Fact-esque

If Only Blair Were Churchill or Thatcher, What a Wonderful War it Would Have Been

The Guardian is publishing some excerpts from Sir Christopher Meyer's book, DC Confidential.  Meyer was the British ambassador to the United States during the run-up to BushCo's War in Iraq.  In fact, he is one of the authors of one of the Downing Street Memos I wrote about in June.  In that post, I compared the UK's doomed devotion to Team BushCo to a high school girl in love with the hot Bad Boy.  It seems that Meyer agrees:

Sir Christopher, highly critical of Mr Blair's performance in the run-up to the war, argues the prime minister and his team were "seduced" by the proximity and glamour of US power and reluctant to negotiate conditions with George Bush for Britain's support for the war.

He says Mr Blair failed to exploit his enormous leverage with Mr Bush not only to secure a precious delay but to plan for postwar Iraq. "We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone. Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise."

But Mr Blair did not have any appetite for bargaining with Mr Bush, according to Sir Christopher: "Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside President Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to Blair the Poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power.

Someone was falling for something, that's for sure.  I still don't agree with Meyer that the UK ever had any leverage at all with Team BushCo.  In fact, I called his confindent talk along those lines in one of the six memos released last summer "pathetic."  I'm surprised that he's clinging to that line even now when it seems clear where the real advantage always lay based on personalities alone, something that Meyer never misses a chance to mention.  Then again, I'm always shocked whenever people haul out any version of the old "It could have been such a beautiful war" fairy tale.

Excerpts from Meyer's book are here, here and here.

Are Perjury and Obstruction a Big Deal?

Useful idiot and host of a local NPR talkshow, Marty Moss-Cohane, during an interview of author/lawyer, Scott Turow, this morning asked if he considered perjury and obstruction "serious charges." I don't remember her ever once asking the same question during the many years of Starr's investigation into Clinton's sex life.

But it looks like she's in good company. Dear Leader doesn't seem to think that the charges and the leaks are any big deal either. From Americablog:

Yes, threats to our national security during wartime are very funny, Mr. President. It's especially funny when secret agents, US soldiers, and American citizens' lives are put at risk because of those leaks and our commander in chief doesn't do a damn thing about it.

BUSH JOKES ABOUT HIS WHITE HOUSE TEAM LEAKING
Wed Nov 02 2005 10:58:31 ET

ROUNDTABLE INTERVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT
WITH FOREIGN PRINT MEDIA
The Roosevelt Room
November 1, 2005

With that, we'll start. Jorge, como yo.

Q Mr. President, in Argentina, you will have a bilateral meeting with President Kirchner.

THE PRESIDENT: Si.

Q What I want to know -- sources of the government told me that they would ask you about more cooperation on support for Argentina, you know, in the IMF fund --

THE PRESIDENT: IMF.

Q Exactly.

THE PRESIDENT: Please don't tell me that the government leaks secrets about conversations to the --

Q Well, I have my sources in the government.

THE PRESIDENT: You do? Okay, well I'm not going to ask you who they are, of course. (Laughter.)

Q No, please.

THE PRESIDENT: Inside joke here, for my team. (Laughter.)

END

This is the attitude that first spurred Cindy Sheehan into action. Let's hope more Americans' eyes open in the next few weeks.

Letters to the Editors: The Original Bloggas

The NYT letters to the editors were on fire today.  This one took the faux-objective, ever-equivocating Kristof to task for this paragraph in his first Cheney column:

First, Democrats should wipe the smiles off their faces. This is a humiliation for the entire country, and their glee is unseemly. Moreover, the situation is not that neocons are all crooks, but that one vice-presidential aide must be presumed innocent of trying to cover up conduct that may not have been illegal in the first place.

First?  That's the first thing that should happen?  I swear, I'm incapable of writing about this kind of  strawman-bashing equivocating without resorting to incoherent profanity so I'll defer to Mr. Don Lansner of the great state of New York, who doesn't take on Kristof in exactly the direction I'd like but gets a good start:

To the Editor: Re "Time for the Vice President to Explain Himself" (column, Oct. 30): In the wake of the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Nicholas D. Kristof admonishes Democrats to "wipe the smiles off their faces." Sorry, Mr. Kristof, but I've been walking around with a mournful scowl for five years of Clear Skies, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and W.M.D. fabrications. It is certainly not what Mr. Kristof refers to as the "humiliation for the entire country" that makes me gleeful. That regrettable humiliation occurred before this and reached new lows at Abu Ghraib. My smile comes from the anticipation that truths may now start to be told, and that from that, change can happen. Thanks for continuing to take the vice president to task, but please allow us this moment. It's just the smile of hope. Dan Lansner New York, Oct. 30, 2005

Hear!  Hear!  And, as if that weren't enough, Brierney Two gets it right between the op-editorial eyes:

To the Editor: David Brooks got one thing right in "The Prosecutor's Diagnosis: No Cancer Found" (column, Oct. 30) - there is no cancer on this presidency. The administration is the cancer. Mr. Brooks's frantic attempts to portray I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff until he resigned after being indicted on Friday, as some sort of "lone dissembler" has a highly unlikely premise. We would have to believe that in the highest councils of the most tightly controlled White House in history there lurked a renegade, operating on his own and answering to no one. How he could have escaped detection all this time by the ceaseless truth seekers around him is a mystery for the ages. Such is the nonsense that David Brooks would have us believe, or perhaps more likely, is desperate to believe himself. Well, Mr. Brooks, as you say, one may wish it, but that doesn't make it so. Peter Cohen New York, Oct. 30, 2005

The administration is the cancer.  Brierney left himself wide open for that one.   Oh my, Mr. Cohen, I think  I'm in love.

And, because we can't talk about Brierney Two without mentioning Brierney One,   (It's in their contract) here's a very patient Curtis Brown of Cambridge, Massachusettes, to school the most horribly deceitful of all the currect Op-Ed crop:

To the Editor: In "What Fitzgerald Didn't Say" (column, Oct. 29), John Tierney writes of the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr. that "the cliché about the cover-up being worse than the crime is especially true when there was no crime to begin with." Not so fast.  Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, told us that the cover-up amounted to throwing sand in the umpire's eyes. We don't know whether there was a "crime to begin with." Perhaps even Mr. Fitzgerald doesn't know. Or perhaps he does know, but has been deprived of the evidence he'd need to convict by acts of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice. Curtis Brown Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 29, 2005

And just when I thought my day couldn't get any better, this:

To the Editor: Re "Inside Wal-Mart, a Larger Debate" (editorial, Oct. 28): This is the problem in a nutshell: as a publicly traded, for-profit corporation obligated to enrich its shareholders, "Wal-Mart has no incentive to spend additional money on employee benefits."

This is why the robber barons of the 19th century crushed unions with billy clubs, and why there were child labor, sweat shops, slum wages and no worker benefits whatsoever while the wealthy lived in lavish mansions.

Health care for working Americans will succeed only if it is a universal program administered by the federal government under the control of elected representatives responsible for the welfare of the voters who elect them and not the special interests that currently run Washington.  This may be a Pollyanna vision, but it is how democracies are supposed to work. Doug Gray White River Junction, Vt. Oct. 28, 2005

Now I know I'm in love.

Krugman

Krugman calls out journamalists - especially the ones at his own paper:

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm.  But the nightmare won't be fully over until two things happen.

First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.

It's a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it's hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.

And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.

So the long nightmare won't really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell the public?

The NYT and the rest of the corporate media isn't going to go through another round of mea culpas that date back to 9/11.  They may as well go back to the shameful reporting that was done in November of 2000 or the disastrous, giggling non-coverage of the 2000 campaign.  Wen Ho Lee probably wants a public explanation of what he had to suffer at the hands of the paper of record.  Now we're back in the 90's. 

Keller would prefer to talk about going forward with really good journalism.   In a way, I do too - if the really good journalism actually happens.  The NYT was supposed to do that after they got caught leading us down the primrose path that ended up to be neverending and lined with grief-stricken families and littered with bloody limbs and other sundry body parts.  I'm still waiting for that really good journalism, goodness knows now's their chance,  but at least I'm not waiting for a husband to come back from the dead.

 

Who Are You and What Have You Done with Elisabeth Bumiller?!

Good White House Letter from Elisabeth Bumiller today.  It's a good look at how a burgeoning (my word) scandal on the scale of Traitorgate can be stressful for White House staff.  Looking at the lives behind the WH walls is the mandate, after all, of the column so Ms. Bumiller gives us a look the only way she can, which is by interviewing some people on staff during the Lewinsky deal.  At first I thought the column was going to be an 800-word exercise in false equivalence but she does a good job making it clear that not everyone considers the two situations equal:

But the veterans of the Clinton administration were quick to point out what they saw as crucial differences, and they said they did not have the sensation over the last week of looking in the mirror.  They noted that the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the biggest of those in the Clinton years, was about sex and lying about sex, and not about a leak campaign that grew out of an effort to discredit critics of a war based on faulty intelligence.

That's even a pretty good description of the essence of Traitorgate.  Kudos to you, Ms. Bumiller!

When you spend half your waking life beating the CIA in three-dimensional chess, finding little FBI teeth sunk into your own trouser leg is, at best, a pesky distraction.

Harry Shearer, the best political satirist out there, knows exactly  what's wrong with the NYT.  This is some of his song,  Miss Run Amok  (Jagged  Edge's Girls Gone Wild):

I'm the queen of the newsroom,
my colleagues I greet with gloom.
They came in with a new broom but me it couldn't sweep.
I'm the one they had to keep 'cuz I've got the access.
When I'm around the Veep relaxes, ignores taxes and just leaks.
I'm the open ear he seeks.
It's through me the leakage courses.
I got all the secret sources.
I was in the armed forces,
embedded up to here, wore the uniform to cheer
and to back up my supporting I even dabbled in reporting.

Miss Run Amok, that's what they call me at the paper.
I'm capable of any caper till I run out of luck.
Miss Run Amok.
Not the name I write under but my words crack with thunder.
Till you wonder what I'm smoking or sucking
'cuz the plums I was plucking
had to come from something more than pluck.
From Miss Run Amok.

I'm the queen of the newsroom
the one they couldn't not groom
Even though I wrote "Valerie Plume" or was it "Flame"?
I can't remember.  Taking notes is such a drag
each word a dying ember
Who said what and when
It's not my bag.  What's then is then.
So I'm a pal of Chalabi.
He had a tall tale or two for me.
Some say I should have checked it out, showed some doubt
but if I'd put him in a cage, put a hold on his outrage,
kept his notions off the stage, pulled the curtain,
only one thing is certain:
no matter how prudent or sage,
I wouldn't have made the front page.

There's more and it's all just as dead on.   You can hear it  here.

And if you really want to laugh, check out the 10/9 episode of Le Show, Shearer's weekly radio broadcast.  At around thirty three minutes, he's got a Dick Cheney: Confidential about the VP office spy scandal that's fall-down funny.   

Cheney's voice:  "There are no leaves around the secure, undisclosed location.  So the only way the approach of autumn impinges on my finely tuned consciousness is the dropping of shoes.  The Iraqi Constitution was one of the those little pieces of conceptual footware.  I tell ya' Sysiphus didn't have heavier lifting.  First we got'em to sit down together, then to avoid all sorts of deadlines enshrined in Jerry Bremer's neat little transitional law deal they had to avoid actually reading the full text of the Constitution to Parlaiment.  Then change the rules to make it harder to defeat.  And then the week, Mr. John Bolton couldn't keep the hairless Yorkies at the U.N. from yapping up a storm, we had to get our Iraqi friends to change the rules back again.  All this while the Constituent in Chief was busy doing his Look How Much I Care About the Gulf Cost Tour.  Plus, with Mick Brown doing a heckuva less of a heckuva job, I had a whole new pair of arms to twist over at FEMA to make sure the construction contracts weren't subject to the unconscionable delays of competitive bidding.  But those were just someone else's shoes dropping in the autumnal breeze.  And some of my own were hitting the floorboards. ...

The Le Show link goes to HarryShearer.com, but it's easy to find your way to the Le Show archive with a few clicks.  It's worth it.

A Reminder for the Corporate Media

Dear Corporate Media,

When it's time to file another Traitorgate story that requires an explanation of the timeline of events leading to current investigation which has, so far, yielded the indictments against I. Lewis Libby, don't forget the way history really went down:

Why did I write the article? Because I believe that citizens in a democracy are responsible for what government does and says in their name. I knew that the statement in Bush's speech — that Iraq had attempted to purchase significant quantities of uranium in Africa — was not true. I knew it was false from my own investigative trip to Africa (at the request of the CIA) and from two other similar intelligence reports. And I knew that the White House knew it.

Going public was what was required to make them come clean. The day after I shared my conclusions in a New York Times opinion piece, the White House finally acknowledged that the now-infamous 16 words "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address."

That should have been the end. But instead, the president's men — allegedly including Libby and at least one other (known only as "Official A") — were determined to defame and discredit Valerie and me.

They used eager allies in Congress and the conservative media, beginning with Novak. Perhaps the most egregious of the attacks was New York GOP Rep. Peter King's odious suggestion that Valerie "got what she deserved."

Valerie was an innocent in this whole affair. Although there were suggestions that she was behind the decision to send me to Niger, the CIA told Newsday just a week after the Novak article appeared that "she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment." The CIA repeated the same statement to every reporter thereafter.

I'm just helping you go forward with some really good journalism.

Cost of Fitzgerald's Investigation

Anyone who watched Fitzgerald's press conference yesterday had to be impressed with the guy's integrity and intellect.   He's run a leak-free investigation.  He clearly believes strongly in the professional rules he follows so scrupulously even while allowing for the fact that they may frustrate outside observers.  He knows how to explain complicated issues so that reasonably intelligent and interested people can understand what he's talking about.  He's repectful to his team, to members of his grand jury, to the process to the country.  I'm a little in love with the guy even though he hasn't made this process as painful and embarassing as possible for Team BushCo, who are traitors and deserve to suffer public shame.  To be honest, I'm probably in love with the guy because he didn't take that low road. 

Speaking of prosectors taking low roads, one of the favorite talking points coming out of the RW Noise Machine and one that will probably end up taking root in the corporate media any day is that "millions of dollars have been wasted" by Fitzgerald's investigation that went nowhere.  Okay, that's really two talking points.   Fitzgerald forcefully dismissed the idea that perjury and obstruction are ticky tack charges yesterday.  Armando, at dKos, took care of the cost question on Monday:

A comparison worth considering. To date Fitzgerald has spent:

In its first 15 months, the investigation cost $723,000, according to the Government Accountability Office.

In his "investigation," Ken Starr spent:

The figures show that Starr's office, through the end of November 1998, had spent $40,835,000. That includes $27,749,000 in direct expenses from independent counsel appropriations and $13,086,000 in unreimbursed expenses incurred by other government agencies.

Those figures do not include costs incurred by Starr's predecessor, Robert Fiske, whose office spent about $6 million before Starr was appointed to lead the investigation.

The GAO's most recent report issued last September showed Starr had spent $33.5 million through March 31st, 1998, after taking over for Fiske in 1994.

So, to be charitable to Starr, he spent about $10 million a year while, again to be charitable to Starr (counting 15 months as a year), Fitzgerald spent $700,000 a year.

Sure, Fitzgerald and his team are paid by the government but my gawd, $13 million in expenses not related to the lawyers' time? How much in fees? Tens of millions? Sheesh, Starr fleeced the Republicans if you think about it.

That's a lot of graft with nothing to show for it.

Tell your friends.

Your Right Wing Noise Machine at Work

I caught three minutes of the disturbing Rita Cosby's show on MSNBC last night.  Three minutes is all I can take of her distractingly deep and thready voice before the seizures start.  I've heard it described as throaty and husky but that makes it sound sexy, which would be very wrong.  I could, for instance, listen to Demi Moore or even Kathleen Turner all day.  Cosby sounds like she's recovered from a diabling larnyx injury that's left her an octave too low and unable to swallow the phlegm in her throat. 

During those painful three minutes  I saw that one of her guests was Lanny Davis.   I was shocked to see Lanny Davis anywhere on tv - even MSNBC - but even more surprised to see that he was equivating with the best of them.   After reading  BTC News'  critique of  Davis'  NYT op-ed that ran today, I get it. (via Atrios):

Davis plays the equivalency game: for every Republican sin, he has to offer up a counterweight Democratic one. But Republicans have owned the government for five years now; there is no equivalency. There are no powerhouse Democratic lobbyists under indictment, if only because Tom DeLay has been so successful in purging Democratic lobbyists from K Street.  There are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders under indictment, if only because there are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders.  Democrats didn’t out a covert CIA agent; Democrats didn’t drag the nation into an illegal war based on bogus intelligence  (although more than a few are complicit in the effort); Democrats didn’t institutionalize torture or strip US citizens of basic constitutional protections.

Get your op-ed in the NYT, show up on cable "news" the night before.  That's the synergy of your RW Noise Machine, folks.  You can't beat it.

Another Chance to Do Their Jobs

Digby explains what should be obvious to the corporate media:

If they care to do it, this case is a way for the media to save its soul after its outrageous conduct helping the administration make its case for war on lies. It is the responsibility of the NY Times and the Washington Post and NBC and all the rest to revisit what this administration has done ever since 1999 when the national press overlooked its sleazy and dangerous behavior. If they care to salvage their reputations they have the chance right here, right now.

Let's say I remain cautiously optmistic.  These few paragraphs of the immediate online NYT reaction to Fitzgerald's press conference weren't very encouraging though:

The indictment of Mr. Libby is the latest chapter in an episode that came to light in the summer of 2003.  At first, the matter seemed like a tempest in a political teapot, driven by spite and revolving  the issue of whether anyone had violated an obscure federal statute that makes it illegal, under some circumstances, to unmask an undercover agent.

But well before the charges were announced, the affair had mushroomed into something far more serious. It resulted in the jailing of a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, who had resisted Mr. Fitzgerald's pressure to testify, and it provided regular grist for administration critics to assert that the Bush White House routinely bullied its political opponents.

Bullying?   That's a nice a way to put it.

For the record, that same NYT article also continues the paper's policy (official?  Ask Keller.)  of leaving out of Traitorgate's timeline the fact that a day after the Wilson op-ed appeared, the WH issued a statement that said that "knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."   You know, I keep waiting for some of that "really good journalism" and I'm just not seeing it. 

I haven't watched any cable "news" since about three thirty, and I was watching MSNBC then, but I could already get the idea that the corporate media is throwing itself between Big Time Dick and any flak that might come his way.   Actually, I saw it start last night on MSNBC when the pro-war WaPo's Mike Allen took special pains to make it clear that nothing at all suggests that Cheney was in any kind of legal trouble leading up to Fitzmas.  He felt compelled to correct a reporter from the Nation, who, in response to a leading question from Tweety said something very close to, "It's not my job to indict the Vice President.  I'll leave that to  Patrick Fitzgerald."   Allen would not let that stand.

Then today in the aftermath of Fitzgerald's presser, my old pal, Dana Milbank, made a special effort to say that something very close to:  "In fact Patrick Fitzgerald said that anyone mentioned in today's indictment is not under suspicion of wrong doing."  I'm not too good with understanding law talk, even the dumbed down dialect Fitzgerald was speaking today, but I thought it was pretty clear that, due to the secrecy rules of the grand jury, he was simply restricting his comments to today's indictment and therefore was making no comment about anyone else's wrong doing or innocence  at this time. 

QUESTION: Mr. Fitzgerald, do you have evidence that the vice president of the United States, one of Mr. Libby's original sources for this information, encouraged him to leak it or encouraged him to lie about leaking?

FITZGERALD: I'm not making allegations about anyone not charged in the indictment.
Now, let me back up, because I know what that sounds like to people if they're sitting at home.  We don't talk about people that are not charged with a crime in the indictment.

FITZGERALD: I would say that about anyone in this room who has nothing to do with the offenses. We make no allegation that the vice president committed any criminal act. We make no allegation that any other people who provided or discussed with Mr. Libby committed any criminal act.  But as to any person you asked me a question about other than Mr. Libby, I'm not going to comment on anything. Please don't take that as any indication that someone has done something wrong. That's a standard practice. If you followed me in Chicago, I say that a thousand times a year. And we just don't comment on people because we could start telling, "Well, this person did nothing wrong, this person did nothing wrong," and then if we stop commenting, then you'll start jumping to conclusions. So please take no more.

Milbank heard somewhere in that an exoneration of the vice president.  But I should cut him a break.  Maybe Cheney threatened his wife and Milbank knows what's good for him.