….excerpted from NYT Magazine :

Generally Speaking

Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: July 1, 2007

 

(Karen Ballard photo)

As a retired four-star general and former presidential candidate, you’re about to publish a memoir whose title, “A Time to Lead,” might seem to suggest you’re personally eager to lead this country. Is that an accurate reading?

“A Time to Lead” is a time for America to lead. That is the intention of the title. Certainly we are having a leadership crisis. We have an administration that has lost all sense of strategic purpose in the Mideast. I am very concerned that we have lost the foundation of America’s worldwide power and influence. It has been squandered.

Are you referring to our military strength?

The most important element of power is not the military. After World War II and through the end of the 20th century, we had a legitimacy that magnified our military strength and economic strength. We weren’t like other powers. We weren’t after an empire. We didn’t torture. What we’ve lost is our legitimacy. It’s time for every American to be a leader.

more at the LINK

C’mon Wes, get in this race!

Joe Rothstein’s take…I agree with Mr. Rothstein, “Do yourself a big favor.”  (excerpt)

What We’ve Really Lost in Iraq: Legitimacy

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.comMay 18, 2007

Do yourself a big favor

Go to http://www.sais-jhu.edu and click on the speech given the other day by retired General Wesley Clark to an audience at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Clark titled his speech: “Legitimacy—First Task for America’s Security.” Here’s his core argument: For all the military power the U.S. has at its disposal, the nation’s safety and economic strength ultimately depends on maintaining our status as a nation that pursues objectives held in common by most peoples who share the planet:

–The wise and benign use of power
–Defense of human rights
–Protection of civilian populations
–Cooperation with, not intimidation of other nations
–The primacy of the rule of lawAll of that, he argues, has been put into question by our nation’s behavior in Iraq. And the result has “robbed every American” of his or her heritage and made us all less safe and secure….  

Indeed, that was the very argument General Clark made….You can listen to the speech at JU SAIS or at Securing America View a FHA from an attendee plus slide-show of the event.

Also well worth the read, Bob Guttman’s blog, “General Wesley Clark makes sense: Should he run for president?”…restoring legitimacy to the nation? What a concept! YES!

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Former GOP Rep. Pete McCloskey registers as a Democrat

Associated Press

Article Launched: 04/16/2007 04:53:00 PM PDT

WASHINGTON – Maverick former GOP Rep. Pete McCloskey, who represented Northern California in Congress from 1967 to 1982 and ran unsuccessfully again last year, has announced that he’s switching party registration and becoming a Democrat.

McCloskey, who was an original author of the Endangered Species Act, made his scorn for the modern Republican Party clear during his primary campaign against former GOP Rep. Richard Pombo of Tracy last year. He contended that leaders like Pombo and former Majority Leader Tom DeLay had been corrupted by power. After losing to Pombo, McCloskey endorsed Pombo’s Democratic opponent, Jerry McNerney, who beat Pombo in the general election…

(hopefully the author of the ES Act will make his presence felt in the pending race for Charlie Brown in CA-4)

…”I finally concluded that it was a fraud for me to remain a member of this modern Republican Party,” wrote McCloskey, who farms with his wife Helen in Yolo County.

For the common good, “…country before party” — Wes Clark

Feinstein asks the question everyone’s been wondering about (from the AP)…

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Tuesday she wants answers about the departure of the former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who resigned last October before the Justice Department’s dismissal of eight other U.S. attorneys sparked controversy.

“I have questions about Debra Yang’s departure and I can’t answer those questions right at this time,” Feinstein, D-Calif. and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters in response to a question. “Was she asked to resign, and if so, why? We have to ferret that out.”

Debra Wong Yang went to work for a private law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and has said she left of her own accord.

A Gibson Dunn spokeswoman issued a statement on Yang’s behalf Tuesday night. “Debra Wong Yang’s decision to leave her post as U.S. attorney to pursue a private practice was entirely her own, and she had many options to choose from. We are delighted that she chose Gibson Dunn,” it said.

You’ll remember that the Duke Cunningham investigation spread out in several directions. One was into the CIA. Another was on to Capitol Hill. The big fish there was Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), then Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The Lam investigation in San Diego sparked the Lewis investigation. But the Lewis investigation itself was and is being run out of the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. And that brings us to Debra Yang.

And from The Hill:

…Gutierrez and Abramoff had discussed removing Black from his position, “need[ing] to get this guy sniped out of there,” according to one of the lobbyist’s e-mails. Black had already indicted several members of Gutierrez’s administration and was starting to look at Abramoff.

Black’s case may get another look from Congress. Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) wrote to both the Senate and House judiciary committees last week, asking them to add Black’s demotion to their broader investigation of the U.S. attorney scandal.

In a statement made to The Hill, Miller repeated his calls for another investigation.

“The letter from Fred Black is another good example of why it’s necessary to re-open the investigation into Black’s demotion and to closely examine whether Abramoff or anyone working with him tampered with anti-corruption efforts in the U.S. attorney’s office,” he said.

“This letter is indicative of Fred Black’s perspective, which leads one to wonder why the Justice Department removed him, when he seems to be doing his job,” said Guam Del. Madeleine Bordallo (D) in a statement…

tip-of-the-iceberg?

A Wes Clark Democrat does the math here:

2004 Primary – How did Clark really do in raising money?

John Edwards raised $26,973,278 for the 2004 primary over a period of 14 months.

Wesley Clark raised $21,971,302 for the 2004 primary over a period of five months.

Wesley Clark raised $4,394,260.40 a month for the 2004 primary.

John Edwards raised $1,926,662.71 a month for the 2004 primary.

LINK

Not being a numbers-cruncher myself, I thought this was worth more than a glance. So with a hat-tip to WesDem and keeping in mind that a Clark announcement in April would still put the General @ six months earlier than his late entry - ’04…and keeping in mind that at this point in the ’04 election cycle Joe Lieberman was mainstream media’s ”annointed one”…is Wes Clark too late? Are the others too early? Waiting for grown-ups? C’mon Wes, let’s give them something to talk about!

Please sign the petition ———>

Bigotry That Hurts Our Military By Alan K. Simpson - March 14, 2007

> Harriet Miers, the White House counsel whom Mr. Bush tried to elevate to the Supreme Court, originally wanted to replace all 93 attorneys with Republican appointees.<

[altho it is said that Clinton and others did this? Not so fast...But in an e-mail to Harriet Miers on Jan. 9, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff Kyle Sampson (who resigned yesterday) admitted that the Clinton administration never purged its U.S. attorneys in the middle of their terms, explicitly stating, "In recent memory, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Presidents Reagan and Clinton did not seek to remove and replace U.S. Attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision" ]

>Congress should broaden the investigation to determine whether any other prosecutors were forced out for not caving in to political pressure — or kept on because they did. <

>If that sounds cynical, it is. It is also an accurate summary of the governing philosophy of this administration: What’s the point of having power if you don’t use it to get more power?<

Politics, Pure and Cynical  (snips)

 Time and again, President Bush and his team have assured Americans that they needed new powers to prevent another attack by an implacable enemy. Time and again, Americans have discovered that these powers were not being used to make them safer, but in the service of Vice President Dick Cheney’s vision of a presidency so powerful that Congress and the courts are irrelevant, or Karl Rove’s fantasy of a permanent Republican majority.

 In firing the prosecutors and replacing them without Senate approval, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took advantage of a little-noticed provision that the administration and its Republican enablers in Congress had slipped into the 2006 expansion of the Patriot Act. The ostensible purpose was to allow the swift interim replacement of a United States attorney who was, for instance, killed by terrorism.

 Among the documents is e-mail sent to Ms. Miers by Kyle Sampson, Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, ranking United States attorneys on factors like “exhibited loyalty.” Small wonder, then that United States Attorney *Carol Lam of San Diego was fired. She had put one Republican congressman, Duke Cunningham, in jail and had opened an inquiry that put others at risk, along with party donors.

…about this Dept. of Justice? Those in favor of Lam writing a tell-all, say aye.

“aye”

Washington, D.C. – Retired General and Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley K. Clark today endorsed the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Health, and Iraq Accountability Act and issued the following statement:

“House Democrats have offered a responsible approach that protects our Armed Forces, the troops and their families, and encourages both the Iraqis and the Bush Administration to work more effectively to salvage some success in ending what has been a tragically mistaken and failing mission. This conflict must be resolved politically – military efforts alone are insufficient – and this legislation strongly promotes that political solution. This legislation is the product of the kind of responsible legislative leadership that the American people voted for in 2006, and I wholeheartedly support this bill.”

GOP readies opposition to troop bill    (ap)

WASHINGTON – Democratic-backed legislation to withdraw U.S. combat troops from

Iraq cleared its first Senate hurdle Wednesday, but Republicans confidently predicted they would soon defeat it and President Bush backed them up with a veto threat.

The legislation, calling for combat troops to return home over the next 12 months, “would hobble American commanders in the field and substantially endanger America’s strategic objective of a unified federal democratic Iraq,” the White House said in a written statement.

The strong veto message underscored the intensifying struggle between the administration and the new Democratic-controlled Congress and came on a day in which the Pentagon conceded in a report that “some elements of the situation in Iraq are properly descriptive of a civil war.”…

…In the House, Democratic leaders said they were building support behind legislation to require the withdrawal of troops by Sept. 1, 2008, if not sooner. That plan faces its first test vote Thursday in the Appropriations Committee, and Democrats circulated a letter of support from retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander who ran for president in 2004.

While waiting the pending announcement on Monday by Senator Hagel, as to his presidential aspirations, and having re-read the March issue online Esquire Feature this a.m., headlined:

‘Before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment.’

Interview of Senator Chuck Hagel by Charles Pierce opens like this…

“The rapier is more silver than the moon. The horse, red eyed and fierce in the California night, is rearing up, and its rider points his sword toward the sky, and its tip seems to touch the lunar surface, dimpling it further between the craters… “

the interview itself is fairly good actually, altho it surely raised a number of questions in my mind re: a certain lack of conviction on the senator’s part

…and having also re-read this (non-poetical) Hagel-touting piece over at Steve Clemons place :

The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill on the Chuck Hagel Salon:

“I think that there are a number of candidates on the Democratic side that may move in this direction eventually — but I’m not convinced that many have really offered more than incrementalist proposals that remain in the same general grooves of Bush’s direction in the Middle East. Wes Clark and Joe Biden are exceptions — and there are others — but they are not yet setting the political pace of the country…”  

[not yet]  

And lastly, but not leastly, this a.m., I re-read this classic from 2004: ‘Cometh the Hour…’ 

…We need, at just this time, a military personage as president, one who is more in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower than of Ulysses Grant. In Wesley Clark, we have a four-star general and former NATO commander who is a diplomatic unifier, an authentic hero, wise and compassionate….

penned (quite beautifully I think) by Harold Bloom.  (Mr. Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale.)

Wesley Clark, we sorely need your voice in ’08!

Please sign the petition…………

Reg: Do you think your economic plans that you had ’04, like your tax plan, your college tuition plan, do you think they’d still be possible now with all the new debt we’ve accrued? Would we have to sacrifice that because of the war?

General Clark Well, I want to be really careful about raising taxes. I really am going to try not to raise taxes, but I do believe we’ve got to take care of people. You have to- I, I’ve been telling people in business, I said, You know, we’ve got a potential legitimacy problem. When a CEO makes 400 times what a worker makes, then you have to ask, Why does he deserve that much?

What is interesting is that the question was answered in the future tense…notable I think, given the recent pile-up on the internets 

Complete interview from CCN’s “Generation Whatever” series blogs:

A Conversation With the General by Reg NYC

Posted today at securingamerica, including a youtube video of the interview wherein Wes Clark and Reg NYC discuss ‘art matters’ (true that it matters in my humble opinion) and other critical issues of our times.

Also notable, who knew that Wesley Clark played around with the violin? From the interview:

“…And it’s one of these things that’s better than golf. I’m going to get my violin handicap down to zero.”

Proving once again that real men can (and/or) do whatever they like. Yes, they can!

It’s a really fun read. Don’t miss it.