Former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, “Scooter” Libby, has been found guilty of four charges. The Guardian has coverage. The charges against Libby arose from his leak to the media of the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, in an act of retribution against her husband, who had cast doubt on administration claims that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger. There’s no doubt that Libby was a fall guy for Cheney. Sympathy expressed by jurors for Libby indicates, having heard the evidence, this was also the perception of the jury. Any remaining doubt would be dispelled if Bush pardons him, which is fairly likely. It’s an “accountability moment” for the White House’s politics of smear and lies.
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The way is now clear for former ambassador Joe Wilson to sue the pacemaker out of Cheney, and sue other principlals over the spiteful outing of his CIA spouse Valerie Plame. We’re taking serious punitive damages here. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) people and the WHIGs (White House Iraq Group) literally ate their own. “Good Shepherds” (cf, De Niro’s new film) , are not supposed to barbecue and cannibalise their own. This sends a particularly poor message to other operatives “in the field”. It’s also illegal.
Sure Scooter will appeal(and loose). The Imbecile will almost certainly pardon him. POTUS’s get to issue several “Get Out Of Jail Free” cards as a perk of office. Sort of a Seppo noblisse oblige.
As one of the scribes at Huffpo said today, Cheney could be forced to resign within a month with TankerGirl Rice bursting through to claim a seat at the front of Air Force 2. Rosa Parkes would have enjoyed the moment but Surge McCain and Big Giuli won’t. (Longshot presidential nominee contender Newt Gingrich only cares where he sits on Ai Force One, so no real problem here). Condi’s furthur ascendence would provide shear-type friction between the GOP machine and BushCo. A tectonic situation. Their San Andreas moment.
All this, and BushCo are gearing up to whack Iran.
Still, Scooter hitting the skids on four counts out of five is heartening for all outside ticking range of Cheney. Judith Miller can dazzle us anew with her astute and deeply insightful stenographic skills. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter are always on the lookout for a hot scoop of fresh material. Whose show will scribe Judy favour first with her upcoming book? Random House are reconstucting their image after the O.J. pulpdown. Perhaps said publishers who know no shame can take their shot at redemption with a contemporary “Miller’s Tale”.
And firedoglake’s going off! http://www.firedoglake.com/ :Best coverage of the trial and it’s fallout.
A great if The big question now is will Fitz go after Cheney? Can’t wait for the White House response. What a great day.
baudrillard is dead
CK, Fitz said he will leave it at that. Joe Wilson will provide the “footsteps” for JerkShot.
Irwin “Scooter” Lewis Libby is facing a long stretch for going down four from five.
The Imbecile is officially “saddened”.
Hope he doesn’t cut up too bad; there’s a mite more decidin’ to be done before the world can free from them varmint terrsts.
““I start at 6 in the morning and go till 8 or 8:30 at night,â€? Mr. Libby said. “I can’t possibly recall all the stuff that I think is important, let alone other stuff that I don’t think is as important.â€?
Evidently, that statement did not persuade jurors, despite what one of them told reporters was considerable sympathy for Mr. Libby in the jury room.”
How on earth did you get from that to this except by some very wishful thinking-
“There’s no doubt that Libby was a fall guy for Cheney. Sympathy expressed by jurors for Libby indicates, having heard the evidence, this was also the perception of the jury.”
There is nothing so phyrric as the vindictive catharthis of the duped as the bullies before whom they have cowered for so long are finally exposed as mediocrities, and led away. Buckle yourselves in for the tawdry spectacle of two hundred million ‘outraged’ American voters pointlessly shredding the Bush wolf’s carcass long after it’s savaged the national flock. To anyone quagmired in Iraq, or who simply prefers America to be globally engaged than isolationist, the next two years of frantic pass-the-parcelling will be distrastrously distracting. Let’s not blame the victims outright for Libby’s crimes by pointing out the awkward fact that his mob were democratically re-elected long after Plamegate and his role in it was publicised. Still, how ’bout that no-b/s American heartland, eh? But the most self-righteous among the public lynch mobs now forming up will be the same mainstream reporters who wilfully ignored the truth about men like Libby et al even further back, when the US had still to commit itself to the greatest foreign policy disaster in its history. The Beltway media fearlessly facing up to Libby’s wrong-doing now, five years and a court conviction after it was obvious to anyone who didn’t not want to see it, is as lame, anachronistic and lemming-like as America’s mainstream pundits piously accusing Anne Coulter of going ‘too far’ only after the bog-standard Coulterism she happened to fling out this time transgressed a PC trope with some prime time bite.
The ‘perfect storm’ of the neocons’ suicidal foreign policy is almost complete. All that remains is for the last of this latest gaggle of tyre-kicking ‘ismic’ dilettantes to wander offstage, having tinkered with a ‘Big Idea’ for just long enough to feel personally Big too. Little lunch in the global playground is over. All the cool toys of Lone Superpowerhood have got broke or boring. The teachers are coming out to round up the naughty kids. They’ll smile (a bit naughtily). They’ll shrug (a bit ironically). But no matter how brutal their playtime doings and how many other kids they beat up out there, America being the land of perpetual public redemption they’ll demand and expect and no doubt receive their retirement milk and cookies, to a last naughty boy. A little 60’s do-gooding over at the World Bank; a directorship at the Carlyle Group; a HarperCollins book tour here, a Rendon consultancy slot there, perhaps that overdue trip to the Holy Land, or a nice indulgent book-essay on Nabakov for The Hitch (because he’s earned a sabbatical from all that vulgar politicking, the poor exhausted chap). Even a bit of quiet nick, before a chastened re-emergence as my generation’s elder statesman of geopolitical fuck-uppery dissected. Many of the lunatics who bought us Operation Freedom have or are hightailing it for MSM pundit slots as the USS Bush goes down, from where the less gracious of these lucky life-boaters will doubtless go on ‘contributing to American democracy and public debate’, rehabilitating their reputations while sneering at the Democrat successors they’ve left to sail America on. Facts
on the groundin the water, goingforwarddown.There’s nothing to celebrate here, Kim. Pro or anti-invasion, there is nothing to celebrate about the wholly-predicted and inevitable unravelling of the pre-emptive FP disaster-of-choice that these weak, incompetent and cowardly men gave us – and Iraq, and the world. To take any pleasure at all in the collapse of the Bush Administration long after it has been allowed by us all to do its worst is to add insult to injury for the US veteran with no arms and no legs sitting in his pool of stinking shit and piss in Walter Reed, and the starving Iraq child with no family and no future, alike. The only potentially constructive outcome of convictions like this is also the one that will never transpire: sentences that required each felon to remain in public office until Operation Iraq Freedom lived up to its name in substance, not merely style. From start to finish what has been lacking most of all in this entire fiasco has been any sense of responsibility for its outcome – beyond in an empty rhetorical sense – among those who forced it upon us. But it’s hardly as if whoever takes over from the Bush-Blair-Howard axis of arrogance, incompetence and half-assedness will be able to sell their respective constituencies the case for investing an even larger national stake in Iraq’s successfully secured freedom and prosperity. Which if we are honest is what on 21 March 2003 became morally requisite on all our parts, pro or anti invasion alike. It’s unlikely the next President will even try, and half a decade from now the Libby’s will thank their lucky stars they are well out of it. A benign conviction (and likely Bush pardon) like his is going to look like a mighty attractive Iraq ‘exit strategy’ to whichever luckless bastard (or bitch) is sitting atop a vindictive, broke and increasingly isolationist US populace. Because that populace still doesn’t get one important thing about Iraq yet: In geopolitical terms, there is no exit strategy for the US now. It simply doesn’t exist.
Rush Limbaugh freaks out: http://www.crooksandliars.com/Media/Play/15010/1/poking-the-bear.mp3 Be careful. You’re poking the bear people.
That is the problem, Gwynn. The US system places far too much power in the hands of far too few over far too many. Add in the idea that the office of the US president is supposed to be almost revered, and these militarist crimes will continue to occur. Specially when fools like Bush can gain power – not once but twice!
Awesome wrap up Gwynn.
To answer obs’ objection – follow this link:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/03/06/juror-speaks-out-libby-is-guilty-but-hes-the-fall-guy/
Then check out about a million press reports which say basically the same thing. I didn’t really have time to write a comprehensive post before 7am when I was getting ready for work.
Obby’s going to have his hands full as the week draws to a close.
It’s him and FOX against the world on Scooter. Your next task of denial Obby will concern the Sacked Attorneys mystery. While Firedog Lake have Scooter covered, try Josh Marshall for all the freshness on the latest GOP unravelling.
Sigh, remember when “getting” Dan Rather was considered an achievement?
Seems pretty penny ante when compared to the change being provoked by lib’rul bloggers in the US. There’s an opening there Obby….
“The US system places far too much power in the hands of far too few over far too many.”
Don’t agree, wbb. The US system of democracy is fine. Criticism of Bush’s Iraq misadventure ought to be rigourously confined to…criticism of Bush’s Iraq misadventure. As Americans are finally realising, that catastrophic singularity is more than enough to assure his place in history as the worst ever US President, anyway. Don’t bin the baby with the bathwater, though. There’s plenty wrong with non-Bush America, if less than most countries, but trying to articulate what it might be through the opportunistic prism of Iraq just plays into the hands of those who want invasion opponents to situate their vindicated outrage at this policy, this Administration even, in a wider anti-American worldview. Duped ‘pro-invasion liberals’ like Nick Cohen and our own Pamela Bone, for example, are trying hard just now to ameliorate their own dawning useful idiot-hood by contrasting their (mythical) moral clarity with the (equally mythical) irrational West-hatred of an invented strawman Left cavorting in bed with terrsts and illiberal regimes. An oldie but a goodie: if get something wrong, invent another guy who got something even wronger, and screech: ‘Well, at least I’m not as wrong as that asshole‘. Don’t help make that essentially lifeless strawman dance on cue to their baited ‘G’arn, bash America for us, Lefty’ ditty, wbb. Don’t give ‘em room to sidestep their own culpability in this. All of us need to be Enlightened enough to look hard in the mirror of our consciences on Iraq.
More importantly, what you say is just not true and certainly not fair to America. Honest scrutiny reminds us that these latest ‘militarist crimes’ (ahem) were (as ever) the result not of the US system working to fail, but failing to work. There were at least four broad systemic mechanisms I can think of without thinking much by which gentle America should, if important people had done their jobs conscientiously and kept their nerve in the post 9/11 frenzy of patriotism and fear, have short-circuited this calamity:
- Congress should never have passed the Iraq Resolution.
- The non-elected arms of the Administration – State, Pentagon, A-G, the Int Communities – ought to have served the Constitution, not the President, as their oath of duty demands if there’s ever a conflict. And shown some gumption and wit in doing so.
- The Fourth Estate should have reported what it knew to be lies as lies during the build-up to invasion – particularly focussing on the PNAC agenda and the role and provenance of Chalabi’s INC.
- Treasury (prompted by leading business figures and Wall Street, say) ought to have costed the invasion more honestly and publicly in advance. This alone would have made it politically near-impossible for Bush. When all else has got suckered in America, the bottom line is often the sceptical-check of last resort.
wbb, I reckon a properly working US system would never have allowed this FP travesty to get off the wacky PNACism drawing board. Perhaps Osama bin Laden’s vague hope was to throw ‘the system’ out just far and long enough on 9/11 for a malleable President to be duchessed by kooks and thugs into doing his own wonderful country lasting damage by over-reacting in exactly the wrong direction and way. If so, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Hardly any cause for celebration, much less criticism of that nation’s splendid system and ideals as such. Thanks for your time and thoughts, wbb.
Zorronsky: You’re v. kind to think and say so. And that’s the second coolest blog tag I’ve ever seen, btw. Is it your real name? You sound like a shadowy radical libertarian in a dystopian Terry Gilliam film.
Gwynn, I agree it’s important criticism of the US invasion of Iraq should not be susceptible to easy dismissal as just more America-hating.
But I don’t think that discussion on whether the US system hands over to much executive power to the Whitehouse would fall into that category.
Was not that Congress mislead by the Whitehouse into believing that the President knew better than they did? Do congressional members have sufficient, timely and unmediated access to information from military and security organisations? If they don’t then one elected person – the president – has too much power over the debate.
But they didn’t. Why? Is it not possible they didn’t because the moral authority of the presidential office is too great in US political culture? And that therefore they kept stumm because “nobody ever got sacked” for obeying the Whitehouse?
But they didn’t. Judith Miller for eg contented herself with channelling Whitehouse propaganda instead. Again I ask if it is not because the US presidency holds a large part of US opinion in its thrall?
When your president says that you are engaged in a Global War on Terror, you don’t think it politic to mention your reservations about the cost. Not when Defence says it’s going to be a cakewalk, the Fourth Estate is cheer-leading and Congress has rushed thru the necessary vote.
And while, obviously, we have to go with the American system we’ve got, not the American system I reckon would be better – I don’t think it is letting those who perpetrated this ongoing atrocity off the hook to occasionally take a broader view of the political structure that has bequeathed the Iraqi people this nightmare.
I’m not trying to claim the US system is so bad that this was the inevitable result. Merely that given the toxic array of individuals and interests which congealed around the Whitehouse in 2000, that the political culture and structure wasn’t up to the task of repelling them.
Well, wbb, the Prez typically has more power in time of war. Of course, when the Prez orchestrates that war… But what we are really talking about is a distortion of the American system of checks and balances orchestrated by characters obsessed with executive power like Cheney and Rumsfeld, the old Nixonians. Sometimes the checks and balances work. Not when there’s a supine Congress and media, though. I suspect we agree on most of this, but I’m not sure whether you’re talking about the evisceration of the governmental structures under Bush, or how the US system always functions.
America’s a very paradoxical country in many ways. Strong distrust for government is reflected in its institutions. Yet it’s built up huge military power and reach.
Immanuel Wallerstein touches on some of these issues in his latest commentary piece on Iran:
http://fbc.binghamton.edu/203en.htm
‘- The Fourth Estate should have reported what it knew to be lies as lies during the build-up to invasion -”
Aint that the ever loving truth, the media are as complaisant as the neo cons in the Iraq fiasco, and are still following the party line.It is a complaisant/compliant/biased media that is even now, laying the propaganda frame-work for a possible air attack on Iran.
At the end of the day,why any one is surprised that America embroiled itself in Iraq is beyond me,the same old bullshit was served up to the American people about Kuwait/ Korea/Viet Nam/Panama etc, now as then, they bought it.
If Osama bin Laden didn’t exist,the American media would have invented him,for the crooks and ruthless bastards that is America incorperated,he wasn’t so much the enemy but the saviour of a system that is not only not working,but is rotten to its foundation.Bush and his coterie of fucktards, are just a few names of the long list of shitbag leaders in American history.Bush will soon be gone, and the next anointed President will lay waste to the plebs,knowing the gullibility of the American people knows no bounds.
I understand that there has been “evisceration of the governmental structures under Bush” and that this is probably prime in all this. But yes I was talking also about “how the US system always functions”.
I am wondering if the office of the US president isn’t too powerful both in real terms and in emotional terms.
In real terms, the US a has a single elected official – the president – with enormous power. Here, for example, a PM would have to maintain the direct support of a majority of his elected colleagues at all times.
In emotional terms, the president in the US seems too often to be seen as embodying the national character and will to an unhealthy degree. There is no president in opposition. There is no whisper of doubt.
Here we have a PM who can stand for us also in times of national importance but there is always an opposition leader who is willing (99% of the time) to voice at least disquiet but mostly outright disagreement. Debate is constant.
In the US, the president always has, by definition, 100% of the Whitehouse votes. Here, the PM has, very often, only a slim majority of votes and sometimes in only one house.
Fair comment. But the casting asides of restraints on presidential powers (including things like “signing statements” asserting the rights of the executive to ignore Congress’ intentions with legislation) really exacerbates the tendencies you speak of. Of course, at some points in US history (late 19th century, or the Republican post-WW1 administrations, particularly Coolidge’s), the Prez was pretty irrelevant in many ways.
Worth noting as well is the tendency for incompetence built into the huge US bureaucracy and its warring fiefdoms – eg. State vs. Defence in the Bush first term – which was exacerbated by the “Decider-in-Chief’s” inattention to his job.
This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning.
Good points, wbb. Sure, each of those four check-and-balance mechanisms I mentioned failed. There were others, too. I don’t deny the points you make about the nasty pressures placed on individuals at the relevant check points by the Bushies, especially the grubbier types just like Libby. And I do agree that in times of crisis the C-in-C’s mystique and perceived omnipotence is greatly amplified. It certainly makes it harder to stand up to it when the White House is intent on war. Harder, but not impossible. And as a species we can’t afford to forget – ever – that in the end, we each of us alone are responsible for what we do and do not do. Now, of course, there are scores of ‘yes’ vote Reps and Senators kicking themselves, wishing they’d voted ‘no’ on the Iraq Resolution (just to take the first failed checkpoint). For the sake of our civic workability we can’t simply ‘blame’ the President for ‘duping’ them. Part of their job as Reps & Senators is NOT to be duped. However imperfectly, the Committee System does give the Houses a quasi-independent look-in on stuff like intelligence, too, so I don’t buy the mock-outrage coming from the more senior ‘yes’ voters, anyway. Because there were plenty of Reps and Senators who weren’t ‘duped’. Those weren’t unanimous votes, y’know. More broadly, there were CIA whistleblowers. There were dissenting generals and diplomats and int analysts. There were sceptical reporters. There were many highly-public critics of this lunacy, and they were being heard. Just nowhere near enough to counter the majority groupthink, especially when such a large and aggressive portion of that majority dedicated so much of its pre-invasion ‘debate’ time to trashing those dissenters. But if one single Robin Cook could resign from the UK government in protest, making in his speech what turned out to be a pretty fair fist of the truth about Saddam’s WMD; if one single Andrew Wilkie could sacrifice his career over the way he (rightly) argued intelligence was being misused and misrepresented; if one single Seymour Hersch could not be swept up and away by the paranoia and groupthink and keep asking obvious questions…then while your points about WH power are accurate with respect to all those in the lemming packs who ran obediently over the cliff after President Bush, they aren’t really mitigating factors. If one lemming doesn’t allow himself to be bullied into jumping, all of them could have. There were plenty more than one, too.
That’s why catharthis trials of the principals like these always underwhelm me as much as calls to change ‘the system’. It’s not ‘the system’s’ fault too many people failed it. Still, I bet the ’system’ is energetically ‘addressed’ now, as another mechanism for culpable people to pretend they are not. Such are the ways those vast lemmings packs, without which Libby et al would have remained just another effete would-be Ism-ist, will slake their thirst for absolution of their own sins-of-omission-and-apathy. Reform the system. Shave any sin-committing head they can get in the stocks. Beat their breasts. Trumpet the new era. Sweep, sweep, sweep. String ‘em up. Fine. The Libby’s will get no sympathy from me. But the increasingly hysterical righteousness with which the barbers of Iraq will scythe themselves clear of the past will distract us all from being honest about our own culpability here, major or minor. And so as a democratic society we will doubtless make the same mistakes a generation or two down the track, choosing to forget again that when Burke warns us that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, that ‘good men’ bit DOES mean ‘ME’, no matter how big (Congressman) or small (mere voter) is my role in our ’system’ of democratic agency-and-responsibility.
Thanks for an interesting exchange all.
Hold up on the mangled recounting of events guys or you might be charged with perjury.
I don’t think Bush will need to pardon Libby, but we’ll see.
Bush gave an interview today in Spanish where he said he had no intention of pardoning Libby.
LP’s Washington operative reports that Dick Cheney has been put on heavy -duty course of Warfarin since returning from Australia. Are you all thinking what I am thinking? (Warfarin was originally developed as a rat poison). Thus:
1. He exchanged fluids with our Ratty.
2. DVT due to flying high and long to avoid air to air missiles.
3. Anxiety about Scooter singing to Fitz to try to get a reduction in porridge time – this leads to Dick having a surge of adrenalin causing an accelerated thrombotic reaction.
Gwynn Tull,
you make an interesting argument that the system of government in America should not be scapegoated so that individual responsibility can get swept under the carpet. Individuals are important. Rove chose Bush, and in an earlier time Kristol chose Dan Quayle to channel his ideas. Its strange how the smartest operators choose the dumbest politicians.
And George Bush. Did he select Douglas Feith, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Perle, Ashcroft, Abrams, Cheney, etc. Or did they select him? These people were the main protagonists for war in Iraq. Perle was called the architect of the war. Feith was his head propaganda minister.
Except for Cheney – who got voted in on Bush’s coattails – not one of these people were elected to their positions.
How do unelected officials like this, with their own wild-eyed agendas, get to hold sway over the the congress on such an important matter, and there is nothing wrong with the system?
Gwynn, I’d like to read your posts, but they’re a bit dense. Could you break them into pars of, say, no more than two sentences?
Didn’t Cristy reinforce the three par rule for comments recently? It really does help the discussion if people can express their point succinctly.
Yes Kim. People need to realise it’s a blog, not War & Peace. Shortish and sharpish is all the rage.