Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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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Reading the Wingnuts So We Don’t Have To

The Daou Report has a very helpful special page up featuring the musing of both right and left on the Plame Affair. If you want the overview of how both sides of the blogosphere are dealing with the issue this is a great place to go.

Today on the left we are talking about the Iraq lies, parsing the evidence and calling for Rove’s head for leaking. On the right they are saying Clinton was worse and the whole thing is boring. It’s fun, check it out.

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The Cup is Empty

If you have an extra buck or two, my friend Joe Vecchio, who runs Cup ‘O Joe “the blog of the working unemployed man,” could use a little scratch while his wife’s in the hospital.

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Bad Advice

If anyone is still in the dark about what is wrong with the Democratic Party, look no further than this:

I just got off the boat. For the past week my family and I have been guests on the R Family Vacations cruise created by Rosie and Kelli O’Donnell. Along with 2000 other people – gay, straight and lots of kids – we sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia and back down to NYC through Boston and Cape Cod. And I was a cynic. Truth is, since I get both claustrophobic and seasick, I had to be brought kicking and screaming on this trip. I just wasn’t in the mood for an onslaught of gayness.

I was wrong. It was a magical vacation…But sailing in international waters gave me a different perspective to the news of the moment. The distance I felt from the hype was much akin to the everyday attitude of a majority of Americans.

Over and over people on the ship asked me why the Democrats are focusing so much attention on Karl Rove and not, instead, providing a better alternative story for the American people to hear. It is a good question.

Karl Rove won’t resign no matter how many blog posts, front page stories or speeches from the floor of Congress take place…So why are Democrats wasting the chance to talk to people about what they really care about? As long as the political conversation is about Karl Rove, the Republicans win. Sure, the President’s current allegiance to Rove is damaging but the White House has obviously made a calculation that it is better to keep Karl around than to get rid of him and have the subject changed. That alone should give Dems a clue as to how important it is for us to change the subject.

It is no sure thing that Democrats will be able to get people to focus on politics at all during these few weeks. But our only hope is to talk about something more relevant. Summer vacation is family time. It is also a time for anxiety for parents. Because instead of worrying about our jobs, on vacation, most parents worry about their kids.

[…]

(And lest anyone doubt that the gay and lesbian parents on our cruise have all the same anxieties and commitment to their children as straight parents, rest your concern. In fact, the normalcy of the conversations was soothing.)

Democrats have more answers to the problems faced by families in America today. Now is a good time to try and dominate the conversation with those concerns. When people across the country feel certain that the Democratic political leadership cares more about these issues than scoring political points, we will finally benefit from the President’s dropping approval ratings.

Hold on to your hats folks. This person is a Democratic political consultant. In other words, Democrats pay her for political advice. I’m not kidding.

First of all, her attitudes toward gay people seems to be something closer to an anthropologist finding the lost tribe of Borneo. She wasn’t ready for an “onslaught of gayness” but was eventually soothed to learn that gay people are normal. Good for her.

But, of course, the other huge sin is this fucking insane, deranged, bass-akwards, idiotic advice that we should stop talking about Karl Rove so we can swing the conversation toward child care. She actually said that as long we are talking about Karl Rove, the Republicans win.

Oh yes, by all means let’s drop this hot potato and schedule a press conference about parental anxiety. The cable shows and the papers are clamoring for that kind of copy. They can’t get enough of it. Perhaps we can get all the elected Democrats to stand on the steps of congress and sing “I’m a little teapot, short and stout” for the evening news. Meanwhile, let’s just let the criminals in the White House blow up the world. After they’re done, we’ll have a helluva parental leave policy to enact. Unfortunately we won’t have a country.

Seriously, as long as we have this white house off balance, not controlling the message and the agenda, the Republicans lose. Really. The Democrats can’t “win,” you see, because we have no power to legislate or mandate fuck-all. Our only job is to stop the Republicans from destroying the country any more than they already have and lay the groundwork for winning elections. Taking on Republicans is a vital part of that job.

I’m sure that Rosen had a lovely time with the liberals on the ship who all were parroting the conventional wisdom “but the Democrats don’t have any ideas!” or “nobody knows what the Democrats stand for” which Rosen, the professional political consultant, took for some sort of homespun wisdom. If she thinks being on a cruise with 2000 people who can afford to spend a week with Rosie O’Donnell and her family is like being an average American she needs her head examined.

Here’s a clue for the professionals who hear this shit at cocktail parties: people say this because they don’t have anything else to say. These mantras are conversational elevator music, things that people say in social situations that are uncontroversial, genteel and guaranteed to result in agreement. These political platitudes are conversational filler that are often used to obscure the fact that the speaker isn’t really conversant with the details or because they really, really don’t want to get into an argument. And it’s exactly the type of bullshit that you see among super liberals who feel they have to temper their overwhelming feelings of shadenfreude with public tut-tutting about the terrible waste of it all in light of all the real problems in the world.

I don’t understand how anyone can become a political consultant without having some instinct for the manners of even her own social class. Ms Rosen should probably re-read her copy of Pride and Prejudice and concentrate on something besides Mr Darcy this time. She’d learn something about human nature.

There is no way we will ever again be in a position to help families or do anything else as long as our politicians are being advised by people like this.

Update: I’ve been reliably informed that Hilary Rosen is gay. It’s good to know that she discovered on her trip that other gay people are normal. She must be so relieved.

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Hot Links

For those of you who are enjoying playing Nancy Drew in this Rove case, here is a great link resource to official documents related to Plame. Have fun!

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The Smoking Notes

I somewhat regrettably waded into the minutia of the Rove case last week-end and am now stuck with revising what I said everytime I become aware that I got something wrong in order to hold up the honor of the self-correcting blogosphere. So here goes.

I wrote that I thought the person who wrote the June 10th classified memo was the same INR analyst who had been quoted liberally in the SSCI report and who was evidently the one who noted that “it appeared that she [Plame] had arranged the trip” in his notes of the meeting. I won’t go into it here — if you need a nap you can read my whole post.

Anyway, I was challenged by emptywheel at The Next Hurrah (who wrote this excellent post called “Anatomy of the WH Smear defense” and this one, called “About That INR Memo”) who was working the same angle, but who concluded that the memo may have been based on this INR’s notes but that it appeared it was written by someone else. (We are interested in this because it might have been someone juicy from Bolton’s gang, for instance.) Anyway, I said I preferred the simple explanation that the one who wrote the notes probably wrote the memo.

I was wrong because I think I know who wrote the notes and he was long gone from the State Department when the memo was written. I’m pretty sure that the INR analyst was Greg Thielman, one of the good guys. He’s one of the few people who went on the record that they administration was cooking intelligence.

I had written in a draft of the post that I thought it was ironic that the INR analyst who apparently spilled the beans on Plame in his notes (which was picked up in the “work-up” later done on Wilson in May of 2003) was also the guy in the SSCI report who was most skeptical of the Niger connection and who backed Wilson’s interpretation of events. (You should read how tortured the analysis was to come up with some factual basis for the Niger connection. It’s shockingly thin.)

Anyway, here’s the gist. Greg Thielman left the State Department in September of 2002. But he left his notes behind. When Wilson’s story started to surface in the press, the white house or somebody ordered someone to put together a file on how Wilson was sent on the trip. (Although Wilson never said Cheney directly sent him, the inference was that he knew.) So the INR went through its files on the matter and put together a report. (I suspect the other agencies did the same thing.) This report contained a nugget of information that nobody else had — that Wilson’s wife had sent him on the trip.

That was seized upon as a good smear and the rest is history.

The reason I believe it was Greg Thielman who wrote the notes in question is because the SSCI report indicates that the same person who wrote the report Niger: Sale of Uranium Unlikely is the same person who noted that “it appeared” Wilson’s wife arranged the trip. Greg Thielman wrote that report.

If you are at all interested in this subject, check out this PBS interview with Thielman. Has anybody talked to him lately?

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Tangled Up In Yellowcake

Responding to my quip about Rove not being in town to “warn off” 60 Minutes from its embarassing TANG story, Lukery of Wotisitgood4 reminds me in the comments that the TANG story actually knocked off another big story that 60 Minutes had been working on for months: The Niger forgery story.

If you’ll recall, after Rathergate 60 Minutes decided to withhold the story entirely. I have been unable to ascertain if it was ever shown, but I know I didn’t see it.

Salon magazine saw a tape of the show and reported this:

The importance that CBS placed on the report was evident by its unusual length: It was slated to run a full half hour, double the usual 15 minutes of a single segment. Although months of reporting went into the production, CBS abruptly decided that it would be “inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election,” in the words of a statement that network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards gave the New York Times.

The real reason, of course, was that because of CBS’s sloppy reporting on the Bush National Guard story, the network’s news executives believed they could no longer report credibly on the heart of the Iraq nuclear issue, involving another set of completely forged documents: those purporting to show that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium from the African country Niger.

Salon was given the videotape by CBS News on the condition that we report on it only shortly before it was to air. But after the network effectively spiked its own story (which was reported by Newsweek online and by the New York Times), we sent an e-mail late last week to CBS stating that we believed that the embargo no longer applied. We received no reply and therefore feel free to report.

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Whatever the case, the CBS producers apparently decided to concentrate on what could be nailed down: the Bush administration had, either intentionally or with breathtaking credulity, relied on patently false intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq.

“Two years ago, Americans heard some frightening words from President Bush and his closest advisors,” Bradley said in his introduction of the now-shelved report. “Saddam Hussein, they said, could soon have a nuclear bomb. Of course, we now know that wasn’t true.” Not only did Saddam not have a nuclear program, Bradley said, but “he hadn’t for more than 10 years. How could the Bush administration be so wrong about something so important?”

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In his closing, Bradley explains how fiercely the White House fought his report. Administration officials and Republicans in Congress turned down “60 Minutes'” requests for interview. So did former Rep. Porter Goss, the Florida Republican whom Bush has appointed as the new director of the CIA.

“60 Minutes” defied the White House to produce this report. But it could not survive the network’s cowardice — cowardice born of self-inflicted wounds.

What a shame. The TANG story really was old news and the only people who still cared about Vietnam were hardline republicans who were always going to vote for Bush. This story was about a real scandal.

It is interesting, though, that the White House fought this story tooth and nail but didn’t say a word when 60 Minutes ran the story about the Killian documents past them. You can understand why these people believe so fervently in God. 60 Minutes killed the serious story about forgeries that would have fed right into the Democrats’ story line about Iraq so that they could show a senational story about Bush that was based on forgeries. God was definitely rooting for the Republicans that day.

I wonder if 60 Minutes is recovered enough from their trauma to think about finally running (or rerunning) this story. Or do they still think it’s inappropriate?

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Case Closed

We can all close shop on Rovegate. The freepers have it all figured out:

Joe Wilson already admitted she was not under cover and:

Plame was not a covert agent. She had not been covert for nine years as she was outed by Aldrich Ames prior to 1994 and then again by the Cubans. She was assigned a desk job as an analyst at that time for her own safety.

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.

Washington Times

She would have had to have been covert in the last five years for Rove to have broken the law, per former Assistant Deputy Attorney General Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the 1982 law in question.

For Plame’s outing to have been illegal, the one-time deputy AG explained, “her status as undercover must be classified.” Also, Plame “must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years.”

Case closed.

So, there you go. The bizarro world version of the Plame case brought to you by the Washington Times and Newsmax.

Oh, and there’s one more interesting little bit of speculation that I think we all need to think about. (These freepers are sharp.)

And we’re to believe that Judith Miller went to jail to protect Karl Rove?

Really. I am so very interested to know what the Prosecutor knows about Judy Miller that we don’t. Is this going to end up with The Plame-Wilsons in jail?

I’ve read that elsewhere. There really is a theme on the right that Fitzgerald is actually going to indict Joseph Wilson and his wife. This is understandable. In their experience federal prosecutors are all Republican hacks who work hand in glove with Drudge and Lucianne Goldberg. In their view the rule of law says that only Democrats are criminal. (And note the derisive “Plame-Wilson.” Does Karl know his people or does Karl know his people?)

And then you have to really love this one:

and I’m sure he’ll go right ahead and shut the whole thing down.

And end his lucrative gig?

Fitzgerald’s in it for the money.

Remember, this is the base that Karl and Junior have so carefully cultivated and are valued over any other constituency in the country. Doesn’t it make the hair on the back of your neck stand up?