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Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Salon, August 13, 2007

It is difficult now — it has always been difficult — to visit Alaska and not depart with the feeling that you have witnessed something experimental and anomalous. The state seems less an extension of America proper than a distilled counterfactual, a pioneer’s idea of what the country could have become. There is the magnificent landscape, of course, the rough survivalist feel, the intimacy with the natural world and the disorienting, ever present gender imbalance (a substantial majority of the adult population of the state is male). There is the state’s unique transience, too, the notion that with more than 80 percent of Alaska’s population born elsewhere, the state’s very existence depends on hundreds of thousands of decisions to pick up stakes and leave the Lower 48, and on an equal number of individual commitments to live not only differently but apart. And then, perhaps even more vividly, there is the politics.

The political anomalies of the far Northwest are on view right now in a scandal that looks likely to bring down much of the state’s Republican establishment, threatening the careers of oil executives, lobbyists and all three of Alaska’s representatives in Washington. The alleged improprieties are as crass as they get — lobbyists handing out bribes on the floor of the state Legislature, federal money directed by Alaska’s U.S. senators to those companies, and lobbyists who granted politicians personal favors. The taint has spread so far that it has become a crisis not just for those politicians who have been directly implicated, and not just for the Republican Party, but for the state itself. The Associated Press was recently moved to call the few living statesmen who had signed the state’s first constitution, in 1956, and ask them what had become of their creation. ” Greed is rampant,” one of them, Vic Fischer, told the AP. “I’m very disgusted. It’s not a matter of betrayal. It’s more a matter of sadness and concern. But most of all disgust.”

What’s wrong with Alaska? The state’s politics can seem an accident of its own isolation, and dependence. There are few states that seem as ripe for scandal as this one, with its history of single-party rule and an economy, based on the extraction of wealth from public lands. But there may also be another, deeper truth: Alaska’s strange, enticing political culture may equally be a legacy of the state’s senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens.

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Tim Grieve, Salon August 13, 2007

We could spend days reminiscing about the role Karl Rove has played in our politics over the past decade or so — the whisper campaigns against Ann Richards in Texas and John McCain in South Carolina, the fight over Florida in 2000, the demonization of John Kerry in 2004, the “thumpin’” Rove and his boss and their party took in 2006 — and we’ll be looking forward to what Rove himself has to say about all of it when he sits down to write his book after leaving the White House this month.

In the meantime, here are a few memories that spring right to mind:

The Outing of Valerie Plame:

Rove leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to Robert Novak and to Matthew Cooper in the summer of 2003. For as long as it could — or as long as it needed to — the White House adamantly denied that Rove was involved in Plame’s outing. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in September 2003 that “the president knows” that Rove wasn’t involved and that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that he was. In October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken with Rove and Scooter Libby and that they had “assured” him that they were “not involved in this.” Rove himself was cagey: “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name,” he told ABC early on, a formulation he repeated for Larry King at the Republican National Convention in August 2004. Only after Bush was reelected in 2004 did we learn the truth: Rove had, in fact, been “involved.” And while he may not have leaked Plame’s “name,” he confirmed for both Novak and Cooper that ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. Asked about the revelation that Rove had, in fact, been involved, Bush said in June 2006: “I trust Karl Rove.”

Karl Rove and Patrick Fitzgerald:

When Rove first sat down with FBI agents investigating Plame’s outing, he somehow forgot to mention that he had revealed Plame’s identity to Matthew Cooper. He somehow forgot to mention it a second time when he first testified before Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury. Four visits to the grand jury room later, Rove somehow managed to avoid the perjury, false statement and obstruction of justice charges Scooter Libby ultimately faced. In his opening statement at Libby’s trial, Libby defense attorney Ted Wells argued that the White House had tried to make Libby take the fall for outing Plame because Rove “had to be protected.” After Libby was convicted, a puzzled juror asked, “What are we doing with this guy here? Where’s Rove?”

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, August 13, 2007

Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your father’s political campaign.

Last week, at one of Mitt Romney’s “Ask Mitt” forums, a woman in the audience asked Mr. Romney whether any of his five sons are serving in the military and, if not, when they plan to enlist.

The candidate replied with a rambling attempt to change the subject, but near the end he let his real feelings slip. “It’s remarkable how we can show our support for our nation,” he said, “and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I’d be a great president.”

Wow. The important point isn’t the fact that Mr. Romney’s sons aren’t in uniform — although it is striking just how few of those who claim to believe that we’re engaged in a struggle for our very existence think that they themselves should be called on to make any sacrifices. The point is, instead, that Mr. Romney apparently considers helping him get elected an act of service comparable to putting your life on the line in Iraq.

Yet the week’s prize for most self-centered remark by a serious presidential contender goes not to Mr. Romney, but to his principal rival for the G.O.P. nomination.

Rudy Giuliani has lately been getting some long-overdue criticism for his missteps both before and after 9/11. For example, The Village Voice reports that he insisted that the city’s emergency command center — which included a personal suite with its own elevator that he visited “often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced” — be within walking distance of City Hall. This led to the disastrous decision to locate the center in the World Trade Center, an obvious potential terrorist target.

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, August 12, 2007

The cases of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch were ugly enough. So surely someone in the White House might have the good taste to draw the line at exploiting the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. But nothing is out of bounds for a government that puts the darkest arts of politics and public relations above even the exigencies of war.

As Jane Mayer told the story in last week’s New Yorker, Mariane Pearl was called by Alberto Gonzales with some good news in March: the Justice Department was releasing a transcript in which the long-incarcerated Qaeda thug Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to the beheading of her husband. But there was something off about Mr. Gonzales’s news. It was almost four years old.

Condoleezza Rice had called Ms. Pearl to tell her in confidence about the very same confession back in 2003; it was also reported that year in The Journal and elsewhere. What’s more, the confession was suspect; another terrorist had been convicted in the Pearl case in Pakistan in 2002. There is no known corroborating evidence that Mohammed, the 9/11 ringleader who has taken credit for many horrific crimes while in American custody, was responsible for this particular murder. None of his claims, particularly those possibly coerced by torture, can be taken as gospel solely on our truth-challenged attorney general’s say-so.

Ms. Pearl recognized a publicity ploy when she saw it. And this one wasn’t subtle. Mr. Gonzales released the Mohammed transcript just as the latest Justice Department scandal was catching fire, with newly disclosed e-mail exchanges revealing the extent of White House collaboration in the United States attorney firings. Had the attorney general succeeded in enlisting Daniel Pearl’s widow as a player in his stunt, it might have diverted attention from a fracas then engulfing President Bush on his Latin American tour.

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Jeff Zeleny and Marc Santora, The New York Times, August 12, 2007

DES MOINES, Aug. 11 — Even as they call for an end to the war and pledge to bring the troops home, the Democratic presidential candidates are setting out positions that could leave the United States engaged in Iraq for years.

John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, would keep troops in the country to intervene in an Iraqi genocide and be prepared for military action if violence spills into other countries. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York would leave residual forces to fight terrorism and to stabilize the Kurdish region in the north. And Senator Barack Obama of Illinois would leave a military presence of as-yet unspecified size in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, fight terrorism and train Iraqis.

These positions and those of some rivals suggest that the Democratic bumper-sticker message of a quick end to the conflict — however much it appeals to primary voters — oversimplifies the problems likely to be inherited by the next commander in chief. Antiwar advocates have raised little challenge to such positions by Democrats.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico stands apart, having suggested that he would even leave some military equipment behind to expedite the troop withdrawal. In a forum at a gathering of bloggers last week, he declared: “I have a one-point plan to get out of Iraq: Get out! Get out!”

On the other side of the spectrum is Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who has proposed setting up separate regions for the three major ethnic and religious groups in Iraq until a stable central government is established before removing most American troops.

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