Peter Baker of the Washington Post fetes Deputy National Security Advisor Jack Dyer (J.D.) Crouch II for not being Doug Feith:
“We sort of decided that J.D. was the one we would take a harder view of,” said one Senate Democratic staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“But as it turned out, we probably should have focused more on Feith than him. [Crouch] didn’t pan out to be the archfiend that we thought we had on our hands.”
Wow, that’s a ringing endorsement. Baker also quotes John Isaacs at the Council for a Livable World and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy David Trachtenberg to suggest “Crouch has proved more of a professional than an ideologue.”
Baker even mentions that Crouch was “honored as Missouri’s reserve deputy sheriff of the year for pulling an unconscious teen-ager from a fiery car wreck in southwestern Missouri.”
Maybe Baker and Crouch are neighbors or have kids on the same soccer team.
Baker omits any description of the bureaucratic wrangling over the Administration’s North Korea policy or Crouch’s role as Deputy National Security Advisor after the big shake-up. Maybe Chris Nelson will have the inside scoop tonight.
Right wing hack Jim Hoagland recently cited Crouch’s appointment as evidence that Vice President “Cheney is charging ahead with undiminished influence and unshakable self-confidence.”
I’d appreciate some evidence to evaluate these competing claims.
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“That’s his academic hat,” he said. “Part of his job [was] to be provocative. We in academia don’t have any responsibility except to teach our students.”
Some hippie defending Ward Churchill? Nope, William Van Cleave defending J.D. Crouch’s more extreme writings about North Korea and women in the workplace.
You know, I can’t prove it, but my take is that this position is Bush’s reward to Crouch for his work under Feith. Crouch is a professional in that he moved quietly and got stuff done in the Pentagon, sticking to the neocon agenda without publicizing it. His underlings sabotaged a lot of treaty and counterpro work while forcing the Joint Staff to chase issues down rabbitholes.
I had a chat with Baker Spring at a dinner at one stage last year or the year before in which I discussed Crouch going back to SMS after his term in DoD (this was about all of the politics we discussed – I wanted to keep things polite and moved it to DC real estate until the speeches started). Dr. Spring was convinced that Crouch was only too happy to be returning to SMS.
Apparently, too happy to move to SMS starts with being Ambassador to Romania for a little while (that’s Ambassador Crouch to you, sucka wonk), and now this. Looks like our key new NATO ally got a whole lot of attention. So much attention that Crouch even mucked up his post-Cold War history, as I blogged about back when I could still keep up with Two Minutes Hate: http://lookingforsomeonetolietome.blogspot.com/2005/01/two-minutes-hate-january-16-2005.html