Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“We will ask not only what is legal, but also what is right”

“Only one in 10 Americans said they believe Bush administration officials did nothing illegal or unethical in connection with the leaking of a CIA operative’s identity, according to a national poll released Tuesday.”

I will change the tone of Washington. I’ll bring good people to our nation’s Capitol, and surround myself with a strong team of capable leaders.

I sent a clear signal of my intentions when I named a great citizen to be my running mate: Dick Cheney.

It would be presumptuous for me to name other names before the people have spoken, but I have great respect for the man who introduced me today — and I hope his greatest days of service to his country might still lie ahead.

Should I earn your confidence, I intend to work with Republicans and Democrats to get things done for the American people that both parties represent.

We won’t always agree, but I’ll work to keep our disagreements respectful and I’ll work to find common ground. I will do everything I can to restore civility to our national politics – a respect for honest differences, and decent regard for one another.

I know you can’t take the politics out of politics. I’m a realist. But I’m convinced our government can show more courage in confronting hard problems; more good will toward the other side; more integrity in the exercise of power.

This isn’t always easy, but it is always important. It is what people expect of their leaders, and what leaders must require of themselves. My administration will provide responsible leadership.

Finally, a leader upholds the dignity and honor of his office. In my administration, we will ask not only what is legal, but also what is right – not just what the lawyers allow, but what the public deserves.

In my administration we will make it clear there is the controlling authority of conscience. We will make people proud again – so that Americans who love their country can once again respect their government.

Bush gave versions of that speech several thousand times during the 2000 campaign and it was probably the single most compelling part of his message. People were sick of the scandals and even if they knew the Republicans were behind it, many thought that Bush was different. (A majority knew better, but that’s a different story.) He may have been a little bit dim but at least he was a decent guy. He was hiring the “grown-ups,” the old guard like Cheney and Powell, people who were above the sort of petty politicking that characterized the Gingrich-Burton era.

That was, of course, fiction. Bush Sr, of Willie Horton fame, was as ruthless as they come and little Junior was the creation of the most ruthless Republican operative in the country.

Karl Rove, “the architect,” came to the Bush family’s attention in 1972:

Republican Natinal Committe Chairman George Bush has reopened an investigation into allegations that a paid official of the GOP taught political espionage and “dirty tricks” during weekend seminars for College Republicans during 1971 and 1972. Some of the 1972 seminars were held after the watergate break-in.

Bush said he will urge a GOP investigating committee to “get to the bottom” of charges against Karl C. Rove 32 [sic], who was executive director of the College Republican Committee. (Washington Post story, Bush’s Brain p.135)

This had come to the attention of the Washington Post by a fellow college Republican who Rove and Lee Atwater had cheated in an election (in which Rove had sent “an alternate slate of electors” — sound familiar?) Bush pere looked into it and wrote the guy who blew the whistle on Karl out of the party, telling him, “don’t ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever,” (Or something like that.) A short time later he hired Rove as a special assistant to the RNC.

This was all known in 2000. Wayne Slater wrote about it in the Dallas Morning News. But the national press corpse was so enamored of their darling narrative that had the simple but virtuous Bush paired against the lying, freakish metrosexual Gore that they couldn’t be bothered. And, as we’ve seen so perfectly demonstrated lately, they have been infected by the toxic political culture that says character assassination and dishonest smears are not only perfectly natural, they are admirable actions by virtuous people.

Still, reality does bite eventually. George W. Bush is at the center of the most powerful, vicious political machine in American history. They will destroy anything that gets in their path. They aren’t just playing with silly, gossip items like extra-marital blow-jobs. They are deadly serious. Outing a CIA agent for political purposes is the least of it. They purposefully took this country to war on false pretenses for reasons that were in large part purely political:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Now, if the reports we are hearing about indictments are true, Karl Rove is going to be charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in the Plame case. And the Republicans are going to howl that he’s being charged for politics, not criminal activity. When this happens I would hope that every single Democrat who is quoted or goes on television reminds the American people that Bush and his White House won the election by claiming that they would not only ask what was legal but what was right.

And when the Republicans say that Karl Rove wasn’t committing perjury or obstructing justice — that he just stumbled and couldn’t remember — every Democrat should remind people that Karl Rove has been doing this stuff since 1972. He is known to have an almost photographic memory. He is the man who everybody on both the right and the left have acknowledged as the most effective political operative in history. You can say a lot of things about the Boy Genius (as Bush calls him) — bumbling, confused and dim-witted aren’t among them. He does not do things he doesn’t mean to do.

Bush’s Brain has left a long trail of bodies behind him; it’s simply not believable that a man who has been a Master of Hardball Politics since 1972 is just an innocent bystander this time. After all, his motto since he was in high school is a quote from Napoleon:

“The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.”

Update: And somebody needs to have a talk with John Weaver, Rove’s Texas rival, if the man is not drunk on schadenfreude today. There are many things he’s never told. If he has ever fantasized about sticking in the shiv, once Karl is indicted and begins his PR offensive to portray himself as a poor lil’ office clerk who got confused, Weaver may have some tid-bits to share.

Update II: Think Progress has video of Bush making one of his “honor and integrity” speeches. I’m thinking it may be time to do some national ads.

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They Never Asked

The Times report said Mr. Libby had taken notes of a conversation he had with Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, after Mr. Cheney had spoken to George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, about newspaper stories quoting an anonymous former diplomat taking issue with the administration’s use of intelligence about Iraq’s effort to acquire nuclear material in Niger.

The notes do not show that Mr. Cheney had learned the name of Mr. Wilson’s wife or her covert status, lawyers involved in the case said. But they do show that Mr. Cheney knew and told Mr. Libby that Mr. Wilson’s wife was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and may have helped arrange her husband’s trip, they said.

Republicans sympathetic to Mr. Cheney said there was no inconsistency between what the vice president is reported to have told Mr. Libby and what Mr. Cheney said on “Meet the Press.” They said there was nothing in the reported conversation to suggest that the vice president knew Mr. Wilson or knew who had sent him to Africa.

Please. He spoke with Tenet about the newspaper stories. He found out about Wilson and he found out that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and and “may have helped to arrange her trip.”

But he didn’t know who “sent” him and he never asked. Sure.

He was either lying or he just jumped on the juicy tidbit that girly-man Wilson’s CIA wife sent him on the boondoggle — to which Libby saluted smartly and went out to spread the good word.

I think it’s important to remember something. Even if these guys didn’t have a clue that Plame was undercover — they should have asked. These are people who have the toppermost of the poppermost secret clearances. They have an obligation to check before they start talking about CIA employees to reporters.

In order to smear her husband, these guys behaved in a totally irresponsible manner, no matter whether they knew she was covert or not. If they aren’t fired for being under indictement for a crime, they should be fired for reckless, negligent behavior. They should have been fired a long time ago.

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Do The Wild Kabuki!

Via Think Progress:

CBS’ JOHN ROBERTS: Lawyers familiar with the case think Wednesday is when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will make known his decision, and that there will be indictments. Supporters say Rove and the vice president’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, are in legal jeopardy. But they insisted today the two are secondary players, that it was an unidentified Mr. X who actually gave the name of CIA agent V alerie Plame to reporters. Fitzgerald knows who Mr. X is, they say, and if he isn’t indicted, there’s no way Rove or Libby should be. But charges may not focus on the leak at all. Obstruction of justice or perjury are real possibilities. Did Rove or Libby change statements made under oath? Did they deliberately leave critical facts out of their testimony or did they honestly forget? Some Republicans urged Rove to step down if indicted. Not a happy prospect for president Bush.

Everybody dance now…

Fitzgerald knows who he is — why he could even be indicted for revealing the identity of a CIA agent and endangering national security! But, there are a bunch of other people who know who Mr X is, aren’t there? They are called “reporters” — the ones to whom Mr X allegedly leaked in the first place.

Won’t it be nice when the public is finally informed about all the things half the Washington Press corpse has been keeping secret?

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Question

Chris Matthews says that it’s been reported that Libby asked Cheney for guidance on how to handle the Wilson matter.

I’ve been a little punchy lately. Have I missed something? Does anyone know where he got that?

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“History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

It’s clear that the White House defense is to slime Joe Wilson some more. The Washington Post helpfully kicked off the new campaign just this morning.

Top administration officials are looking at federal indictments for crimes committed while sliming Joseph Wilson and they just keep at it. These people really do take that “stay the course” thing seriously, don’t they?

Maybe some of the borg ought to check out how Bush looks at their future if this “resolute” strategy doesn’t pan out:

They describe him as beset but unbowed, convinced that history will vindicate the major decisions of his presidency even if they damage him and his party in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

I guess you loyal GOP boys and girls are just going to have to take one for the team. He’ll be vindicated eventually. And he doesn’t have to run again, so what the hell. The rest of you can just piss up a rope.

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It’s The Cover-Up

There is a reason why the saying “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” has become a truism in these high profile political scandals. In the first place, no matter who does it, when someone covers up a crime they tend to make it more difficult to prosecute it, obviously. For instance, suppose that Novak and Rove conspired to get their stories straight. You can’t prove what was originally said because they’ve decided to lie about it. But if you can prove that they lied to the authorities or took affirmative measures to obstruct an investigation in which it could have been found that they committed a crime, you prosecute. Committing a crime to cover up something that may or may not be a crime is still a crime.

In the political world, it happens all the time because people are as concerned about appearances as they are about legalities — maybe more. They will cover-up actions that might not be technically illegal, but will make them look bad because they are unethical or just plain slimy. But covering up slimy political activity by lying to the authorities is illegal and you aren’t allowed to do it. This is particularly true when the underlying slime would have been prosecutable if you hadn’t successfully covered it up.

The Republicans abused the legal system shamelessly during the Clinton administration by financing the Paula Jones lawsuit and holding endless phony congressional investigations into arcane, trivial and lurid tabloid matters that had nothing to do with the administration’s behavior in office. They forced the appointments of an endless string of independent prosecutors and actively “criminalized” politics for partisan gain. The alleged crime and sleazy behavior in the Lewinsky case involved the prosaic and ordinary act of a middle aged man having an affair with a younger woman and lying about it. The American people understood it for what it was and rejected the notion that it was criminal. It is typical of the Modern Republican Party to now accuse the special prosecutor of doing what they themselves did. The GOP truly is Projection R Us.

However, the Fitzgerald investigation is not a partisan witchhunt and the underlying crime may have been awful — David Ensor on CNN says that his sources in the CIA report that there was real damage in Plame’s outing. This is meaningful. If the crime was covering up the purposeful or accidental revelation of a CIA operative for purely political purposes, it deserves to be prosecuted.

These are people with tremendous power to shape events. They are answerable only to the public in a relativist world in which media manipulation and marketing have made it very difficult to persuade people that there is any sort of objective truth. The legal system is the only forum left in which people are held liable for lying and in which there are rules and procedures for hearing all sides of the story in a coherent fashion. Sadly, epistemic relativist Republicans and their media helpmates have managed to pretty much eliminate all other avenues for finding out the truth.

And may I second Tristero’s post below:

Traitors simply cannot be permitted to continue to serve at the highest levels of goverment. And that is a principle worth defending, no matter what it takes.

When playing with national security for mere political purposes and personal grudges becomes politics as usual, this country is in serious danger. These people must be stopped. Even Nixon didn’t stoop this low.

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2000

Thirty-four years old:

The Pentagon said Staff Sergeant George Alexander, 34, had died on Saturday of injuries sustained eight days ago when a roadside bomb set by insurgents blew up near his vehicle in the town of Samarra.

[snip]

In the Iraq war, which began in March 2003, more than 15,000 U.S. troops also have been wounded in action.

Casualties among Iraqis have been far higher, first in the invasion and then the insurgency that elections and October 15’s constitution referendum have failed to calm.

Traitors, Technicalities, And Crises

Kristof’s op-ed which I ridiculed below, represents the elite media CW about Traitorgate that is now going public. I heard these same arguments from journalist friends over the summer. They are quite wrong. The issue of whether a crime can be legally proven is a technicality. An important technicality to be sure, but nevertheless not the real point.

It’s quite clear what happened: Treason was committed at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Can it be proven? Yes, in fact it has been proven. The convergence of already available evidence makes treason the most plausible conclusion. Is there enough evidence to stand up in a court of law and prove treason in a legalistic, technical sense? We don’t yet know, but that doesn’t mean that treason wasn’t committed, just as OJ Simpson’s acquittal doesn’t mean he was innocent of murder. Of course, the law must presume innocence in order to function. The civil community, meaning among others the mass media, doesn’t have to operate with that presumption. That doesn’t give anyone the right to sling around reckless charges. In this case, the accusation of treason rests, already, on an enormous amount of evidence that leads to that conclusion.

This case, like Simpson’s, is very simple, if perhaps difficult to legally prove. A CIA agent was deliberately exposed by people who had sworn never to do so. That has the potential to undermine the safety and intelligence gathering capability of the US. By exposing a CIA agent, they have aided this country’s enemies. That is a betrayal of country, in a word: Treason.

All the “yes, buts” are just so many “gloves that don’t fit” and the like. It doesn’t matter whether Ames had leaked her name to the Russians, or even if Plame had worn a button saying, “Kiss me! I’m CIA!” No one working in government had the right to mention her name outside highly classified circles, even if it was “just to confirm” info from other places.

Legal, schmegal, these slimeballs are traitors. That the MSM is falling for the GOP line, that blatant treason is being seriously discussed as “maybe just a policy dispute” and “no big deal,” just “politics as usual,” and “not a crime” should probably not surprise anyone. And it is not surprising that anyone who calls these traitors by their proper name will be more or less banned from the mainstream media. That is how low this country’s media have sunk. That is how low this country’s “public intellectuals” have sunk.

It hasn’t always been like this. The little secret about most of “Left Blogistan” is that we’re not that far left: actually most of the folks I read are moderates or moderate liberals. Need an example? Atrios will do, not to mention the brilliant Digby. In truth, many of us in “Left Blogistan” don’t have much patience with radicalism, socialism, revolution, class analyses. As for social mores, few of us live the frisky, often reckless, lives enjoyed by so many rightwing priests and GOP bigwigs. It is an indication of just how far right the discourse has become that Kristof is considered a thoughtful left-wing commentator and that Krugman – a pro-globalization Reagan official – is dubbed a radical leftist.

Now back when moderate liberals were actually provided regular access to the mass media, there would have been no problem labelling treasonable behavior as exactly that. Today, since no one “reasonable” can use that word -unless you’re on the right, of course- the moral outrage all Americans should feel about this exposure never happens. And so it goes.

These traitors are not, and never were, the state, despite what DeLay boasted. This government is no man or woman, this is not the United States of Cheney/Libby/Rove/Bush, et al. These are merely people who work for the state and the state is us. And some of them have betrayed us and aided our enemies. They are traitors. Given what we already know, it is high time those who betrayed us resign, all of them, regardless of whether treason technically can be proven in a court of law. The very hint that a high government official may have been involved in the exposure of a CIA agent should be reason enough to go, and go now.

Since we are dealing with scoundrels of the highest order and they will never resign, they nevertheless must be brought to trial on whatever legally admissible evidence, if any, Fitzgerald has. A constitutional crisis might result, but that is not Fitzgerald’s doing. That is what these traitors have been spoiling for since the 2000 election fiasco; that’s what Schiavo was about, what the torture condoning was about, what the filibuster rule change was about. Such a crisis would be as wracking to this country’s psyche as Katrina was to its citizens. But they have made it all but unavoidable.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained by a constitutional crisis and no sane opponent of the Bush administration should welcome one. But there is no longer anything to be gained by appeasement, either, and much to lose. Traitors simply cannot be permitted to continue to serve at the highest levels of goverment. And that is a principle worth defending, no matter what it takes.

(Edited slightly after original posting, to fix typos, mostly.)

[Update: Larry Johnson notes:

This scandal is about destroying and diverting national security resources for petty political gains and using the power of the White House to attack American citizens. If that is not justification for impeachment than nothing meets the test.]

Helping Nick Kristof

I’ve decided that Nick Kristof needs help, my help. He seems to have Attention Deficit Disorder and has not been taking his Ritalin. After a very promising start to his op-ed today on Traitorgate, Kristof starts to ramble, finally degenerating into total incoherence, something about Les Miserables or some other Broadway musical he once saw a long time ago.

Anyway, I’ve decided to help him refocus. Now, here is how Nick’s column begins, before it goes off the rails:

Before dragging any Bush administration officials off to jail, we should pause and take a long, deep breath.

Not bad, eh? I agree. Now, here’s how he should have continued, but didn’t:

Before dragging any Bush administration officials off to jail, we should pause and take a long, deep breath.

Then, we should firmly grasp their arms and legs, and, being sure we lift from our knees, toss them into a nearby tar pit, cover them in feathers, and frog march them into the closest federal penitentiary for a very long, hopefully lifelong, incarceration.

Classy

“He’s a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he’s been tapped by God to do very important things,” one White House ally said, referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

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