Tancredo's Tall Tale

During the Republican presidential debate on CNN last week, Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado repeated a tale he's been telling for years. "Some time ago," he said, "2003 I think it was, I got a call from Karl Rove who told me that because of my criticism of the president, I should never darken the doorstep of the White House."

What everyone drew from this, of course, was that Tancredo had neither been invited to the Bush White House nor gone there in the aftermath of his unpleasant chat with Rove. For the offense of having publicly disagreed with the president, the congressman was persona non grata at the White House, banned for the life of the Bush presidency.

Turns out you'd have been wrong if you thought that. Tancredo was invited to the White House twice each year in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, and once in 2007, with a second invitation about to be sent his way. And, lo and behold, he accepted and showed up on most, if not all, of those occasions. True, these weren't policy meetings but social occasions like barbecues for members of Congress or Christmas parties or gatherings for all House Republicans. But Tancredo has darkened the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue multiple times.

What prompted the dispute between Tancredo and Rove were comments by the congressman to the Washington Times in April 2002. Tancredo said President Bush favors an "open door" policy on immigration. According to the newspaper's paraphrase of what Tancredo said, he called this an open invitation to terrorist attacks. "Unless we do something significant to control our borders, we're going to have another event with someone waltzing across the border. Then the blood of the people killed will be on the hands of this administration and this Congress."

When Rove read the story, he called Tancredo to complain. Earlier, he had invited Tancredo to the White House for an hour-long chat. And a White House official says Tancredo had written Rove, asking him to speak at a Tancredo fundraiser. This time, the conversation was less chummy. But Rove never said Tancredo wouldn't be invited to the White House, according to the official, and never used the phrase "darken the doorstep."

There goes Karl Rove's reputation as the Dr. Evil of the Bush White House.

Excusing Iran

As Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote in last week's issue, Iran's clerical regime "has aided and abetted virulently anti-American, radical Iraqi groups, exported to Iraq sophisticated automatic explosive devices designed to kill American and British soldiers, pushed forward defiantly its construction of uranium-enriching centrifuges, and kidnapped at least five American citizens in Iran. . . .

"Utterly bogus espionage charges have been hurled at three, including Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center in Washington. Like her boss, former congressman Lee Hamilton, a chairman of the Iraq Study Group, Ms. Esfandiari has been an advocate of reconciliation between the United States and her homeland."

As Gerecht noted, the espionage charges were a calculated outrage-a thumb in the eye of the U.S. government lodged the day after the May 28 talks in Baghdad between U.S. and Iranian officials. The accused Americans have "absolutely nothing to do with U.S. intelligence and would have recoiled from any advocacy of 'regime change.'"

Comes now Time magazine to defend the Iranian government. "Did the U.S. Incite Iran's Crackdown?" asks Time in its headline, and as usual with such phony rhetorical questions, you know the answer is yes even before reading the story.

"Tehran's jailing of Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old grandmother," Time's correspondent finds, is the fault of the Bush administration for having "trumpeted its $61.1 million democracy program" aimed at undermining the Iranian dictatorship. Esfandiari's jailers, you see, were provoked. "Akbar Ganji and Emaddeddin Baghi, two of Iran's most prominent pro-democracy activists, who have served long prison sentences for their activities, are among those who protested the U.S. democracy program. In a letter to international human rights organizations after Esfandiari's imprisonment, Baghi denounced the program as morally unjustifiable for effectively putting Iranian activists in harm's way."

But wait, there's more: "The pro-democracy program is not Tehran's only sore point with the U.S. Apart from the ongoing nuclear controversy, Iran is angry over the continuing detention of five of its diplomats, arrested during a U.S. raid in Iraq in January. There was some speculation that the arrest and interrogation of Esfandiari and other Iranian-Americans might be an attempt to set up a 'hostage exchange'-the U.S. citizens in return for the Iranian diplomats." Time fails to report the contention of the U.S. government that the "diplomats" are in fact members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which is providing assistance to our enemies in Iraq.

It used to be that dictators had to rely on the likes of Ramsey Clark or Lord Haw-Haw to provide this quality of one-sided advocacy. Now they can just depend on the Bush-bashing predilections of the American press.

We're Not Gonna Take It

Last week at a conference of black clergy, Illinois senator and presidential hopeful Barack Obama recalled the 1992 Los Angeles riots and argued that race riots have been erupting in this country ever since-we just don't notice them: "Those 'quiet riots' that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths. They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates."

We don't know about you, but when we heard the phrase "quiet riot" our thoughts turned ineluctably to the defunct '80s 'hair band' of that name. And sources tell us Obama plans to advance this line of criticism next with a speech questioning the president's Metal Health and describing the White House as a Mötley Crüe with an Appetite for Destruction, issuing policies of Poison. Often seen as the Cinderella candidate, Obama preaches inclusiveness regardless of race, gender, creed, and sexual orientation-including those who are AC/DC-while the president, in his opinion, "ain't talkin' 'bout love."

Congratulations!

The ninth annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism has been awarded to Max Boot, a WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor, for his exceptional foreign policy analysis and reporting. The pieces that earned him the award included "Bush Didn't Start the Mideast Fire" ( Los Angeles Times), "The Power of the Pentagon" ( Wall Street Journal), "Darfur Solutions: Send in the Mercenaries" ( Los Angeles Times), and "The Second Lebanon War: It Probably Won't Be the Last," which appeared in this magazine's September 4, 2006, issue.

Sponsored by the Eric Breindel Memorial Foundation, and generously supported by News Corporation, Breindel's longtime employer and this magazine's corporate parent, the award carries a prize of $20,000 and is presented each year to the columnist or editorialist whose work best reflects the spirit that animated Breindel's own writing: love of country, commitment to democratic institutions, and determination to bear witness to the evils of totalitarianism. Congratulations, Max.

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