Friday, 09 April 2004

Riceshomon. I didn't watch Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 panel (it aired at about 2 AM local time here in Sydney), so I'm relying on blogs to tell me how it went; so far, after reading most of the usual suspects, I still have no idea. Aside from the delightfully cynical Stuart Benjamin at The Volokh Conspiracy, who prepared a Bingo scorecard with words that partisan pundits would use, I've yet to find a description of Rice's testimony that doesn't sound like mad spin-doctoring.

For the record, my sources for this exercise are (listed roughly in order from far-left to far-right): Daily Kos, Whiskey Bar, Washington Monthly, Daniel Drezner, One Hand Clapping, Instapundit, and USS Clueless. Part of the problem here is that three of my middle four (Billmon, Drum and Drezner) punted this morning, leaving their commenters to battle it out; the remaining pundits' reactions were, shall we say, easier to predict in advance.

On the left side of the spectrum, nearly everyone described Rice as being nervous, hesitant, evasive and insecure. These comments tapered off as you move towards the right, where pundits were more likely to criticize the 9/11 Commission itself (using words like "farce", "ineptitutde", and "partisan jackasses"). The liberals were also much more likely to note that the President's Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001 was titled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States", and that it mentioned the possibility of Al Qaeda hijacking airplanes.

The right was, above all else, pissed off at Bob Kerrey. Already they're warming up the hate machine, preparing to give Kerrey the full treatment: Kerrey joins Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson, the people of Spain, and pretty much everyone who's not already a neocon on the right wing's Official Enemies List. Kerrey's sin was that he directly questioned the wisdom of Bush's war in Iraq, which (as far as the wingnuts are concerned) is the lowest form of high treason — and, more to the point, has very little to do with the mandate of the 9/11 Commission.

It was difficult to find any analysis of the substance of Rice's testimony, especially on the right: Steven Den Beste went straight to ad hominem attacks on family members of 9/11 victims; Instapundit highlighted the back-and-forth between Kerrey and Rice (and made the bizarro observation that Dr. Rice is a black woman — apparently a crack team of wingnuts worked round the clock to unearth that bombshell); and Donald Sensing dismissed the entire proceedings as a farce. One anonymous Instapundit reader claimed "if Dr Rice didn't refute nearly everything Dick Clarke said, I was clearly asleep for 3 hours", but offered nothing further to back up this bold assertion.

Daily Kos contributor DHinMI was really the only one to step forward and offer substantive analysis of Rice's testimony. Not surprisingly, he observed that Rice was "not forthcoming about actions and decisions," that Rice spent more time challenging the questions than she spent answering them, and that she didn't accept responsibility for failing to prevent 9/11. DHinMI also compared Rice's testimony with Clarke's, contrasting the relative candor of both officials and noting how each addressed structural problems.

Overall I get the impression that Rice's testimony didn't do much to restore the Bush administration's credibility, compared to the impact that officials like Richard Clarke and David Kay have had in recent weeks. Partisans on both sides are unswayed by her comments, centrists are still harboring the same doubts that they had the week before — and events on the ground in Iraq will have more impact on public opinion than anything Rice said today.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:49 pm. comments.