1 Boring Old Man

Angry Wolfowitz in four-letter tirade

Sounding more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international leader, in testimony by one key witness Mr Wolfowitz declares: "If they fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too."

The remarks were published in a report detailing the controversy that erupted last month after the size of Ms Riza’s pay rises was revealed.

In this widely quoted outburst from Paul Wolfowitz, the focus has been on his four letter word. To me, much more damning is his threat to retaliate by smearing his oponents [I think it’s called blackmail]. It occurs to me that Paul Wolfowitz was the Assistant Secretary of Defense, an Administration insider, until 2005. He originated the Bush Doctrine, he set up the Office of Special Plans with Douglas Feith, and is called the "Architect of the Iraq War." I can hear him saying this same thing about Joseph Wilson when Wilson’s op-ed came out. And I can hear him saying "Out his fucking wife. That’ll fuck him good!" He was certainly well placed to know about Valerie Plame’s job. He is certainly vicious enough to propose such a thing. And he was certainly a major player in the rush to war on false information.

Wolfowitz Emerges as Key Figure in Intel Manipulation

Paul Wolfowitz, former under secretary of defense, has been identified in recently released grand jury transcripts as being involved in a White House smear campaign against Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.

The previously undisclosed development comes on the heels of a scathing report released last week by the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General that said Wolfowitz played a key role in the cooking of intelligence related to Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda and its supposed cache of chemical and biological weapons. That effort helped the White House lay the groundwork for a US-led invasion.

Taken as a whole, the involvement of Wolfowitz in a full-scale effort to undermine the credibility of an Iraq War critic, and his hands-on role in knowingly providing the White House with the sort of dubious intelligence that came under scrutiny by people like Wilson, shows how widespread the issues surrounding manipulated intelligence truly were, and how crucial it became for senior members of the Bush administration to discredit anyone who threatened to expose their ruse…

Founder of the Moral Majority Rev. Jerry Falwell dies at 73 …

The Rev. Jerry Falwell was stricken at his campus office and died Tuesday after a career in which the evangelist used the power of television to transform the religious right into a mighty force in American politics. He was 73.

The founder of the Moral Majority was discovered without a pulse at Liberty University and pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later. Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell’s physician, said he had a heart condition and presumably died of a heart rhythm abnormality.

Driven into politics by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. One of the conservative lobbying group’s greatest triumphs came just a year later, when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Falwell credited the Moral Majority with getting millions of conservative voters registered, aiding in Reagan’s victory and giving Republicans control of the Senate.

He seemed to find a place along with James Dobson [an equally self-righteous middle level Charlatan] between the more rational Evangelists like Billy Graham and the whack-jobs like Jimmy Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart. I expect that there will be some people singing "ding dong the witch is dead" and others who will try to be more respectful in deference to his family or his followers. For myself, I think we never knew him. All we knew was his bloated sense of self importance and his impact as a force for prejudice – unleashing and legitimizing a political movement that carried a cross of bigotry and elitism into the White House. Jerry Falwell was a real player in the debacle of the Bush Administration. In many ways, his ability to disguise hatred and contempt behind the euphemism of "Family Values" was the template for the more secular politicians that surfed Falwell’s wave into Washington. His preaching against the judiciary probably fueled some of the sentiment that lead to the current crisis at the Justice Department. But, besides his specifics, he originated and promulgated the ludicrous claim that the United States is a Christian Nation rather than a nation with religious freedom. It is his most terrible legacy.

Outgoing deputy knew best about prosecutor firings, Gonzales says

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday he relied on his resigning deputy more than any other aide to decide which U.S. attorneys should be fired last year.

His comments came a less than a day after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty announced he would resign at the end of the summer _ a decision that people familiar with the plans said was hastened by the controversy over the purge of eight prosecutors.

"You have to remember, at the end of the day, the recommendations reflected the views of the deputy attorney general. He signed off on the names," Gonzales told reporters at a National Press Club forum in Washington. "And he would know better than anyone else, anyone in this room, anyone _ again, the deputy attorney general would know best about the qualifications and the experiences of the United States attorneys community, and he signed off on the names."

McNulty, reached in San Antonio after Gonzales’ remarks, declined to comment.

McNulty has acknowledged approving the list of prosecutors who were ordered to leave last October, a few weeks before the firings were made official. But documents released by the Justice Department show he was not closely involved in picking all the U.S. attorneys who were put on the list _ a job mostly driven by two Gonzales staffers with little prosecutorial experience.

Gonzales ultimately signed off on the list in a process that Congress is investigating to see whether the firings were politically motivated.

Gonzales also called McNulty’s pending departure "a loss. … I’m really going to miss him." But his comments about McNulty’s role in the prosecutors’ purge seemed designed to distance himself from the deputy who announced his resignation just 18 hours earlier, following a year and a half on the job.

in·teg·ri·ty  {ɪnˈtÉ›grɪti}

–noun

1.	adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.
2.	the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished: to preserve the integrity of the empire.
3.	a sound, unimpaired, or perfect condition: the integrity of a ship’s hull.

---

[Origin: 1400–50; late ME integrite < L integritās. See integer, -ity]

—Synonyms 1. rectitude, probity, virtue. See honor.

—Antonyms 1. dishonesty.

After reading Comey’s testimony, I read about Alberto Gonzales jumping to blame the firing of the Attorneys on Paul McNulty [less than a day after McNulty resigned]. So I looked up the antonym [opposite] of integrity.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee [having already testified before the House Judiciary Committee]. There is a live-blog transcript on Firedoglake and a summary on TPM Muckraker. Comey was Deputy Attorney General under John Ashcroft and later Alberto Gonzales. He came before Paul McNulty who resigned yesterday.

Comey is the person who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the C.I.A. Agent leak and he’s the person who refused to sign the White House’s Domestic Surveillance program. He testified about that today – about Alberto Gonzales [then White House Counsel] and Andrew Card [White House Chief of Staff] racing to the hospital to get a delerious John Ashcroft to sign their order. It’s an outrageous story.

But the most strioking thing in Comey’s testimony was his integrity. He answered questions directly. He was careful not to overstep his bounds, refusing to reveal confidential information, yet forthcoming on all reasonable questions. He is a person of Integrity. We’ve heard almost none of that thus far in these hearings. The Senators spoke to him respectfully, even when he wouldn’t say what they wanted to hear. They seemed to know that they were talking to someone who was going to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet‘s book sits on my desk – thumbed, but not really read. I doubt it ever will be. For one thing, it’s boring. For another, one doesn’t have to read very far to get the point of the book – it’s not really Tenet’s fault ["it" in this case refers to anything you can think of]. In the places where mistakes are admitted, they’re honest mistakes – or even heroic mistakes, but not the mistakes of a person sucking up to the President and his friends. Hard to swallow, the parts I’ve thumbed and read.

Then there are the reviews. Seeking Shelter From the Storm, by Judith Miller, in the New York Sun is really quite something. It is Judith Miller’s self-serving critique of Tenet’s self-serving book. In her review, she presents herself as one who was thrown off the path and who wrote a series of collassally wrong articles in the lead up to the Iraq War because the C.I.A. lead her so far off the path of truth. She doesn’t mention that her sources were anything but the legitimate Intelligence community. In fact, she doesn’t mention her sources at all [though we know that a lot of her info came from the masters of sleight of hand – the Iraq National Congress of Amhad Chalabi].

But the winner is Douglas Feith‘s review of Tenet’s book in the Wall Street Journal – Inside the Inside Story. Filled with sarcasm, Feith debunks Tenet’s version of things while venerating his own [must I say "self-serving?"]. He says:

Fairness, evidently, was not Mr. Tenet’s motivating impulse as an author. His book is defensive. It aims low — to settle scores. The prose is humdrum. Mr. Tenet includes no citations that would let the reader check the accuracy of his account. He offers no explanation of why we went to war in Iraq.

…

I sat with him in many of the meetings, and no one prevented him from talking. It is noteworthy that Mr. Tenet met with the president for an intelligence briefing six days every week for years. Why didn’t he speak up if he thought that the president was dangerously wrong or inadequately informed?

Tenet, Miller, and Feith are a quite a trio – each in their own special way playing a role in the Invasion of Iraq – now gnashing at each other at a time when a more appropriate thing for them to do would be to hold a joint Press Conference to apologize, in unison, for the role each played in America’s biggest mistake to date – the Iraq War…

• White House Counsel: Harriet Miers
  
• Deputy White House Counsel: William E. Kelly
• Attorney General: Alberto Gonzales
• Attorney General’s Chief of Staff: Kyle Sampson
• Deputy Attorney General: Paul McNulty
  
• Deputy Attorney General’s Chief of Staff: Michael Elston
  
• Associate Attorney General: William Moschella
• Director of Public Affairs and White House Liason: Monica Goodling
• Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys: Michael Battle
  

What got us here? How did we reach such a low point as to have an utterly ruthless, partisan government that governs irresponsibly, corruptly, ineptly, and has wrangled a situation where they can do so without oversight and apparently without penalty? How can it be that the legitimate media is so docile in speaking out about this rotten state of affairs, and an alternative media consisting largely of masters of sarcasm and contempt can hold the ears of so many people? We grew up thinking that the American system was foolproof, and would self correct when it became skewed as it is today. But one begins to wonder. The most frightening thing about this Administration is not its ineptness and its concerted attempt to reshape the entire system. The most frightening thing is their success at eroding the very system of checks and balances that should keep our governmental system running. It is not likely that the Bush Administration can create the kind of government they want us to have – their ideas are just too self serving to last. But it is possible that they can destroy the system we do have beyond recovery.

We don’t like to ponder such things – but this group of people have been able to sow such a divisive thread into our culture that they may have polarized us into camps that have actually lost whatever it takes to pull together and demand integrity from our system, independent of our partisan opinions. It’s actually a dark time in America – another Civil War. Even more than our disasterous war in Iraq, this Attorney Scandal is the crisis  that may make or break us. Without a viable and functioning system of justice, all else is lost…

Cheney Visit Is About The Oil Law

The official story this morning is that Shooter made a surprise visit to Baghdad to urge Prime Minister al-Maliki to press ahead with reconciliation efforts, although you’ll note that his regional visits this time are the same as his last trip when he coordinated the covert effort through Saudi Arabia and others aimed at toppling the Iranian regime. Despite the official line that the media will willingly stenograph today, this trip was prompted in part because the White House now knows despite renewed veto threats, there will be GOP support of some type for Iraqi benchmarks in the supplemental appropriation bill, and Shooter wants the administration to suddenly get ahead of this oncoming train. Plus, with the Pentagon now announcing that the “surge” is now a long-term escalation well into 2008, the White House knows that the only way to prevent vulnerable GOP incumbents from jumping ship in September is to create the illusion of Iraqi progress immediately, even if the Iraqis take July and August off for recess.

I suspect that another, unofficial reason for Shooter’s trip is to demand that al-Maliki get the current draft of the Oil Law passed, before the whole government dissolves into chaos and al-Maliki is replaced with someone who is more nationalist, less sectarian, and who would pursue greater reconciliation by rewriting the Oil Law and demanding the Americans leave much sooner. Defense Secretary Gates said as much last month, when he specifically mentioned passage of the Oil Law as something that would speed reconciliation, an odd statement from someone who supposedly is concerned primarily about military matters rather than what is good for the oil lobby and GOP elites. At least Cheney is showing his usual level of contempt for the media overseas that he does here.

According to the prepared statement of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, it’s time to move on, time for Congress to stop worrying with his firing the U.S. Attorneys. You can watch him testify to Congress [again] at 9:30 AM on CSPAN]…

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanted his job so much, why did he give it away on March 1, 2006 with order 2808-2006?