How else to interpret
this:
Clarke, bound by the usual pre-publication review agreement, shipped it to the National Security Council on Nov. 4 for a review that lasted at least a couple of months, the White House said.
Not once, apparently, did the NSC reviewers mention to the communications or political people that they had an election bomb on their hands.
Buzz is that the NSC types apparently felt it would have been inappropriate to do so.
I have been wondering who dropped the ball on this, but I guess it was intentional. It looks like It looks to me like there was more loyalty by the NSC types to Clarke than to Rice and Dubya.
Al Kamen then has a bunch of stupid comments, basically suggesting that Dubya and company could have used the time to go harder after Clarke!
What? Once again the Bush White House stubbornly refuses to use the levers of power for political purposes? So maybe there is some legal, moral or ethical constraint. This is Washington, for crying out loud.
Had the political people gotten their hands on the book, they might have rushed the vetting so the book could have come out in December. (This in turn would have strengthened the argument that Clarke put it out now only for sales and political purposes.) Or they could have tried an extended rope-a-dope to delay publication until after the election. (Risky with a wily bureaucrat like Clarke, but . . .)
At the very least, they could have improved NSC deputy chief Stephen Hadley's performance Sunday on "60 Minutes" or the impression they are scrambling in defense. And how about a good, old-fashioned Washington hatchet job on Clarke? With more time, they could have done a thorough check for tax problems, various vices, latent thespianism and so forth.