi’ite fault line halfway across the globe indefinitely; most want the massive resources now being drained by Iraq to be directed homeward. And there’s enough distrust of politicians who backed this war in the first place to be suspicious of anyone who did so and who is still eager to keep troops there indefinitely.
It’s hard to see how McCain escapes this trap. If Iraq gets worse, the domestic desire to leave will grow. If Iraq improves, the domestic desire to leave will grow. Either way, McCain’s posture – stay in until the job is done and preferably, in smaller numbers, for ever – is too close to Bush’s to avoid electoral danger. It is a cruel paradox: the more he is proved right about the immediate past, the less he seems suited to run the immediate future.
McCain’s time was eight years ago – and who knows how the world would now look if he had defeated Bush. Maybe an unforeseen crisis – perhaps with Iran – will change the terrain sufficiently for this underdog to come back one more time. But the odds are against him. And in so many ways, it isn’t his fault.

This is important, history in the making!
Spielberg, Ambani May Form Movie Venture,

From WSJ
By Subramaniam Sharma and Joseph Galante
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Steven Spielberg and Indian billionaire Anil Ambani are close to forming a venture that may help the movie director's DreamWorks SKG team exit from Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group will invest as much as $600 million in the studio, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. The venture may borrow another $500 million to finance about six films a year, the Journal said. Reliance and Viacom declined to comment on the report, and spokesmen at DreamWorks weren't available.
Spielberg and DreamWorks co-founders David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg sold the studio to Paramount in 2006 and have since produced ``Transformers'' and the latest ``Indiana Jones'' movie. They have rights to retain the DreamWorks name. In February, Viacom Chief Executive Officer Philippe Dauman said the studio is willing to negotiate a new agreement when Spielberg's contract expires at the end of this year.
``Spielberg leaving might not immediately get recognized on the bottom line, but it certainly would be a squandered asset that could result in less profit over the long term,'' said Fred Moran, an analyst at Stanford Financial Group in Boca Raton, Florida. He recommends Viacom shares and doesn't own them.
Class B shares of New York-based Viacom fell 43 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $32.42 at 11:10 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Before today, the stock had dropped 25 percent this year.
Film Expansion
Anil Ambani, 49, ranked by Forbes as the world's sixth- richest man, has built his entertainment business through acquisitions, partnerships and setting up radio stations after parting with his elder brother Mukesh Ambani in 2006.
Reliance, based in Mumbai, purchased Adlabs Films Ltd., a producer and distributor of Hindi-language Bollywood movies, in June 2005. The group also operates 41 radio stations across India, according to the company's Web site. It operates Internet Web sites, social-networking and game Web sites and an online movie rental business.
Reliance Big Entertainment announced at the Cannes Film Festival last month that it would consider financing films for eight Hollywood-based production companies promoted by actors and directors, including George Clooney, Nicolas Cage, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Chris Columbus, Jim Carrey and Jay Roach.
Movie Company
``We see Reliance Big Entertainment as a global entertainment company, and Hollywood certainly presents a bigger and wider basket of opportunities,'' President Rajesh Sawhney said today in an e-mailed statement. He declined to comment on whether the company is in talks with Spielberg.
The development deals are part of Reliance Entertainment's strategy to build an integrated movie company that includes production, distribution and exhibition, the company said in a news release on May 18. The deal also secures Indian rights for resulting movies which Reliance co-finances, it said.
Reliance also expects to attract Hollywood productions to India where it owns physical studios and other facilities, the company had said.
Anil Ambani also operates India's second-biggest wireless company Reliance Communications Ltd., the nation's third-biggest utility by market value, Reliance Infrastructure Ltd., and financial-services provider Reliance Capital Ltd.
Voice and e-mailed messages left by Bloomberg News for DreamWorks spokesmen Chip Sullivan and Marvin Levy weren't immediately returned.
Viacom spokeswoman Kelly McAndrew referred questions to Paramount spokeswoman Patti Rockenwagner, who declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News.
Geffen and Spielberg are negotiating to move to NBC Universal, General Electric Co.'s media unit, the New York Times reported last November, citing people close to the talks.
NBC CEO Jeffrey Zucker said in December his company would be interested in DreamWorks if the studio became available.

Tim Russert, ‘Meet the Press’ Host, Is Dead at 58
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights since becoming moderator of “Meet the Press” nearly 17 years ago, died Friday after collapsing at the Washington bureau of NBC News. He was 58 and lived in Northwest Washington.
His death was announced by Tom Brokaw, former anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” who broke into the network’s programming just after 3:30 p.m.
An NBC spokeswoman, Allison Gollust, said in an e-mail message Friday night that Mr. Russert had died of a “sudden heart attack.” His internist, Dr. Michael A. Newman, said on MSNBC that an autopsy had found that Mr. Russert had an enlarged heart and significant coronary artery disease.
When stricken, Mr. Russert had been recording voice-overs for this Sunday’s program. Mr. Russert, who was also the Washington bureau chief and a senior vice president of NBC News, had returned in the last couple of days from a trip to Italy to celebrate the recent graduation of his son, Luke, from Boston College.
With his plain-spoken explanations and hard-hitting questions, Mr. Russert played an increasingly outsize role in the news media’s coverage of politics. The elegantly simple white memo board he used on election night in 2000 to explain the deadlock in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore — “Florida, Florida, Florida,” he had scribbled, in red marker — became an enduring image in the history of American television coverage of the road to the White House.
More recently, he drew criticism for his sharp — some said disproportionately sharp — questioning of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in her pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, most notably in a debate between her and Senator Barack Obama in Cleveland in February. But he asked tough questions of Senator Obama, too, as well as any number of Republicans.
But he leavened his prosecutorial style with an exuberance for politics — and politicians, on both sides of the aisle. And the easy way he spoke on camera belied his fierce preparation, often to the detriment of his social life. He rarely ventured out on Saturday nights.
“He really was the best political journalist in America, not just the best television journalist in America,” said Al Hunt, the Washington executive editor of Bloomberg News and former Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Russert’s political analysis was born of experience: he worked as a counselor to Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York in 1983-84 and for five years before that was special counsel to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. He had been chosen to run Mr. Moynihan’s New York City office before he turned 30.
“He absolutely set the standard for moving from politics to journalism,” said Mr. Hunt, a close friend who first met Mr. Russert in his days working for Mr. Moynihan. “He proved it could be done. He proved it could be done with extraordinary skill and integrity.”
Or, as Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, told NBC on Friday: "He had done his homework, so we didn’t have to do ours. We longed to hear what his take on world events was."
“Meet the Press,” the top-rated public affairs program on television, is viewed by nearly four million people each Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research. As word of Mr. Russert’s death spread across BlackBerry and computer screens, tributes poured into NBC from the highest elected officials and competitors on other networks. Dozens of loyal viewers also posted tributes on media Web sites.
Mr. Brokaw is to host a special edition of “Meet the Press” on Sunday, which will pay tribute to Mr. Russert’s life and career. With Mr. Russert’s unexpected passing, NBC will soon be forced to confront a question with no immediately easy answer: how to replace its lead political analyst with the presidential election less than five months away.
In a statement, President Bush described Mr. Russert as “an institution in both news and politics for more than two decades.”
“He was always well-informed and thorough in his interviews,” Mr. Bush said. “And he was as gregarious off the set as he was prepared on it.”
Former President Bill Clinton and Senator Clinton issued a statement saying: “Tim had a love of public service and a dedication to journalism that rightfully earned him the respect and admiration of not only his colleagues but also those of us who had the privilege to go toe to toe with him.”
With his bulky frame, thick face and devilishly arched eyebrows, Timothy John Russert Jr. was an unlikely television star. And it was not just that he was the son of a onetime garbage collector in his native Buffalo, or a graduate, with honors, of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. When he joined NBC in 1984, it was as an executive working on special news projects. Among his earliest “gets”: arranging an appearance a year later by Pope John Paul II on the “Today” program, broadcasting from Rome.
Behind the scenes and off camera, Mr. Russert’s colleagues at NBC News soon learned that he had a gift for making the most complex political machinations understanding and compelling.
“He had a better political insight than anyone else in the room, period,” said Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, who was then an up-and-coming producer.
As Mr. Zucker told it Friday, Michael Gartner, then president of NBC News, went to Mr. Russert at some point in the late 1980s to ask him to be the Washington bureau chief.
“Michael came back from the meeting,” Mr. Zucker said, “and said he had also decided to name him the new moderator of ‘Meet the Press.’ ”
“This was a guy who had no on-camera experience,” Mr. Zucker said. “Forget that he had never hosted a program. He had never appeared on television.”
He made his debut as moderator in December 1991. Eight years later, Bill Carter wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Russert had reinvented “Meet the Press,” which first appeared on television in 1948, “changing it from a sleepy encounter between reporters and Washington newsmakers into an issue-dense program, with Mr. Russert taking on the week’s newsmaker.”
Among those who submitted to Mr. Russert’s prosecutorial questions (which he often set up with evidence, often from the subject’s own mouth, cued on videotape) were Bill Clinton and Al Gore, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, John Kerry and John McCain.
During the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Mr. Cheney’s former chief of staff, Mr. Russert was put in the unfamiliar position of answering questions himself, from the witness stand. Mr. Libby had said that he first learned of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson, from Mr. Russert in a July 2003 conversation. Mr. Russert denied the claim, and prosecutors have asserted that Mr. Libby concocted that account to avoid acknowledging that he had learned about her from fellow officials.
Those reporters who covered the television beat saw many sides of Mr. Russert, whether it was in a direct phone call or voice mail message sternly questioning the accuracy of a particular reference to him, or the way he would seem to melt when being asked about one of his heroes, Bruce Springsteen, who was known to receive Mr. Russert backstage at his concerts.
Off camera and away from the office, Mr. Russert was a gregarious man with a rolling laugh and a roster of friends who were in his life for decades. Those who were in the presence of him and his son were long struck by the closeness of the relationship. Mr. Russert was known to steal away from the NBC Washington bureau during the day to greet his son upon his return from school, or to surprise him while he was caddying at a golf course in Nantucket, Mass., where the family had a home.
Four years ago, when the younger Mr. Russert was preparing to depart Washington for Boston College, several friends wondered aloud to the father how he would survive being so far away from his son.
In addition to his son, Mr. Russert is survived by his wife, Maureen Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine; his father, Tim Russert and three sisters. The elder Mr. Russert is the subject of the son’s best-selling book, “Big Russ & Me.”
Mr. Hunt, of Bloomberg News, said that in one of the last of their nearly weekly conversations, early this month, he and Mr. Russert were relishing the opportunity to cover this year’s presidential campaign. As his old friend recalled through tears Friday, Mr. Russert marveled, “Can you believe we get paid for this year?”
Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.

fighting words (Slate)
The Lion Who Didn't Roar
Why hasn't Nelson Mandela spoken out against Robert Mugabe?By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, June 9, 2008, at 12:27 PM ET
The scale of state-sponsored crime and terror in Zimbabwe has now escalated to the point where we are compelled to watch not just the systematic demolition of democracy and human rights in that country but something not very far removed from slow-motion mass murder a la Burma. The order from the Mugabe regime that closes down all international aid groups and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations is significant in two ways. It expresses the ambition for total control by the state, and it represents a direct threat—"vote for us or starve"—to the already desperate civilian population. The organization CARE, for example, which reaches half a million impoverished Zimbabweans, has been ordered to suspend operations. And here's a little paragraph, almost buried in a larger report of more comprehensive atrocities but somehow speaking volumes:
The United Nations Children's Fund said Monday that 10,000 children had been displaced by the violence, scores had been beaten and some schools had been taken over by pro-government forces and turned into centers of torture.
While this politicization of the food situation in "his" country was being completed, President Robert Mugabe benefited from two things: the indulgence of the government of South Africa and the lenience of the authorities in Rome, who allowed him to attend a U.N. conference on the world food crisis—of all things—despite a five-year-old ban on his travel to any member of the European Union. This, in turn, seems to me to implicate two of the supposed sources of moral authority on the planet: Nelson Mandela and the Vatican.
By his silence about what is happening in Zimbabwe, Mandela is making himself complicit in the pillage and murder of an entire nation, as well as the strangulation of an important African democracy. I recently had the chance to speak to George Bizos, the heroic South African attorney who was Mandela's lawyer in the bad old days and who more recently has also represented Morgan Tsvangirai, the much-persecuted leader of the Zimbabwean opposition. Why, I asked him, was his old comrade apparently toeing the scandalous line taken by President Thabo Mbeki and the African National Congress? Bizos gave me one answer that made me wince—that Mandela is now a very old man—and another that made me wince again: that his doctors have advised him to avoid anything stressful. One has a bit more respect for the old lion than to imagine that he doesn't know what's happening in next-door Zimbabwe or to believe that he doesn't understand what a huge difference the smallest word from him would make. It will be something of a tragedy if he ends his career on a note of such squalid compromise.
As for the revolting spectacle of Mugabe flying in to a Food and Agricultural Organization conference in Rome last week, there were quibbling FAO officials who claimed that the ban on his travel to the European Union did not cover meeting places of U.N. organizations. This would not cover the luxury hotel on the Via Veneto where Mugabe and his wife stayed. And it seems he bears a charmed life in Rome. He was there only recently as a guest at the funeral of Pope John Paul II and was able to claim that he was on Vatican soil rather than Italian territory. Which in turn raises an interesting question: What is it going to take before the Roman Catholic Church has anything to say about the conduct of this member of its flock? Mugabe has been a devout Catholic ever since his days in a mission school in what was then colonial Rhodesia, and one is forced to wonder what he tells his priest when he is asked if he has anything he'd like to confess.
By way of contrast, look what happened to Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo. This Catholic churchman in Zimbabwe's second city was a pillar of opposition to the regime and a great defender of its numberless victims. After a long campaign of defiance, and after surviving many threats to his life, the archbishop was caught on video last year having some fairly vigorous sex with a woman not his wife. Indeed, she was someone else's wife, which made it adultery as well as fornication. You might think the church would have been glad of a bit of heterosexual transgression for a change, but a dim view was taken of the whole thing, in spite of the fact that it bore all the marks of a setup and was immediately given wide publicity by the police agencies of the Mugabe state. Ncube is no longer the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo.
Very well, I do understand that he broke his vows and that the rules are the rules. But he didn't starve or torture any children, he didn't send death squads to silence his critics, he didn't force millions of his fellow countrymen into penury and/or exile, and he didn't openly try to steal an election. Mugabe has done and is doing all these things, and I haven't heard a squeak from the papacy. A man of his age is perhaps unlikely to be caught using a condom, but one still has to hope that Mugabe will be found red-handed in this way because it seems that nothing less is going to bring the condemnation of the church down upon his sinful head.
It is the silence of Mandela, much more than anything else, that bruises the soul. It appears to make a mockery of all the brave talk about international standards for human rights, about the need for internationalist solidarity and the brotherhood of man, and all that. There is perhaps only one person in the world who symbolizes that spirit, and he has chosen to betray it. Or is it possible, before the grisly travesty of the runoff of June 27, that the old lion will summon one last powerful growl?Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

The Future has begun.
The United States took a proud step forward today. We overcame rustic culture, embraced international norms and have become the leader of nations, culture, and the promise of humanities future. We have begun the hard task of passing the torch of leadership to a new and exciting generation!
The brilliance of America shines so fully so completely it staggers the imagination and exhilarates the mind. We have every reason to believe in ourselves and to celebrate our success. We are every bit of what we claim and even our most committed critics must in some fashion acknowledge the truth or be dismissed as fools.
It is our destiny that the United States will take humanity to the stars and will establish a fabulous empire not of conquest but of commercial enterprise. Our devotion to genuine justice and absolute integrity of personal worth will define us to the Galaxy.

The United States marches forward in a purposeful and intelligent way. The American dream is proof positive of human beings capacity to create and sustain civilization that promotes individual accomplishment and community tradition across generations by embracing private talent and encouraging public service. There are no aristocrats autocrats nor plutocrats or elites in America. It is here that every person has a credible opportunity and every mind is given a true chance at illumination and positive construction. No personal success will ever be limited by envy or humiliated by political or religious or social torment; every American has access to unlimited possibilities. In America opportunity is not a ruse but a fact and success is not a sham, but genuine and has the full authority of the state as it’s protector and ally. No one, no faction, no ideology, no theology and no politick can defeat Americas fundamental belief in the value of every person.

Barack Obama’s securing the Democratic nomination is a true moment of history and a step forward for all of us. We should be proud and we should be encouraged.

We witness here the promise fulfilled that every person can if they choose, to rise up and seize the day and define tomorrow. Obama stands at the ramparts of history; his intelligence is his shield and his gentleness is his sword and his decency is his creed. The world calls his name.

We are the ones we have waited for!

After a dark season; a time of terrible distress and national alarm, we now turn away from despair and walk confidently into the light of the future, unbounded by fear or remorse, but inspired by that which is good, that which is just, and that which we value most; a nation united in common cause to defeat extremism, irrationalism, and hysteria, not by vengeance or terror, but by responsible action and the rule of law.

Barack Obama offers us a chance to make anew the ancient American devotion to liberty justice and enlightened progress. Not just for ourselves but for humanity. Our happiness is incomplete until all the nations are free and happiness is everywhere.

We recognize that Barack Obama's success is ours and his victory is proof of our worth and his presidency will announce a new era and commence a new season of progress, and accomplishment!

Obama gives full measure to the power of democracy and the magnificence of commercial invention and social cooperation. Obama gives energy to ambition and inspires creativity because his life is the direct consequence of those things. The very breath he takes, the light in his eyes and the compassion in his heart define him and reflects onto us what we are and what we have become.

Now Barack Obamas journey to the White House begins! The future has come alive and it belongs to us.

We need not be afraid we need not hesitate we need not reconsider, we have the strength and we have the right ideas and the proper tools to get there and construct a future that will light up the galaxy for a very long time.

Yes, we can, and we will.

Comment by David A Fairbanks 6308 9PM SFCA

NY Times Editorial
Mr. Rove Talks, but Doesn’t Answer
In a recent appearance on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Karl Rove was asked if he had a role in the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute Don Siegelman. The former Democratic governor of Alabama was convicted and sentenced to more than seven years, quite possibly for political reasons, and there is evidence that Mr. Rove may have been pulling the strings.
Mr. Rove, who has traded in his White House job for that of talking head, talked a lot but didn’t answer the question. He also did not directly deny being involved. The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed him to testify. It should do everything in its power to see that he does and that he answers all of its questions.
Mr. Siegelman — who began serving his sentence before being freed on appeal — was convicted on corruption charges that appear to be flimsy, and his supporters have long insisted that he was prosecuted for partisan reasons. Until his indictment, he was the Democrats’ best chance of taking back the Alabama governorship.
After Mr. Siegelman’s conviction, Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer, swore in an affidavit that she had heard another G.O.P. political operative, Bill Canary, boast in a phone call that his wife would “take care” of Mr. Siegelman and that Mr. Rove was involved in the planning. Mr. Canary’s wife is Leura Canary, the United States attorney for Montgomery, and her office prosecuted Mr. Siegelman.
The House Judiciary Committee has prepared a report on the Siegelman case, and several other questionable prosecutions. Ms. Simpson told the committee staff under oath that Rob Riley — the son of Alabama’s Republican governor, Bob Riley — told her that his father and Mr. Canary discussed the Siegelman case with Mr. Rove. She said the younger Mr. Riley also told her that Mr. Rove had spoken to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section about getting Mr. Siegelman indicted.
If these charges are true, they suggest that the justice system was turned into a partisan tool, and that Mr. Siegelman’s freedom may have been taken away because of his political allegiances.
Mr. Rove has already defied a Senate subpoena on the issue of politicized prosecutions, claiming executive privilege, and he seems intent on defying the House’s subpoena. His claim of executive privilege is not only weak; it is shamefully cynical.
If he was drumming up political prosecutions in the Justice Department, and talking about it with operatives in Alabama, those conversations are not privileged. And if there is any privilege to be protected — such as a conversation with the president that did not involve illegality — he would still need to show up in Congress and plead the privilege to specific questions.
It is time for Michael Mukasey, the attorney general, to stand up for justice by enforcing Congress’s subpoenas. If he will not do that, Congress must ensure that its investigative authority is not thwarted.
Mr. Rove seems willing to talk about this case everywhere except where he is required to: in Congress, in public, under oath. The American people, and Mr. Siegelman, are counting on Congress to find out the truth.

Would the Clintons kindly leave the building
Andrew Sullivan (London Times)

So this is how the Clintons end – not with a bang but with a whimper? By this time next week Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. Yes, I’ve thrown a little salt over my shoulder, crossed myself a few times and said 10 decades of the rosary, but the laws of mathematics have to be worth something.
There remains the unknown quantity of the Clintons’ miraculous ability to produce high drama from delegate calculus – “You can’t tell how far a frog will jump until you punch him,” Hillary Clinton mystifyingly warned last week – but the overwhelming probability is that by the end of the week she will have to decide either to fight on, pointlessly, until the Democratic convention in August or make a nice concession speech and wait a few months, if Obama loses the presidency, before saying “told you so”.
By Wednesday all the votes from the primaries in Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico will have been counted and many of the disputed Michigan and Florida delegates ceded to Clinton, but still she won’t have enough to win. Obama will still need the support of the super-delegates – party officials who have a vote at the convention – to make him the undisputed winner. But there are many signs that the numbers he needs will begin to declare themselves in a wave after the final primary votes come in.
We still don’t know fully how the Clintons intend to respond to this extremely inconvenient truth. So far as I can tell, very few people have yet approached Her Majesty to ask what she actually intends to do. If you want to have a good idea of how dysfunctional and Bush-like a Clinton administration would be, that’s a good place to start: a leader whose closest aides are often afraid to talk to her.
Her departure – drama-laden or not – will transform the electoral scene. American presidential elections are somewhat different from British elections because they focus on two people alone. And with Obama and John McCain it would be very hard to imagine a more arresting or fascinating contrast.
You have in one corner an iconic figure of the late 20th century: a naval man, famous prisoner of war, torture victim and youthful lothario and trouble-maker. McCain is a product of the west, Arizona and the military. And yet he is also extremely comfortable in elite circles, loves gabbing with journalists, enjoys the company of Hollywood moguls and stars and feels uncomfortable with religious fanatics.
Despised by many hardcore conservatives, he would be the oldest first-term president and closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on issues such as climate change, campaign finance and immigration. Alternately charming and volcanic, conciliatory and dogmatic, he remains an enigma as a potential president, a job that he wanted (and deserved) eight years ago.
Against him we see a walking symbol of 21st-century America. A mixed-race son of a divorced mother, reared in Indonesia and Hawaii, Obama is an American whose father was a member of the Kenyan elite and whose great-uncle liberated Buchen-wald concentration camp in 1945 as part of the US army. He is the first unashamed liberal to run for president since George McGovern, but a man whose capacity for reason and inclusion and civility has won him many conservative friends and admirers.
A bi-racial man who does not condone but will equally not disown the angrier segments of black America, Obama glides through public life like a visible incarnation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. He is as cool as McCain is hot.
As the Clintons fade ungraciously away, the emergence of these two from the dust of an astonishingly vivid and endless primary campaign comes to me, at least, as a massive relief. These two men are easily the best each party has to offer, the two most capable of talking to the other side: serious, decent, principled figures with, of course, their fair share of political shading. And in a war against Islamist terror, which for me remains the most important issue, they offer a choice as stark as it is difficult.
The biggest worry about Obama is whether he will be too reflexively diplomatic. Does he believe that some of America’s enemies are reasonable in a good way rather than rational in a malign way? How will he respond if our enemies attack? His defenders point to his diffident but tough composure in this campaign as a sign of his steeliness. He has supported military strikes in Pakistan, they say. He was trained in urban Chicago politics, they remind. We’ll see.
A more telling question for me will be how he adjusts to new realities and possibilities in Iraq. Recent successes for the Maliki government and Iraqi army in Basra and Sadr City and the lowest level of civilian deaths in four years suggest that Iraq has altered for the better. Can Obama adjust his strategy – so we withdraw in the best way possible for our interests?
With McCain there’s a reverse worry. Has he become more neocon than Bush? In the past McCain has been known as a pragmatist and realist, able to see when American interests have to come before American rhetoric or sentiment. But in the past few years, as the Iraq debate has polarised so many, he has become shriller and more demagogic on the war in the Middle East, more prone to Bush-style declarations about good and evil than subtler assessments of how best to mix force, diplomacy and multi-lateralism to the West’s advantage.
And so one worries: has his admirable sense of the danger of our foes blinded him to ways in which a defter diplomacy and shrewder deployment of force can help to advance our inter-ests? Does he understand the need to appeal beyond Muslim leaders to Muslim populations? Is he temperamentally suited to the delicate chess game of the new global politics?
Let’s say both broad worries about both men are salient. The question then becomes: is Obama more capable of adjusting to toughness or is McCain more capable of adjusting to nuance? Neither is perfect. The job that Americans will soon face is to figure out who is more perfectable in office. My sense at this point is that Obama is more capable of strength than McCain is of subtlety. And that McCain’s domestic weakness with his own base may force him into cruder measures than are appropriate to the threat we face.
But these are, perforce, preliminary judgments. We need a longer, deeper campaign between these two to see where the contours of the next presidency will fall. And for that to happen the Clintons still have to leave the building. They have to grasp at this stage in their lives that it isn’t always, everywhere, about them.
We’re waiting. Until the last frog is punched.