When I was a kid back in the Seventies, a favorite sarcastic phrase used to peers who were getting a bit too full of themselves and getting all entitled and snippy about playing fair was: ‘What do you think you are — some kind of P.C.?’ ‘P.C.’ stood for ‘Privileged Character.’
Dick Cheney is now officially our nation’s most privileged character.
It seems that Cheney Branch has thought up another innovative new privilege to protect itself from Congressional Oversight. As Isikoff and Hosenball remark at Newsweek, (and as my colleague has likewise noted),
The decision by the White House to refuse to honor the subpoena from Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for Cheney’s interview was hardly unexpected, given the administration’s history of fiercely protecting presidential prerogatives. (Newsweek)
But as the article remarks with wonderful restraint,
What was surprising to some legal scholars was the basis for shielding the FBI interview report. It was covered, Mukasey said, by what he called "the law-enforcement component of executive privilege." (Newsweek)
Let me see if I can interpret this. Reading between the lines, I would interpret it to mean that any legal scholars who know anything about executive privilege and who still believe in ‘rule of law’ are gobsmacked that Mukasey would have the gall to make this absolutely specious argument. (Newsweek)
But of course, any legal scholar who hasn’t spent the last seven+ years locked in an ivory tower with no internet access doubtless isn’t all that surprised that he did. Mukasey quickly learned the Bush administration’s foolproof strategy: if you’re the executive and refuse to account for yourself, who is really going to make you if you come up with some kind of color-of-law excuse to refuse? Even if the judiciary calls you out, you can always make up another one.
Or as Benen more succinctly puts it, ‘The Bush gang plays by its own rules — the ones they make up as they go along.’
In testimony on Capitol Hill, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan basically painted a portrait of an administration that created its own credibility gap — and a White House response to his testimony further underscored why the gap continues to exist.
Former presidential spokesman Scott McClellan on Friday said President Bush has lost the public’s trust by failing to be open about his administration’s mistakes and backtracking on a promise to tell all about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
“This White House promised or assured the American people that at some point when this was behind us they would talk publicly about it. And they have refused to,” McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee. “And that’s why I think more than any other reason we are here today and the suspicion still remains.”
The former White House press secretary suggested that Bush could do much to redeem his credibility on the Plame matter and his reasons for going to war in Iraq if he would embrace “openness and candor and then constantly strive to build trust across the aisle.”
That’s as likely right now as General Motors announcing that it has decided to quadruple its production of SUVs. The administration’s modus operandi — which is creating problems for GOP presumptive Presidential nominee as Democrats try mightily to tether him to the most unpopular President in recent American history — is now clear and documented.
The problem was underscored by the administration’s response to McClellan: not addressing the issues and in attack mode:
The White House was dismissive of the event and McClellan himself.
“I think Scott has probably told everyone everything he doesn’t know, so I don’t know if anyone should expect him to say anything new today,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.
U.S. President George W. Bush did not know about a White House effort to leak the identity of a CIA agent but tried to protect staffers who were involved in one of the biggest scandals of his administration, former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told Congress on Friday.
McClellan said he did not think Bush was involved in a 2003 effort to blow the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war.
But Bush, through his chief of staff, ordered McClellan to tell reporters that White House staffers Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby were not behind the leak, even though they both turned out to be involved, McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s involvement in the leak might have been greater, McClellan said.
What’s the upshot of the testimony? (1) He further documented in general terms why the administration has a credibility gap. (2) His sworn testimony paints a picture of an administration that wasn’t honest with the American public because of backtracking at a time when original statements aren’t forgotten due to the Internet, YouTubes, and a non-ending news cycle. (3) The White House response that didn’t address issues raised by McClellan directly but just went after him personally underscored why there is a credibility gap for an administration that believes attack mode rather than explanation mode is the solution for controversies.
In “McCain: Four More Years of Mumbling?” Michael Reagan says, “…a quick look at the amazing progress in present day Iraq accomplished by the president reveals a greatness that offends liberals.”
While I agree with Michael Reagan that we definitely do not want “Four more years of mumbling,” and although I am not a “liberal,” I am offended, but–please–not by President Bush’s “greatness.” In fact let’s take a look at this president’s “greatness,” by examining what greatness is not.
“Greatness” is not taking our nation into a disastrous war based on lies, cooked intelligence, exaggerations and deception.
“Greatness” is not mismanaging such war at the expense of over 4,000 of our finest and bravest
“Greatness” is not Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture, waterboarding, black prisons and extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, the end of habeas corpus, kangaroo courts, warrantless NSA wiretapping on Americans…
“Greatness” is not Walter Reed, the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch lies, neglecting our veterans, outing a CIA operative.
“Greatness” is not Katrina, the firing of U.S. Attorneys, the Terry Schivo “case.”
“Greatness” is not, “Osama Bin Laden, where are you?”, “Heckuva job, Brownie,” “We don’t torture,”
“Greatness” is not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Paul Bremer, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith, John Bolton, Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Halliburton, Blackwater…
“Greatness” is not a vast increase in our budget deficit; an increase of over 60 percent in our national debt; attempts to privatize social security; pillaging Medicare, Medicaid, and children’s health care; declaring war on stem cell research, efforts to mitigate global warming, evolution science, abstinence programs; swift boating your political opponents.
“Greatness” is not the failure to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations; the failure to bring a modicum of peace and stability to the Middle East.
“Greatness” is not using signing statements (more than 150 of them) to obey and implement only those parts of the law one likes.
“Greatness” is not corruption, nepotism,cronyism, Dick Cheney’s secretive Energy Task Force, lost White House emails, ignoring subpoenas, stonewalling, subverting justice.
“Greatness” is not Recession, an economy in tatters, mounting fiscal deficits, tax relief only for the wealthy…
“Greatness” is not promising to “restore honor and integrity to the White House,” and doing just the opposite.
“Greatness” is not diminishing the image of and respect for our country abroad
“Greatness” is not, to begin with, getting selected by the Supreme Court with a little bit of help from Katherine Harris and “dimpled chads.”
Sorry, Michael, but this kind of greatness offends not only “liberals,” but every American.
When he was the Bush White House’s press secretary, Scott McClellan took a lot heat and some analysts thought he showed every single sweat gland of it. Next week McClellan has a new memoir coming out, and according to reports President George Bush and the White House might begin sweating a bit — because they’re going to have to go into full damage/discredit control on this one: it is reportedly scathing.
According to the Politico, the book “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” will add to growing archive of published information on the Bush administration’s credibility gap — and how it starts at the top. The Politico reports:
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):
• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
“Doing the right thing” is the universal wrench of politics and governance. This is because what constitutes the right thing has more to do with how a pol or public official adjusts the wrench to fit their circumstances — which is to say survive with arms and legs intact if not win points — than the moral high ground.
That so noted, the news that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed a outside prosecutor aka special counsel for the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the willful destruction of those CIA torture tapes is welcome. But we’re so used to former AG Alberto Gonzales doing the wrong thing with such consistency that I’m having to suspend belief that Mukasey is doing the right thing and not playing a role in a drama with an outcome pre-determined by the White House.
I apologize for my cynicism, but you have to admit that it is well earned. There have been many investigations, criminal and otherwise, of administration officials that have gone nowhere because they were tinged with politics, and the only Bush era precedent for the Mukasey appointment is naming Patrick Fitzgerald to be an independent prosecutor in the Wilson-Plame leak investigation.
Mukasey assigned John H. Durham (photo), a veteran federal prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the CIA tapes investigation with the FBI.
Durham’s appointment is an indication that there is reason to believe that high-ranking CIA officers, and perhaps other administration officials, may have committed criminal acts in destroying tapes of the 2002 interrogations of two Al Qaeda operatives despite explicit instructions that they be preserved.
A year ago today, back when a surge was something that you didn’t want to fry your computer, extraordinary rendition was a stirring playing of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, people thought FISA was the federal agency that protected their bank deposits and a Huckabee was a . . . something or other, I posed a couple of questions:
Can we survive two more years of a Bush presidency?
Have we become a nation of sheep?
Looking back over the previous 12 months and ahead to a watershed 2008 election, the answer to both questions is an equivocal “yes.”
The ability of the most amoral presidency since forever to shock but not surprise ripened like cow pie in a pasture on a hot summer day during 2007:
* George Bush’s Forever War morphed into a business deal that merely forestalls the eventual collapse of Iraq: Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki gets coup insurance in the form of a long-term U.S. troop presence and the U.S. gets first dibs at Iraq’s vast untapped oil riches.
* In a fairy tale ending, the president commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby, of course, had been thrown overboard by his bosses as they lost control of the Wilson-Plame affair, which grew out of one of the administration’s bigger whoppers justifying the war.
* U.S. attorneys were sacked because they resisted becoming handmaidens for a Justice Department that had become a branch of the Republican Party with subpoena power.
* The shroud of secrecy was torn off the administration’s enthusiastic embrace of Nazi-like torture techniques, which so troubled the head of the CIA’s clandestine service — although not for the right reasons — that he ordered the destruction of terrorist interrogation videotapes despite being explicitly told not to do so.
* The administration’s bellicose Iran policy crashed upon the shoals of a report by the nation’s spymasters that Tehran apparently had shuttered its nuclear weapons program four years earlier, an inconvenient disclosure that did not dissuade the president and vice president from continuing to rattle their sabers.
* Two key administration players – presidential mentor Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – resigned after working tirelessly to suborn the rule of law while stonewalling a feckless Democratic congressional majority in its feeble attempts to call them out. Both men, and most especially Gonzales, face a perilous New Year because of their probable criminal culpability.
* Meanwhile, the U.S. economy increasingly looked like a house of cards as the gap between Wall Street and Main Street grew, the war became a half-trillion dollar albatross and the dollar tanked against major foreign currencies. A home mortgage meltdown long in the making was exacerbated by an administration that shamelessly continued to reward the rich and give the finger to a middle class in crisis through, among other acts, vetoing an expansion of the life-saving S-CHIP program.
Can we expect more of the same in 2008? Absolutely. But that does not diminish the importance of digging deeper into the rotten core of the Bush presidency.
This means bringing Gonzales and other perps to justice, demanding increased transparency in what the administration and Congress does, working to restore civil liberties lost in the unprecedented Bush-Cheney power grab, and insisting that the Republican presidential field either climb out of Bush’s bed or explain why voters can expect more of the same any of them become president.
Will the republic survive another year? Yes, just as the hundreds of terrorism suspects have survived another year without due process in Guantánamo Bay and other way stations in the Rumsfeld Gulag, but there remains the specter of a citizenry even more disenchanted with its president and other so-called leaders and the institutions they profess to represent then at the end of the Clinton presidency.
December 10th, 2007 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Former vice presidential chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby has dropped his appeal of his conviction in the Wilson-Plame leak case
Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction but President Bush commuted his 30-month prison sentence.
“We remain firmly convinced of Mr. Libby’s innocence,” attorney Theodore Wells said today. “However, the realities were that after five years of government service by Mr. Libby and several years of defending against this case, the burden on Mr. Libby and his young family of continuing to pursue his complete vindication are too great to ask them to bear.”
Translation: Libby didn’t have a pot to piss in, and even had he won a new trial he may have faced even greater legal jeopardy. And, of course, may not have a sympathetic president to get him off the hook.
As noted here last week, Representative Henry “Mr. Investigation” Waxman, the dogged Democrat from California, is still trying to pry loose Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s FBI files on the case.
Waxman wants the potentially explosive files for an ongoing Oversight and Government Reform investigation because they include information that Fitzgerald did not present to the grand jury — and therefore is not subject to secrecy laws — that subsequently indicted Libby.
Once upon a time, when Iran supposedly still had a nuclear weapons program and there was a war in Iraq, there was a scandal involving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former vice presidential chief of staff whose conviction in March as a result of the Wilson-Plame affair was commuted by President Bush.
Those halcyon days may seem like so much ancient history, but not for Representative Henry “Mr. Investigation” Waxman, the dogged Democrat from California, who is still trying to pry loose Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s FBI files on the case.
Waxman wants the potentially explosive files for an ongoing Oversight and Government Reform investigation because they include information that Fitzgerald did not present to the grand jury — and therefore is not subject to secrecy laws — that subsequently indicted Libby on obstruction of justice and perjury charges.
In July, the president turned down Waxman, but he has now asked newly-minted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to light a fire under the White House.
Fitzgerald, according to Waxman, has been cooperative and forwarded to his committee CIA and State Department files, but he cannot release White House-related files on his own.
The upshot of the Mukasey overture is likely to be more stonewalling because Waxman wants the transcripts, notes and other documents relating to Patrick’s interviews with the president, Vice President Cheney, former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
I agree with blogger Empty Wheel, late of FireDogLake, that the focus of Waxman’s continuing investigation is how it was that Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA operative was leaked but there was no investigation or removal of security clearances for the blabbers, who include Rove, among others.
The answer, of course, is beyond obvious: The White House had no interest in doing anything, let alone play by the rules, once its primary objective was attained – striking back at Joseph Wilson for revealing that one of the principal rationales for the Iraq war was false and then ruining his wife’s career for good measure.
Bush administration apologists will continue to argue that Plame really wasn’t a covert operative, Patrick overstepped his bounds, Libby was framed and Bush’s commutation of Libby’s 30-month prison sentence was appropriate. They’re right about the commutation insofar as it was within the president’s purview, while the other claims are demonstrably false.
So if this is ancient history, why should Waxman be wasting his time and our money on it?
Because unlike Arkansas land deals and Oval Office blow jobs, national security was severely compromised and the truth must out.
November 23rd, 2007 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
How about that Thanksgiving Eve bombshell?
Former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan reveals in a forthcoming book that he was lied to in 2003 when he falsely assured us that nobody in the White House had leaked Valerie Plame’s confidential CIA status in retaliation for husband Joseph Wilson’s criticism of George Bush’s rationales for the Iraq war.
You may recall that the presidential mouthpiece went so far as to tell the press that he had checked with Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, and both men had assured him that they had no involvement in the infamous leak.
Writes McClellan:
“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
“There was one problem. It was not true.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff (Andrew Card), and the president himself.”
I don’t know about you, but I have two big problems with McClellan’s confessional:
First, if McClellan was so put out when he learned that he was lied to, why did he wait so long to blow the whistle? In fact, isn’t he just as guilty of obstruction of justice as was Libby?
Second, McClellan’s belated whistle blowing is a whole lot more selfish than selfless given the White House’s culture of lying — including even lying when it didn’t have to — and his key role in that.
Conscience clearing? No, utterly self-serving. Can you say big, fat book contract?
November 21st, 2007 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan has penned a book called What Happened (due April 08).
The book’s highly-regarded publisher, Public Affairs, released a brief excerpt today, one that may pour substantial salt into old wounds…
Scott McClellan writes,
“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
“There was one problem. It was not true.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.”
McClellan Quit Speaking for Others; Why He May Finally Be Speaking For Himself Now
Though the title of the book could be misconstrued to be asking, “What happened?” as a person suffering from being slipped a Mickey might ask when suddenly awakening again, the title is meant as “Here’s exactly what occurred.”
And, this excerpt sheds some light on McClellan’s seeming hasty bowing-out from his position at the White House. It may also resurrect the spooky Bermuda Triangle of missing vessels once sailed by Rove, Rumsfeld, Bush, Andrew Card/ Cheney/ Libby/ Novak/ Miller, et al.
To many at the time, Mr. McClellan’s was a puzzling leave-taking. I thought he seemed suddenly and unduly tired. He spoke in arid, terse tones usually associated with carrying a hidden broken heart, or having been personally disrespected in a substantial way, and wanting to keep it private.
His book is many months away from bookstore lay-down. It would be promo-suicide to begin to tout a book this far out without risking the book losing all momentum … yet the release of the excerpt might be a teaser, but it could also at the same time represent an altruistic turn in timing, a desire by Mr. McClellan himself to stand a certain way in written history
What McClellan’s Excerpt and Book May Really Set Afire; A New Blaze Altogether
Regardless, Mr. McClellan’s excerpt may touch new flame on a straw– to the dry tinder of another issue entirely
– certainly, the credibility of data being passed from/by the White House to the public…
– but more so, the credibility, or if I might put it more pointedly, the seeming lack of incredulity…. of some in the White House Press Corps in gathering and weighing and delving for the “news underneath the news” …in order to pass facts and situations in-depth to us, the public, the clear ’supposed to be’ inheritors of the work of ‘the fourth estate.’
Journalists who make errors, and more pointedly, omissions, regarding mining for content and veracity of the White House briefings, take the huge risk of enabling such half-news or ‘non-news posing as truth’ to flow into the larger print papers of record. The fake-notations are taken up by the regionals, and flow thence into the local papers and other mediums.
In media, as in family life, as in ecology, as in religiousity, if the oceanic poisons the rivers, then the streams and creeks are poisoned too. You couldn’t create a better venous system for delivering mind-poison —or anesthesia.
Without deep news, truthful news, the highly valued “public’s right to know” then turns into the “public’s plight from being snowed” — the readers and listeners become the biggest dumbed-down electorate that ever lived. All the while fighting with one another over whose half- or non-truths are most valid.
How to keep an entire electorate functionally illiterate? Feed them half-validities and false faces with lots of lipstick on them to disguise their lack of substance… so citizens can never weigh the actual facts…therefore the citizenry can never create nor vote an initiative with gravitas and wisdom—and peace.
How some in media ever became such colluders in endarkenment of the public, is the media travesty of our times.
When The Egotistic Wins Over the Hard Work of In-Depth Investigation and Reporting
For years now, many have asked, Aren’t some of the White House news correspondents being too chummy with White House Admin, including partying with Read the rest of this entry »
They can start disinfecting the White House now. Karl Rove is leaving “for the sake of my family.â€
It will take reams of obloquy to write his political obituary, but it’s not too soon to start.
Never the master strategist or shrewd tactician of Bush folklore, he was the greasy mechanic of the White House sleaze machine.
His first significant sighting came on Election Night 2000 just after the networks called Florida for Al Gore. With a knowing smile, Rove told a network reporter to wait for the absentee ballots, which we later learned had been rigged by the Bush people.
Fittingly enough, Rove started his career by stealing letterheads from an opponent’s office to send out fake messages and going on to perfect his craft under the tutelage of Nixon’s dirty trickster Donald Segretti.
Nixon brought shady operators into the fringes of his White House. Bush took it further, putting the man he called “the architect†into the heart of the Oval Office.
From the sliming of John McCain in the 2000 primaries to the outing of Valerie Plame and the firing of the U.S. Attorneys for not being political enough, Rove’s fingerprints have been all over every unethical, immoral and illegal move of the Bush Administration.
He may be leaving the White House, but Sen. Patrick Leahy’s Judiciary Committee will do everything possible to keep him in Washington. The capital wouldn’t be the same without him.
August 1st, 2007 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
In shrinkdom, there is a disorder that is well known amongst career criminals. It is called Factitious Disorder. It is an intentional production or theatrical, staged by a person feigning physical and/or psychological symptoms… for ulterior gain.
This can include mimicking fugue states (taking unremembered travel whether across the hall or across the world… and claiming not to remember what one did or who one spoke to, the content of what was said, or what occurred (for instance, in the recent news chopper crashes in Phoenix, the suspect who’d stolen a truck claimed he later woke up at his family-member’s house, not remembering that he’d led a multi-car police chase, saw the huge plume of smoke from the crashed helicopters, felt the impact of the truck’s tires being blown, et al.)
Think also of Congress’s failed attempts to get Cheney to give on which oil co execs he talked to and about what. IF Congress moved that inquiry along, it is highly likely based on Cheney’s m.o. to this point, that Cheney would demur and say, he recalls nothing, as though he has a brain stem injury all of a sudden.
A person enacting a Factitious Disorder may claim amnesia, (episodic or concurrent inability to remember personal information that is often, in reality, seriously threatening to their charade of innocence or ignorance). Think of all those who have murdered their families and claimed they were knocked out at the scene by five Black or Hispanic men. They often don’t realize the moment they say Black or Hispanic men, and their injuries are nowhere commensurate with the injuries to their family members, they may become an instant prime suspect
Think of Cheney claiming he knew nothing about Scooter Libby’s work product, that Cheney was busy being ‘sick’ having heart conditions on and off throughout that time.
Or a criminal may feign a kind of multiple personality disorder; speaking clearly with full memory and accuracy about selected matters, but when interrogator, interviewer, investigator comes near the stressful facts that might force the criminal’s revealment, suddenly a ’second personality’ is pretended, one that is terse and uncommunicative and irritated. The ‘other’ personality carries any number of symptoms which most often are pretended to affect memory. There may also be facetious and wrongful blame assigned to others who may, in actuality, be innocent.
Other ‘pretend symptoms’ may give the appearance of addledness, ‘closed head’ injury, aphasia (not being able to speak), somnolence (pretending sleep or pretending drowsiness), and feigning Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It would be interesting to track Cheney in two ways… to see over which topics he ‘falls asleep’ during… perhaps so he can feign ‘no memory’ afterward… and where he goes when he says he’s going to the doctor… amongst criminals, ‘doctor’ is sometimes code for one who helps you ‘fix things.’ In investigation, even odd trajectories are looked at until proven cogent or not. Those odd tracks are followed because it is amazing often, how highly symbolizing criminals are in their subterfuges.
The criminal’s underlying motive is to evade being brought to justice, to continue in their own fiefdom, to gain privilege, to be fawned upon, to dangle reward for whomever will not turn them in, to retain power, to evade consequences of their own ill and egregious actions, to walk free.
The denouements I’ve seen of burrowed-in wily criminals are often effected by men who are bigger than the criminal, and smarter, and in a way, more wily about human nature than the criminal is… that is, the big guys press them in every way, not let them off the hook, not being deferent to them, using a two member team of good cop/ bad cop and often a third to give the criminal friendly philosophical advice, to interfere with and question the criminal’s fantasy of protected privilege, to not be politic or polite, to log all their movements and meetings, to Read the rest of this entry »
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by outed spy Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials.
U.S. District Judge John Bates said the lawsuit raises “important questions relating to the propriety of actions undertaken by our highest government officials.” But in a 41-page decision, he found that Plame and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, failed to show the case belongs in federal court.
Al Jazeera West is at it again. ABC TV’s doughty “investigative team,†which specializes in Al Qaeda handouts, is reporting the impending Mother of All Terrorist Attacks, as gleaned from an exclusive interview with Taliban military commander Mansour Dadullah.
“You will, God willing, be witness to more attacks,” he told a Pakistani journalist, according to ABC.
“Just last month,†the network notes, “Dadullah presided over what was termed a terror training camp graduation ceremony in Pakistan, supposedly dispatching attack teams to the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany.â€
The question arises: Why are Dadullah and his “Pakistani journalist†being so good to ABC? Last month, they gave the network an exclusive on the “graduation ceremony,†which was dutifully reported without qualification.
No one would want to dampen the investigative team’s zeal for terrorist coverage, but perhaps Brian Ross and his crew are cultivating their sources a bit too much.
Terrorists must have their Scooter Libbys, too, and it would be a shame if American journalists hadn’t learned to be more skeptical of all leakers bearing gifts.
A new Gallup poll indicates a whopping majority of Americans think President George Bush should have stayed out of the Scooter Libby case — yet another poll which is underscoring a fundamental question about this President:
President Bush’s commutation of a prison term for a former aide to Vice President Cheney did not play well with the public or even Republicans, a survey found.
In a USA Today-Gallup poll released on Tuesday, 66 percent said Bush should not have intervened in the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, whose sentence for obstructing justice in the CIA leak case included a 2 1/2-year prison term.
Thirteen percent said the president’s move was correct, and 6 percent said Bush should have given Libby a full pardon.
This puts Bush — as other polls are showing — at the fringes of what most Americans believe is not only adequate job approval, but propriety. MORE:
Bush didn’t even receive much of a boost in support from Republicans. Among them, 44 percent said Bush should not have taken action in the case. Ten percent said he should have pardoned Libby while only 26 percent said Bush did the correct thing.
So the Rush, Sean and Bill Kristol sentiment — highly touted on talk and cable shows — really represents a small percentage of Americans.
It’s perhaps time to frame the central question that is now emerging with George Bush.
Is his key quality (or flaw, depending on your affiliation) his being “resolute?” Is that what’s at play here in the Libby case? Is that what’s behind his refusal to not just not consider authentic change in Iraq war policy, but to also not consider other views on a host of other issues — and at least pay lip service to the fact that consensus has traditionally been an important part (and strength) of American democracy?
In a column titled “Resolute Amid the Wreckage” that should be read in full, Washington Post’s columnist Eugene Robinson argues that Bush values being seen as “resolute” above anything else and that explains his actions:
Allowing himself to be forced to retreat from Iraq would ruin George W. Bush’s fantasy of someday being seen as a latter-day Churchill. Bush keeps a bust of the British leader in his office, and he has praised Churchill as being “resolute.”
At the end he writes:
Democrats and war-weary Republicans on Capitol Hill are doing what their constituents want them to do — push George Bush to face reality in Iraq and bring American troops home. I just don’t see any signs that their message is getting through.
Pressed as to whether there was a debate in the White House concerning meaningful withdrawals, spokesman Snow said: “The conversation is always about what do you do to succeed in Iraq.” It doesn’t seem to make any difference that success is so vaguely defined. Being “resolute” is all that matters.
But is that really the problem?
If you follow this administration, and Bush’s attitude on various issues, you begin to conclude that unlike any other Chief Executive the United States has ever had George Bush simply does not cherish the model of democracy as set down by the founding fathers and perpetuated by many administrations throughout our history. His attitude now seems to go beyond this merely being a post-911 world that requires changes in security matters.
His broader attitude goes to the heart of huge power grabs by the executive branch, his administration’s seeming disdain for Congress’ power and its constitutional legitimacy stemming from its composition of duly elected members of BOTH parties, and his rejection of consensus, compromise, aggregating interests and the importance of a leader in a democracy to follow or at least respect the will of the people.
It’s increasingly clear that even the feelings of his own concerned partisans in Congress are now perceived by him and his associates as, in the long term, small potatoes.
Rather, Bush on a host of issues — even ones where it’s likely legal or CYA considerations are at play — now emits the vibes of someone who feels he is the country and can use his lawyers to look through every law’s sub clause to press the envelope and toss away years of governance conventional wisdom. And because he has impacted the courts, perhaps those who think these decisions won’t hold up will be in for an unpleasant surprise.
The tragedy is that there are some willing to go along with whatever he does or proposes because they voted for him and he’s seen as the captain of their political sports “team .” So they enable him to change longstanding rules of America’s democratic, political, and foreign policy decision making games.
The good news is that the number of people willing to support him no matter what is rapidly — and steadily — shrinking.
NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts from time to time by readers who don’t have their own websites, or people who have websites but would like to post something for TMV’s diverse and thoughtful readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Moderate Voice or its writers. This is another Guest Voice by Alex Hammer.
The Scooter Libby Affair by Alex Hammer
Four wrongs don’t make a right.
Libby was wrong to engage in the behavior for which he was found guilty. A significant number have concluded that Libby was prosecuted in a hyper-aggressive manner by a prosecutor unable to capture “bigger fish”, or used as a pawn in an attempt to do so. This would also, of course, be very wrong. What President Bush did, disregarding the decision of the jury, was wrong. And the Clinton’s statements, given Bill’s troubling pardon history, is hypocritical. And wrong.
So, there you have it. A sad, sordid (if that’s the right word), sorry affair almost all the way around.
I’m having a difficult time finding many - if any - people smelling like roses in this entire situation.
When Paris Hilton was sent to jail (and then sent back to jail), people debated about whether she was being treated more or less punitively than would be a regular (non-celebrity) individual due to her celebrity status. My central question is, if Libby was an individual who didn’t work for the Vice President of the United States, in the Bush Administration, how might he have been treated by the prosecutor, the jury, and the President?
And judged by the Clintons?
It’s just a question, and not one I know the answer to. But I think very worthy of thought.
To borrow from a famous commercial, “The world may never know”.
I believe emphatically in accountability and the rule of law. But I don’t believe in “gotcha politics”, nor in using people as pawns (if that did occur).
I also don’t believe in events being dominated by spin. And there seems to be enough of it in this case - in various aspects and by various sets of proponents - to mimic the most terrifying death-defying roller coaster ride at a major theme park.
And not that it is so easy to do, I realize, but we need to stop electing Presidents, frankly of any party, and supporting processes, that represent less than noble aims. Call me idealistic.
Or naive.
Our public figures, in some sense, reflect the public, that is, the common body from which they arise.
As the saying goes, “We have met the enemy, and it is us”.
A new Newsweek poll has three key elements:
(1) Americans are ready to elect a black President. The poll has some hedges in these numbers but the bottom line is: Americans say they are ready.
(2) Despite predictions that President George Bush would get a “bounce” from his conservative base for commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby, it looks like it has not helped him one bit. He remains at 26%. The only Presidents who had lower numbers were Richard Nixon and Harry Truman.
(3) If you look at the specific poll number approval ratings, Bush more than ever is actually President Of The GOP Base. Republicans approve of him 60%, Democrats 8% — and Independent voters approve of him with a tepid 20%. A whopping 87% of Democrats disapprove of Mr. Bush and a nearly-as-whopping 70% of Independents disapprove of how he’s handling his job.
Newsweek reports:
Could 2008 be the year that Americans put an end to an unbroken 218-year streak of electing white male presidents? Large majorities report a willingness to vote for either a woman or an African-American candidate for the office, according to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll. But those numbers drop significantly when respondents are asked whether the country is ready to accept a black or a woman in the White House.
Although 92 percent of the NEWSWEEK Poll’s respondents claim they would vote for a black candidate (up from 83 percent in 1991), only 59 percent believe the country is actually ready for an African-American president (an improvement over 37 percent in a 2000 CBS News poll). Similarly, 86 percent of voters say they would vote for a female commander in chief, but only 58 percent believe the country is ready for one (up from 40 percent in a 1996 CBS poll). Two thirds (66 percent) of voters said there was at least some chance they’d vote for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama (35 percent said there was a “good†chance, up from 20 percent last May). About as many (62 percent) said there was some chance they’d vote for Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton (43 percent said good chance, up from 33 percent). In a head-to-head race, though, Clinton dominates Obama 56 to 33 percent.
Experience appears to outweigh both race and gender in voters’ minds, however.
His toughest, angriest comment yet on the Bush/Libby decision. Increasingly, people either love Olbermann or hate him. Must viewing no matter what you think of him.
The one problem he now faces as a broadcaster: there is only so much outrage and anger you can display before it doesn’t have an impact on audiences and some begin to perceive it as schtick.
On the other hand, this IS an administration that seemingly prides itself on decisions that are made that fly in the face of consensus, bipartisanship and popular opinion and caters mostly to its own party’s hard-right base.
That is bound to provoke outrage not just among Democrats but also independent “swing” voters, who have broken with this administration in huge numbers, if you look at the polls. So dismissing Olbermann’s outrage as mere showcraft would not be accurate. He is not the only person in the nation to react this way to Bush’s decision (although Rush and Sean and Bill Kristol are very happy).
