East Tennessee. We have the strongest women in the world and can beat your god damn tanks with her just throwing pig shit at you!

Shucks, no need for you girls in ET to worry your pretty little heads over it ... no way the invaders will get past us, north past the Cohutta or the Chattahoochee, or even an inch into the Nantahala (even Jeff Davis couldn't handle it in there!).

Be good if you could watch that Western approach, though. And, ah, keep an eye on Oakridge for us, y'hear? :>

Seriously, you probably already know that this is why the Brits emptied their jails of the final Stuart holdouts and spread our lot out over all these mountains, with their eyes on the sneaky Spanish to the south ... (sig)

And then they gave Jay Rockefeller the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Seems pretty clear that Perino was lying, the WH knew what was going on, and Rove was in the loop. And it's pretty hard to believe that he wouldn't be, so no surprise.

I'm not convinced that he was "behind' it, though. Bad as it is, aren't the mechanics a little beneath his pay grade? The administration is filthy with liars and schemers and abusers of power, all toadying up to their caporegime. Seems likely to me that this was home-grown in DOD.

You could read (again, playing devil's advocate) the email 'I'd love to see if we could get them in with potus as well (I think that was submitted to karl and company from dorrance smith last week)' as saying, the idea to get the MAs in a meeting with POTUS was submitted to Rove, with multiple possibilities about the context of that 'submission'. None of those require that Rove is driving the train.

Now, not playing DA: It seems clear that he would have had to know about it, and that nobody in OASD-PA would 'freelance' a project like this without keeping him in the loop (hence, 'wouldn't want you to have to explain Afghanistan not happening after you had briefed karl and company on it'). If he's connected and knowledgeable, that's enough to reinforce the case that this was propaganda and not just 'keeping the public informed', which they claim it was.

And that's good enough, right? We don't need to gild the lily. We've got more serious crimes (e.g. torture) we can trace all the way to the top.

That was an interesting little tidbit at the end of Lawrence's email to Barber.

My guess is that the 'games afoot' aren't about elections, though; I'd bet he's referring to internal organizational dynamics, office politics ... and of course, sucking up to Barber and signifying his loyalty while Barber's out of the office, vs. that of those 'backstabbers'.

My guess is that those 'backstabbers' are not other political appointees. If I were investigating this on the ground, I would definitely pursue that, see who's disgruntled and why. While these guys don't appear to think they did anything wrong, I'd bet there are some career civil servants who knew better.

There's always some tension between political appointees and career civil servants; w/in the pentagon they've seen what happens to those who speak out publicly, so they aren't going to shoot themselves in the foot, but it's not hard to imagine them testifying gleefully once they don't have to fear retaliation.

Nice spreadsheet for download at that MM link, very useful.

The table in-line in the article is pretty good, too; note that among the 20 analysts, only 9 are Fox consultants (counting Gen Scales, who doubled up with NPR ... talk about schizophrenia ...), only three of which are in the top 10, 0 in the top 5.

In fact, if you add up all three Fox MAs in the top 10 (Scales, 176, Cowan, 189, McInerney, 144), the total number of appearances (509) is still less than any ONE of the top 3 (Gen Grange, 921, Sheppard, 713, McCaffrey, 642) who appeared on CNN or NBC/MSNBC.

So much for the faux argument that they were only preaching to the choir on Fox, eh?

Could be you're right ... but to me, this wouldn't necessarily connect to Barber being out of the office, or having to be 'here to stamp out the backstabbers' (ital mine, obviously).

The timing works out though ... maybe the generals' criticism is related, or maybe it was just something else that put pressure on the bosses in the PR shop ...

Welcome back, my friend! We were about to assemble the search party (or at least, you know, talk about assembling it :>)

Good historical allusion re the commissars and political officers. In reading about how this worked in the Soviet military, my eyes flew open and my jaw dropped to read some of the ingenious ways the rank and file devised to avoid being watched by the PO and to keep them in the dark as much as possible.

There were some less clever ones, too ... a long series of POs attached to Spetnaz appear to have been killed in training accidents within a month of being assigned ...

Assuming the dead ones are inaccessible, these are the ones I want to find and get on the record among our own apparatchik ...