Month: July 2005

The Good Old Days

Via Think Progress, we are reminded of Ronald Reagan’s words upon signing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act

Whether you work in Langley or a faraway nation, whether your tasks are in operations or analysis sections, it is upon your intellect and integrity, your wit and intuition that the fate of freedom rests for millions of your countrymen and for many millions more all around the globe. …

Like those who are part of any silent service, your sacrifices are sometimes unappreciated; your work is sometimes misunderstood. Because you’re professionals, you understand and accept this. But because you’re human and because you deal daily in the dangers that confront this nation, you must sometimes question whether some of your countrymen appreciate the value of your accomplishments, the sacrifices you make, the dangers you confront, the importance of the warnings that you issue.

He continued

But that’s not true. As long as you are provably loyal to the Republican Party above all else and promise to fit intelligence to our preconceived notions, we appreciate everything you do. Otherwise you are fair game.

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Back Scratch Fever

In case anyone is wondering if Roberts really is a partisan hack or not, Jeffrey Toobin’s book “Too Close To Call” sheds some light on that subject:

The president’s first two nominations to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia curcuit — generally regarded as the stepping-stone to the Supreme Court — went to Miguel Estrada and John G Roberts Jr., who had played important behind-the scenes roles in the Florida litigation.

“Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But, until that day, accept this justice…”

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Up, Up And Away

A commenter asks why I think Clement was floated earlier in the day and it’s a good question. I don’t think it served any purpose. The only reason to float trial balloons on Supreme Court justices is to guage how they’ll be accepted. That is an irrelevant concern for this White House except for one consituency — the radical religious right. But they have a very direct pipeline to the the leaders of that constitutency and they don’t need to float a name publicly to find out how it will be seen by these people. They just have to pick up the Jesus phone.

I think it was a mistake. And I’m surmising that it might just be because things are breaking down a little bit in the vaunted white house message center. Perhaps people are a little bit distracted and not keeping their eye on the ball the way they should? Wonder why?

Honestly, I can’t think of a single good reason to do it.

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Demographically Correct

Is it just me or is it a little bit odd that the allegedly liberal Washington Post is advertising on this conservative DC blog and not advertising on this liberal DC blog?

It seems particularly odd considering that the conservative blog gets only 1/6th the weekly traffic that the liberal blog gets.

That damned liberal media sure is biased.

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Ooops

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame’s name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.

Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove’s accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information.

Martha knitted a lovely poncho and lost 25 pounds. Do you think Karl will make such good use of his time?

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GOP Creature

My initial take on reading around the web on Roberts is that he’s a purely political choice — a Republican die-hard to the bone. This means that even if he isn’t seen as “ideological” in theory, he’s ideological in practice. They all are.

He’s spent his entire adult life in Washington. He’s been a judge for only two years. Before that he represented corporations and worked for Republican administrations. That’s it. He’s not a scholar or a prosecutor or someone who has ever worked in the trenches. He’s a creature of the radical right GOP establishment.

Good choice for Bush. He’ll take care of his friends. And he knows exactly what he’s supposed to deliver.

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The Suspense Is Killing Me

CNN has already announced who the new Supreme Court nominee will be. Yet the president is still going to go live at 9pm est to give us this “news.”

And right now, 29 minutes before the big “announcement” CNN is discussing the nominee while a clock ticks down in the corner of the screen telling us how long we have to wait until the president tells us what we already know.

Reason #4672 why the cable news networks are completely worthless.

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John Roberts

So what do the shrieking wingnuts think of him? Is he pure enough? Does he speak in tongues, handle snakes, speak directly to Jesus and James Madison about original intent? Fill me in.

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Scotus With The Mostest

I think Clement is going to sail through — unless the far-right has a temper tantrum. So the question is, how do we get as much political advantage from this as possible?

Would it be best to try to bait the far right into blowing it by saying that we think Clement may be the kind of “Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter” centrist that we can live with? You know how they feel about that.

Or do we use the opportunity to ram home all the principles and ideals that we feel are in jeopardy with Republicans in power choosing who gets lifetime appointments?

As I said, she’s in. The Gang of 14 are not going to disband over this one. So, how do we get the most out of it?

I’m thinking it might be a good play to rile up the wingnuts while Karl is on the hotseat. Karl probably made this decision, after all. How could he betray them this way?

Update: What? A one day trial balloon? Whatever. We’ll know in a couple of hours…

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Clueless

Gawd help us. Apparently Jon Meacham has spent so much time praying with Monsignor Tim lately that he hasn’t had time to bone up on the basic facts of the Plame case. It hasn’t stopped him from talking about it, though. According to The Daily Howler, he actually said on Don Imus that Wilson was dispatched after the war had started. For real:

How completely clueless was Meacham? This clueless—he actually thought that Wilson’s trip had been commissioned in the spring of 2003, after the war in Iraq was over. He had seemed to imply this at the two-minute mark, bringing our analysts out of their chairs; discussing the political fall-out in the spring 2003 as the WMD failed to turn up, Meacham said that Wilson had “undertaken a mission to go to Niger and discover if these 16 words were true.” Since Wilson’s trip occurred a full year before those 16 words were spoken, it seemed that Meacham was working from a bogus chronology—but even we couldn’t quite believe that the parson could be this clueless. But later, as he gave that brilliant “best guess,” his confusion became all too clear:

MEACHAM: My best guess is that it did come out of the bureaucracy of the CIA, and it may have, it could have originated with the wife.

IMUS: Who asked them to do it, the CIA?

MEACHAM: Well, they were trying—remember, everything was falling apart. So they’ve got to—now, one would hope that they would have undertaken this, done their homework before we had begun a war based partly on this. But things were beginning to very explicitly disintegrate and these documents were—it turned out they’d been faxed through Italy, remember this?—on the uranium. So I think it came out—it probably came out of the CIA, which is supposed to vet all of this.

But this should not surprise us. Meacham proved to us some time back that he has a rather odd notion of reality when he wrote this:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

The uniqueness, one could say oddity, of big time celebrity “reporters” who don’t know their asses from holes in the ground argues that mainstream journalism is more likely moribund than relevant.

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