Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Machine Justice

I think it’s kind of cute that so many conservatives are expressing such angst at the choice of Harriet Miers this morning. Seems they thought that the Bush administration was about conservative ideology. Funny.

The Bush administration is about setting up the legal and institutional framework for a Republican majority for the next generation. That is Karl Rove’s raison d’etre, beyond Junior, beyond conservatism, beyond ideology.

Harriet Miers is the official machine justice, a made woman, the one whose only committment and loyalty will be to Karl Rove and George Bush. I’m sure they would have preferred Alberto Gonzales but he is too much of a known quantity to easily finesse the varying political requirements within the base. She will do just fine. She is their creature. Her purpose on the court is to assist the Republican party in any way necessary, not to advance conservatism.

Voting for business interests is, of course, a given. Now the Texas mafia and the spawn of the college Republicans have their own seat on the highest court in the land for the next 20 years. But having one on the court for the next 10 years is crucial. With the election fixing, gerrymandering, corruption and executive power cases coming before the court over the next few years, her position will be very important to the GOP machine. It may very well be personally important to Karl Rove himself. (One hopes that the Democratic senators will, at least, take the PR opportunity to extract a bunch of public statements from her that she will recuse herself if and when specific criminal cases involving big name Republicans she’s worked with come before the court.)

It’s important to recognize, finally, what Karl Rove and the Bush administration, with the help of the modern Republican apparatus under Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed is all about. They are building a political machine, not a political movement. I find it very amusing that the right wing “intellectuals,” from their ivory tower think tanks and millionaire supported sinecures at political magazines, have still failed to recognize that.

“She’s the kind of person you want in your corner when all the chips are being played,” said one friend, Joseph M. Allbaugh, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Here’s a little insight into Miers’ involvement with the Texas mafia, from buzzflash.

Update: Regarding Roe vs Wade, I think she will vote to overturn Roe vs Wade if the leadership of the Republican Party feels it is in the party’s best interest to overturn Roe vs Wade.

It’s my belief that the GOP would love to overturn it as a payback for their base, and they will “arrange” for her to overturn if they feel it’s time. But what they are most interested in is getting someone on the court who will not independently decide that the interests of democracy require that they vote against whatever GOP electoral schemes come down the pike. There can be no daylight on that. Miers can be guaranteed to do what is best for the GOP.

It’s certainly possible that the elite wingnuts are in cahoots creating this little backlash against Miers, but it was orchestrated going back to last week with Pod and Frum both public dismissing her as a lightweight and a hack. I wouldn’t put it past them, but I just have a gut feeling that they were taken by surprise by this one. This was a level of coordination that I’ve not seen on the blogs before, if that’s what it was. (I think it was more what Atrios said — they are disappointed because they wanted the satisfaction of telling the Dems to go fuck themselves.)

Many movement conservatives, whether from the Christian conservative base or the neocon cosmopolitans, really bought into the idea that Bush believes in something deeper than corporate power, cutting taxes for high earners and kicking ass. Yet, there is absolutely nothing in his performance in office that suggests he cares about anything else.

Rove, on the other hand, has the very public agenda of building a “permanent” Republican majority. That is what he’s trying to do. Period. Whatever it takes to get there is what they will do — neocons and Christian alike are just cogs in the machine.

Deep down they know the score. They sold their souls to this devil (don’t tell me they didn’t know what they were doing when they went after Clinton, Gore and Kerry like a pack of wild, rabid dogs) and now they are faced with the fact that they too have been punked.

The modern Republican party, at its core, is not about ideology or values or anything else that high minded mediocre intellectuals and religious zealots pretend motivates their “movement” It’s about money and power. Same as it ever was. Ask Grover.

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Plame Out

I’m busy today and won’t have time to post. So I will leave you with this tantalizing thought to chew over from my super-smart commenter Sara:

Judy is not the main course at all. What I suspect Fitzgerald had to do was eliminate the defense, namely that Miller and Cooper and other reporters were the source of the identity of “Wilson’s Wife” as CIA NOC. Remember we have already been through this defense as PR over the past couple of years — Wilson’s wife scrubbed floors at CIA, she was a lowly secretary, an apprentise in the Directorate of Intelligence — she ran the travel bureau — defenses that would all exclude her identity as a NOC. I suspect that is what transpired today, so Fitzgerald’s positive case can now emerge.

This makes sense to me. Now read the rest of her comment for a novel theory of Fitzgerald’s case. Jane at firedoglake has been following this line too…

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Channelling Scott McClellan

This. Is. Bullshit.

Judy has been released from her confidentiality agreement by her source and she is refusing to even name him publicly? Even though his own lawyer has given interviews in the press. Jesus H. Christ.

Q. Can you describe your role in this case since you didn’t file a story but did go to jail? How would you characterize your role in this whole investigation?

MILLER. I was a journalist doing my job, protecting my source until my source freed me to perform my civic duty to testify.

Q. Scooter Libby’s lawyer – and your source’s lawyer – I suspect you’re not going to tell us if that’s correct.

MILLER. I am not going to tell you if that’s correct.

Q. Your source’s lawyer has said that had you asked, you wouldn’t have had to spend any time in jail; he would have been more than willing to give you the explicit waiver you say you now accepted.

MILLER. No. Since I was not a party to those discussions, I’m going to let you refer those questions to my lawyer. I can only tell you that as soon as I received a personal assurance from the source that I was able to talk to him and talk to the source about my testimony, it was only then and as a result of the special prosecutor’s agreement to narrow the focus of the inquiry to focus on the way – on that source, that I was able to testify. I testified as soon as I could. And I will ask you to please address the questions to which I was not a party to my lawyers.

Q. But Judy, a conversation you were party to: On the steps of this courthouse, when you and Matt faced contempt of court charges, you said out here, when Matt was asked the same question, your answer was different. You said no waiver would be acceptable.

MILLER. No. I said I had not received a personal, explicit, voluntary waiver from my source – what I considered that. That was my position and I said it many times. I said it before I went to jail. I said it when I was in jail.

Q. What about the perception that you spent 85 days dancing on the head of a pin?

MILLER. I will let people draw their own conclusions. I know what my conscience would allow and I was – I stood fast to that.

Q. Beyond the narrowest of principles involved, what is this really all about? Why was your testimony so important in Mr. Fitzgerald’s . . .

MILLER. You’ll have to ask Mr. Fitzgerald why it’s important.

So this alleged reporter got a waiver handed to her on a silver platter and now refuses to tell the public what she knows? WTF???

Apparently, Judy is no longer a journalist but an official member of the Bush administration. She is using the patented McClellan non-answer “you’ll have to ask Mr Fitzgerald” and “I can’t speak to conversation to which I wasn’t a party.”

The only thing that allows Judy to pull this shit is if she’s a target herself and there is no evidence of that. Otherwise, she is abdicating her responsibility as a reporter. If Libby released her to talk to the Grand Jury she has no obligation to keep it from the public, whom she allegedly serves. Matt Cooper discussed it and wrote about it. Pincus discussed it. Only Russert hasn’t talked, but then nobody has had the balls to ask him about either. Novak has had to be restrained from spilling his lying guts. But Judy just can’t seem to say or write a word about this.

Damn. If she had been this reticent about printing every piece of bogus bullshit that Ahmad Chalabi and the Bush administration poured into her willing little gullet, a hell of a lot of people would still be alive today.

This woman is not a journalist. She is a political operative.

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Greatest Show On Earth

David Corn offers up the “rebuke” scenario and also speculates that the White House might be flogging that poor old dead pony, “the CIA did it.” (You really have to wonder what they are giving Tenet if this turns out to be true. It would have to be on the order of a small monarchy somewhere or a trip around the world with Paris Hilton.)

I haven’t any idea if what he says is true, but this caught my eye:

When Fitzgerald first pursued Miller and Cooper, it was easy to dismiss him as an overzealous prosecutor interested more in a vendetta than in making a case. But as the Cooper portion of this episode demonstrated, Fitzgerald was after information crucial to his investigation. From Cooper he obtained material that showed Rove had discussed the CIA identity of Wilson’s wife with a reporter. Though Fitzgerald and Miller have clashed on non-Plame business previously, perhaps he has been seeking information just as critical from her.

For anyone following the matter, it’s impossible not to guess about what’s going on and what Fitzgerald will do. His grand jury expires at the end of October. He could impanel a new one and keep investigating. But all indications suggest he’s close to done. One person who recently had contact with Fitzgerald and his attorneys says that they seem confident about whatever it is they are pursuing. The Miller matter was something of a sideshow that at times drew more attention than the central issue.

Tantalizing, isn’t it? If the Punchin’ Judy play is the sideshow, the main attraction must be a doozy.

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Black Talk

I hesitate to get into this because people are sick of my preaching, but the hell with it. The fact is that Bill Bennett’s racist statement is actually just one of many that are apparently happening all over right wing radio in the wake of Katrina:

Here’s another example:

As if Hurricane Katrina victims didn’t have enough going against them, now they’re the latest targets of hate radio. Just listen to WFTL-AM (850), the 50,000-watt home of the Florida Marlins. It’s also the home of some of the most radical right-wing voices in America.

One regular syndicated host, Atlanta-based Neil Boortz, contended after the disaster struck that a “huge percentage” of the evacuees from New Orleans were “parasites, like ticks on a dog.” Then he warned, “They are coming to a community near you.”

When a caller remarked that most of the evacuees were fat, Boortz readily agreed. “They didn’t drown because you couldn’t push them underwater if you had to,” he chortled.

Then there’s Kelley Mitchell, who spent a week broadcasting at the Houston Astrodome among flood victims. Mitchell, a big-boned blond who spent years on South Florida television news stations, didn’t seem too concerned about the harrowing stories from the people in the stadium. Instead she was virtually obsessed with the reports of looting and railed for days against the alleged behavior of poor New Orleans blacks during the disaster. She took to calling the state “Lose-iana” and announced she was boycotting any monetary donations to the victims.

“If I heard, ‘I’m looking for my mom, my dad, and my baby daddy again,’ I would cringe,” she said, referring to the victims who had lost relatives. “Everybody knows it’s important to speak English but these knuckleheads.”

[…]

Another Mitchell gem: “When I see bad behavior … that’s when it became about race. Whoever got over deep-seated prejudices is now wondering if it was right to do so.”

[…]

“We need to let black America know we do want you, but we want you on the terms of the United States of America,” she explained in a voice that sometimes sounds eerily similar to that of similarly built actress Kathy Bates. “And we want you to be full and complete human beings.”

Isn’t that special? “We” do want you. Apparently, black Americans, many of whom had ancestors wwho ere here a century or two before many right wing racist assholes’ are now provisional Americans who have to adhere to certain “terms of the United States of America.” I guess she wants to send them “back” to Africa if they fail to comply.

Ugh.

And, by the way, Bennett’s crime is that he essentially said “blacks are born criminals.” Certainly, you can say that aborting any number of discrete demographic groups could have an effect on the crime rate, but attributing it to race suggests something immutable. Males commit more crimes than females at least partly because of biological characteristics. Poor people of all races commit more crimes (at least a certain kind of crimes) because of their economic circumstances and cultural influences. Statistically, Blacks may commit more crimes than whites because of both of the above reasons, but there is nothing in the color of their skin or their DNA that makes them more likely to commit crimes than anyone else.

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Libby Plus

Ok kidz. Judy’s lawyer Bob Bennett just told Wolf Blitzer that Judy’s agreement with Fitzgerald was limited to “the Valerie Plame matter” not just Libby. Wolf pressed. Fitzgerald Bennett reiterated that it was “the Valerie Plame matter.”

Judy was worried that Fitzgerald was going to pursue her bogus WMD claims.

Bolton and Cheney and Rove all the rest aren’t off the hook on Plame. Do you suppose that includes Niger?

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Condolences

My blogger friend Joe Vecchio lost his wife to illness this week. She was quite young. Any of you who have enjoyed Joe’s “the voice of the working man” blog over the years, (and those who’ve not had a chance) can go over and pay your respects — and donate little bit if you can. He’s been out of work while his wife was very ill and the family could use some help.

RIP Catherine Susan Vecchio.

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He’s Gonna Hold His Breath Til He Turns Blue

Via Liberal Oasis, here’s the latest from rightwing land on the new supreme nomination:

“Shell shocked,” “confused,” “stumbling,” “full of doubt.” These are all words I have heard used to describe the current White House effort to find Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement. Batchelder, Williams, and Owen have all been interviewed, but the process continues to sputter along.

Several have told me not to buy into the Miers trial balloon. It is, I’m told, just that — a trial balloon. Another tells me, “The President wants Gonzales. That’s what is dragging this thing out. They’re sending out people to say he is conservative as if by telling us that enough we will say, ’sure, he really is one of us.’ That is not going to happen.”

The process is still moving. Those I have talked to in the past twenty-four hours tell me we should expect a minority or woman. The odds are that it will be a woman. Sykes’s name has gotten little play in the past twenty-four hours and Luttig’s name has gotten none. Larry Thompson’s name continues to surface. One person disputes all my sources and tells me that Thompson, not Clement, was the almost pick last time.

The jury is still out on the nominee. Says one from a phone call this morning, “The White House has gone into second guess mode. They want another Roberts, an enigma who will slip through and turn out to be a conservative. They are second guessing their picks. That, I would think, increases the chances of a Thompson or a Gonzales — someone the President’s gut tells him is conservative. My gut tells me we have to keep the pressure on or we’re [screwed].”

They don’t want to put another woman on the court. Not really. The conservative Sandra Day O’Connor, who was personally distraught at the idea that Bush might not have won the 2000 election and made sure he was installed anyway, is now seen as some sort of left wing bra burner on the right. Clearly, women can’t be trusted.

This is not an accident. There is a serious movememnt afoot to denigrate women’s issues, and therefore, pressure Bush not to nominate another woman. Check out this story by Dahlia Lithwick on the “chick-baiting” that’s going on around this supreme court nomination:

A few weeks ago I suggested that race and gender should not be the only—or even the primary—filter through which we consider Supreme Court nominees. I rejected the arguments that minority candidates serve as proxies for minority views (whatever those might be), or that they create the appearance of a court that “looks like America.” I was wrong. We need another woman on the Supreme Court. And while we’re at it we need a few more women on the Senate judiciary committee.

[…]

I wonder why both Ginsburg and O’Connor—who differ on virtually everything—feel so strongly that there should be two women on the Supreme Court that they’d use their offices to publicly urge the president to appoint one.

And I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with the ways in which gender politics are starting to infect our discourse about the courts. Consider this commentary by Bruce Fein this week in the Washington Times: Fein lines up Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then levels potshots at them as believers in Supreme Court justices as “apostles over the law” because of their concern for John Roberts’ positions on women’s and civil rights. Oddly enough, Patrick Leahy, Joseph Biden, Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and the other male Senate Democrats who called for Roberts’ views in this area are never mentioned.

Mark Steyn is positively bilious about this feminization of the Democrats in the Washington Times on Monday. Again Feinstein (and only Feinstein) is blistered for wanting to hear Roberts “talking to me as a son, a husband and a father.” For which Steyn’s prescription is that she “get off the Judiciary Committee and go audition for ‘Return To Bridges Of Madison County,’ or ‘What Women Want 2’ (‘Mel Gibson is nominated to the Supreme Court but, despite being sensitive and a good listener, is accused of being a conservative theocrat’).”

And here’s George Will this week, also taking his nasty stick to Sen. Feinstein: “Dianne Feinstein’s thoughts on the nomination of John G. Roberts as chief justice of the United States should be read with a soulful violin solo playing, or perhaps accompanied by the theme song of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’ Those thoughts are about pinning one’s heart on one’s sleeve, sharing one’s feelings and letting one’s inner Oprah come out for a stroll.” Will’s contempt for Senate efforts to know something about the next chief justice’s “temperament and values”—to understand his heart—is absolutely laser focused on the senator from California. Odd. Never a mention of Biden, Schumer, Mike DeWine, and Dick Durbin—each of whom similarly deployed the language of hearts and feelings in their questioning of Roberts.

Now, I am not come today to praise Sen. Feinstein. Her performance during those hearings probably set the women’s movement back a decade. From her ingenuous “Now, I’m not a lawyer …” questions to her tendency to turn even declarative sentences into halting questions, she hardly projected the air of mastery and confidence I’ve seen in her in the past. I’m not sure I can sign off on her self-appointed task of representing all 145 million American women at the hearings. I can’t even get behind her efforts to force a clearly private man into vomiting up mawkish personal revelations onto the hearing-room floor.

But I do wonder why it became so very easy to blast only the woman who wanted to cut through Roberts’ repeated claims to be a lean, mean law-making machine. I wonder why the woman who worried about his aloofness and disconnection from poverty or suffering was singled out for derision. Is it because the stereotype of the pathetic, whiny, “but how do you feel” nag fits so much better if the asker is wearing curlers and a housecoat? Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women? Or is it, in the end, the consequence of having only one woman on the committee?

I’m sure it’s just an accident that Fein, Steyn (weird name-coincidence or conspiracy?), and George Will each singled out only Feinstein as their judiciary committee poster-person for the strange quest-for-feeling that characterized the Roberts hearings. But it certainly evokes something Ginsburg mentioned in her remarks yesterday at Wake Forest. According to the report, she noted that “she started in law school in the 1950s—a time when law students and law practitioners were predominantly male. She said she felt pressure to excel, to break the stereotypes about women. … ‘You felt like all eyes were on you. If you gave a poor answer in class, you felt like it would be viewed as indicative of all female students.’ “

Imagine being judged and ridiculed as a lightweight, when—as sole representative of your gender—you feel you must defend the achievement of all women. The solution for both Ginsburg’s problem and Feinstein’s is simple: Give the critics more targets. Load up the courts and Congress with enough women, and then maybe blaming them for being women in the first place will stop sounding like a legitimate critique.

Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women?

It’s both. And one follows from the other. Lithwick says she’s sure it’s just a coincidence, but it isn’t. These things don’t come out of nowhere on the right.

One thing I hope that people think a little bit about is that this distaste for women’s issues is one that can easily be internalized on both sides of the political fence. Indeed, it already has in some ways. This, like race, is much simpler for the right to deride than it is for the left to defend. These are complicated issues. Nonetheless, we have no choice. It is the essence of what we stand for — liberty, equality. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

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Grey Lady Down

Dan Kennedy writes about Michael Isikoff taking TIME and the NY Times to task for not following up on the Plame story. Isikoff has a very checkered past in these matters, but in this case he is correct. The fact that TIME and The NY Times dropped the ball on these stories because their reporters refused to reveal their sources is really unconscionable. They should have pursued the stories more vigorously, not less.

If a reporter has a confidential source who is giving them backround information, they are supposed to, you know, go look for things like documents and other witnesses so they can actually publish a story. Matt Cooper, to his credit, did at least write one story and he took the proper inference from the leak — that the white house was trying to discredit Wilson. The magazine then failed to properly follow-up and even withheld evidence in fear of swinging an election!

Miller never writing a story at all and the Times treating the whole thing like a pile of stinking garbage in which they didn’t want to dip their finely manicured hands is just shocking.

Arianna excoriates both today and asks the following very pertinent questions:

And so we don’t forget what this story is really about, and given that the aluminum tubes crap that Miller put on the front page of the New York Times was being heavily promoted by Cheney, how much of that bogus information came to Miller via Libby?

And here are a few questions for the Times:

Had a Plame/Wilson story been assigned to Miller or not?

What, if anything, did she say about the story to anyone at the paper at the time… and what did they say back?

Why did the Times hold back the story about Miller’s release and let multiple other news sources scoop them? Were they trying to miss the evening news cycle and avoid the overnight thrashing their spin has rightly received?

It would be nice if they spent the same amount of time handwringing about this as they did that puerile stunt by Jayson Blair, but I’m not holding my breath. When a newpaper is partially responsible for sending a country to war on false pretenses, they tend to circle the wagons. I thought the days of William Randooph Hearst were long dead history, but maybe not so much.

Update:

Just to be clear — in my post below where I say that Libby’s lawyers had better shut up, it was not because I thought their version of events with respect to the waivers was necessarily correct or incorrect. It was because it’s never a good idea for lawyers to anger witnesses who are going to appear before a grand jury the next day.

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Fat Lady Clearing Throat, Not Singing

It’s kind of painful watching people talk about Libby and Miller this morning on television when it’s clear that they are just riffing. Jonathan Alter is a smart guy, but his main talking point (on MSNBC) is whether Fitzgerald will issue a report that “rebukes” Rove and Libby for discussing a CIA employee even though they didn’t do anything illegal. He seems to be resigned to the fact that there will be no indictments.

There does seem to be an emerging conventional wisdom (among my commenters at least) that Fitz will not indict. The fact that he doesn’t intend to ask Miller about anyone but Libby feels like some sort of capitulation but let’s keep in mind that any thoughts we had that he wanted to ask about anyone but Libby were always pure speculation. There was nothing in any of his court filings that indicated he wanted anything other than to question her about one specific person — Libby. The court issued its contempt order based upon that request alone.

There was never any reason to believe that Fitzgerald wanted to discuss Judy’s other sources, only that Judy didn’t want to discuss her other sources with Fitzgerald. We may never know what motivated her to become the Martyr of Times Square (Hat tip Billmon.) She’s a drama queen of the highest order and probably had a whole list of reasons. But Fitz has said from the beginning that he needed her testimony for one specific purpose and perhaps we snould believe that.

People are also saying that Judy will simply lie. To that I reiterate what I wrote in the post below. She never wrote a story so someone had to have told Fitzgerald that Judy and Libby spoke. Nobody knows who that was. Maybe it was Libby. Maybe it was someone that Libby told. Maybe it was someone Miller told. Judy cannot be sure what Fitzgerald knows or who he talked to. It would be very, very risky for her to lie.

Lifted from the comments down page, here’s some intersesting speculation from Emptywheel of The Next Hurrah (one of the best Fitzgerald kremlinologists in the blogosphere) about what Fitz might have and what Judy might bring to the table:

What did Fitz get?

Proof that Libby’s notes have been tampered with.

Notes that say WHIG carried out a plot to get Wilson (the conspiracy angle that gets Dick).

The crucial link in the chain of custody of the information.

Why did he agree to avoid other sources?

Because he already has the evidence. Before subpoenaing a journalist, you have to prove the journalist is the only source of the information. Someone else had/has that info for Fitz, so he doesn’t need Judy for it. (Although she’s going to look stupid in court when someone from the Times gets up and talks about her receiving some stuff from Bolton, but not testifying herself. But looking stupid never seemed to be a problem for her.)

The notes are clearly key:

“One set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser. Prosecutors have described the notes as ‘copious.’” [New York Times, 2/10/04]

It would be pretty to think that Judy might have notes that conflict with Libby’s about the famous WHIG meeting that Joe Wilson wrote about in his book. That’s what people have been waiting for.

For those who would like a quick refresher in who the administration players in this are and how they fit into the story as we know it, here’s Think Progress’ handy little primer.

(My good buddy Jim Wilkinson doesn’t appear, but I have a feeling that he’s lurking in this story somewhere too. He was a member of WHIG.)

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