Posted on 07/20/2005 1:04:52 PM PDT by flixxx
July 20, 2005 Rove Scandal: Finally, a Real Distraction Is Karl Rove in so much trouble that the White House really did believe it was necessary to rush out the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court? Bloomberg News did report that the White House accelerated its schedule on the Roberts nomination to draw attention to another news story. At least, the Bush gang in this case relied on something real--a Supreme Court nomination--to distract and not the usual mis- or disinformation. (See postings below.)
This will likely work for several days--longer if the Democrats and the progressive groups are able to make and sustain a political stink (which will be difficult). Look at the news pages of today's Washington Post. Mucho coverage of Roberts. Nada about Rove. Last night when I sent out my latest posting (the intelligence veterans' letter on Valerie Wilson in the item below) to various liberal bloggers, one sent me an email asking that I resend it later. He was neck-deep in Roberts. There's nothing wrong with that. A Supreme Court pick is a big deal and deserves the ink. Now only if William Rehnquist dies and Bush appoints Pat Robertson to take his place. Then Rove would truly be sitting pretty.
I'm traveling today, so I'll be brief. On the Roberts nomination, Bush was damn smart. He left the Democrats little room for maneuvering. Roberts was easily confirmed by the Senate two years ago for an appellate court position. At the time, several former Clinton officials praised him. He has a relatively short record as a federal judge, one that cannot be picked apart too easily. He's reassuring to righwingers. He was a rising star in the Justice Department in the Reagan and Bush I administrations and earned his conservative credentials. In 1990, he argued that Roe v. Wade had no foundation in the U.S. Constitution. And during his confirmation hearings in 2003, he tied himself to the buzz phrase of choice for conservatives who oppose abortion rights but don't want to scare folks into thinking they might actually do something about it. He declared that Roe v. Wade was "settled law." Social conservatives understand what such rhetoric means: "settled" for now.
So what are the Democrats' options? This guy went to Harvard Law. A majority of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee voted for him two years ago when he was nominated to the Court of Appeals in Washington, DC. (Only three gave him the thumb's down.) He was approved on the full Senate floor by a voice vote--which means his nomination did not stir much of a controversy. The New York Times' website ran this headline today: "Bush's Supreme Court Choice Is a Judge Anchored in Modern Law." That sure makes him sound as if he's in the mainstream.
The deal on judicial filibusters that was struck in May only grants Dems the right to mount a filibuster in "extraordinary" circumstances. And as a practical matter, the seven GOP members of the Gang of 14 have to accept the extraordinariness of the circumstances. It's hard to see how the Democrats can win a debate over whether Roberts' nomination is "extraordinary." A conservative president has appointed a conservative jurist with strong credentials. What's extraordinary about that?
The liberal advocacy groups can--and have begun to--argue that Roberts' will push the court to the right and that will lead to decisions bad for minority rights, reproductive rights, civil liberties, environmental protection, and consumer safety and good for corporate interests. There's not much argument over that. But my hunch is that not everyone in the Democratic caucus of the Senate is yearning to rush to battle on these grounds in the absence of "extraordinary" circumstances. Thus, Democrats will yammer about wanting to examine fully his record. They may even be guided by what The New York Times declared on the editorial page today: "If [Roberts] is a mainstream conservative in the tradition of Justice O'Connor, he should be confirmed. But if on closer inspection he turns out to be an extreme ideologue with an agenda of stripping away important rights, he should not be." But for a significant number of Senate Democrats the bar for being an "extreme ideologue" will be quite high. (And this guy doesn't have a funny Bork-like beard.) Given the numbers in the Senate, the Democrats have no play to make whatsoever unless they can keep their side united. Absent any bombshell revelations about Roberts, they cannot stop him if the Senate Republicans are willing to kill the judicial filibuster. And an attempted Democratic filibuster against Roberts would presumably provide sufficient motive to the Republicans to pull the trigger.
With the Roberts nomination, the Democrats are in a deep hole, The Bush White House has made a clever pick--and, at least for the moment, shoved the Rove scandal to the side. It's a twofer.
The RATS will come up with some cockamamie reason for it, and be exposed (AGAIN) for the lying sacks of...that they are.
David Corn is slime.
Rush out? Huh? Dims have been hyperventilating for the best part of two weeks. Is there something I'm missing here, other than yet another attempt to cast a negative taint on anything Bush does?
I thought the Rove stuff was just a distraction from how bad we were doing in Iraq.
And Iraq was just a distraction from how bad we were doing in the War On Terror.
And The War On Terror was just a distraction from how bad the economy is doing.
Someone ask this guy: "What is the precise number of days a president should wait to announce a Supreme Court nominee?"
When David Corn pulls his head out of Joe Wilson's rectum long enough to look around he will discover that the fraudulent media tempest these two (and Plame and others...) concocted in 2003 is going to backfire big time on the 'Rats. The juvenile delinquents have had their day, now the adults are going to re-assert some common sense and rationality.
The Dems and the MSM know this "scandal" never got traction. People could tell it was a fabricated scandal by the way the Press had to couch everything in legalspeak. Now the time has passed. The best they can hope for is that the American people bought the lie and believe it.
Sorry, David, I make my living reading the news all day and writing jokes about it for radio stations all night, and I've been doing it for 14 years. I can spot phony scandals fanned up to take advantage of a cyclical news lull in the same way that normal civilians can recognize the arrival of winter. This Rove thing is the type of story that's not even worth writing jokes about because NOBODY outside the Beltway cares. It's what I call a MEGO story: "My Eyes Glaze Over."
Corn is in a quagmire.
IMHO... they've already painted themselves(and their MSM allies) into a corner on Rove. It's 'gonna take some top-notch spin in order to 'splain' their way 'outta this trumped-up witch-hunt.
To attempt a Bork or Thomas strategy on Roberts is NOT 'gonna be popular with a large majority of voters. But the hard fact is... the Dem's cannot let their constituency down. They HAVE to find Roberts unconfirmable... simply for being a conservative.
Bet on a filibuster for Roberts... and for the Rove flap to evaporate in thin air.
Sen. Boxer has already said that a Supreme Court nomination meets the "extraordinary circumstance" test.
That's the real point. Journalists (or in this case, David Corn) can not stand being lied to.
Now all she has to do is convince the 7 Repubs in the gang of 14 that. Good luck, Barb. Graham has already says he plans to vote for Roberts. We just need one more.
I have found some interesting articles:
If Joe diGenova is right, and I suspect he is, the federal investigation into the disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame should never have happened.“My views are stronger than ever,” the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said Monday when asked about the white-hot controversy that has sent a New York Times reporter to jail, changed the rules of investigative journalism and now threatens to envelop the White House in a major crisis. “This investigation never should have started because it’s apparent that no crime was ever committed.” “The only way an investigation can begin is if the agency swears — swears — that it took every conceivable step to protect this person’s identity.”
For example, the CIA had to answer 11 specific questions about what steps it took to protect the identity of a covert agent. But diGenova questions whether some of the information the CIA provided the Justice Department on those 11 questions “was materially false.”
In addition, he pointed out that the CIA paid for Wilson’s trip, didn’t ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didn’t object to his writing the op-ed article in the Times and allowed him to conduct TV interviews and to appear in a photo with his wife in Vanity Fair, he noted.
“The CIA isn’t stupid,” he said. “They wanted this story out. I’m raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?”
Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?
Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr. Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time.
The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media. The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power. Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.
It was a publicity stunt from the get-go. Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.
According to Goss' supporters, the agency has been out of control, recently leaking negative stories to the press to undermine the White House.
"The CIA has got to be kept out of partisan politics," said Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director under President Carter. "And it appears that they were leaking information to influence the election. Porter Goss has now got a difficult problem."
An article I found while doing research on the multitude of CIA resignations a few days ago, which at the time I dismissed as moonbat rantings until I found the above stories:
Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?SourceThe real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence “failures” before the upcoming presidential election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown. Shortly after the “surprise” Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer.
Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled “The Stovepipe.”
“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.“Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.'
He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”
Yes, I have my tin foil hat securely on, LOL!
David Corn and all of his cronies in the democratic party, the left wing media, the academic community and Starbucks throughout the land, have had their asses kicked time after time by people who do not claim intellectual superiority as they go about their daily lives.
Those genius wannabes fail to see that they are outmatched, and perpetual losers.
You have to love it!
"He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”"
Wellll, most of that website reads like the ravings of a far-left moonbat.... but this tidbit, if there's anything to it, would correspond with just what I've thought about those forged documents: that they were most likely a plant from some person(s) seeking to discredit the US administration. Whether they were fabricated in the USA or Europe or Middle East or anywhere else, they smell of someone trying to discredit the whole concern with Iraqi WMD programs. We had PLENTY of reason to crush Saddam, regardless of the Niger uranium issue, and these documents themselves seem to be merely a red herring (the Brits still maintain that they have independently obtained intel which led them to make the assertion about Iraqi interest in Niger uranium). Take Niger uranium completely out of the picture and it was still just as desireable that Saddam's regime be swept into the dustbin of history, once and for all!
The "forged documents" were produced by a Belgian at the behest of French intelligence, then passed to Italian intelligence.
The purpose is rather obvious: As cover for COGEMA, the French uranium mining consortium that operates in Niger. COGEMA was selling yellow-cake off-the-books to rogue regimes and smuggling it out of Niger.
These documents were designed to be discovered, promoted and then discredited as the forgeries they were. Anybody claiming that rogue regimes were getting their yellow-cake from Niger would thus be "proven a liar".
The documents came into U.S. hands in November, 2002. When Bush made just such a claim in his January, 2003 SOTU, the trap was sprung. When the documents were subsequently demonstrated to be forgeries in March, 2003, they had served their purpose.
Except British intelligence -- and Bush -- knew otherwise. And when 700 T of Nigerien yellow-cake turned up in Libya, Bush and the British had the last laugh -- plus the full cooperation of French intelligence in the War on Terror.
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