Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth - Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism. By Fred Kaplan: "Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, 'The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more.' And: 'The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded.' (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)"

The most chilling paragraph in a very good essay on the entire Clarke allegations. The White House has tried to attack him, but in an amazingly contradictory way. Rice says that Bush relied heavily on Clarke, while Cheney says that Clarke was out of the loop. Scott McClellan said that the proof that Bush never met with Clarke in the way that he said, is that Bush wasn't in the Situation Room right after 9-11. Incompetent. Incompetent.