Here's the Scooter Libby indictment in a nutshell: A washed up ambassador turned weaselly liar wanted to see Karl Rove "perp walked" for an actual alleged crime. So said weaselly liar attempts to create an actual alleged crime by outing his own wife in the New York Times in an op ed piece where he blames others for outing his wife, who couldn't actually be outed anyway because she wasn't a covert CIA agent. With the help of his equally weaselly little buddy, the "senior" senator from New York, Chuckie Schumer, he indignantly demands an investigation into the non-outing of his wife who couldn't be outed because she wasn't undercover. In the end, the special prosecutor investigation demanded by Chuckie the weasel as a favor to Joe the weaselly liar, fails to uncover a crime because no crime was committed and, hence, fails to result in Karl doing the frog walk. Instead, the investigation into the alleged non-crime snares a smaller but equally hated fish for allegedly lying about a non-crime that was never committed. And there you have the indictment of Scooter Libby.
To tell the story of the non-outing of the non-spy that resulted in the indictment of Scooter Libby for a non-crime, you have to start with this fact: The term "CIA leak case" is a farce in itself because there was nothing to leak; Valerie Plame hadn't been a covert agent for years.
From this fact we can infer another fact: The term "undercover CIA agent" to describe Valerie Plame is a lie. The same is true for the terms "covert CIA operative", "undercover CIA officer" and "CIA spy" all terms that have been thrown around in the willing, slavish, lapdog liberal media to describe this woman, who was, at best a CIA employee working in a place no more dangerous than CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
With these two facts in mind, let's start at the beginning: With the washed up ambassador turned weaselly liar and his trip to Niger, arranged by his wife, Valerie Plame, the non-spy. This is where "the former ambassador", upon returning from Niger, began to tell several different stories to several different organizations and entities. But don't take my word for it, read it straight from the web site of the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which issued the report on the Iraq/Niger connection:
In an interview with Committee staff, Mr. Wilson was asked how he knew some of the things he was stating publicly with such confidence. On at least two occasions he admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all. For example, when asked how he “knew” that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved “a little literary flair.”
The former Ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading. Surely, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has unique access to all of the facts, should have been able to agree on a conclusion that would correct the public record. Unfortunately, we were unable to do so.
One of the big things he conveniently left out of his several stories was that there WAS an Iraq/Niger connection; but why sweat the details and the actual facts when your goal is to take down a Republican administration?
If there is any doubt in your mind that this was the liar Wilson's ultimate goal consider this:
Joseph Wilson has had extensive ties to the Democratic Party throughout much of his time in Washington. Wilson is an unabashed supporter and donor to the Kerry/Edwards campaign for the presidency. In 2000, he donated to Vice President Gore’s election, as has his wife, Valerie Plame. In the mid-Eighties, Wilson worked for Gore as a congressional staffer. He has donated money to such liberal stalwarts as Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. He has in the recent past spoken to liberal “527” groups like Win Without War, which is a part of MoveOn.org, the premiere liberal hate group that is renowned for its coarse and hate-inspired political sloganeering.
If you need more evidence of Joe Wilson's aversion to the truth, The Nine Lives of Joe Wilson's Reputation, originally published in The Weekly Standard on July 25, 2005, does a great job of chronicling Wilson's passion for dishonesty.
So far, the facts are this: The idea that Joe Wilson's wife was a "spy" was a farce and Joe Wilson's trip to Niger on a mission for which "the former ambassador" was completely unqualified (last time I check the guy was just a washed up ambassador, not a spy or weapons inspector) was a farce. So the only conclusion it is possible to come to in light of all of these facts is that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's entire investigation is a farce as well.
Again, don't take my word for it; take Fitzgerald's word himself, straight from his press conference last Friday:
Let me then ask your next question: Well, why is this a leak investigation that doesn't result in a charge? I've been trying to think about how to explain this, so let me try. I know baseball analogies are the fad these days. Let me try something.
He's been trying to think about how to explain why no crime was committed and yet Scooter Libby is being charged with covering up a crime that never happened -- in other words Fitzgerald has been desperately trying to figure out how to explain the ridiculous and unexplainable. Although you can read his stupid baseball analogy yourself, I can assure you, it wasn't worth posting here.
The fact that Plame wasn't a spy and no one outed her but her husband and the fact that Fitzgerald is probably, nearly a week after his press conference, trying to find a rational explanation for indicting Libby makes it no surprise that Fitzgerald's 22-page indictment of Libby makes no mention of "leaking" the name of a "CIA operative", because, as it has been well established, there was no covert operative's name to leak and, if anyone leaked it, her husband did. And it's strange that although his indictment makes no allusion to the idea that Libby "outed" a "CIA agent", Fitzgerald insists that Valerie Plame the non-spy was outed even though she wasn't:
FITZGERALD: The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It's important that a CIA officer's identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation's security.
Valerie Wilson's cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003.
But Mr. Novak was not the first reporter to be told that Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, Ambassador Wilson's wife Valerie, worked at the CIA. Several other reporters were told.
So in perpetrating the lie that he knows to be a lie in his press conference, you can see that Fitzgerald has exactly as much credibility as the liar Wilson does, which is to say none. And we're talking about the guy who is indicting Scooter Libby for "lying". If Fitzgerald indeed thought that he could've have charged Libby with "outing" Plame, he would have done so. He also might have done well to tell Joe Wilson that his wife's identity was "classified" because Wilson did more to "out" the identity of his non-covert wife than anyone. After all, in addition to "outing" his non-spy wife in the New York Times, Wilson appeared in a color spread in Vanity Fair magazine with his non-spy wife and the two were well known in Washington social circles. And as far as Valerie the non-spy goes, the New York Sun in an editorial the other day made this simple but brilliant point:
If Ms. Plame didn't want her identity out, she shouldn't have gotten her husband a secret mission and then allowed him to wage a public campaign against the president's foreign policy.
So what we've got here is a severe case of Special Prosecutor Syndrome: Patrick Fitzgerald slaved for years and came up with nothing so the best he could possibly come up with is to indict somebody -- anybody -- for lying about nothing. And if the liar Wilson, his non-spy wife and the weasel Schumer weren't going to get Rove, they were at least going to get ONE member of the Bush Administration and not some pissant reporter. So Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the one who gets indicted for nothing.
But what about "perjury" the liberals among you are saying? Yes, all those solemn faces and voices on the TV over the weekend -- liberal and conservative alike -- saying "why, yes perjury is a very serious charge and if Scooter Libby is guilty of perjury, that is a very serious offense." This liberal red herring -- the "it's the seriousness of the charge, not the nature of the evidence" is total and complete crap. Using this favorite liberal standard for the guilt of a conservative, the farcical (or maybe not so much) charge "Barney Frank anally raped a baboon at the National Zoo" carries more weight than the farcical charge "Scooter Libby lied about who he found out the identity of Valerie Plame from even though revealing the identity of Valerie Plame was not a crime" does. (My apologies to the esteemed Representative Frank for "outing" him.) The simple fact of the matter here is that Scooter Libby had no reason to recall inconsequential conversations from three years ago about the identity of someone of whose identity, in the final analysis, was of no consequence.
Tell me what you had for breakfast two and a half years ago last Tuesday. Or better yet, tell me the exact details of a conversation you had at your workplace two years ago with a co-worker regarding some detail of that co-worker's job or your job or some other detail involving some other colleague. How much do you want to bet that your recollection of that conversation now, assuming you could even recall it, is going to be different than what the conversation actually was at the time? Furthermore, your recollection of it will no doubt be substantially different than your colleague's recollection of it. Perhaps any scribbled notes you took regarding that conversation at the time, should you happen to come upon them, would be substantially different than what you told someone about that conversation today. This is exactly the situation Scooter Libby finds himself in: Being badgered into recalling the minute details of inconsequential conversations he had with Bush Administration colleagues and reporters several years ago and not being able to; then being tripped up by notes he made about one of those conversations years later.
So there you have it: Scooter Libby as the victim of a liberal witch hunt on the Bush Administration, shrieking liberals demanding an apology from the Bush Administration for doing nothing and screaming for Karl Rove's head on a platter -- again for doing nothing. Now we have the Democrat's ridiculous grandstanding today on Capitol Hill, calling for a secret session of the senate -- again, for nothing more than the massaging of their own egos and a huge bit of political grandstanding for their party at the expense of the Bush Administration and Scooter Libby who did nothing more than being a little forgetful about details he had no real reason to remember.
I recall a time not too long ago when conservatives were accused of witch hunts against liberal presidents – back when liberal presidents were actually perjuring themselves in front of grand juries; back when liberal presidents were having their mistresses swear out false affidavits for presentation to said grand juries; back when liberal presidents were paying large sums of money for settlement of sexual harassment claims. (By the way, has this certain liberal president gotten his license to practice law back after losing it for committing perjury?) Back when a certain liberal president and his wife saw fit to go begging to little old ladies in order to amass several million dollars in a "legal defense fund" -- a first in presidential history. Coincidentally, this was at the same time that wives of certain liberal presidents were misplacing billing records from work done for a development corporation in Arkansas for which she had a substantial interest; the same investigation in which several close friends and acquaintances of a certain liberal president and first lady ended up not only indicted, but convicted and thrown in jail. Another happy memory from these not so long ago times involves the hurried “tidying” of the White House office of Clinton buddy and attorney in the White House counsel’s office Vince Foster after his “suicide” in Fort Marcy Park. And who can forget, again from that same not so long ago era and involving the same liberal president and first lady, the selling of missile secrets to the Chinese for campaign contributions or the White House “coffees” and expensive overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom or dialing for dollars from the Vice President’s office? When you recall even a tiny portion of all the actual crimes and actual perjury committed by liberals in Democratic presidential administrations not too long ago, the contrived charges against Scooter Libby are even more obviously ridiculous and trumped up. But why should we expect any less than a conservative witch hunt over a bunch of trumped up charges from the pack of hypocritical, lying weasels the Democratic Party has become? We can only expect more from these jackasses as the mid-term elections approach: The lies, hypocrisy and false charges are only bound to get worse.
by Steve Bowers |
