Righty Bloggers Want Cheney To Pardon Libby

When news broke that Dick Cheney would be standing in for Bush for a few hours tomorrow, an interesting chorus sounded in the rightosphere.  From the front pages of Redstate, Gateway Pundit and NRO, to the comment section of Little Green Footballs, the message to Cheney is clear: Free Pardon Scooter!

Well, that… and “bomb Iran!”.

umm…

Everyone say a little prayer for George W. Bush, OK?  Even if you’re not religious.

Update:  DownWithTyranny! was thinking along the same lines.

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My Use Of The N-Word

About a month ago, I received this response to one of my comments on LGF:

#30

DesertSage  6/03/2007 11:03:23 pm PDT

…but because they figure he isn’t one of the neocons.

“neocon” is Lefty code-speak for “Jews”.

ChenZhen uses the term “neocon” as a pejorative.
ChenZhen is an anti-semite, I new there was a reason I disliked him.
Babbazee is right!

If there’s one thing I really can’t stand is an anti-semitic Leftist.
The thing I like even less is an anti-semitic Leftist that denies that he’s an anti-semite…so don’t even try it ChenZhen!

Then, last night, I spotted this comment on another WP blog:

25. Mark – July 4, 2007

…Gabe, Neo-Con is a racist slur. No shock that you use it…

 

Am I missing something here? Isn’t ‘neocon’ just short for ‘neoconservative‘? It’s just political ideology, right?

Intrigued, I did some searching, and I stumbled upon some old opinion pieces:

Blame It on Neo -Don’t call me a “neocon” unless you are a friend.

One big culprit has been Air America. Tune in to the proudly liberal radio network, and you’ll hear actress-turned-activist Janeane Garofalo and other hosts frequently blast the “influence” of the “neocons” on the Bush Administration, then go on to name names such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams and Libby. Not a single gentile name makes the list, so it’s the Jewish influence to which the network takes particular exception.

‘Neocon’: Slang for ‘Jew’?

After laying the groundwork of neocons as superhawks, the Business Week piece informs readers that the key members of the movement who advise President Bush are “Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith and Defense Policy Board member Richard N. Perle.” Fair enough. All three have, at various times, been labeled neocons. But then, Mr. Dunham draws an interesting distinction. He describes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney as “key allies,” but not as “neocons.” In the remainder of the article, former Reagan administration official Ken Adelman and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol are identified as other “neocons.”

I have to apologise.  I had no idea that when I called Francis Fukuyama a ‘neocon’ in this post a year ago I was actually using code to label him a Jew.

I’m hoping some of my fellow bloggers could help me out here. What would be more politically correct? Should I just spell out ‘neoconservative’? Or should I adopt some sort of family-friendly way to post the word, like n**cons?

Edit- That was sarcasm, BTW.

One final note.  I see all this as grievance theater.  Accusations of anti-Semitism seem to get fired at people on a hair trigger all the time, and I think this is a perfect example. 

My July 4th Sentiment

I have a confession.  I was pretty close to celebrating the 4th of July on my blog by posting a nice video of flags waving or fireworks bursting and the national anthem blaring.  I must have searched YouTube for a half an hour looking for the perfect vid.  However, as I sat there watching these videos I couldn’t help but to think that the whole idea just didn’t seem sincere. 

Call me unpatriotic if you want, but displaying such a video while our country is being led by a dangerous administration and an equally broken Congress wasn’t going to encapsulate my attitude this day.  I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that ‘taps’ would be the tune that jumps ahead in one’s mind, actually.  So, I’ve decided to post a different video.

As I mentioned a couple of posts down, I did a lot of blogging on the FearBush.com site before starting the blog here (I’m still a regular in the forums).  I thought of it as kind of a privilege, since it was one of the few sites out there whose founders were prophetic enough to have actually predicted the Bush disaster back in early 2000.  In fact, the url was originally intended as a warning (as you might have guessed).  Since then, many others have joined on the anti-Bush bandwagon, and I suppose by now I feel a sense of vindication for having felt passionately about this for so long. 

Of all the anti-administration rants I posted over there over the last couple of years, I never posted any of the Keith Olbermann “Special Comments”, since I preferred to give my own perspective.  Today, however, I’m gonna give Keith a post on this blog, because tonight’s edition was one heck of a doozy.  On this 4th of July, we should all consider what’s being said here and what it really means to be patriotic.

(video hat tip: Suzie Q)

Enjoy the fireworks.

As Long As Bush Is Commuting “Excessive” Sentences…(Update: Nevermind)

Bush got busy today playing politics with the justice system and decided to commute Scooter Libby’s prison sentence:

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

No doubt there will be plenty of debate over this over the next week.  I’m probably the 12,645th blogger to comment on it in the last hour alone, actually.  I realize that this was a politically motivated action, and I’m really not going to place as much blame on Bush as others would for this.  I mean, the guy has very little to lose at this point.  He kinda split the difference here, and maybe it’s better that way.  Let’s face it, he could have given Libby a full pardon without taking much more of a dent politically.

I’m commenting here because of Bush’s referral of Libby’s prison sentence as “excessive”.  That’s probably his opinion, and I’m not sure if that’s the opinion of the nation as a whole, but he’s the President.  But this word “excessive” reminded me of another convicted felon that has been featured here in the Chamber before: Genarlow Wilson

Here we have a kid that is 2 years into a 10-year sentence for receiving (consensual) oral sex from a 15-year-old when he was just 17.  You’d think this thing happens every day in America, but because of a legal loophole in the state where the act occurred, Mr. Wilson got the shaft.  Much has been made about Mr. Wilson’s case in the media, and it’s almost a universal opinion that the prison sentence in his case was most certainly excessive.

So…what say you Dubya?  Wanna bust Genarlow out while you’re at it?

Update:  Nevermind.  “Bush has denied more than 4,000 commutation requests, and hundreds of requests for pardons and commutations are still pending”  I’m guessing that Wilson’s was one of those requests. (hat tip: Think Progress)

Update:  OK I feel kinda stupid, as I probably should have brushed up on facts regarding clemency before posting this thread.  Thanks to fellow LGFer Darren.  From wiki:

The pardon power of the President extends only to offenses cognizable under U.S. Federal law. However, the governors of most states have the power to grant pardons or reprieves for offenses under state criminal law. In other states, that power is committed to an appointed agency or board, or to a board and the governor in some hybrid arrangement.

Since this is a stupid law in the state of Georgia, Bush has no power to grant this poor kid a commutation of his sentence. 

His Royal Cheneyness

There’s already a consensus that Dick Cheney is the most powerful VP in our nation’s history, and it’s no secret that he has a long history of being a proponent of almost unlimited power for the executive branch, but this is getting pretty surreal: Vice President Exempts His Office from the Requirements for Protecting Classified Information

The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.

For documentation purposes:   Fact Sheet on the Vice President’s Efforts to Avoid Oversight and Accountability (pdf)

In my quest to figure out what that really means, I spotted a great post from Scholars:

Having the Vice President, and a Republican at that, responsible for egregious breaches in national security sets a very poor example. After all, if the Vice President’s office can be exempt from secrecy requirements, then other offices could be as well. How long will it be before the entire Justice Department uses the identical argument (its duties are split between the executive and judicial branches, after all) to exempt itself from annual ISOO oversight?And what are the sanctions for breaking this particular EO?

Is “What the hell is he hiding?” a fair question?  Does it have anything to do with what happened to Scooter Libby?  

If you’re not part of the legislative, judicial, or executive, I suppose that leaves some sort of position of royalty.  How should we address thee?

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

I had an idea (strange, huh?). Originally I thought it would be neat to add political WordPress.com blogs in a special section of my blogroll, and create my own little community of amateur pundits that use the service. In a way, ALL WP.com bloggers are part of a community already, but I thought I’d start a club just for those who like to talk politics.

Most political bloggers will have blogs from other services in their blogroll.  Not everyone uses WP, after all.  There are advantages to staying within the community, however. One advantage would be ease of commenting. Once you’re logged in, you can hop from blog to blog without having to enter in tedious email info and quickly drop a comment (nice to have avatars too), and all discussions can easily be kept track of through the “my comments” section of our dashboards.  Another advantage: you don’t have to do a lot of work to ping these blogs.  All you have to do is link to a post, and it pings them immediately (leaving a pingback in the comments section).  With other blogs (or blog services), you may have to copy/paste trackback urls, and that can be a bit of a crap shoot.  It can work real slick for some blogs and not work at all for others (or at least I’ve discovered). Yet another advantage is how easy it is to search for tags within the community, but that is less special because services like technorati seem to be dialed into it as well. Anyway, you get the idea….

So, every so often, I’ll click on the WP ‘politics’ tag and check out what people are posting.  If I stumble upon a blog that I haven’t seen before, I’d just add it to the blogroll.  I’ve been adding a couple a week since I started it.  I’m sure there are more, so as time goes on this list will grow in my sidebar (under “wordpress political blogs”)

Then I started thinking. What if we formed some semi-formal alliance? A ‘club’ made up exclusively of WP.com political bloggers (right, left, and center) who could regularly exchange ideas and comment on others’ posts. So far I haven’t seen anything like that. Maybe it’s worth a shot?

I whipped up a ‘club’ button that we can put in the sidebar. You’ll have to forgive my photoshopping skills, but here goes:

If you want to add the button to your blog (it links back to this post), here is the code (with border):

<a href="https://chenzhen.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/wordpress-political-blogger-alliance"><img src="https://chenzhen.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/wppoliblog1.jpg&quot; alt="WordPress Political Blogger" /></a>

…and without a border:

<a href="https://chenzhen.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/wordpress-political-blogger-alliance"><img border="0" src="https://chenzhen.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/wppoliblog1.jpg&quot; alt="WordPress Political Blogger" /></a>

Update 11/2:  The alliance has become interactive!  The lowdown:

What I’m attemping to create here is a tool that we can use to make our blogs more lively and entertaining.  I’m not really forcing any obligations on anyone, so I don’t want you to get the impression that going along with this means that there’s going to be a whole list of expectations (beyond etiquette).  You don’t have to respond to every ping.   Just so you know.  

If you want to participate, there are just a few details…

1. In order for this to work smoothly, everyone needs to create a page that can be pinged.  It took me about 2 min. to make mine: https://chenzhen.wordpress.com/wp-political-blogger-alliance/ .  And I need to know the link so that I can consolidate them, so just post it in that thread or respond in email once you’ve whipped it up.  That’s really the only requirement.  A handful of you already have done this, and the pings work beautifully.  The idea here is to compose a code that is easy to paste in your post that allows you to ping everyone in the alliance at the same time.*
2. I don’t really like the idea of any one blogger “abusing” the tool by using it to try to dominate the discussion.  In other words, if you’re calling out and pinging the alliance 3 times a day it might get a little annoying.  Sure, it’s easy enough to just ignore such a thing, but nevertheless I think it would be akin to blog whoring just for the sake of blog whoring.  It’s kind of a fine line, and we’ll probably tweak the guidelines as we go forward, but for now I’ll stick with a rule of 1 per day max.  No minimums, since some of you might prefer to comment only.  And, it probably goes without saying, but we don’t want to double up on a topic either, so try to make sure that a story or headline hasn’t already had pings sent by someone else first.  If it has, and you’ve got your own unique analysis that you just spent like 2 hrs on, just link to that thread in your post instead.  We’ll see it.  Make sense?
3. Be somewhat civilized.  This might be the hard part, ’cause a) there’s a very diverse crowd being pinged and b) it’s the internet.  In debate, you win by attacking the argument or idea, and you lose once you resort to attacking the person (there is a difference).  Keep that mindset, and we’ll be fine.  That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a good blog war.  This will be a bit of a free-for-all, so I hope people are relatively thick-skinned when it comes to having  logic, facts, position, etc. challenged.  We’ll just have to see how this goes, cause I’m not sure if anyone has really tried anyting like this before. 
4. This is about “politics”, so use the “politics” tag/category when you post, and only send the pings when you post about “politics”.  You might have a cool car, for example, but please don’t ping the whole group to show off the latest pics you just posted.  Also, consistent use of the “politics” tag in general means more views from the wider wordpress.com audience.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy as individuals to block urls and IP’s if #2 or 3 becomes a problem for someone.

* The up-to-date code can always be found in my sidebar (——>): 

Founder of the WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

Simply copy the “WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance” and paste it at the bottom of your post. Once your post is published, it will send a ping back to everyone in the alliance.  Easy!

Update 11/4: A tag (category) specifically for the alliance:

WordPress Political Blogs

Create the “WordPress Political Blogs” category and add it to your alliance-oriented posts.  In2thefray and I have already added the RSS feed for this tag in our sidebars, so we can see the latest offerings right on our blogs:

WP.com political blog alliance

Even better, if everyone uses the tag consistently, the above link will provide a great chronological record of the posts within the alliance. In addition, you will have a record of your own contributions to the alliance in your sidebar (assuming you have added the “categories” widget).  Remember to use “WordPress Political Blogs” exactly (alternate spellings and abbreviations will be a different tag, technically)

Karl’s In Charge

Please forgive my semi-lame play on the title of an old ’80’s sitcom, but I’ll try my best to have it make sense.  I wanted today’s entry to be all about everyone’s favorite Bush administration figure, Karl Rove, as he seems to have a hard time staying out of the news lately:  Rove warns of threat of terrorism

In a question-and-answer period after his speech, Rove was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war.”

“I think it was Osama bin Laden’s,” Rove replied.

Someone on the Think Progress thread pretty much stated the response to this as I would have:

Actually Rove is right. Getting the US bogged down in a nasty guerrilla war in the heart of the Middle East is exactly what Bin Laden was after when he launched the 9/11 attack.

So the question becomes, why were Rove and the rest of the Bushies so eager to give Bin Laden what he wanted?

Comment by A Hermit — April 19, 2007 @ 3:15 pm

Now, it’s pretty easy to pick on Rove for silly comments like that, as it is just another example of the ridiculous spin that has come from this administration over the last 6 years.  If you’re really interested on why I agree with A. Hermit’s post, check out this thread in the fearbush forums. My real reason for this post has to do with Rove’s involvement with this A.G. Gonzales fiasco (called by some as a non-scandal scandal). First, a few pertinent links:

• E-Mails Show Rove’s Role in U.S. Attorney Firings
• Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing
• White House: Millions of e-mails may be missing
• Gonzales’s testimony leaves senators frustrated

All this presents quite a few question marks, and an immediate impression that the administration may be covering something up here.  Although that might be true, I’m not convinced that it means that they are covering up anything improper or illegal, per se.  It has been noted by many that Bush is well within his right to fire attorneys at any time.  So…. why?

As you might expect, I have a theory…

What Rove’s conveniently missing emails and Gonzales’s abysmal memory are hiding has less to do with the firing of U.S. attorneys, and more to do with Rove’s power in general.   They’re covering up the uncomfortable revelation that Rove has been wielding more power and asserting more influence over our branches of government than his title of Deputy White House Chief of Staff would seem to imply.  In other words, it could very well be that when it comes to who’s really running things in the White House, Karl’s in charge. Unfortunately, considering the Bush administration’s terrible luck with finding documents (along with their secretive nature in general), we may never know for sure.

Update:  The L.A. Times is reporting that there will be investigations into Rove’s scheming: Low-key office launches high-profile inquiry (for the digg link, click here). 

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

Hopefully they won’t run into too many missing documents or administration officials with preemptive alzheimer’s, but this is definitely something worth following up on. 

Others blogging the L.A. Times story:

The Blotter, Shakesville, TPMmuckraker, The Carpetbagger Report, Discourse.net, CANNONFIRE, NION, PoliBlog (TM), DownWithTyranny!, On Politics, CorrenteWire, Think Progress, Balloon Juice, AMERICAblog, TIME: Swampland, Tennessee Guerilla Women, The Heretik, The Agonist, Macsmind, Little Thom’s Blog, Prairie Weather, On Deadline and Liberal Values

 

Andrew Sullivan On The Libby Verdict

I was going to post my thoughts the Libby verdict, but I saw this post by Andrew Sullivan and decided to give him credit:

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.

It was the “insane over-reaction” to what was merely an op-ed in a newspaper that presents the occam’s razor moment (for me anyway). I am a little disappointed that Sullivan left out the fact that there were a lot of people who could “smell it”, but stood idly by while this administration dealt us nothing but spin for 4 years.  As far as anyone going after Cheney goes, well, I’m not holding my breath.  There seems to have been a notably high level of timidity  in Washington  towards Cheney.   I suppose things like outing a CIA agent ( not to mention talk of a ‘dunk in the water’ ) might have that effect.  I shudder to think of what he’s liable to do when he’s really in a corner. 

 read more

Update: For more on Dick Cheney’s battle for control of intelligence from 9/11 to the Iraq invasion, along with lots of background on Cheney’s ‘network’, check out PBS’s FRONTLINE doc The Dark Side :

Libby has worked closely with Cheney for almost 20 years, starting when he was an under secretary at the Pentagon when Cheney was secretary of defense. As Cheney’s chief of staff during the run-up to war with Iraq, Libby helped push the vice president’s agenda at the CIA, the State Department and in the press. CIA officials claim Libby accompanied Cheney on many trips to CIA headquarters, where the pair questioned analysts about Iraq’s weapons capabilities.

In other words, he’s just the type of guy who would take the fall to protect the boss. 
 

Did Joe Wilson Write The Biggest Op-Ed In History?

First, I’m not going to pretend that I’m a scholar of print media, or even an avid reader of the opinion section of a newspaper.  This post is more of the “I’m willing to wager” variety.  When it comes to sitting down and writing something that’s to be reprinted in the opinion section of a major newspaper, What I Didn’t Find in Africa has got to go down in history as one hell of a doozy.  On July 6, 2003, Joe Wilson dropped a rock in a pond that is still making waves: Court Hears Libby Describe Cheney as ‘Upset’ at Critic .

Libby’s portrayal of the zeal to discredit Wilson’s claims, reaching to the White House’s highest echelons, reinforces Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s assertion that the criticism of war provoked such a political crisis among Bush’s top aides that it is unlikely the defendant simply forgot his role in the leak, as defense attorneys contend.

I think it’s pretty easy to make the case for Joe, actually.  Think about it.  His little piece in the NYT set off a chain reaction of events that were described in national headlines that read things like “CIA Agent Outed”, and “Reporter Goes To Jail”, and “Vice President Testifies”, and is finally drawing to a close with a perjury trial…three and a half years later.   Forget the subject matter, this op-ed could be placed on a pedestal based on the chaos it caused alone.

Update:  I reprinted this entry, with a poll, at dailykos.

What Will Come Out In The Libby Trial?

I know a lot of bloggers out there are on the edge of their seats watching this Scooter trial from the sidelines.  I’ve been following the whole Plame thing off and on for the past few years.  Today, a familiar name popped up in the Raw Story feed: 

 Newsweek: Rove could testify in Libby case as subpoenas delivered

But the Rove account could cut in other ways. Fitzgerald would likely argue that Libby’s comment to Rove merely shows that the vice president’s top aide “was even lying inside the White House,” according to the legal source. Moreover, Rove is likely not eager to recount the story either. The reason? He would have to acknowledge that shortly after he had the chat with Libby, he went back to his office and had a phone conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper in which he also disclosed the fact that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. The disclosure was potentially illegal since, at the time, Plame was employed in the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s covert arm…

Grab the popcorn folks.  I think there’s going to be a lot of unpleasant revelations laid bare in the next few weeks.  What will be exposed is an administration that was either a) so determined to cover their Iraq deception that they would risk exposing a CIA agent to discredit the critic, and send a shot across the bow of any future challengers, or b) were legitimately trying to “correct a story” (to whatever degree), but wound up outing the agent inadvertently (the old “cover up worse than the crime” scenario).  Either way, it looks like Libby is going with the defense that someone else is lying to make him take the fall.     Like I said….grab the popcorn.