This from Mickey Kaus at Slate:

Time‘s Joe Klein reports on a White House attempt to “destroy” Brent Scowcroft, quoting “a prominent Republican,” who tells Klein that the White House sent out talking points “about how to attack Brent Scowcroft” after Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent New Yorker profile.

“I was so disgusted that I deleted the damn e-mail before I read it,” the Republican said. “But that’s all this White House has now: the politics of personal destruction.” [Emph. added]

Hmm. Weekly Standard notes that if Klein’s source hadn’t deleted the e-mail he would have noticed that it was a completely civil and substantive attempt to rebut the substance of Scowcroft’s arguments. Real Clear Politics reprints the sober, almost academic email, which ends with a vicious, inflammatory, “Let the debate proceed.”