The Prince of Darkness, Hyper Of Threats and Spit-Mousse Fan has generated enough news to earn his own compilation post.
* First, Al Maviva sent me this World Bank report to suggest that the girlfriend scandal doesn’t have much meat on the bun.
* Reporting in Salon, Sid Blumenthal digested the World Bank report, adds a few more bits and suggests that the meat is still there, we just misidentified it as a bun.
* The Washington Post reports that the World Bank board is on the edge of recommending Wolfowitz’s ouster.
* Readers should remember that the Bush administration used a nonexistent program to enrich uranium as a pretext to pull out of the Agreed Framework with North Korea. In response the DPRK unsealed its plutonium fuel and made a handful of bombs. Clearly some official deserves a pat on the back, but who? Somebody overruled intelligence analysts to promote a borderline insane overestimate of a foreign enemy’s WMD activities. Inadvisable policy decisions followed. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but the Nelson Report adds a touch of color to what we could have guessed.
[W]e quoted one of these sources as saying he personally witnessed the intervention of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to produce a formal assessment on the hard-line extreme of the interpretive spectrum.Yes, you would be correct to recall a similar phenomenon, and player, in the Iraq WMD fiasco.
Commenting privately today, a concerned observer, then and now, said “the [HEU] evidence was very ambiguous. Wolfowitz took it and ran with it as hard as he could, and the upshot was that we shut down everything we planned to do with the DPRK. It was after that [Jan., 2003] they threw out the IAEA and began [what became] the run-up to the bomb test [last fall].”
Surprise.
***Update***
Confidential sources have informed me that Richard Perle is the semi-official Prince of Darkness, not Paul Wolfowitz. I blame Clinton for the error.
The Other Steve
I’m incredibly struck by just how fucking stupid Wolfowitz is.
John S.
Weren’t you supposed to say quelle surprise, Tim?
You are a frenchman after all.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Yet when Wolfowitz worked for Carter, none of you had a problem with him. You fucking moonbat hypocrites. (Sorry, I had trouble tying Clinton in on this one.)
tBone
I think the nickname “Prince of Darkness” belongs to Richard Perle, not Wolfowitz. I don’t think you can use the ‘ol spit-comb and still qualify for a cool nickname like that, anyway.
Punchy
Come ONNNNNN, Tim. Please try harder next time. Here’s some suggestions:
Hungry like a Wolfowitz
Elf-like Cretin Creatin’ Crisis
Capo Paulie
WallnutsWolfowitzRelated: if this clown doesnt lose his job, than just disband the World Bank. Switch the phrase “world bank” into some new basketball move….
grumpy realist
The FT thinks the pressure is ramping up at the World Bank on Wolfowitz. They’ve decided to expand the investigation to look at Wolfowitz’s hiring of the horde he brought with him.
The EU really, really wants Wolfie gone. So do most of the bank employees.
Tsulagi
You know, I wonder if Gen. Tommy Franks didn’t pause just for a moment thinking of Wolfie before calling Doug Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”
With so many in the admin qualifying, it’s really hard ordering them in stupid, stupider, and stupidest.
Pb
The Big Bad Wolfowitz
An American Wolfowitz In The World Bank
The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz
A Wolfowitz In Cheap Clothing
Teen Wolfowitz
A Wolfowitz At The Door
Frankenstein Meets The Wolfowitz
The Electric Wolfowitz Strikes Again
Peter And The Wolfowitz
Wolfowitz Of London
etc.
jake
Wolfowitz Dogged by Scandal.
Wolf Bites.
As for a nick name, Twinkle Toes comes to mind.
chopper
(Bush is trying desperately to sell the iraq war)
Cheney: You ain’t got no problem, George. I’m on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them goopers out and wait for the Wolfowitz who should be coming directly.
Bush: You sendin’ the Wolfowitz?
Cheney: Oh, you feel better, motherfucker?
Bush: [relieved] Shit, Negro, that’s all you had to say!
ThymeZone
Q: How do you know that a woman is his girlfriend?
A: By the Wolfowitz whistles when she walks by.
The Other Steve
That might be because I was only 8 years old.
Andrew
Do you expect that to excuse your flip flopping?
mrmobi
Nice Pulp Fiction reference, Chopper!
Little known fact, that’s actually how they talk at the WH.
And Wolfowitz loves 50 cent.
Punchy
Winnah, winnah, chicken dinnah.
p.lukasiak
I think that the World Bank Staff has you all beat…according to Blumenthal, they refer to Wolfie’s girlfriend as “the neoconcubine”
Fred
“Readers should remember that the Bush administration used a nonexistent program to enrich uranium as a pretext to pull out of the Agreed Framework with North Korea. In response the DPRK unsealed its plutonium fuel and made a handful of bombs. Clearly some official deserves a pat on the back, but who?”
No. Its the voters who put Bush in charge who deserve a pat on the back.
p.lukasiak
oh, btw Tim, I can’t believe you are citing a wingnut like Malvina
actually, it adds up to quite a bit. The biggest problem is that the World Bank never suspected that someone would be as corrupt as Wolfowitz, so they don’t have rules to cover it.
Apparently, the Ethics Rules didn’t cover ordering that your girlfried be given a $60,000 raise, a two level promotion, guaranteed positive performance reviews, and additional promotions when a conflict of interest arose and she had to get a job “outside” to avoid the conflict.
Malvina’s argument is that because no rules were broken, there is no scandal. That’s crap — the failure of the World Bank to anticipate the shear venality of people like Wolfowitz doesn’t make it a non-scandal.
That’s like saying that 9-11 never happened, because “no one anticipated” it.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Exactly. The fact remains, your third-grade self was just fine with the Carter Administration. But now, when Wolfowitz is a Republican and a patriot, you’re out for his blood. Typical BDS-suffering moonbat partisan hypocrites, the lot of you.
Case in point: Woodrow Wilson. Moonbats were all for it when he wanted to change the Middle East democratically, yet now, when a Republican proposes exactly the same thing, you’re all suddenly opposed. Well, color me unimpressed. You had your chance to object, and that was in 1919. Since then, we’ve had 22 Presidential elections, and each one has been the real referendum that mattered on the subject. So suck it up and live with the fact that Wilson would’ve wanted a war in Iraq, you crybaby Hippy loons.
DougJ
You lost me at “Al Maviva.”
Gary Farber
“Confidential sources have informed me that Richard Perle is the semi-official Prince of Darkness, not Paul Wolfowitz.”
Perle is the decades-old designee, with the fallback being Robert Novak. Wolfowitz is just wrong.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
As wingnuts go, he’s an okay guy most of the time. Still insane, but politely so. Then again, he rambles so much that if he insults me I’ve stopped reading him by the time he gets around to it.
Rome Again
Woodrow Wilson? Wow, sorry, I never had any opinion of any of his ideas until long after he was DEAD. You had to go back to a president who died seven months (to the day) before my father was even born? I’m sure you’ll find many people here who had deeply held opinions of Wilson’s actions as they were occuring (NOT!).
Zombie Santa Claus
I think that guy was being sarcastic, RA.
I certainly hope so.
Rome Again
ZSC, I do know what sarcasm is, really.
Never-the-less, if someone’s gonna put that out there, I’m gonna knock it down – sarcasm or not!
Fledermaus
Wolfie is about to learn an important rule: do not fuck with European bankers.