Who's on First? - New York Times: "October 29, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Who's on First?
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.
But this Irish priest of the law, Patrick Fitzgerald, neither Democrat nor Republican, was very strict, very precise. He wasn't totally gratifying in clearing up the murkiness of the case, yet strangely comforting in his quaint black-and-white notions of truth and honor (except when his wacky baseball metaphor seemed to veer toward a 'Who's on first?' tangle).
'This indictment's not about the propriety of the war,' he told reporters yesterday in his big Eliot Ness moment at the Justice Department. The indictment was simply about whether the son of an investment banker perjured himself before a grand jury and the F.B.I.
Scooter does seem like a big fat liar in the indictment. And not a clever one, since his deception hinged on, of all people, the popular monsignor of the trusted Sunday Church of Russert. Does Scooter hope to persuade a jury to believe him instead of Little Russ?
Good luck.
There is something grotesque about Scooter's hiding behind the press with his little conspiracy, given that he's part of an administration that despises the press and tried to make its work almost impossible.
Mr. Fitzgerald claims that Mr. Libby hurt national security by revealing the classified name of a C.I.A. officer. 'Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life,' he said.
He was not buying the arguments on the right that Mrs. Wilson was not really undercover or was under 'light' cover, or that blowing her cover did not hurt the C.I.A.
'I can say that for the people who work at the C.I.A. and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected,' he said, adding: 'They run a risk when they work for the C.I.A. that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees.'
To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty. Unfortunately for them, this time they Swift-boated an American whose job gave her legal protection from the business-as-usual smear campaign.
The back story of this indictment is about the ongoing Tong wars of the C.I.A., the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon: the fight over who lied us into war. The C.I.A., after all, is the agency that asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate how one of its own was outed by the White House.
The question Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to answer yesterday - Dick Cheney's poker face has finally met its match - was whether this stops at Scooter.
No one expects him to 'flip,' unless he finally gets the sort of fancy white-collar criminal lawyer that The Washington Post said he is searching for - like the ones who succeeded in getting Karl Rove off the hook, at least for now - and the lawyer tells Scooter to nail his boss to save himself.
But what we really want to know, now that we have the bare bones of who said what to whom in the indictment, is what they were all thinking there in that bunker and how that hothouse bred the idea that the way out of their Iraq problems was to slime their critics instead of addressing the criticism. What we really want to know, if Scooter testifies in the trial, and especially if he doesn't, is what Vice did to create the spidery atmosphere that led Scooter, who seemed like an interesting and decent guy, to let his zeal get the better of him.
Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson's name from the C.I.A. and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the C.I.A. to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on the altar of faith-based intelligence.
Vice spent so much time lurking over at the C.I.A., trying to intimidate the analysts at Langley into twisting the intelligence about weapons, that he should have had one of his undisclosed locations there.
This administration's grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they're promoting national security when they're hurting it; they say they're squelching terrorists when they're breeding them; they say they're bringing stability to Iraq when the country's imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)
And the most dangerous opposite of all: W. was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn't have been listening to, and not listening to his real father, who deserved to be listened to."
01 November, 2005
What Did Cheney Know, and When Did He Know It? - New York Times
From Jon Stewart...
"If only lies left semen stains..."
LOVED IT! :-)
"If only lies left semen stains..."
LOVED IT! :-)
09 October, 2005
Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Rocket error dooms ice satellite's launch
Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Rocket error dooms ice satellite's launch: "A new satellite to help provide insight into one of the more controversial environmental issues being faced today failed to reach orbit to begin its mission to monitor crucial changes in Earth's polar ice caps because its rocket booster's flight computer had a missing command."
I bet Bush and his cronies destroyed this to keep it proving global warming.
I bet Bush and his cronies destroyed this to keep it proving global warming.
Survivors Sought in South Asia Earthquake - Yahoo! News
20 to 40 thousand dead in Pakistan. Where is Bush? Helping his "friends" in Pakistan? No movement. Indecisive. Clueless. Moron. Here is a chance to help, to show that hiding Osama is not worth it. What do we do but stand there and watch?
15 September, 2005
A Fatal Incuriosity - New York Times
A Fatal Incuriosity - New York Times: "The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late."
What a moron. How can we get him impeached? As bad as Cheney is, I doubt he is as incompetent at Incurious George.
What a moron. How can we get him impeached? As bad as Cheney is, I doubt he is as incompetent at Incurious George.
03 September, 2005
New Orleans Left to the Dead and Dying - Yahoo! News
What a mess. I doubt anyone could have done better than Bush, but I bet the war in Iraq caused quite a few of the lives lost in New Orleans.
Impeach Bush!
From Maureen Dowd's column...
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Impeach Bush!
From Maureen Dowd's column...
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
14 August, 2005
Someone Tell the President the War Is Over - New York Times
Someone Tell the President the War Is Over - New York Times
I like this guy. Frank Rich...
"A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire. "
"Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
"But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it."
"WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month."
I like this guy. Frank Rich...
"A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire. "
"Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
"But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it."
"WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month."
08 May, 2005
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!: "May 6th, 2005 6:37 pm
British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy
By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott / Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.
The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service.
The visit took place while the Bush administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war.
'There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable,' the MI-6 chief said at the meeting, according to the memo. 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,' weapons of mass destruction.
The memo said 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'"
I think it is time to start Impeachment investigations.
British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy
By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott / Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.
The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service.
The visit took place while the Bush administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war.
'There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable,' the MI-6 chief said at the meeting, according to the memo. 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,' weapons of mass destruction.
The memo said 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'"
I think it is time to start Impeachment investigations.
The Raw Story | Rep. calls for deeper inquiry into secret Iraq attack plan
The Raw Story | Rep. calls for deeper inquiry into secret Iraq attack plan: "Eighty-eight members of Congress call on Bush for answers on secret Iraq plan
RAW STORY
Eighty-eight members of Congress have signed a letter authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) calling on President Bush to answer questions about a secret U.S.-UK agreement to attack Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.
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In a letter, Conyers and other members say they are disappointed the mainstream media has not touched the revelations.
'Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States was too busy with wall-to-wall coverage of a 'runaway bride' to cover a bombshell report out of the British newspapers,' Conyers writes. 'The London Times reports that the British government and the United States government had secretly agreed to attack Iraq in 2002, before authorization was sought for such an attack in Congress, and had discussed creating pretextual justifications for doing so.'
'The Times reports, based on a newly discovered document, that in 2002 British Prime Minister Tony Blair chaired a meeting in which he expressed his support for 'regime change' through the use of force in Iraq and was warned by the nation's top lawyer that such an action would be illegal,' he adds. 'Blair also discussed the need for America to 'create' conditions to justify the war.'
The members say they are seeking an inquiry."
I have the outrage! Where is the media! REPORT IT!
RAW STORY
Eighty-eight members of Congress have signed a letter authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) calling on President Bush to answer questions about a secret U.S.-UK agreement to attack Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.
Advertisement
In a letter, Conyers and other members say they are disappointed the mainstream media has not touched the revelations.
'Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States was too busy with wall-to-wall coverage of a 'runaway bride' to cover a bombshell report out of the British newspapers,' Conyers writes. 'The London Times reports that the British government and the United States government had secretly agreed to attack Iraq in 2002, before authorization was sought for such an attack in Congress, and had discussed creating pretextual justifications for doing so.'
'The Times reports, based on a newly discovered document, that in 2002 British Prime Minister Tony Blair chaired a meeting in which he expressed his support for 'regime change' through the use of force in Iraq and was warned by the nation's top lawyer that such an action would be illegal,' he adds. 'Blair also discussed the need for America to 'create' conditions to justify the war.'
The members say they are seeking an inquiry."
I have the outrage! Where is the media! REPORT IT!
03 May, 2005
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Swindler on a Gusher
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Swindler on a Gusher: "The Iraqis have thrown us another curveball.
Ahmad Chalabi - convicted embezzler in Jordan, suspected Iranian spy, double-crosser of America, purveyor of phony war-instigating intelligence - is the new acting Iraqi oil minister.
Is that why we went to war, to put the oily in charge of the oil, to set the swindler who pretended to be Spartacus atop the ultimate gusher?
Does anybody still think the path to war wasn't greased by oil?
The neocons' con man had been paid millions by the U.S. to tell the Bushies what they wanted to hear on Iraqi W.M.D. A year ago, the State Department and factions in the Pentagon turned on him after he began bashing America and using Saddam's secret files to discredit his enemies."
It goes on... where is the outrage?
Ahmad Chalabi - convicted embezzler in Jordan, suspected Iranian spy, double-crosser of America, purveyor of phony war-instigating intelligence - is the new acting Iraqi oil minister.
Is that why we went to war, to put the oily in charge of the oil, to set the swindler who pretended to be Spartacus atop the ultimate gusher?
Does anybody still think the path to war wasn't greased by oil?
The neocons' con man had been paid millions by the U.S. to tell the Bushies what they wanted to hear on Iraqi W.M.D. A year ago, the State Department and factions in the Pentagon turned on him after he began bashing America and using Saddam's secret files to discredit his enemies."
It goes on... where is the outrage?
28 April, 2005
20 April, 2005
Matthew Rothschild comments on the news of the day. | The Progressive magazine
Matthew Rothschild comments on the news of the day. | The Progressive magazine: "Rice Erases Terror Scoreboard
The Bush motto seems to be, if you can't beat terrorism, stop keeping score.
Condoleezza Rice, who has been getting all sorts of underserved praise in the mainstream media these days, just decided to deep-six the State Department's annual report on international terrorism, according to a story by Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder."
The Bush motto seems to be, if you can't beat terrorism, stop keeping score.
Condoleezza Rice, who has been getting all sorts of underserved praise in the mainstream media these days, just decided to deep-six the State Department's annual report on international terrorism, according to a story by Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder."
15 April, 2005
16 March, 2005
BBC NEWS | Europe | Revolutionary bike 'too quiet'
BBC NEWS | Europe | Revolutionary bike 'too quiet'
No! Adding a noise maker to make it less quiet? Ha ha ha! Just put a horn on it.
No! Adding a noise maker to make it less quiet? Ha ha ha! Just put a horn on it.
04 March, 2005
Paul Craig Roberts: The Coming End of the American Superpower
Paul Craig Roberts: The Coming End of the American Superpower
Here is a Regan administration official who thinks we are screwed. I agree with him. The falling dollar leading to loss of forgein banks using dollars leading to very high interest rates leading to housing market crash and so on.
Here is a Regan administration official who thinks we are screwed. I agree with him. The falling dollar leading to loss of forgein banks using dollars leading to very high interest rates leading to housing market crash and so on.
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