Nightly Ramble: The New Truck, Tenant, Etc.

First order of business: The new truck. I’m a little short on pics of it just now, but if the light behaves itself tomorrow night, I’ll fire off a series.

For now; It’s a Buick Rainer.

It’s kinda like the Chevy Trailblazer, except they’ve added a lot of quieting to this; It’s without question the quietest SUV I’ve ever driven.

Got the 4.2L inline 6, 24 valve. Kicks around 275hp, 275PF of torque. Tust me, this thing will hurt the tires, given the chance. That’s hooked to an uprated version of the 4L-60E tranny that I had in the van, and from there to the same all-wheel-drive system the van had.

With all that and the fulle body on ladder frame design, it rates for around 6000lbs of towing… more than enough for the trailer we tow.

All the toys… it’s a Buick, after all.. including automatically adjusted air ride, of all things. Black outside, Tan leather inside. Not as big as the van, but the creature comforts are all there. About the same gas consumption as the van… rated 17-21, though we got 18 around town and 23 on the open road over the weekend, which is about the best the van ever got…and I think I can improve that a bit.

What’s really going on here is that we went for the bumper to bumper 100,000 mile warranty, because much as we loved BitsBox, it was getting up in miles, and didn’t have the warranty.
As I say, I’ll post some better stuff tomorrow.
Yeah, yeah yeah, lots to catch up on. Let’s get to it.

* My initial reaction to the George Tenant thing was that Tenant was trying to sell books, but something didn’t ‘feel’ right about that, so I held my peace. For one thing, the press, always over-eager for something/anything to throw at this administration, seemed to me a little too willing to take Tenant at his word about some things.

Former CIA Chief George Tenet writes in his just-released book that on the day after 9/11 he met with Pentagon adviser Richard Perle.

“He said to me, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.'” But Bill Kristol notes in The Weekly Standard: “Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United States until September 15.”

That’s one sure sign of many that the press wasn’t doing it’s homework before making a move. Irony abounds; isn’t that exactly what they’ve been screaming that the Administration did?

However; for all of the screaming that the left has been doing with regards to “political manipulation of the Pre-war intel” George tenet makes it quite clear, that that was not the case. I’ve read the “referenced on radio once and TV once, but I haven’t seen it reported yet, where I can link it. Apparently, there is quite a bit in the book, which the press has passed right over in their efforts to hype any book that apparently takes a chunk out of the Bush administration, which paints a quite different picture from the one the hype paints…. even without the aforementioned credibility issues. But the people trying the hardest to sell this book have not been Tenant or his people, thusfar, but rather the press.
By the way, I see others wading into this one, incautiously, such as Hitchens, who of course, in his very first line says:

It’s difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm.

Apparently, Mr. Tenant isn’t the only one with a flair being incautious. I’ve been finding Hitch’s analytical skills increasingly suspect, since he started mouthing is nonsense about how religion is the root of all evil.

In this case, his judgement is well beyond the suspect, and into the maddeningly bizzare:

“This has bin Laden all over it,” Tenet told Boren. “I’ve got to go.” He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. “I wonder,” Tenet said, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone.

I find it improbable but that Tenant would have decided to leave Moussaoui alone, without some political direction, most likely in the form of a directive from Bill Clinton.

Hitchens needs to consider that we were still operating in a September the tenth environment, where PC is the run of the day. on what basis, does anyone suppose that we would have been able to pick up Moussaoui, on the tenth of September?

While Hitch would apparently like to think that Tenant had sole responsibility for the information that the United States, and indeed the world acted upon, it was in fact information gathered from all over the world, and from intelligence agencies from all over the world. This was not , repeat not, solely a CIA operation. Nor was the CIA alone in their conclusions.

George Tenant is not a totally unsympathetic character, but this is by no means to be considered a defense of Director Tenant. There is the as yet on answered question of that long line of trucks moving out of Iraq toward Syria just prior to the invasion. Clearly, that’s something the CIA already knew about. If there was a major screw up at the CIA, that one point qualifies as probably the biggest in 40 years. That one falls at the feet of George Tenant.

As for the rest, however, let’s consider the degree to which the CIA had been emasculated and by the Clinton administration, who, by the way, itself also acted on the same information that was provided to the Bush administration. To this day, the anti-war left praises Clinton for his military action, on the very same information that George Bush acted upon. Go figure.

I’m certain I’ll have more about this, as the days progress, but I have to tell you that this is both more and less than the initial press hype makes it.
* We’ve been hearing for years, now, about how a few thousand gallons of jet fuel, couldn’t have brought down the world trade center. Wrong. By way of Beck. …Who, by the way, I have got to be able to get down to see when the Coots are playing. I was busy with the new truck this weekend. Always something… and I get the feeling I’m missing something special.

* So Corzine is out of the hospital. OK, fellow human being, and all that. But I wonder if any of these new mobile grained inDUHviduals who are cheering his return, have really thought about the extraordinarily remote possibility that he’s going to bring about any positive changes for the state of New Jersey?

* On the other hand, nice to see Tony Snow back on the job. What stories I’ve seen about his progress, leave a little to be desired; and I can’t get rid of the nagging urge of comparison to Cathy’s situation. Obviously, that’s an unsettling comparison, but there it is.

* It amazes me that we have a presidential candidate who still can’t figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.

* I’ll resume posting music notes tomorrow…My mixer’s giving me problems at the moment so I’m not listening to anything tonight, anyway.