Nothing to See Here, Move Along

Barack Obama and his team haven't reached the White House yet, but they already seem to have mastered the art of the slow-motion leak. We learned yesterday, via George Stephanopoulos, that Rahm Emanuel has been cleared in the incoming administration's internal investigation of its dealings with Rod Blagojevich. Whether that was a deliberate, strategic leak or just intrepid reporting, it served its purpose: The story trickled out on a sleepy Sunday morning, got picked up everywhere, and by today it seems like old news. Well, glad that's all cleared up! Let's move on now.

To an unusual degree given how quiet he's been so far, Joe Biden is much in the news today. Biden will be chairing a task force on "strengthening the middle class," which sounds -- even by the standards of Washington task forces -- dull and more likely to be the source of photo ops rather than real legislative action. And after Biden and Dick Cheney both made Sunday show appearances, much of the focus was on how the two men differ on the proper role of the vice presidency. Biden said he wants to "restore the balance" between the president and vice president, while Cheney said Biden wants to "diminish the office" of the No. 2.

Here's another difference: Cheney probably wouldn't be caught dead chairing a task force on strengthening the middle class. Remember, this is the VP who reportedly said no when asked whether he would head up the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. For the most part, Cheney seemed to have free rein on issues that interested him and stayed as far away as possible from those issues that didn't. What will happen the first time Obama asks Biden to do something he would rather not?

George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews

George John Tenet (born January 5, 1953) was the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency and is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Tenet held the position as the DCI from July 1997 to July 2004, making him the second-longest serving director in the agency's history — behind Allen Welsh Dulles — as well as one of the few DCIs to serve under two U.S. presidents of opposing political parties. In February 2008 he became the managing director of the secretive investment bank Allen & Company.
That's him!
I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."

Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.
I'll ask around about this and post any responses I get.