1 Boring Old Man

National Security: Iraq is making great strides towards Democracy. We’re winning the Iraq War and in the War on Terror. Pulling out of Iraq now would be abandoning the Iraqis, handing them over to the Terrorists, and strengthen the Terrorist Movement. We need to renew the Patriot Act and embrace the necessity of unwarranted domestic surveillance.

and now…

The audit by the department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, detailed widespread abuse of the FBI’s authority to seize personal details about tens of thousands of people without court oversight through the use of national security letters.

It also found that the FBI had hatched an agreement with telephone companies allowing the agency to ask for information on more than 3,000 phone numbers — often without a subpoena, without an emergency or even without an investigative case. In 2006, the FBI then issued blanket letters authorizing many of the requests retroactively, according to agency officials and congressional aides briefed on the effort.

The disclosures prompted a public apology from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and promises of reform from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who was the focus of a new tide of criticism from Democrats and Republicans already angry about his handling of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

"I am the person responsible," Mueller said in a hastily scheduled news conference yesterday. "I am the person accountable, and I am committed to ensuring that we correct these deficiencies and live up to these responsibilities."

Bush, at his news conference in Uruguay today, praised the inspector general for "good and necessary work" and added he was pleased that Mueller moved quickly to respond.

"He took responsibility as he should have," Bush said. "I’ve got confidence in Director Mueller, as I do in the attorney general."

I don’t know what "I’ve got confidence in Director Mueller, as I do in the attorney general" actually means. But I do know what, "He took responsibility as he should have" means. It means the same thing as George Tenet taking responsibility for the "sixteen words" in the 2003 SOTUS and "Good job, Brownie" in New Orleans. It all means "It’s not my fault."

The glut of Talking Points about the Libby Verdict has been truly amazing. In medicine, we have a term TNTC – "too numerous to count." O’Reilly said that we don’t even no she was couvert [shortly after Fitzgerald announced it as a "fact" on the courthouse steps], calls for pardon, WSJ editorial calling it the Libby Travesty, Rush screaming. It just goes on and on. My favorite was the Fox News trailer, "SCOOTER LIBBY FOUND NOT GUILTY OF LYING TO F.B.I. INVESTIGATORS." 

I wonder where all of these Talking Points are created? Is there a Central Agency? They seem to go out in pathways directed at the faithful. They must be terribly effective from the way things have gone these recent years. Speaking of medicine, we also have a principle – early detection, early intervention. I think there must be a doctor in the Spin Headquarters, because these carefully phrased Talking Points appear immediately, I guess to try to dissuade any independent thought before it gets out of hand.

Heretofore, I’ve been a big advocate of parsing these Talking Points as rapidly as they are generated. They were so devastating in 2000 and 2004 when we just ignored them. My thought was that early detection, early intervention was a good way to counter Talking Points too. But this time, I’m not so interested in doing that. What’s the point? They can attack Fitzgerald for indicting Libby all they want. They can say it’s a Liberal plot. They can twist it and turn it any way they can think of. But the fact is that Libby’s lawyers had just as big a hand in picking those Jurors as Fitzgerald did.

It was a Jury Trial. It stands on its own. A Jury of Peers trumps Talking Points [but if you need to counter a Talking Point in your own neighborhood, Media Matters has a good summary of the facts and the myths]…

Gingrich Had Affair During Clinton Probe

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There’s certainly times when I’ve fallen short of God’s standards."

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton’s infidelity.

"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton’s 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, ‘Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept … perjury in your highest officials."

Robert Novak is not someone I ever read before the Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame Affair. He’s almost always touting one or the other of the Talking Points du jour. And, frankly, he is a boring writer. He’s very adept at sneering with words, and I don’t care much for sneers – from either side. But today’s oped had one piece buried among the sneers that caught my attention.

 

A Verdict on the Wilson Affair

…

The worst news Tuesday for firebrand Democrats was that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was going back to his "day job" (as U.S. attorney in Chicago). With no underlying crime even claimed, the only question was whether Libby had consciously and purposefully lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned of Mrs. Wilson’s identity.

…

I think we all knew that Patrick Fitzgerald was done. There wasn’t going to be a way to charge anyone with the IIPA Crime. He just couldn’t prove that the principals knew Valerie Wilson was a Secret Agent – and maybe they really didn’t know. But what I read Novak to be saying, and what I heard Fitzgerald say, was that there is no ongoing investigation. If there is no ongoing investigation, why do President Bush and Vice President Cheney keep saying that’s why they won’t comment? Sure, they’ve changed the wording. Here’s Cheney’s version:

Since his legal team has announced that he is seeking a new trial and, if necessary, pursuing an appeal, I plan to have no further comment on the merits of this matter until these proceedings are concluded.

But that’s no reason not to talk about it. Their talking has nothing to do with the request for a new trial or an appeal. Argh [I wish I could write like Novak, sneering with words]. They apparently feel under no obligation to answer to the American people. And this Trial has raised a whole lot of questions – a whole lot of very, very good questions…

The thing we’ve all loved about Patrick Fitzgerald is how absolutely straight he has played every hand. We even accepted our disappointment with his indicting only Libby, when we wanted him to indict most of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the trial, he lined up his witnesses in order. He asked only the essential questions. In his cross-examinations, he walked softly, but carried a powerful stick, like when he sent Hannah stumbling down a garden path into the briar patch. It was only in his closing argument, the one that brought us to our feet even if we weren’t there and could only hear it through the lightning key clicks of the firedoglake live-blog, where he told us what he thought. And what he thought was very clear. Libby was lying to cover the centrality of his boss, Dick Cheney, in this whole orchestrated attack on Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie. What you could hear, sometimes in his words, and sometimes in the background, is that Patrick Fitzgerald knew what the Office of the Vice President had done, and that he knew why they did it.

Comes now this letter from Henry Waxman, carefully worded, that says, "inform the Committee about your views and the insights you obtained." It’s not "What did you prove?" It’s "What do you think?" So they’re asking him to step out of his persona, and become something else – something he actually is – a ranking expert on the C.I.A. Leak case. They’re asking him to bring the case he couldn’t take into the courtroom into halls of a Congressional hearing.

I doubt that he’ll do it – at least not in the freewheeling way this letter requests. Like with the indictments, he’s a very careful guy. But if they can find a way for him to testify that fits his straight and narrow code of being a Federal Prosecutor, this game may move along at a rapidly accelerated pace.

Václav Havel’s "The Trial"

… the thought of a bunch of people launching "a play" that they thought they controlled, but one that ended up entangling them in totally unexpected ways. I see Libby, refusing to flip on Cheney, going through the "embarrassing spectacle" to the end. And David Addington, totally honest in his unfiltered babble of data, exposing the Unitary Executive for the farce it is.

…

Now I’m not saying this trial is definitely going to be the beginning of the end for the evil direction our country is headed in. Only time will tell whether this trial acquires more significance, finally, than Anna Nicole Smith’s death.

But sometimes trials like this can be a beginning–the start of something important. I, for one, will think of this trial as a beginning, not an end in itself.

Marrcy’s post comes from her Ph.D. thesis about feuilletons – short newspaper essays that have historically been a powerful tool in bringing about change. The analogy to political blogs couldn’t be more appropriate.

I’d never try to out-philosophize Marcy Wheeler. She’s the gold standard. But I’ve been having similar thoughts. I recalled the well worn lines from several of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

from Little Gidding:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

and the more familiar:

from Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

It’s been a long journey from July 6^th, 2003 to March 6^th, 2007 – from the time of the first solid sighting of the dark cloud over the Presidency, to the first official action to validate it. The pundits on Fox News, and Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh, and the Wall Street Journal, and even the editorial page of the Washington Post are still screaming that the clouds aren’t there, just like they’ve done for most of this almost four year storm. But it’s different now. It’s a palpable difference, finally.

I agree with Marcy. We’ve made it to the beginning.

from the most familiar:

from Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

As the dust settles and the air begins to clear, refined questions come into better focus. What we’re hearing from the Principals is "poor Scooter and his family" and "blah, blah…ongoing investigation…blah, blah." So we’re still on our own out here. As I look at my little tables from the other day, a number of things come to mind.

Leaked/Confirmed Valerie Plame’s Identity to Reporters

Leaked the National Intelligence Estimate

• Not one person on that list came forward voluntarily. Most of them fought coming forward period. Possible exceptions were Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus. Walter Pincus at least said that he’d been "leaked to" as soon as it became apparent that this was going to be an important issue, though he protected his source, Ari Fleischer, to the end. Bob Woodward finally did the same thing, finally. But everyone else had to be prodded [and prodded with the threat of punishment]. Is there something called coerced cooperation? What this says to me is that if we are ever to hear the whole story, it’s going to be because someone with some power goes after it with a pick ax!
• The people in the first column are the "first assistants" to the President of the United States,  the Vice President of the United States, and the Secretary of State for the United States. They are the "go-fors" for these important people, not independent centers of initiative. If you find out that your assistant or your executive secretary has gone off on their own and acted as an independent authority, you fire them in a heartbeat. If you’re going after Enron, you don’t prosecute and investigate Kenneth Lay’s executive secretary, or Fastow’s assistant. In a real world, it’s the bosses that get investigated – George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell [among others].
• What about those people in the second column? The reporters? As much as the blogosphere pundits attack the "Main Stream Media," there’s a fact in that table. Only two of those reporters wrote about Valerie Plame – Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine. Judith Miller was already in hot water for previous faulty reporting, shamed by her wild ride across the desert searching for dust bunnies, and in no position for a "scoop." But everyone else apparently took these leaks for what they were – tabloid smears – and went on about their business. Good on them!
• How do you get people like the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State to either tell the truth or to lie in a venue with consequences? We all know the answer – impeachment hearings. There really isn’t any other way. And we have a fine precedent for that in the attack on President Clinton last time around. I’m in the minority among liberals. I thought President Clinton behaved abysmally, and hoped he’d do the honorable thing and step aside. The attack on him was vicious to be sure, maybe even inappropriate, but he was lying to the American people – lying outright. And it took an impeachment proceeding for the truth to be known – or at least a threat of impeachment. Finally telling the truth didn’t stop things, but I thought that his finally coming clean was an attempt to abort an ongoing avalanche. Clinton’s fate is not my point. My point is that our forefathers protected the Presidency and Executive Branch on the one hand. On the other hand, we were given a mechanism that goes straight to the heart of things – impeachment by our elected Representatives. The question here is not "crime" in our very liberal sense of that word for ordinary citizens. The question is about how our leaders have acted as our agents with the power we’ve given them – still the greatest human power on our planet. There is way more than enough evidence that they have abused that power to a level unprecedented in our history. Certainly there’s enough evidence to scream for a deep and thorough investigation.

Speaking of blogger scoops!

After Libby

Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president’s office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about – what it has always been about – is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide? We now need a Congressional investigation to find out more, to subpoena Cheney and, if he won’t cooperate, consider impeaching him.

Andrew Sullivan is a conservative professional blogger for The Atlantic OnLine. What he says here [to the horror of his conservative peers] is dead center on target. The point from my perspective is not that this conservative pundit has "come around." The point is that this is not a conservative/liberal issue. It never has been. The vicious civil war between conservative and liberal that has been waged for the last six plus years is the creation of an Administration that is neither. By pitting liberal against conservative and Christian against everyone_else, this Administration has controlled our country while pursuing another agenda – one that many call neoconservative, but even that is a bit lofty. I hope Andrew Sullivan’s is the first of many to detach the true traditional conservative from this pack of self-righteous fools that have lead us down the dead end street to the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of our Constitution.

There is definitely something very rotten in the heart of Washington, and we need the principled conservatives to help us get it stopped before it is too late. How we miss the days when Liberals and Conservatives debated rather than demonized each other.

Back in the Fall of 2005 when Judith Miller got out of jail and showed up in court, some really wierd things happened. She testified, then the next day she testified again having located a notebook in a sack under her desk that reminded her of yet another meeting with Scooter Libby, that just wasn’t in her mind the day before. Excuse me! When I started to roam the Internet to see if anyone knew what was going on, I ran across something called "The Dust Bunny Theory." Ultimately, I ended up on a blog that was new to me, Firedoglake, and a lady named Jane Hamsher. And that blog lead me to another new blog , The Next Hurrah and someone named emptywheel. I had no idea that I’d happened onto two of the best minds in the emerging blogosphere. And these last few weeks, they’ve really strutted their stuff with the live-blogging of the whole Libby Trial.

Hats off to the dynamic duo!