"So, what happens to Cheney now? I think the answer if Libby is acquitted is likely nothing. But, what if Libby is convicted? If Libby has been promised a pardon, it's unlikely he'd take a deal with Fitz. But, maybe Fitz will feel emoldened by a conviction of Libby regardless of whether he can get Libby's testimony. I wonder if Fitz has other immunized testimony -- from those who didn't testify at Libby's trial that he could use against Cheney. If he immunized others who didn't testify at Libby's trial, we wouldn't know about it.* digby:
The mainstream media seems to think Fitzgerald is done. I'm not sure he isn't holding something in his back pocket against our Vice President."
"It is amateur hour and these zombies must be stopped. Until the Democrats, and the country, recognize this undemocratic and criminal element in our politics it is going to continue every time the Republicans take power. When they have a congressional majority with a Republican president they steal the country blind and when it's a Democrat they harrass him so badly that its a miracle he is able to function. When they have the presidency they become despotic criminals. This has been true for the last 30 years.
And now the Bush administration has spawned untold numbers of future war criminals who will claw their way back into power so they can "prove" they were right the first time. This pattern is repeating itself over and over again and we simply have to figure out a way to put an end to it.
Today we have the DOD equivalent of Brownie running around with boatload of cash making deals with Muslim extremists and Saudi princes, whom the administration has divided up into completely useless designations of "reformer" and extremist." Nobody knows who's talking to who or what agenda they really have. Liberals think up complex plots like this and make them into movies. Republicans steal billions from the taxpayers and actually try to implement their hare-brained schemes."
* frank rich (thnx jen):
"MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States”
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This is why the entire debate about the Iraq “surge” is as much a sideshow as Britney’s scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what’s going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war’s critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?
The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it’s revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on “Meet the Press” that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was “pretty well confirmed,” he said (though it was not), that bin Laden’s operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.
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Five years after 9/11, the terrorists would seem to have us just where they want us — asleep — even as the system is blinking red once again."
* NCTimes:
"The handling of national secrets could play a role in the conspiracy case against the CIA's former executive director who is accused in a corruption scandal that allegedly involves a Poway defense contractor.* emptywheel:
A prosecutor and a defense attorney for Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the CIA's former No.3 man, have both said that they intend to use classified information in the case. National security concerns have already triggered a federal law called the Classified Information Procedures Act that is designed to protect state secrets and a defendant's right to a fair trial."
"It seems that the whole corrupt GOP enterprise created by Tricky Dick has morphed into a system shamelessly called "Pioneers and Rangers," as if their creative means to bilk the American people were somehow noble.
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You see, I've long believed that after Tricky Dick went down, they didn't change their approach. They just found new entities through which they could carry out the same kind of dirty tricks. The NH Phone Jamming scandal and the OH GOP Party used a number of Pioneers and Rangers to steal victories in key states. Pioneers Jack Abramoff and Brent Wilkes brokered off our nation's interests. Charles Wyly is a big sugar daddy funding misleading GOP smears campaigns. And now we learn these thugs are laundering their criminal smears through Pioneers and Rangers, too, a bunch of rich fellows masquerading as "lobbyists."
It really is getting to the point where we ought to start going down the list of Pioneers and Rangers and asking how each has advanced the criminal plots of the GOP, because it's sure beginning to look like the Pioneers and Rangers program is just a brilliant front for old-style Dirty Tricks.
* haaretz:
"Three Arab states in the Persian Gulf would be willing to allow the Israel Air force to enter their airspace in order to reach Iran in case of an attack on its nuclear facilities, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyasa reported on Sunday.
According to the report, a diplomat from one of the gulf states visiting Washington on Saturday said the three states, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, have told the United States that they would not object to Israel using their airspace, despite their fear of an Iranian response.
Al-Siyasa further reported that NATO leaders are urging Turkey to open its airspace for an Attack on Iran as well and to also open its airports and borders in case of a ground attack.
According to a British diplomat who spoke to an Al-Siyasa correspondent, Turkey will not repeat the mistake it made in 2003, when it refused to open its airspace to U.S. Air Force overflights en route to attacking Iraq."
mistake?
6 comments:
WhiteHouseforSale.org is a good place to start if someone seriously wants to work through the list of Bush Rangers and Pioneers. (And lo, Jack Abramoff's name leads all the rest!)
http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/ContributorsAndPaybacks/pioneer_search.cfm
Steve Fraser had this the other day, advancing a hypothesis with which I agree, that America's and the world's social ideology is the thing that drives the political mood in Washington. He doesn't come right out and say it, but somewhere along the line we became ignorant and mean. He says:
Might a social movement or movements emerge from outside the boundaries of conventional politics, catalytic enough to fundamentally alter the prevailing metabolism of political life? Might the mass demonstrations of immigrants portend something of that kind? Might the anti-war movement soon enter a period of more sustained and varied opposition in the face of this administration's barbaric obtuseness? Straws in the wind as we race toward 2008. Indeed, I think if more people had more kindness and curiosity in them, guys like Cheney wouldn't become hundred-millionaires by dabbling in public service.
The "ignorant and mean" part seems to go back to the acceptance a century or so back of Social Darwinism as the basic framework for understanding of society. Since then, conservatives have plunged enthusiastically into the war of all against all, while liberals have wrung their hands over it and tried to cushion the fall for the worst-off of the losers. But none of them have doubted its basic validity.
Oddly enough, while that form of self-bafflement has been going on in the world at large, evolutionary theory itself has done a 180 and seems less and less inclined to accept the individual as the irreducible evolutionary unit. For example, we are now regularly told that the gene is more essential, so that individuals are driven to altruistic behavior to preserve their own genetic endowment by supporting their near kin.
But there is, I think, an even more radical -- and non-reductionist -- change on the horizon. It is becoming clear that mutual support is itself an evolutionary advantage, and that groups whose members protect one another and nurture the wounded are likely to be far "fitter" overall than those which contend among themselves and turn on the weak.
Even mutual support outside of species is becoming apparent -- for example, everything from plants to tropical songbirds sends out warning signals in the presence of predators that alert the entire neighborhood. And going beyond that, I don't doubt that soon enough science will finally "prove" the observation Albert North Whitehead made some 80 years ago that any organism which degrades its environment also condemns itself.
Given a little time for all these observations to trickle down and become the new basis of social commentary, we just might create a social order which is not only more mutual and cooperation but is one in which liberals no longer feel they have to beat themselves up for being irredeemable wimps.
As for the stupid British diplomat . . . I wouldn't be so sure, unless the US and UK have been seriously courting the Pashas . . . those SOBs. At least, gathering what I can from media and events, I think that the US/UK have been courting the fat and disgusting Pashas, but on the other hand, there is reality to deal with, too. Reality is that no matter what, Turkey will remain in the region and it will remain a neighbor of Iran. . . and Turkey's Islamist government has been getting along pretty well with the mullahs since 2003.
Also, I thought it was interesting that Wolfowitz took to berating the Pashas because the overwhelming majority of the Turkish population DID opposed involvement in the Iraq war. Here was perhaps the only time in history that Turkey actually behaved like a "democracy," and one of the bureaucrats of the leader of the so-called free world almost had a heart attack.
Very funny.
Just curious, Starroute . . . why are you content only to be a liberal when what you describe in your last paragraph is really a feature of anarchy?
Er, Mizgîn, can you find some place I ever called myself a liberal?
FORT WORTH, Texas -- The Army's highest-ranking officer and the former leader of the secretive world of special operations offered his thoughts on the importance of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, and they're probably not what anyone expected.
"I don't know whether we'll find him," said Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff. "I don't know that it's all that important, frankly." (1)
Which is it...is Bin Laden regrouping or is has he been marginalized?
Rich is spouting the "Iraq was a diversion from the WoT" talking point. I guess working for an Establishment paper means he has to accept the WoT paradigm even though it is in certain respects total bullshit.
Zawahiri's latest tape is a good example. Zawahiri criticized Bush so obviously (according to Fox news and company) critics of Bush=Democrats=terrorists. The tape came out just as Congress debated whether they would debate the non binding resolution.
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