Rasmusen Weblog

If anyone thinks Wilson's has any credibility left to destroy, the book is good for that too, but I focussed on what we might learn about his career, about his motivations, and about the CIA.

In this post: Wilson and his career:

Page 31: Wilson's uncle was mayor of San Francisco from 1912 to 1931 and then governor of California 1931-1934. Another uncle was a U.S. Representative.

Page 33: His family was Episcopalian, though his first wife was Jewish.

Page 34: He spent his high school years in Europe--Nice, Mallorca, Montreuz, and Biarritz. Page 35: "My only experience with the public sector up to that point had been collecting unemployment insurance during the winters at Lake Tahoe,..."

The prediction of my earlier post is confirmed: Wilson is a classic example of the Limousine Liberal-- Northern California subspecies. Keep in mind that the traditional habitat of this type has been the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, and the traditional enemy is the rest of the Republican Party-- The Old Guard, Southerners, Taftites, Reaganites, Goldwaterites, Southern Californians, traitors to their class such as the Bushes, ethnics of the Slavic, Irish, or southern European varieties, anyone religious, and anyone who shops at K-Mart.

We also learn about his politics:

Page 32: "When in 1967 Muhammed Ali declared he had nothing against the Vietcong, it made sense to me and my friends even as it sent chills down the spines of our parents."

Page 63: When he worked for Al Gore as Foreign Service Fellow, "I saw myself, then as now, as center-left in my outlook on social issues and as a realist in foreign policy."

Page 239: " While I generally voted for the Democratic candidate for president, President Bush had received my vote in the 1992 election that brought Clinton into office. Not surprisingly, my votes generally reflected the political agenda most important to me: foreign policy and national security."

p. 282. Vitriolic comments about Florida 2000: "I had railed against such conduct in flawed elections in Africa , and disliked it just as much in my own country." He claims that the "gutter tactics" of "an out-of-state rabble" stopped the recount in Dade County.

Page 321: ."The Christian Right, with its literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, had become increasingly strident in promoting war in the Middle East as necessary for the return of Jesus and the subsequent "rapture" promised on Judgement Day."

Page 439: "By uncritically favoring Likud, President Bush has done our Israeli friends and allies no favors." Again, as on page 321, he says that the rapture is the goal of American evangelicals.

Again, we have the Liberal Republican, even down to being willing to vote for a preppie Bush against an Arkansas Democrat. Note how he admits to not having anything against the Vietcong. And, of course his knowledge of evangelical Christianity is embarassingly wrong. For those readers of mine who also know little of this (but are, I hope, less willing to show their ignorance in print), the idea of the rapture is unique to "Dispensationalism", a 20th Century school of exegesis that is common but not the mainstream of Evangelicalism. Also, it isn't clear to me what the rapture has to do with support for Israel even for Dispensationalists. More simply, evangelicals support Israel so strongly (more strongly than American Jews) because Israel is an outpost of Western civilization, which evangelicals support, because they feel kinship with Jews, and because Islam is far more hostile to Christianity than religious Judaism (secular Judaism is another matter!).

And we learn about his career:

Page 209:"I had no intention of remaining in the Foreign Service any longer than necessary to qualify for my retirement, which was just a few years off." This, about 1995.

Page 275: "I had risen about as high as I could in the Foreign Service and decided it was time to retire and try something else in life while I was till young enough to make the transition.

Page 275: "My list of clients was small, as I did not want to overextend myself while learning the ropes,but my geographical reach extended into Africa, Western Europe, and Turkey. The breadth of companies and sectors was already fascinating for me. I had become involved in gold mining in West Africa-- including in Niger, which was just opening up some fields-- as well as telecommunications and the petroleum sector."

Page 341: After his New York Times article attacking the Administration on July 6, 2003, "All that week after the article appeared and the one following, I played as much golf as I possibly could."

My earlier post had sources suggesting that he left the Foreign Service before he qualified for retirement, and involuntarily. I also wondered whether his "consulting" was actually a real job, or whether he just played a lot of golf. Apparently, he didn't have many clients and he did play golf. Another prediction confirmed? Maybe tomorrow I'll report more from this book.