Kaplan in Slate: on Colin & Condi

In addition to the Salon newsletter (which I wrote about here), I also signed up for the Slate's newsletter(s). A bit annoying b/c you have to go through MSN, but worth it, b/c Slate also has good content.

For example, Fred Kaplan has been putting up good commentary. Here's a sampling on the Secretary of State shakeup:

Why Powell Had To Go
And how will Condi fare as his successor?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Nov. 15, 2004, at 3:06 PM PT

Journalism w/ hyperlinks is great. The above column links to these earlier ones of his from last spring:

Condi Lousy
Why Rice is a bad national security adviser.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, April 8, 2004, at 3:17 PM PT

The Tragedy of Colin Powell
How the Bush presidency destroyed him.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004, at 9:56 AM PT

Poking around Slate also turned up this dialogue from last January:

Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War
Jan 12-16, 2004

The list of participants is amazing: Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria.

I'll have to highlight that dialogue in a separate entry. Can't leave it buried at the bottom of this post.

One last comment and link regarding the cabinet changes over the past week. A friend asked me over e-mail what I thought. I replied that my impression is similar to what Josh Marshall wrote in this TPM post: the White House (Bush-Rove) is consolidating power.