Old news

A former aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in preparing Powell's presentation to the U.N. about Saddam's threat to the world was "the lowest point" of his life.

CNN waves this around like a scalplock. Why? It seems to be something about journalists to want to update old stories, especially when they have no current value except to suggest that the Democrats should have won the elections. Do we really need more proof that our intelligence agencies screwed up? And is there any significance that this is being reported at the same time the Able Danger story is getting a lot of play. As I noted earlier, would it have changed anything if the FBI had received this data? Probably not. John O'Neill tried to stop Al Qaeda, and was basically forced out of the FBI. Would it have mattered if he had received the Able Danger material. Probably not.

I guess it's one of those debating points you can use on your Republican associates. Mickey Kaus did something similar the other day, pointing out that bloggers' (and John Podhoretz's) claim that the 2000 vote recount wouldn't have changed the outcome if it hadn't been stopped by the Supreme Court, which in turn was cited as a criticism of Paul Krugman's taking the occasion of Katherine Harris' bid for the Senate to remind everybody that Gore would have won if the election system wasn't so crooked.

Who cares? Is anybody going to go back and change things, or is it important just for those times when you want shut some jerk up? Like if he blames Carter for the hostage crisis, you can say "It wouldn't have happened if we hadn't installed the Shah and supported his brutal regime."

And Gore would have won, too, if the Supreme Court hadn't interfered (with the Florida court-ordered recount)! To which someone will surely bring up the view that Kennedy won in 1960 through vote fraud in Texas and Illinois.

All of which somehow proves that we should pull our troopss out of Iraq RIGHT NOW!

Journalism is the first draft of history, but couldn't we quit rewriting it and get on with the new news?

Like Cindy Sheehan.