Another Moneyshot Quote

"I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."

-- Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, on Dick Cheney.

Murtha, who has a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts from his service in Vietnam, retired as a colonel from the Marines after 37 years and was elected to Congress in 1990. He serves on the House Appropriations Committee, which among other things oversees military spending. White House press secretary Scott McClelland, following the Chickenhawk-in-Chief around in Korea, took his mouth off the President's boots long enough to describe his boss as "baffled" -- no surprise there -- but then began the Swift-Boat-style smear by saying Murtha was "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party."

Now I proudly consider myself one of those, and as such don't consider that kind of comment an insult, especially when I consider the source. But how I would take it isn't the point; how it's intended is.

Speaker Denny Hastert, himself a Vietnam draft avoider (he had bad knees, so he stayed home to wrestle) described his own fat ass as "saddened". "Rep. Murtha and Democratic leaders have adopted a policy of cut and run," he said.

This is how the White House and the Republican leadership treats the people who actually supported them on the war. The ones who truly believed they were doing the right thing at the outset.

They piss all over them. Publicly.

Reuters buried the lede (but I dug it up)

Not that there wasn't anything newsworthy on the first page, but on the second page of this Reuters news item, rather innocuously headlined "Post urged to probe Woodward's role in CIA case":

A White House official said on Thursday that national security adviser Stephen Hadley was not Woodward's source on Plame. According to current and former administration officials and lawyers, neither was: President George W. Bush himself, top political adviser Karl Rove, Libby, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, counselor Dan Bartlett, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former CIA director George Tenet, and former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin.

You may have noticed that Dick Cheney is conspicuously absent from that list.

Now on the one hand, why should I believe an unnamed White House official when it turns out I shouldn't have believed Scottie McClellan when he said that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had nothing to do with the CIA leak?

Unnamed sources in the Bush administration lie like rugs. Even the offical White House spokesperson doesn't know what the truth is. And besides, why doesn't this conflict with the offical position that the White House does not comment on an ongoing investigation?

Are they lying now or were they lying then?

Eh...

My money is back on Vice President Torture as the felonious leak, especially with the news yesterday that Cheney refused to comment on the Woodward bombshells.

No wonder "Last Throes" Dick has been so grouchy lately.

Moneyshot Quotes of the Week

The last couple of weeks I have simply made headlines out of them ...

(Pat Robertson, by virtue of his condemning the city of Dover, PA for kicking their creationists out of office, has been inducted into the MsQotW Hall of Fame. From now on we can all ignore everything he ever says.)

"War is not a Republican or Democrat (sic) issue. The casualties of war are from both parties. The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years."

-- Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., departing again from the Rove talking points

"When we have our majority leader being indicted and a bridge to nowhere, then it's time for us to reflect upon the Republican Party."

-- Rep. Charlie Bass, R-N.H., who also said that the House Republican conference "would be healthier and more unified if we had real elections and if Tom DeLay would step aside".

It was Hadley all along

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA officer, attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials tell Raw Story.

Hadley, you may remember, has been previously implicated in the Niger forgeries, and has also been the point man in 'catapulting the propaganda that "everyone believed" Iraq had WMD.

You may also recall that Hadley was the fall guy for the infamous "sixteen words" in the State of the Union speech. His excuse? "I forgot I was told to take that out."

So it would seem that the National Security Advisor of the United States of America appears to have been at the center of most of the lies told by this administration over the past four years.

If he keeps going at this rate, he'll be promoted to Secretary of State when Condi Rice replaces Cheney (who will be resigning shortly due to health concerns).

Update (11/17): I could still be correct about Cheney.

Woodward's disgrace

One of my favorite sites described Bob Woodward, all the way back in September, as a "Pre$$titute Extraordinaire." And did so again in October with Bob Woodward, Pre$$titute Extraordinaire (Part 2).

Rook's Rant:

"Woodward has to be the biggest disappointment in all of journalism. At what point did he stop being a reporter and start being a Republican mouth piece? It seems traitorous to journalism. Even worse, he appears to be an apologist for the administration."

Pamela at the Democratic Daily has more:

"This all comes out now, more than a year after disclosures of this sort might have swayed voters' opinions in the ‘04 presidential election. How convenient is that?"

Others commenting on the Woodward bombshell include The Carpetbagger, Mahablog, and BooMan.

Woodward and Bernstein were icons of journalistic integrity, modern-day Thomas Paines who saw corruption and followed the links to the nation's first constitutional crisis. They were idols of mine as soon as I saw All the President's Men. I was 18 years old when I first saw Redford, Hoffman, Robards, Holbrook, et. al. reprise the real-life journalists -- and "DeepThroat", whom we finally learned (from Woodward, who hid the secret for thirty years) was a CIA man named Mark Felt. The lesson I learned was that no man, not even the President of the United States, is above the law.

Richard Nixon was brought down by two dogged reporters (and the editors that backed them) who were unafraid of pressure and threats. At least, that is how my eighteen-year-old brain interpreted it.

And now Woodward's image lies in tatters. At his own hand. You might as well have told me that Babe Ruth used steroids.

The man who brought down Nixon turns out to be nothing more than a shill for Bush.

And a liar.

The President has four Mommies

OK, this is just weird.

The Washington Moonie Times' Insight magazine, courtesy of Americablog:

President Bush feels betrayed by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office, administration sources say. The president’s reclusiveness in the face of relentless public scrutiny of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and White House leaks regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame has become so extreme that Mr. Bush has also reduced contact with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, administration sources said on the condition of anonymity.

And then Drudge follows up with this:

The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions.

Who says the United States has never had a woman President? Hell, we have four of them right now.

But don't tell the other kids at school; they might tease little Georgie. That could be very traumatic for him, and later in life he might start to drink, take drugs, lie, deceive and evade his responsibilities.

Georgie, I want you to know that it is perfectly fine to have two four mommies. We are not prejudiced. Diversity is beautiful. It's like a game! No daddies allowed in your clubhouse!

Plamegate, Watergate, fossil fuel, and Dick Cheney

There were a couple of items that broke late yesterday that seem to be more bad news for the Cheney administration regarding le affaire Plame. First, from the front page of this morning's WaPo:

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

So you really ought to go and read the whole piece, because there are several things revealed that portend to be big trouble for a lot of people. More:

Woodward did not share the information with Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. until last month, and the only Post reporter whom Woodward said he remembers telling in the summer of 2003 does not recall the conversation taking place.

"The only Post reporter" is Walter Pincus, who among the members of the MSM has done the yeoman's labor unwinding this tangle. Still more:

Woodward's testimony appears to change key elements in the chronology Fitzgerald laid out in his investigation and announced when indicting Libby three weeks ago. It would make the unnamed official -- not Libby -- the first government employee to disclose Plame's CIA employment to a reporter. It would also make Woodward, who has been publicly critical of the investigation, the first reporter known to have learned about Plame from a government source.

The testimony, however, does not appear to shed new light on whether Libby is guilty of lying and obstructing justice in the nearly two-year-old probe or provide new insight into the role of senior Bush adviser Karl Rove, who remains under investigation.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Rove, said that Rove is not the unnamed official who told Woodward about Plame and that he did not discuss Plame with Woodward.

Got all that?

"A senior administration official" -- not Libby, not Rove -- told Woodward about Valerie Wilson first. Beforethe leak trickled to Novak, Judy Miller, Tim Russert, or any of the other reporters. Woodward didn't think it was important enough to mention this to his boss until a month ago -- coincidentally about the time Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby -- but Woodward claims he did mention it to the WaPo writer leading the CIA leak investigation, who claims he doesn't remember that happening.

Bob Woodward is on the record as having called the special prosecutor's investigation into the leaking of a CIA agent's name "laughable" and the consequences of that leak "quite minimal".

Editor and Publisher has more.

There is certainly a few best-selling books' worth of irony here, with Bob Woodward being eyebrows-deep in the government's deception as opposed to his '70's role as intrepid reporter, but for now I'd rather speculate on the unnamed official who leaked to him.

It's "Big Time" Dick Cheney, I'm guessing.

Speaking of Vice President Marquis de Sade, his oil task force is also Page A-1 in the Post today:

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

So you're telling me that the oil company CEOs lied about this? Imagine that. Lying to Congress is still a crime, though since they weren't sworn, the crime isn't perjury.

Where's the Vice President going to be for the next few days?

Yesterday he got jeered at a ceremony in Tennessee honoring Howard Baker, who had a small role in Watergate if I recall correctly. Something related to a question regarding 'what did the President know and when did he know it' kinda thing. I hear he's planning on being in Houston next month ...

W: "YOU screwed up, you trusted us"

That's the abridged version of what Fred Kaplan is saying. It's worth repeating his words, though:

President George W. Bush has suddenly shifted rhetoric on the war in Iraq. Until recently, the administration's line was basically, "Everything we are saying and doing is right." It was a line that held him in good stead, especially with his base, which admired his constancy above all else. Now, though, as his policies are failing and even his base has begun to abandon him, a new line is being trotted out: "Yes, we were wrong about some things, but everybody else was wrong, too, so get over it." ...

Let's go to the transcript:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

This is not true. Two bipartisan panels have examined the question of how the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs turned out so wrong. Both deliberately skirted the issue of why. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence deferred the second part of its probe—dealing with whether officials oversimplified or distorted the conclusions reached by the various intelligence agencies — until after the 2004 election, and its Republican chairman has done little to revive the issue since. Judge Laurence Silberman, who chaired a presidential commission on WMDs, said, when he released the 601-page report last March, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." ...

That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate—who had access to the same intelligence—voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

This is the crucial point: these Democrats did not have "access to the same intelligence." The White House did send Congress a classified National Intelligence Estimate, at nearly 100 pages long, as well as a much shorter executive summary. It could have been (and no doubt was) predicted that very few lawmakers would take the time to read the whole document. The executive summary painted the findings in overly stark terms. And even the NIE did not cite the many dissenting views within the intelligence community. The most thorough legislators, for instance, were not aware until much later of the Energy Department's doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were designed for atomic centrifuges—or of the dissent about "mobile biological weapons labs" from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. ...

What we didn't know—and what the Democrats in Congress didn't know either—was that many insiders did have reasons to conclude otherwise. There is also now much reason to believe that top officials—especially Vice President Dick Cheney and the undersecretaries surrounding Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon—worked hard to keep those conclusions trapped inside.

Everything this administration does has the stench of deception around it.

Gammage for Governor?

A couple of sites are reporting that Bob Gammage, a Democrat with a long resume' in state party politics -- mostly recently as a Texas Supreme Court Justice -- is considering a run for Governor.

The links above have all the earmarks of a viral marketing campaign , complete with an e-mail posted here (scroll down to the comments) from Gammage soliciting "your honest, unvarnished and critical opinions" about his prospects.

I am fully supporting the candidacy of Chris Bell, but if Gammage intends to make it a contested primary in March, I think that would be a good thing for the Democratic Party.

Judith Miller To Take Job Actually Carrying Libby's Bags

(The header above and the article below from Tom Burka's Opinions You Should Have:)

Will Continue Work She Started As Reporter At NY Times

Reporter Judith Miller announced today that she will resign from the staff of the New York Times to take a job with White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Miller testified recently before a federal grand jury concerning conversations she had with Libby about CIA agent Valerie Plame.

"Working directly under Scooter seemed like a natural move," said Miller. Miller may also assist Libby with some deep cleaning of intransigent stains in his apartment. "Yes," Miller confirmed, "I will continue to do his dirty work."

Miller has come under fire lately for a 'chummy' relationship with Libby that some say clouded her reporting on Iraq's alleged WMD. Miller wrote five crucial articles advancing the Cheney administration's claims that Iraq possessed WMD, although she later admitted that those articles were "kind of wrong."

"Oops," she said, smiling and shrugging her shoulders.

Responding to critics who alleged that it was, at the very least, poor journalism to uncritically report as fact unsupported theories advanced by President Cheney and Scooter Libby, Miller said, "I can only be as ethical as my sources."

Miller recently spent 85 days in jail to protect the identity of a source whose name she cannot recall.

John Crony-n gets choreographed

by Ralph Reed. I knew he was gay ...

Former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed claimed in a 2001 e-mail to a lobbyist that he choreographed John Cornyn's efforts as Texas attorney general to shut down an East Texas Indian tribe's casino.

The lobbyist was Jack Abramoff, who is under federal investigation along with his partner Michael Scanlon, on allegations of defrauding six Indian tribes of about $80 million between 2001 and 2004. The e-mail, along with about a dozen others, were released last week as part of the investigation. In 2001, Abramoff was working as a lobbyist for the Louisiana Coushatta tribe to prevent rival gaming casinos from siphoning off its Texas customers. He paid Reed as a consultant, and Reed lobbied to get the Alabama-Coushatta and Tigua casinos closed in Texas.

In the Nov. 30, 2001, e-mail, Reed told Abramoff that 50 pastors led by Ed Young, of Second Baptist Church in Houston, would meet with Cornyn to urge him to shut down the Alabama-Coushatta tribe's casino near Livingston, Texas. He said Young would back up the request in writing.

"We have also choreographed Cornyn's response. The AG will state that the law is clear, talk about how much he wants to avoid repetition of El Paso and pledge to take swift action to enforce the law," Reed wrote. "He will also personally hand Ed Young a letter that commits him to take action in Livingston."

Cornyn, now a Republican U.S. senator, had filed a lawsuit in 1999 to shut down a casino operated by the Tigua tribe in El Paso, saying it violated the state's limited gambling laws. In 2002, federal courts shuttered the Tiguas' casino and Cornyn used that ruling to shut down the Alabama-Coushattas' casino.

The entire article, including the transcripts of the e-mail exchanged between Reed and Abramoff about Cornyn, can be found here.

Here's a question for my local paper, the Houston Chronicle: do you plan on investigating this and/or covering it yourselves or are you just going to rely on the wire reports?

(So far, the Austin American Statesman has an identical wire story. Houston Chronicle, nada. Dallas Morning News, zip. Thanks to Sean Paul at The Agonist for the tip.)

Update (11/14): Charles Kuffner has been all over this from the beginning, which was over a year ago.

In honor of her father, on Veterans' Day

My friend Lisa wrote this, and I post it here in its entirety:

I have been thinking about my father a lot lately. It seems like every time we pass another milestone in the Iraq War death count, I think about my dad. No, he didn’t die in a war, but I still believe that war killed him … slowly.

It really saddens me to hear about every new life lost, but for each one of them, how many others’ lives have been irrevocably changed? I was too young to know who my father really was before Viet Nam, but I still realize how it changed him. I was 17 when that realization sunk in.

I was in an advanced history class in high school, which encouraged unusual class projects and different perspectives as opposed to memorization of names and dates. When we reached the Viet Nam era, I had the idea to do an interview with my father about his experiences and how they affected him. He agreed. I had two weeks to write the report. Somehow the weeks passed with him managing to put me off several times.

Finally, the day before it was due, he sat down with me. I asked him to tell me about what it was like. He stared across the room and did not speak. His eyes welled up a bit. He shook his head gently and said, “I’m sorry. I can’t.” He stood and left the room.

Initially, as a rather normal selfish teenager, I wondered, “How the heck am I gonna do this report?!” But then I realized the importance of those two short sentences. It had been almost 17 years, and all he could say was “I’m sorry. I can’t.” That spoke volumes about the horror he had been through. I ended up doing a report on PTSD in Viet Nam veterans and made an A.

In addition to the weight of the terrifying memories, my father also suffered from numerous health problems. Some he believed were related to chemical exposure, most were from alcohol abuse and smoking, both habits he picked up during the war. He would eventually die from cancer, with few treatment options due to damage to his heart and liver.

I often feel like I was cheated. We had a tumultuous family life. Beer was the wall between him and us. At times I thought he hated me because it made him so moody. I was cheated out of having a closer relationship with him, and I was cheated in years as he died in only his 50s. I believe it was war that cheated me and him. I believe that the horrors he experienced changed him forever, and he was unable to cope with it in any other way than by staying numb.

The scene from Fahrenheit 911 that moved me the most was of a young, fresh-faced kid with a hollowness in his eyes talking about his experience. He said, “Every time you kill someone, you can't do it without killing a piece of yourself.” I wondered how many pieces of himself had died already.

I was raised to be patriotic. I even won a scholarship for an essay on patriotism. I love my country, warts and all. I respect people like my father who devote their life’s work to serving their country. I respect them regardless of what mission they are sent on. More than respect, I stand in awe of their commitment. But I respect and love them so much that I can’t bear the thought of them risking death, injury, and emotional trauma for a cause that is not just. They are precious, a resource not to be wasted. It is an INSULT to their honor to use them in an immoral war based on lies and manipulation.

MY troops deserve more respect than that!

My father deserves more respect than that!

Every soldier who has ever served his/her country deserves the knowledge that they and all who come after them will be serving NOBLE causes. It is our duty to ensure that for them.

That is why I march. Justice, to me, is to hold this administration accountable for disrespecting our armed services by committing them to a cause that is beneath them.

I want justice in honor of my father, who gave his life for his country. It just took a long time to happen. I want justice for the men and women we have lost in this war. I want justice for the ones who will come back and never fully recover. I think this justice is also a way of paying respect to the veterans who have served us over the ages. It says “The country you protected strives to live up to your honor.”

Thank you, Dad. I know I didn’t say it enough while you were alive. And thank you to all of you who have committed to protecting me.