Nobody Could Have Predicted...

"Sloppy Second Term"

Since

David Brooks and William Safire get the memo.

Brooks said this incident with Libby was an isolated matter and did not show a "cancer on the administration." On the contrary, it's more like an unsightly blemish, perhaps a pimple.

Safire had the temerity to laud Judith Miller's work. Of course, he did not mention the spoon-fed Chalabi fabrications Miller used in her "work" on WMD and the run-up to the war.

As mentioned below, the lying points are now in plain view. Brooks, Safire, Cornyn and Graham make the same points, draw the same questionable conclusions and try to diminish the importance of the leak and the inquiry that's followed. Either they are channeling each other, or they're all getting their lying points from the same source.

GO Propaganda

Brit Hume (Racist) says that Juan Williams needs to be hosed down for getting uppity.

Crooks & Liars has the video

The GOP Lying Points about the Libby indictment can now be identified:

John Cornyn on This Week and Lindsey Graham on Face the Nation, apparently were recipients of the memo.

This was the act of a single individual and not a broad effort to discredit Ambassador Wilson or cover it up because only Libby was indicted.

This is contrary to information in the public domain, assuming of course, that what we heard is true. Cheney had to know Libby was making false representations to the public, the Special Prosecutor, the Grand Jury and to Scott McClellan who further disseminated the falsehoods. Of course, it is implausible that Libby acted alone, or even if was able to pull that off, that no one else in the administration knew he was a source of the leak or of the attempts to cover it up.

Since no crime was charged, no crime was committed.

This could also mean that no crime was charged because it cannot be proven. Perhaps a result of Libby’s obstruction or perhaps because Alberto Gonzales gave the White House time to destroy documents with a heads up. This is analogous to saying that OJ is innocent because the jury found him not guilty. They do not mean the same thing. Innocence is not having committed the crime, “not guilty” is the failure of the state to prove a crime was committed by the person charged to the satisfaction of the trier of fact.

Essentially, they're making the argument that an indictment is not proof of guilt but the lack of an indictment is proof on innocence. These guys have law degrees?

Rove cooperated fully with the Special Prosecutor and the grand jury.

Did he cooperate fully the first time, the second time, the third time, or the fourth time he appeared before the GJ?

Rove is exonerated because he was not indicted on Friday, October 28, 2005

Rove may be innocent or he may be guilty as sin, neither of which is proven by the failure of the SP and the GJ to issue an indictment. Again, perhaps it just can’t be proven or perhaps an indictment will be forthcoming.
_______________________________________
On Lindsey Graham:

I thought there was hope for Lindsey Graham, but sadly, I was mistaken.

Lindsey Graham continues to defend the smear of Wilson using the debunked claim that Wilson said/suggested the Vice-President/Vice-President’s Office had sent him (Wilson) to Niger. He continued with the White House knew this was false and therefore had a right to defend itself, or something similarly inane. Graham should read “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” and then explain to us where exactly Wilson made the claim he was sent by the Vice-President. What sort of man would attack a critic by attacking the critic’s wife. Hardly seems the Christian thing to do. Besides which, the claim about Niger has been proven false and a crude forgery was the evidence to support the false claim. These continued attacks on Wilson are a diversion from the real issue, the admittedly false claim in the President’s State of the Union Address.

Lindsey Graham is nothing but a hypocritical asshole. During the Clinton impeachment he made the claim that because a phone call was made in the early morning hours, the call must have been the result of sinister motivations. And his great fact-checking led him to accuse Vernon Jordan of involvement in a cover-up attempt at a time when Jordan was in a plane over the Atlantic. Personally, I wouldn’t trust his “legal” judgment any more than I believe Halliburton protects the interests of the American taxpayer. Lindsey Graham is a weasel.

BTW, if Cornyn’s appearance on This Week is any indication of his legal reasoning ability, he belongs nowhere near the Supreme Court or any other body dealing with legal issues.

Worst President Ever!

the administration that ran on returning "honor and integrity" to the White House and that promised not even a "hint of impropriety," would have the first sitting White House official to be indicted since the Grant Administration of the 19th century.

I guess that old up or down vote thing only applies when you're sure you've got enough votes.

W. Christopher Epler: '10 lessons from the toilet presidency of George W. Bush'

From Meet the Press, September 14, 2003

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson.

Intersection in History:

From 1988-1991, Wilson was the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. He was the last official American to meet with Saddam Hussein before "Desert Storm."

Mr. Cheney also served a crucial role when America needed him most. As Secretary of Defense from March 1989 to January 1993, Mr. Cheney directed two of the largest military campaigns in recent history - Operation Just Cause in Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East.

The Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm doesn’t know the last official American to meet with Saddam before the conflict began. Okay.

From Meet the Press October 23, 2005

Mr. Stephen Hayes from The Weekly Standard

We have to remember, Joe Wilson came back, and when he went public, first anonymously then later with his name attached, claims that he had debunked forgeries that suggested an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, the chronology doesn't work. Wilson was in Niger in February of 2002. The U.S. government came into possession of those forgeries in October of 2002. He could not have done what he said he had done. So if you're in the White House at the time, why would you not say, "Gosh, who is this guy? Why is he saying these things that we know aren't true? And how do we fix this?"

From Joseph Wilson’s “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”

The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq — and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival

(As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors — they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government — and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)

As you can see for yourself, Mr. Hayes is simply making things up. First of all, Wilson claims Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick told him the claims had been debunked which may or may not be true, but that is not what Hayes alleged.

Secondly, Wilson claims to not have personally seen the memorandum, so it’s unlikely he would claim to have debunked it.

Third, just because the government claims it did not come into possession of the document until October, does not mean that they had not seen it or learned of its contents.

Fourth, since Wilson never claimed to have seen it, what difference does it make when the actual document made its way to the U.S.
Fifth, just because they did not receive the document until October does not mean that is actually when the document was received. Would they lie about that, perchance?

Finally, why wasn’t Hayes’ statement challenged? Why the factually challenged defense of the White House's motives for attacking a critic?

"We're going after criminal organizations and coyotes that traffic in human beings. These people are the worst of the worst. They prey on innocent life. They take advantage of people who want to embetter their own lives."

Okay, this an extremely serious issue and one should probably not nitpick too much, but shouldn't the product of prep schools and Ivy League colleges have an embetter command of his native tongue?

From Too Stupid to Be President

Top 11 phrases and sayings that will be updated to agree with the President's* vocabulary:

11. Embetter safe than sorry.

10. It is embetter to have loved and lost than never to have beloved at all.

9. A little embutter made emBetty's embitter embatter embetter.

8. May the embetter man winned.

7. Build an embetter mouse trap, and the world will beat empath to your door.

6. "You embetter watch out! You embetter not cry! Embetter not pout! I'm em tellin' you why...Santa Claus is incoming to town."

5. Where am your embetter half?

4. It was the embest of times. It was the worsest of times.

3. Embetter Homes and Regardens.

2. It is embetter to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's em-mouth and remove all indupitabilitude.

1. Embetter dead than enreddened.

RealClearPolitics from 2001


Even for Bush, who probably has more integrity in his left hand than Bill and Hillary have between them, it's not going to be easy. George W. Bush will conduct his administration under the closest ethical scrutiny in the history of our country. Even the slightest hint of impropriety by any of his staff will ignite a media firestorm and unrelenting cries of hypocrisy from the left.

It seems clear that Bush understands the gravity of the challenge. The new president used the first meeting of his first day in office to lay out rules of ethical conduct to his staff in the most explicit terms: "I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries that define legal and ethical conduct. This means avoiding even the appearance of problems. This means checking and, if need be, double-checking that the rules have been obeyed. This means never compromising those rules."

Nobody Could Have Predicted his own words would come back to haunt him...

Please watch for subtle and less than subtle attacks by pundits on Ronnie Earle, Patrick Fitzgerald and the judge in the Delay case.

Likely offenders include; George Will, Bill Kristol, Brit Hume, Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and Fred Barnes.

Never saw a remote wilderness area that wouldn't look better with an oil derrick or natural gas well smack dab in the middle of it.

A graduate of the Donald Rumsfeld "School of Ridiculous Hand Gestures," Ken Starr explains how a disgraced New York Times reporter may have handled "former Hill staffers"

Last night on the television show Numbers, the writers made some interesting and controversial political statements:

They inferred that John Kennedy, JR’s plane crash was a preemptive killing and made to look like an accident in case he ever changed his mind about going into politics.

One of the agents remarked that he joined the FBI after serving in the military for 3 years in Afghanistan and Iraq and what else was he to do with all that training in interrogation.

The underlying story was about an assassination plot to kill a member of the family of a murdered dissident in Columbia highlighting the purported corruption of the Columbian government and the “blind-eye” exercised by our own government.

Finally, they commented on the U.S. government’s training of assassins from other countries and how that training is used in furtherance of corruption and the stifling of dissent in those countries, in this case, Columbia.

{Since becoming secretary of state earlier this year, she has noticed a public interest about even her taste in fashion. Yesterday, she wore a smartly tailored black suit with large gold buttons on the sleeves. "I like clothes — I always have," she said to laughter, answering a question. "You know, when I was 5 years old, my poor father would go off to work on his sermon on Saturday — he was the Presbyterian minister — so he would go off to work on his sermon. And my mother and I would go shopping. Shopping is fun."}

Okay, that explains the shopping for shoes while New Orleans lay in devastation, but it does nothing to explain how the daughter of a Presbyterian minister rationalizes selective adherence to the Ten Commandments nor her penchant for being less than candid. In other words, she's a damn liar whose lies were part of fabric of deception which caused the deaths of thousands. Now, she hides behind the cloak of her "faith." Actions speak louder than words!

When asked about the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court, Scalia lamented about the "politicalization" of the nomination process. Isn't he the same guy who, for purely political reasons, issued an injunction to stop the Florida recount during the 2000 elections and then didn't recuse himself despite blatant conflicts of interest?

The mainstream press is now ridiculing the "scripted" conference between Bush and hand-picked soldiers in Tikrit. There's even news that one of the soldiers is actually a PR flack for the Pentagon. Amazingly, the press chides the administration over this scripting but makes no mention of the scripted press conferences to which it was itself a complicit party. Nor, did the press express the appropriate outrage that a planted shill in the name of Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert was in their ranks regularly tossing softball questions to Scott McClellan and eventually to Bush himself.

The press did not ridicule the choreographed town hall meetings with vetted audience members and rehearsed citizens. The press did not reveal the extraordinary measures taken to insure a favorable reception to Bush and whatever drivel he was spouting that day.

The presss did not appropriately complain that American citizens who held different views or wanted to protest Bush and his policies were routinely segregated into "Free Speech Zones" where no one would see them, especially GWB.

This event was just more of the same from the propaganda masters who've convinced half the populace that a Pinto is a Lincoln Towncar.

How long before a governor's veto is auctioned off on Ebay?

Arnold Watch has the scoop on two vetoes that coincide with large cash donations by those who benefit from the veto.

Non-stop photo-ops can be exhausting!

Where was the "outrage" when these troops were used as a photo-op props just a month ago?

The higher a monkey climbs, the more you can see of his behind __ General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell.

Think you know what "strict constructionist" means? Then you have to get this handy White House reference book.

As Elizabeth Reyes a young attorney now formerly with the Secretary of State's office has discovered, it is possible to become collateral damage when you are just doing your job if it reflects poorly on powerful members of the Bush administration.


Article at Law.com

I want to set up a legal defense fund to help her with her potential legal action. Anyone who knows how this can best be accomplished, please leave a comment. In the meantime, I'll check to see whether this site can just act as a conduit without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Says she wants to spend more time with her cats.

Stay the Course by Captain Edward John Smith.

Jerome Corsi as seen at WorldNetDaily (unlikely as that may seem)

Crony Baloney

More loyal than Barney...

The "innocent till proven guilty" mantra is sure to be repeated ad nauseum by the right-wing, hate chorus in the case of Tom Delay. To be sure, party affiliation often plays a role in how the perpetrator is viewed. In this case, Delay is the victim of a renegade district attorney with a partisan vendetta against "the hammer" who is simply an innocent victim of street-fighting politics. Naturally, Mr. Delay gets his day in court where the case should be tried, not in the media which it seems is where his defenders believe they have a better chance of prevailing.

Let's assume for the moment that the substantive charges of money laundering are true. This would mean that someone at the RNC was either in on the scam, mind-numbingly incompetent, or both. Can we look forward to an indictment of someone at the RNC any time soon?

And if someone at the RNC was a party to this activity, does this fall under the provisions of the RICO act? Are there other instances where the RNC was used to launder money, not just in Texas, but in other states as well? How high up in the party hierarchy does this corruption go? Does any of this activity fall within the broad definitions of wire and mail fraud? If so, which federal laws were broken as well?