Snow Job

Do you remember John Snow?

He was the Treasury secretary, I believe, until the press declared him toast.

"One senior administration official said Treasury Secretary John W. Snow can stay as long as he wants, provided it is not very long," The Washington Post reported on Nov. 29.

On Monday, the New York Times said: "President Bush has decided to replace John W. Snow as treasury secretary and has been looking closely at a number of possible replacements, including the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., Republicans with ties to the White House say."

The Wall Street Journal got in the act as well: "Amid signs that he is close to replacing John Snow as Treasury secretary, President Bush faces two big decisions: Not just whom to pick for the job, but how the administration will make economic policy in his second term."

Well, guess what? Snow is staying. He will be the new Treasury secretary, which really saves on moving costs. Plus they don't have to print up new stationery.

This raises the following possibilities:

1) Those oft-quoted "senior administration officials" and "Bush advisers" sometimes don't know what they're talking about.

2) President Bush, who detests leaks, read the stories and decided to keep Snow just to stick it to the preening peacocks of the press.

3) Journalists are so in love with Cabinet-shuffle speculation that they jump the gun on what is little more than Beltway chatter.

So how did the newspapers handle a situation in which they had obviously been wrong?

The Wall Street Journal: "John Snow will stay on as Treasury Secretary after weeks of speculation that he was on his way out."

Speculation by whom, kemo sabe?

"A Snow supporter in the administration characterized predictions of Mr. Snow's departure by unnamed officials as 'rogue comments that just don't reflect the president's feelings.' "

So who are these rogues, and on how many other stories are they not reflecting the boss's feelings?

The Washington Post shifts the onus to the Bushies:

"President Bush invited Treasury Secretary John W. Snow yesterday to remain on the job after the White House withheld its endorsement for 10 days while aides hinted that he would be replaced."

"Snow was kept on only after the White House considered a variety of possible replacements and sounded out at least one top official on Wall Street. . . . Administration officials said that when no ideal successor could be found, Bush aides decided to retain Snow to put an end to rampant speculation that the former railroad executive was on his way out."

See, we weren't wrong -- they just changed their minds!

Speculation, by the way, isn't "rampant" unless it appears in the newspapers, which are then complicit.

The New York Times also seems to blame the sources, which it found credible enough to rely on the other day:

"President Bush asked Treasury Secretary John W. Snow on Wednesday to remain in his job, the White House said, after weeks in which Republicans close to the White House had talked openly about his impending departure and said that administration officials were interviewing possible successors."

How close to the White House, I wonder?

"The announcement came after Mr. Bush and his top aides determined they had to put a stop to an embarrassing public breach over who should occupy the nation's most central economic policymaking post, several officials said."

Notice the paragraph you don't see in any of these accounts: "The president's announcement followed reports in several newspapers, including this one, relying on advisers who refused to be quoted by name, that Mr. Snow was on his way out and was all but packing his bags and booking a flight."

Well, the intel bill finally passed, and the Los Angeles Times sees a lesson for Bush:

"President Bush has gotten a fresh education this week in how to deal with an increasingly feisty Congress as he heads into his second term.

"The protracted struggle to enact an overhaul of the nation's intelligence community showed that conservative powerbrokers in Congress could not be steamrollered as easily as when Bush first was elected. Republican leaders are not as willing to 'win ugly' as when they rammed his Medicare bill through the House last year, with arm-twisting so aggressive that it drew a rebuke from the Ethics Committee.

"The Senate gave final passage to the intelligence bill Wednesday on an 89-2 vote. The Republican rebellion that slowed action on the intelligence overhaul was a warning sign that Bush will have to speak clearly -- and listen carefully -- to his GOP allies in Congress if he is to hold together his party's motley coalition of defense hawks, religious activists and economic conservatives."

Of course, winning ugly is still winning.

Television just loves this story of Rummy getting grilled, because it's all on video:

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Army troops forced to scrounge in Kuwaiti dumps for metal plates to slap on their vehicles that they will just have to tough it out," reports the New York Daily News.

" 'As you know, you go to war with the Army you have,' Rumsfeld said to soldiers who ripped him on late pay, extended tours and the failure to provide them with armored Humvees.

"Rumsfeld told about 2,500 reservists and National Guard troops in Kuwait about to be deployed in Iraq that they signed on for the military as it is -- 'and not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.'

"The normally aggressive and surefooted Rumsfeld had invited 'tough questions,' but he appeared to be knocked off stride by his audience's bluntness.

" 'Now settle down, settle down,' the 72-year-old Rumsfeld said as the gripes poured in from the ranks. 'Hell, I'm an old man and it's early in the morning.' "

The big DNC vote is coming -- possible candidate Howard Dean made his speech yesterday -- and the Philadelphia Inquirer poses this question:

"Which should come first for Democrats as they retool for the future -- message or messenger?

"In their first meeting since their dark Election Day, Democrats will gather in Florida this weekend desperate to find a way back to power. Their focus will be on a search for a new messenger in the form of a national party chairman to voice the party's ideals on such issues as national defense, Social Security and tax restructuring.

"But some Democratic insiders say the search for a chairman puts too much emphasis on the wrong end of the equation. Instead, they say, the party should settle on a core message, much as Republicans did a generation ago when they became the party of smaller government, lower taxes, and strong national defense."

National Review's Jonah Goldberg says the Valerie Plame leak probe should make clear that journalists don't deserve special legal status:

"Liberals are furious that journalists might actually have to help the investigation they demanded. Journalists are beyond indignant. As a group, they seem to think asking journalists to reveal their sources is more sacrilegious than using a church as a stable.

"The commentary about this affair is focused on whether or not journalists should report what they know about a crime. After all, knowingly endangering a CIA agent's identity is, and should be, a serious offense. If a plumber witnesses a crime, he has to say what he saw or he goes to jail. But not journalists. Indeed, Michael Kinsley recounts an illuminating story. 'A very distinguished New York Times writer' once told Kinsley that 'if the Times ballet critic, heading home after assessing the day's offerings of pliés and glissades, happens to witness a murder on her way to the Times Square subway, she has a First Amendment right and obligation to refuse to testify about what she saw.' Why? Because she's a journalist!

"But in all of this debate, what people seem to be overlooking is that journalists aren't always analogous to witnesses to crimes. Sometimes they're accomplices. Imagine that a vindictive government official wants to embarrass an opponent by leaking his tax returns. He steals them from confidential files and meets a reporter from the Times in a back alley. The reporter publishes them. It seems to me the reporter isn't a witness, he's an accessory. If it makes it easier to understand the point, imagine instead of tax returns it's plans for a cheap nuclear weapon al Qaeda could make.

"Obviously, there's a real, longstanding tension here; journalists do need some wiggle-room. But keep in mind, the Plame case isn't about a whistleblower. It's allegedly about a government official (or officials) abusing their authority. These journalists aren't exposing wrongdoing; they're concealing it."

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber has some thoughts on crusading New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer declaring for governor:

"He's probably the most popular politician in the state -- and maybe the most popular Democrat in the country -- so it comes as no real surprise. And, since Chuck Schumer dropped out of the race (or, more precisely, decided not to get in it) a few weeks ago, the path to the nomination for Spitzer has been pretty clear. I guess the real question is whether George Pataki decides to run for a fourth term. Pataki might not want to push his luck against an unbelievably popular Democrat in a state with two million more registered Democrats than Republicans -- particularly if he's planning to run for president in 2008 (delusional as that would be in my mind). If my reading of history is accurate, defeated governors don't usually make for the strongest presidential candidates.

"One thing Spitzer might be doing by announcing so early is trying to scare Pataki out of the race -- which sounds odd, since Pataki's the incumbent. But it could actually work if Spitzer manages to create a financial juggernaut to match his popularity in recent years.

"Another interesting question: Do all the financial services firms Spitzer has hounded as attorney general get on board and pony up money, worried that there'll be hell to pay if they don't? (Or at least to try to buy themselves some much-needed goodwill?) Or do they hold all the investigations against Spitzer and hope for the best with Pataki? My guess is that, with Pataki looking iffy, and Spitzer in a potentially even more powerful position to hurt them as governor, they'll suck it up and get on the bandwagon. If that's the case, Spitzer's Wall Street crusades may turn out to have been the shrewdest political move in the history of New York politics. (It's ingenious, really. He gets the benefit both of being a reformer and amassing a daunting warchest -- a pretty unusual combination. Obviously they couldn't have known it'd work out that way, but still . . . )"

Media Bistro has a new blog, and it takes a mild swing at the New Republic:

"In last week's New Republic: a full-page ad for the 9/11 Commission Report, paid for by 'the People of Saudi Arabia.' [Ed. -- People of Saudi Arabia who do not remember paying for the ad and may be confused: see question 49 on your zakat/tax forms -- the one that says, 'Ad budget for small left-leaning (but not too left-leaning) American political weeklies: Checking "Yes" will not change or reduce your refund. Do you want 12 riyals to go to this fund?']

"The ad, which is not the first, is accompanied by a transcript of a panel discussion also funded by 'the People of Saudi Arabia' titled, 'Myths and Realities: Saudi Arabia Re-Examined.' The roofline is labeled 'Special Advertising Section' in the usual font (which is somewhere between 'teeny tiny' and 'itty bitty') and a representative pull-quote from the transcript reads, 'It's a delicate balance, but I think the Kingdom is not overrun with violent, plotting anti-Americans.'

"Editor Peter Beinart has insisted elsewhere that the ad packages don't affect editorial. But, still . . . It's may not be ethically wrong in any overt sense, but it seems ethically . . . twitchy? . . . creepy? The reader's ethical sensisibilities are not so much protesting in outrage as shifting uncomfortably in their seats."

The blog RatherBiased (which won't have much to complain about after March, will it?) has an interesting item (via InstaPundit) on CBS:

"The owner of Nonviolence.org, Martin Kelley, said he got an interesting phone call yesterday from a CBS News publicist for -- you guessed it -- Dan Rather's 60 Minutes Wednesday, the same program that carried the infamous bogus memos.

" 'Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News's 60 Minutes. They're running a story tonight on "Deserters," U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program on Nonviolence. In nine years of publishing the peace site, I can't remember ever getting a call from a publicist before. I've talked to reporters from major news networks and papers, and I've talked a booking agent or two to arranging appearances on radio shows, but never a publicist. So now CBS News publicists are courting bloggers. That's great: hey, if y'all want to buy me that new Treo Smartphone or a gift certificate to Gohn Bros I'll say Dan Rather is hotter than an armadillo sunning himself between the yellow lines on the interstate.'

"Despite this, Kelley still agrees with the message of the 60 Minutes report and complied with the publicist's request to talk up the program: 'CBS News Covers New Conscientious Objectors.' "

Any bloggers want to promote my TV appearances, be my guest.