Bad facts

As he was with l'affaire Lott, Josh Marshall has been simply stellar on the matter of the Bush administration's ham-handed bungling with North Korea. Today's post particularly points out how the hawks have bolloxed this up. It's becoming clear that this administration is more interested in discrediting the Clinton administration than it is in protecting the security of the American people.

I've been watching Josh's TV appearances, and it's also clear that the Republicans don't have anyone who is capable of grasping the basic details of this fiasco. Perhaps that's because they don't really want to grapple with the facts, because they make this administration look so flatly incompetent.

I'm reminded of Gale Norton's defense of the cause of the Confederacy. Dixie had made "states rights" their cause, she said, but unfortunately they used that cause to defend slavery. That was the "bad fact" that tainted their effort.

In this case, the "bad fact" is that the administration has completely bungled its handling of North Korea, and no amount of partisan rhetoric over Clinton's alleged "appeasement" can obscure this fact.