I'm all for public disclosure. I share your frustration that they consider so much too "classified" to publicly release.

I certainly entertain the POSSIBILITY they could have something to hide, but at this point there is no evidence of that.

I suspect that the Bush administration feels, --justifiably, based on the relentless coverage that attempts to turn every half-baked allegation into a silver bullet to kill Bush's presidency-- that if they release information, it will just be partisanly spun negatively by a Bush-bashing press.

But just the same, I think they could publicly disclose a lot more, and not releasing information just raises suspicion, whether or not the Bush adminisration is doing anything wrong.

Regarding an earlier point of yours from the previous topic page:

quote:
Originally posted by whomod, in 10-29-2003 post:
From AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE MAGAZINE

Since I can no longer find any news sources that DTWB won't deride as "liberal".

quote:
The Cost of Empire


President Bush’s war policy marks the beginning of the end of America’s era of global dominance.


By Christopher Layne

The administration’s U-turn decision to ask for United Nations help in Iraq, and President George W. Bush’s request that Congress appropriate $87 billion to fund the occupation and reconstruction of that country send a very clear message: the administration’s Iraq policy is a fiasco. And a foreseeable one at that.

U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that American troops occupying Iraq would not be welcomed as liberators but would be resisted. A pre-invasion State Department report warned that the administration had the proverbial snowball’s chance of transforming Iraq into a Western-style democracy (a conclusion reinforced by a recent Zogby poll of Iraqis that found only 38 percent of Iraqis favor democracy, while 50 percent believe that “democracy is a western way of doing things and it will not work here”). Similarly, it was obvious that the administration’s go-it-alone hubris, combined with its sledgehammer diplomacy, would chill Washington’s relations with the other major powers and trigger a worldwide backlash of hostility toward the United States....

http://www.amconmag.com/10_06_03/cover.html

An unsurprising assesment. That is unless you just accept the White House press briefings as gosphel and dismiss anything to the contrary as the treasonous machinations of the "liberals" out to 'get' Bush out of partisan hatred. I have been making many of the same criticisms as the article. but when I say it, It's because I hate Bush and have some evil treasonous agenda that needs to be dismissed if out of patriotism at the very least. What's AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES excuse?...

You raise the point that Republicans are critical of Bush as well.

But I would argue that simply proves the Republican party has a wide range of independent opinions, and are not automatons who blindly follow what Bush says.

And I can just as easily find opinions who are sharply critical of the Democrats and their tactics against Bush

Here from the November 2 broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press, interviewing Democrat Georgia Senator (and former Georgia Governor) Zell Miller:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/969743.asp

quote:

MR. RUSSERT: And we are back. Senator Zell Miller, welcome to MEET THE PRESS.
SEN. ZELL MILLER, (D-GA): Thank you. Honored to be here.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me quote from your book, page nine to be exact. I’ll share it with our viewers:
“Once upon a time, the most successful Democratic leader of them all, FDR, looked south and said, ‘I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.’ Today our national Democratic leaders look south and say, ‘I see one-third of a nation and it can go to hell.’”
What do you base that on?
SEN. MILLER: I base it on history. Look at what has happened. In 1960, John Kennedy carried the state of Georgia by a larger percentage than he carried his home state of Massachusetts. I think it was the second-highest percentage in the nation, next to Rhode Island. And John Kennedy was popular in Georgia. He could have been re-elected because he stood up to the Russians, and he cut taxes; he was a tax-cutter. And Southerners liked him. He carried other states: North Carolina, South Carolina. But that was in 1960.
And if you look at all the cycles since then, in four of those elections they didn’t carry a single Southern state; in two of those elections, the Democrats carried one Southern state; in three of those elections, they managed to carry a handful and they got elected. And only one time since 1964 have they carried the South, and that, of course, was in ’76 when Jimmy Carter was a favorite son. Also, these so-called national leaders, none of them can come South and try to help a fellow Democrat.
MR. RUSSERT: Why not?
SEN. MILLER: Because they’re considered too liberal. They do more harm than good. Terry McAuliffe can’t come down there and try to help us Southern Democrats. Neither can Bill Clinton or Al Gore or Tom Daschle or Nancy Pelosi, because this party has been pulled by these special interests with their own narrow agenda so far to the left that they’re completely out of the mainstream. These special interests, they see their narrow agenda as being more important than the sum total of the party.
MR. RUSSERT: This is how you assess the current Democratic field. “But, Lord, those current presidential candidates in my party! They are good, smart”—”able folks, but if I decided to follow any”—”of them down their road, I’d have to keep my left turn signal blinking and burning brightly all the way. All left turns may work on the racetrack, but it is pulling our party in a dangerous direction. ... They are convinced most Americans will like”—that. “Joe Lieberman, steadily and surely plodding along, one labored step at a time, like Aesop’s tortoise. John Kerry ... posing for Vogue in an electric blue wet suit with a surfboard tucked up under his arm like a rail just split.” “Howard Dean of Vermont...Clever and glib, but deep this Vermont pond is not.”
I take it you don’t respect Governor Dean.
SEN. MILLER: I respect all of them, and they’re good and decent people, but they are so far afield in wherever they’re going in this campaign. I mean, here they have adopted the worst possible features of the McGovern campaign. That is, get out, at any cost. Give up, come home, quit. And, the worst possible feature of the Mondale campaign, raise taxes. Tim, I was there in 1972 at Miami Beach when—here you had this crowd, chanting about the president of the United States, “Liar, liar, liar.” And they had on these T-shirts, “Make love, not war.” And Willie Brown was going around, shouting, “Let my people go.” And then in the wee morning hours, they nominated George McGovern. He carried one state, one single, solitary state. And I was there in 1984 at San Francisco when Walter Mondale looked out and told the nation, “I’m going to raise your taxes.” What? Goodness gracious, that’s not the way to campaign. He carried one single, solitary state. They have managed, except a somewhat [moderate] Lieberman, Gephardt, a little exception—they have managed to make this a double feature of the worst of the Democratic Party.
MR. RUSSERT: The Democratic candidates will say they’re not for pulling out of Iraq but they’re for going to the world community and letting the United Nations and other countries in the world pay their fair share.
SEN. MILLER: There are 32 or 35 nations already over there that are working in Iraq. It’s not a unilateral action, like some say. Sure, we should try to get more people to work with us on that, but I don’t think we ought to do a backflip.
MR. RUSSERT: You then say that, again, on the candidates about the war, “I fear some of the Democratic presidential candidates are treading on very dangerous ground for the party, and, more importantly, for the country. I do not question their patriotism; I question their judgment. ...”
“My concern is that, without meaning to, they are exacerbating the difficulties of a nation at war. A demagogue is defined by Webster as ‘a political leader who gains power by arousing people’s emotions and prejudices.’ Isn’t that exactly what some of them are doing? ...”
“Howard Dean, while not alone, is the worst offender...He likes to say he belongs to the Democratic wing of the”—party—”I say he belongs to the whining wing of the Democratic Party.” Let me show you what Howard Dean said yesterday, and get your reaction.
“I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks...We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats.” Is he making sense with that statement?
SEN. MILLER: Howard Dean knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about Sunday. This must be his Southern strategy. And I can tell you right now, that that’s the same kind of stereotype, that’s the same kind of character trait that I write about in this book. I write about in this book in 1988 Michael Dukakis coming to Georgia and having this rally, and they had all these bales of hay stashed around here and there, like it was some kind of set from the television show “Hee Haw.” That’s not what the South is. The South right now, if you took its economy, it would be the third largest in the world, next to the United States as a whole and next to Japan. Fifty-five hundred African-Americans right now hold office in the South. In Georgia we have several statewide elected officials who are African-American and who were elected last year in a race where a senator and a governor were being defeated. They were being elected in a state that’s 70 percent white. This is not the South that Howard Dean thinks it is. Sure, we drive pickups, but on the back of those pickups, you see a lot of American flags. It’s the most patriotic region in the country. And you see hardworking individuals that want to instill values in their children, and you see a very, very strong work ethic in the South. He [Howard Dean] doesn’t understand the South.
MR. RUSSERT: Do you think the Confederate flag should be flown in public places?
SEN. MILLER: Maybe at a museum or somewhere like that. I think you may know—it’s in the book— that whenever I was governor, early on I tried to remove the Confederate emblem from the flag in Georgia.
MR. RUSSERT: Wesley Clark, the general: What do you think of him?
SEN. MILLER: Well, as you know, Tim, there’ve been 12, I think, generals been elected president of the United States. Only one of them has been a Democrat; 1828, Andrew Jackson. And with all due respect to Wesley Dean, he is no “Old Hickory.” I can tell you that. I have a tremendous respect for anyone who wears the uniform, anyone who has been shot at by our enemies. But when your last boss, in this case General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that you lack integrity, that’s a pretty strong indictment. No integrity? I mean, how would you like to be taking that reference around whenever you’re looking for a new job?
MR. RUSSERT: General Clark will say many other people in the military have a lot more favorable things to say.
SEN. MILLER: Well, this was his last boss. This was a man who’s known him for years.
MR. RUSSERT: What if Howard Dean or the Democratic nominee selected someone like former Georgia Governor Sam Nunn as vice president? Would that be helpful?
SEN. MILLER: Well, I don’t think Sam Nunn would run on that ticket. I would be very surprised if he did. But no—see, that’s also what they think. They think that they can ignore the South and not pay any attention to the South, and then the last six months of the campaign, maybe they can find a Southerner that they will put on the ticket, and that that’s going to be the magic silver bullet that does it all. That is not how you campaign in the South. That’s the old strategy that has failed all this time.
MR. RUSSERT: Some Democrats in your home state are hopping mad about some of your comments, or not taking kindly to them. David Worley, the former Georgia Democratic Party chairman, had an open letter printed in your local Atlanta paper. This is what he said: “Now, with the hot political wind blowing from conservative networks, talk radio and corporate boardrooms, when it’s become the fashion to bash the Democratic Party, you’ve joined in, writing a book betraying the people who stood [with you in] every one of your campaigns—not party activists, but hardworking Georgia families. You cast stone after stone at Democrats. Your silly, petty and often personal attacks remind me of no one more than your old boss, Lester Maddox.”
SEN. MILLER: Well, everybody has [a right]to their opinion, but I think that I am much more in touch with the people of Georgia than the young man who wrote that column. You know, I’m trying to help this party. I’m trying to throw them a life preserver. I’m trying to tell them how to do it. They can call it “Bush lite” and “Republican lite” if they want to, but it’s where the people are. I mean, if David Worley doesn’t want to reach out and take that life preserver, then so be it. To heck with him.
MR. RUSSERT: You wrote a—it was a compilation of your speeches, “Listen to This Voice: Selected Speeches of Zell Miller.” Let me refer you to one from 1976, Governor—or Senator, now Governor—now Senator, former Governor. And this was Zell Miller in 1996 before the Democratic Party Training Academy: “The real story of what happened to ‘We the people’ is that the Republicans sold us out, with a generation of trickle -down economics that blew the deficit sky-high, drove poverty through the roof, squeezed the middle class like a lemon at a county fair. They gave themselves the gold mine and they gave the rest of us the shaft.”
And Democrats would say, “That’s the real Zell Miller. That’s the old Zell Miller, because he now voted for the Bush tax cut and that’s what the Bush tax cut has done to the country, what he was telling us the Reagan tax cut did.”
SEN. MILLER: Here’s what the Bush tax cut has done to the country, that kind of economy right now. I know The New York Times had a time printing this, but “Economy records speediest growth since the mid-1980s.” That’s what the tax cuts have done. I have always been a tax cutter. I was a tax cutter whenever I was governor. I took the sales tax off of groceries and I cut the income tax twice. I came up here intending to be a tax cutter.
MR. RUSSERT: What about the deficit...
SEN. MILLER: We...
MR. RUSSERT: ...$500 billion?
SEN. MILLER: The deficit is there not because of the tax cuts. The deficit is there because we have been in a recession and we’re a country at war. And you always run a deficit in those kind of times. Also, a deficit I would say is there because of a lot of wild spending by the Democrats.
MR. RUSSERT: And the Republicans.
SEN. MILLER: And the Republicans, of course.
MR. RUSSERT: The Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt had this to say. “This veteran Democrat (Miller) has adopted” this “approach: Cut any tax in sight, back every popular spending measure...Oh, yes: Zell Miller supports the balanced budget constitutional amendment” as well.
SEN. MILLER: I tell you what you can do. Al Hunt can go back and research or you could go back and research. In the last four years that I’ve been up here, over three years that I’ve been up here, I bet I have voted against more increases in spending than any Democrat and voted against more increases in spending than a lot of Republicans.
MR. RUSSERT: But you were for the farm bill, for prescription drugs. Even your hometown paper had this to say. “Back when he was governor of Georgia, Miller used to make fun of those who refused to face fiscal reality. As he put it back then, they like to drink that free bubble up and eat that rainbow stew. Now, that he’s up in Washington, though, Miller has found that the free bubble up” while “quite intoxicating, and that” the “rainbow stew real tasty.”
SEN. MILLER: That’s a good line from Merle Haggard about the free bubble up and rainbow stew. I go back to what I said a while ago. I have voted against more spending up here than any Democratic senator serving and more than a lot of Republicans serving. As far as the farm bill, look, one of the most important things that we can do for this nation is to keep a safe and affordable supply of food. What if we were having to import as much food as we are oil? There would be rioting in the streets. That was .5 of 1 percent of the total budget. Whenever we spend money on highways and other infrastructure, we call it investments. This is one of the best investments that this country can make.
MR. RUSSERT: We have to take a quick break. We’ll be right back with more of our discussion with Zell Miller and his new book “A National Party No More” right after this.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: And we are back. Senator, many Democrats are saying you vote with the Republicans, you’ve endorsed George W. Bush for re-election. Why not just be intellectually honest and change your registration to be a Republican?
SEN. MILLER: I know this is hard to understand for anyone, and I thought about it a lot. It’s kind of like living in this old house. You’ve lived in it all of your life. It’s getting kind of run down, and it’s drafty, and the commodes won’t flush. And last week a family moved in down into the basement, and you don’t even know who they are or where they came from. And I would be comfortable probably in some other house much more than I am where I am, but I have been here all these years. I haven’t got many more years to live in it. It’s home. It’s always been home. And I’m not leaving it. Now, I know that doesn’t make sense to everybody that is just so tied up with political parties, but it makes sense to me and it makes sense to my family and it makes sense to my neighbors. And that’s all that matters with me.
MR. RUSSERT: What could a Democratic candidate for president or a future candidate, like Hillary Clinton, do—what one issue or two issues could they seize on that you think would resonate with Southern Democrats?
SEN. MILLER: Well, the road map is out there. The battle plan has been tested and shown to work. Look at how Kennedy ran in 1960. He ran on tax cuts. He was tougher on national security issues than Richard Nixon was. That’s how he won, and he could have been re-elected, as I said a while ago. Look at 1992 and 1996 when Bill Clinton ran. In 1992, he was talking about changing welfare as we know it. He was talking about punishing criminals, not explaining away their behavior. In ’96, he was saying that there’s not—”You can’t have a federal program for every problem.” And he even said that, “The era of big government is over.” That’s how you run, not like McGovern and Mondale did.
MR. RUSSERT: That has to be the last word. The book, “A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat.” Senator Zell Miller, we thank you for your views.
SEN. MILLER: Thank you.