British Tories should not worry about Michael Howard being persona non grata at the White House, because the younger generation has finally figured out how the American right operates and where and how to meet them. Three smart Tory MEPs - Roger Helmer, Christopher Heaton-Harris and Martin Callanan - were spotted recently at Grover Norquist's Wednesday morning meeting. The uninformed assume Norquist to be just another Washington policy entrepreneur with a minor think tank and lobbying group called Americans for Tax Reform. In fact, this is the general staff and communications node of American conservatism, the place where the right-wing media and think-tankers and congressional and White House staffers gather to exchange information. Political careers are made and destroyed at these sessions, and they serve as early warning systems for the fate of congressional bills, governorship campaigns and big issues like the two mammoth projects of Bush's second term: social security reform and changing the tax system. These two goals - the key to the reversal of FDR's New Deal - have been the lifetime project of Norquist, and are now at the top of the White House agenda. With characteristic understatement, Newt Gingrich calls Norquist "the most innovative, creative, courageous and entrepreneurial leader of… conservative grass-roots activism in America," and PJ O'Rourke describes him as "Tom Paine crossed with Lee Atwater plus just a soupçon of Madame Defarge." Euroscepticism is fast becoming the fashionable new idea for American conservatives. Now you know why.
Curse of the second-term scandal
Forget how hard Bush worked to win his second term, and reflect on the grim precedents. Second terms are when the scandals hit: for Clinton it was Monica, for Reagan Iran-Contra, and for Nixon Watergate. And there are several lurking sufficiently closely in the wings to trouble Bush's sleep. The big concern is the fall of the dollar. Mr and Mrs Middle American may not care about being priced out of foreign holidays, but they will not want to go back to rattletrap Buicks because the BMWs and Hondas get too expensive. If Bush can skirt that problem, there are three more worries. The first is the Valerie Plame case: the leaking of the name of an undercover CIA agent who happened to be married to former ambassador Joe Wilson. So far, the prosecutor appointed to investigate the case, Patrick J Fitzgerald, has succeeded in raising its profile and getting every journalist in the US involved by threatening two reporters - Matt Cooper from Time and Judith Miller from the New York Times - with prison for protecting their sources. This has a long way to go, and eyes are on "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Sticking with Cheney, there is still mileage in the Halliburton scandals, less because of the no-bid contracts the firm won in Iraq than because of lawsuits that suggest that Halliburton, while under Cheney's control, might have been breaking US law in letting its German subsidiary deal with Iran.
Spooks with axes
The third potential scandal could be dynamite because it goes to the heart of the pro-Israeli tendency in the Bush administration. Humble Pentagon research analyst Larry Franklin has been charged with passing classified information to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of the pro-Israel lobby group Aipac (American Israel public affairs committee). What he passed has not hitherto been made public, but Tumbler can reveal that it was a report that Iranian agents were planning to kidnap and kill Israelis based in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq. Franklin supposedly asked the Aipac guys to use their influence at the national security council to get this report taken seriously, because his superiors at the Pentagon were downplaying it. But the plot thickens. This was an FBI trap against Aipac and an Israeli diplomat called Naor Gilon, in which Franklin was supposed to be a willing participant. But the deal has gone wrong, and Franklin has stopped talking to the FBI, ditched his court-appointed lawyer and hired top-gun espionage lawyer Plato Cacheris, the man CIA agents turn to when the net closes in. With a lot of disgruntled CIA officials out there after being purged by Bush's loyalty squads, this one could get very nasty very fast. It's the same back in Israel, where seven Mossad section chiefs and over 200 agents have resigned or taken early retirement since Ariel Sharon put a political loyalist, Meir Dagan, in charge two years ago. That's a lot of ex-spooks with anti-Bush axes to grind.
A chickenhawk no more
It seemed a very odd way to celebrate the anniversary of Pearl Harbour, sending Dick Cheney into the lions' den of Kabul to attend the formal inauguration of President Hamid Karzai, despite warnings that the Taleban and al Qaeda were likely to deploy all their remaining assets against such a tempting and high-profile target. So was Bush looking for a new number two? Not at all. The hitherto unblooded Cheney, stung by repeated allegations in the election campaign that he was a "chickenhawk" who avoided military service in Vietnam but then sent others into harm's way, insisted on taking this opportunity to demonstrate his macho credentials.
