Kate Snow of ABC News scores the Big Get with Sarah Palin, and elicits this amazing quotation:

as for whether another pursuit of national office...would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the "department of law" would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

"I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out," she said.

Snow's droll, too-true follow-up line:

There is no "Department of Law" at the White House.

What there is is a legal counsel. He or she counsels but does not "throw" anything "out."

Ten years ago, it was de rigueur for news organizations to go to every Democrat under the sun and press them on their views of Bill Clinton's carrying on with Monica Lewinsky. May we expect the same full-court press on every Republican, to see how they feel about having campaigned, not so long ago, to put this woman one 73-year-old heartbeat away from the Oval Office?

Shall we hear more from Bill Kristol, he who granted his imprimatur to the Governor way back when she was peaceably ensconced in Juneau?

Or Ross Douthat, who on Monday informed his NYT readers that "Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard." And that: "Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true."

Greg Marx at CJR refutes Douthat's faux populism. Sarah Palin is beloved by the Republican base, period. There's no evidence that anyone else loves her (besides Tina Fey and comedy-lovers everywhere).

Truth is, anyone can be a great success story on the op-ed page of the NYT even if he's been to Harvard.

One telling moment in Scott Shane's NYT piece on the FBI's 2004 interrogations of Saddam Hussein, just released through the invaluable labors of the National Security Archive, is this FBI summary trying to explain why Saddam wanted to thwart UN inspections and cover up his non-possession of WMD. This is not brand new stuff, but still revelatory. Saddam told the FBI he

was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions [from] the United States for his refusal to allow U.N. inspectors back into Iraq. [Inspections] would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq.

Shane then quotes the US's former chief weapons inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, attempting to explain why Saddam would have wanted to fake WMD possession. Evidently it did not occur to the geniuses then on a mission to run American foreign policy for God that Saddam, having warred with Iran at the cost of millions of casualties for eight years, might fear the Islamic Republic.

"We did not appreciate how large the threat of Iran loomed in [Saddam's] thinking," Mr. Duelfer said, calling the United States' understanding of Iraq in 2003 "cartoonish."

This insult to the subtlety of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote must not be allowed to stand.

But seriously, the FBI documents, though remarkable, are incomplete. The redacted sections are voluminous, and whatever appeared there is intended to remain classified until 2034. What are the subjects closed to investigation until then? The National Security Archive says:

Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq's complicated relationship with the U.S. - the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba'ath party's rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq's chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds....This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic.

I suppose it's a backhanded tribute to the new-era FBI that the redactions are whited-- rather than blacked--out. But that's not quite the change we had the right to expect from the transparency-claiming Obama administration.

Bring out the rest of this history, people. We have a right to know.

Al Kamen, via Michael Crowley, offers up this spectacular piece of Americana: there is a General Tommy Franks Leadership Institute and Museum.

If it merges with the Bernard Madoff Leadership Institute and Museum to form the Bernie-Tommy Leadership Institute and Museum, it could brand itself with the motto: It Looked Great Until We Tanked.

But that, of course, would be unfair to Gen. Franks. Madoff knew what he was doing.

A well-informed friend writes from Tel Aviv "of the shame of Ehud Barak as a servant of Bibi. Mitchell refused to meet Bibi because he refused to accept a freeze on building in the settlements. Today Barak leaves for Washington as a middleman," to meet with Mitchell. "He comes with an offer: A freeze of 3 months. Everybody knows that 3 months - when one builds hundreds of houses, streets, infrastructure - is nothing. Sometimes it is what one has to wait just for the plumbing company to finish another project. But the cheating that enabled the building of the project of settlement goes on: If one reads the small print in Barak's 'new offer' it says" (according to Yedioth Ahronoth):

Barak would propose that a three-month moratorium would not cover some 2,000 buildings under construction in West Bank enclaves. Work on homes for Jews in Arab East Jerusalem also would continue.

Reuters, which moved a story about the small print, also says:

U.S. officials said Washington was considering making allowances for some structures nearing completion.

The AP has this:

"The stalemate with Israel will continue if settlement growth does not stop," said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Isn't the U. S. in its fifth decade of "making allowances" for West Bank settlements? Isn't it past time to cut off the allowances?

P. S. Gershom Gorenberg has a wise and pungent WP op-ed yesterday on the tedious history of Israeli rationalizations for self-thawing "freezes." His punch-line: "the real question is whether the Obama administration will blink first or stand firm on a freeze as an essential step toward making peace."

Nico Pitney, who's been splendidly liveblogging Iran news, links to an important AP dispatch by Sebastian Abbot and Katarina Kratovac, concerning extensive downloading of the nonviolent systematizer Gene Sharp's manual, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework," in Farsi translation. "The more [Iranian rebels] learn that there is a nonviolent alternative to both violence and passive submission, the more chances they are to take a wise course of action rather than a stupid one," Sharp told the reporters.

I read Sharp's manual after a visit to Belgrade, commemorating the student movement against Milosevic, a couple of years ago. It's extraordinarily sophisticated and methodical. It seems to have played a part in the so-called Color Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Which is not to say one size fits all colors. One of Sharp's leading advocates, Srdja Popovic, one of the Serb nonviolent leaders, now in charge of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or Canvas, cautions: "You can't export nonviolent struggles against non-democratic regimes. Cultural and situational environments are too different. But the principles are the same."

Canvas, and Otpor, the student movement that preceded it, have been tellingly criticized for failing to address Serb war crimes during the fight against Milosevic. I respect the criticism. I'm no expert. Nonviolent movements, like others, have their limits. The Iranian regime is far more brutal than anything encountered in Georgia or Ukraine. But I find it stirring that a sort of Nonviolent International is stirring into existence.

Looking strictly at the Iran questions, off the top. (My paraphrases are approximate, the ones in quote marks are better, and all in all this the best I can do.)

About Iran: "Appalled," "outraged." He was careful to respect Iranian sovereignty, but did tack out a very careful answer to a question about the "international community" and engagement: The Iran government should recognize that what it does has consequences for how the international community will deal with it.

Second in line: Nico Pitney (Huffington Post) gets to ask an Internet-fed question from Iran (and Obama knew that he was collecting Iranians' questions: he's well-briefed on the internets): "Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you did accept it without any conditions, wouldn't that be a betrayal?"

Obama: We didn't have observers. But many Iranians have "significant questions about the legitimacy of the election....Ultimately, the most important thing for the government to consider is its legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. What we can do is to say unequivocally is that there are universal principles and norms....I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize" that there is a good path.

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The Israeli writer David Grossman's reaction in Ha'aretz last Wednesday to Netanyahu's awful speech has now been translated, if a bit awkwardly. It's drenched in despair. The Israelis, Grossman writes, want to bunker down for the duration, and Bibi obliged their moral cowardice with his own:

If we turn from the skilled orator to his audience, we will see how passionately it barricades itself behind its anxieties, and we will feel the sweet stupor from pulsating nationalism, militarism and victimhood, which were the heartbeat of the entire speech.

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On Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei as the NYT says, "mocked the idea that the huge margin attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad could have been won through fraud."

Yesterday, the spokesman for the Guardian Council admitted to discrepancies in the vote count that "could be over 3 million."

Let's see. Three million votes miscounted--sounds like a lot. But funny thing, it would still leave the claimed election margin at 11 million, and the result unchanged. The spokesman himself made the point that the errors he copped to "would not noticably (sic) affect the outcome of the election."

The new style of lying: Admit to inconsequential error.

That's a paraphrase of Mike Tomasky's terrific piece on the Guardian site. His immediate subject is health care and the heads that need to be banged belong to recalcitrant Democrats. It's excellent advice for other fights down the pike, too.

He Said, She Said, hereafter HSSS, is the bane of actual journalism--I thought everyone knew that by now. The point of telling readers that experts disagree is lost unless the journalist explains why they disagree, whether they have good reason to disagree, whether their claims make sense. Otherwise we're left with a sloppy Whatever.

Today's object lesson in how not to help readers is Eric Dash's "If It's Too Big to Fail, Is It Too Big to Exist?" in the NYT Week in Review. The "It" refers, of course, to gargantuan banks, or bank-like behemoths like AIG. These huge money-movers create giant mayhem and then walk away with subsidies. Is it right for them to make out like bandits banks?

Eric Dash has the right idea, to peek under the curtain of Too-Big-To-Fail, but gets us not a half-step toward an answer. The experts are quoted saying things like "I don't think you can completely turn back the clock" (Lawrence Summers) and "You can't put that genie in the bottle again," (Frederic S. Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve governor).

If "there's no going back to the days of small banks" (Dash's paraphrase of Summers), just why is that? What do those like Sheila Bair of FDIC, and Paul Volcker, former head of the Fed, say to this claim? (It doesn't deserve the name of an argument.) Who would gain, who would lose if we went back to small(er) banks? What would be some predictable knock-on effects?

If there's a point to a Week in Review, it's to advance the discussion, not simply to state HSSS and shrug that substantial reform is difficult.

Update: I just got to today's business section, where Gretchen Morgenson's column, under a pungent headline ("Too Big to Fail, or Too Big to Handle?"), goes to the jugular with an apt observation:

More than two years after the crisis began, "too big to fail" remains "too problematic to address" with anything other than more souped-up regulation."

and an apt question:

Given that earlier efforts at policing these entities failed so miserably, why should anyone think that a new-and-improved regulatory approach will fare better?

The management of the WP, in its collective unwisdom, has decided to terminate Dan Froomkin's fine "White House Watch" online column effective early next month. The official statement:

Editors and our research teams are constantly reviewing our online content to ensure we bring readers the most value when they are on our Web site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Regrettably, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced" to The Post's Web site.

Everyone knows the dimensions of the newspaper crisis. Last month, the WP company overall reported "a net loss of $19.5 million...for its first quarter ended March 29, 2009, compared to net income of $39.3 million in the first quarter of last year." Income plunged in all the company's divisions--broadcast, cable, even the Kaplan cram course cash cow that's been carrying the company in recent years.

Here's a business plan: Your company's tanking. You've been buying out your most knowledgeable, most experienced hands. You've been shuttering foreign bureaus, even removed the globe that for years pinpointed their sites from your the newsroom--in embarrassment, presumably. Your paper's lost respect. Its editorial section has gone neocon. What to do?

Let's see: Guess you'd better can the liberal online column there. John Podhoretz is probably available for a substitute, maybe cheaper.

The uprising, or whatever, in Iran is bringing out the highest of revolutionary prose (in English; Allah knows how it plays in Farsi). Consider this passage from an anonymous academic reproduced in Juan Cole's blog:

The procession passes through an underpass and just as there is great pleasure in honking the car horn in tunnels these many people send up an enormous cheer, echoing off the walls. From dark to light the crowd emerges from the underpass and looks back to see what they have done. There is above them stretching across the tunnel a dissonant sight, a sign with the visage and message of the Supreme Leader. He watches over this protest in the manner of TJ Eckelberg...

The whole piece is wonderfully vivid.

Move over, John Reed. May this uprising pan out better than the last time ten days shook the world.

The American media, that herd of independent minds, give Netanyahu the headlines he wanted: "For the first time, Netanyahu accepts limited Palestinian state" (LAT); "Netanyahu Backs Unarmed Palestinian State" (WSJ); "Israeli Prime Minister Backs Palestinian State" (WP); "Israel PM calls for demilitarized Palestinian state" (CNN); and better, "Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians, With Caveats" (NYT).

Further down, you may read about his no to a settlement freeze, no to twin-capital Jerusalem, and the other bricks in the wall he put up.

But the metaphor of the day comes from PA negotiator Saeb Erekat:

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' senior negotiator, called on Obama to intervene to force Israel to abide by previous interim agreements that include freezing settlement activity in the West Bank.

"The peace process has been moving at the speed of a tortoise. Tonight, Netanyahu has flipped it over on its back," he said.

What a dreadful weekend! For all the thrill of Obama in Cairo, Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu are not so impressed.

P. S. Some European headlines are graver and less gullible. The Times of London: "Netanyahu defies Obama with hardline speech"; Le Monde: "Netanyahu poses his conditions for the existence of a Palestinian state"; but the Telegraph lines up with American coverage: "Netanyahu backs creation of Palestinian 'state.'"

P. P. S. Martin Fletcher on NBC last night did this right: "It was billed as a major policy speech, Israel's answer to President Obama's demand for progress towards peace. And tonight Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally did say yes to a Palestinian state, but with conditions. No military. It must recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Jerusalem will remain the undivided capital of Israel. For many in his own government, Netanyahu went too far. For Palestinians, he didn't go far enough. But tonight, Netanyahu just repeated his traditional line, no new settlements but natural growth must be permitted." He interviewed both Erekat and a Palestinian farmer. Imagine! [H/t: Herbert Gans]

They call me Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Do you realize how bloody much fun I had
When the Ayatollah Khamenei
Decided I'd get to stay
You thought that I was some kind of fad?

John Kelly of Columbia, Harvard, and Morningside Analytics has been mapping the Farsi-speaking blogosphere, and if you check out his diagram of technicolor results--visually the gaudiest in cyberspace, but that's another story--you'll see his findings are auspicious on the brink of the election. Turns out that Iranian blogs that link to Ahmadinejad (emtedadmehr.com) are concentrated in a cluster that's normally devoted to Conservative Politics, while the blogs that link to Moussavi (mirhussein.com) "come from all over the map, not just the reformist politics group." In other words, Ahmadinejad's support in the cybersphere is self-limiting.

It must immediately be added that, of course, you would expect proportionately fewer of Ahmadinejad's rural poor to be online than Moussavi's urbanites. Still, if you don't mind having your expectations raised today, this is nice news.

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