Wesley Clark, whipping boy of the blogosphere

David Adesnik and Josh Marshall go after Clark with a vengeance today. Adesnik first: Wes Clark seems to be blaming Bush for 9/11. No, not Iraq. 9/11. While the Administration has hardly been forthright about the intelligence failures that contributed to the attack, Clark really seems to be going out on a limb. In a ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

David Adesnik and Josh Marshall go after Clark with a vengeance today. Adesnik first:

David Adesnik and Josh Marshall go after Clark with a vengeance today. Adesnik first:

Wes Clark seems to be blaming Bush for 9/11. No, not Iraq. 9/11. While the Administration has hardly been forthright about the intelligence failures that contributed to the attack, Clark really seems to be going out on a limb.

In a follow-up post, David thinks that Clark deviated from the written text of the reported speech. Meanwhile, Josh Marshall, who was at the speech where Clark made his accusations, has a different beef with the candidate:

[L]et’s be honest: the air’s going out of his campaign. In money, in direction, in the polls, at the grass roots. In fact, that doesn’t even quite capture it. The air’s going out of his candidacy because he doesn’t have a campaign. Where’s the campaign, the strategy, the organization? What’s surprised me most is that he’s managed to do as well as he has over the last six weeks even with the complete lack of direction and organization from Little Rock. The operation is being run by an interlocking directorate of folks who can’t be bothered to be more than absentee proprietors of the general’s campaign. (emphasis in original)

Ouch. UPDATE: Marshall has more on Clark. ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Kleiman thinks Adesnik’s off base:

Adesnik converts Clark’s well-reasoned rebuke of Bush — for trying to blame the failure to notice that al-Qaeda had plans to use jetliners as missiles on lower-level intelligence personnel — into the absurd assertion that Bush, rather than bin Laden was responsible for the crime.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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