The Special Prosecutor’s entire investigation into who allegedly leaked Valerie Plame’s allegedly covert status has “sand thrown in its eyes” by one of the liberal media’s darlings. (Woodward Was Told Of Plame More Than Two Years Ago – WaPo.)
The 9/11 Commission is shown to be the fraud that it always was.
Maybe next week, some Democrats will actually put forward a plan to win the global war on terror? But don’t hold your breath.
After all it is has been 1,528 days since our nation was attacked by al-Qaeda (for the umpteenth time since 1992) on September 11th.
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
Before Iraq War, Bush Critic Feared Osama Might “Boogie to Baghdad”
Since Byron York regrets that so few in the media have picked up on a catchy expression by one of the many people who mispresents his own statments in order to criticize President Bush and so gain media attention, I decided to post on that very expression.
You see, when Richard Clarke, the top White House counterterrorism official in the Clinton Administration, began to understand the level of Bush-hatred in the media, he wrote a book critical of the current Administration’s attitude toward the terrorist threat. He chnaged some of his past opinions and mispresented his views in order to better attack the president. Given this man’s lambasting of that much-reviled (in media circles) Administration, he got top billing on 60 Minutes and soon became the darling of the MSM and its preferred political party–the Democrats.
All were certain that his revelations would help bring down President Bush. After W’s defeat in the 2004 election, most assumed Clarke would get a top post in the Kerry Administraiton. Fortunately, that did not come to pass.
Will, despite Mr. Clarke’s frequent criticism of President Bush, his words prior to the liberation of Iraq help prove that the president made a strong case for war. Indeed, they help debunk the spurious charge that that good man lied in making that case. Well aware of the relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Mr. Clarke “believed that if the United States made bin Laden’s situation too hot in Afghanistan, then, in Clarke’s non-famous words, ‘old wily Osama will likely boogie to Baghdad.’” Please read all of Mr. York’s piece which can be easily confirmed by checking out the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 134).
The more facts come out, the more apparent it becomes that not only did the president not lie, but that he made a very strong case for leading our nation to war against a bloodthirsty tyrant who, while in power, had been busy building relationships with terrorists bent on attacking America.
Thanks to President Bush, that dictator is no longer in power and can’t very well build relationships with terrorists from a prison cell.
(H/t: Instapundit)
Carter–Departing from the Policies of all Previous Ex-Presidents
Busy leveling overheated charges against the elected president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, proves (once again) that he lacks what columnist George Will called the “grace and restraint” required of an ex-president. His recent public remarks are laced with “venom.” And now this man claims that President Bush “has radically departed from (the policies) of all previous presidents.”
No, Jimmy, you got that wrong. It is you who have radically departed from the policies of all previous presidents. They showed enough respect for the office not to lash out at their successors. And not to use their position to meddle in foreign policy.
Although he left the White House in disgrace, Richard Nixon at least had the courtesy to clear his foreign travel with his successors whenever he left the country. When he met with foreign leaders, he made clear he was not doing so in an official capacity.
Despite the failure of his own foreign policy, Carter, however, thinks it’s his business to meddle in world affairs, even if (or perhaps especially if) his policies differ from those of the elected president. In 1990, he lobbied members of the United Nations Security Council to vote against the First Gulf War, that is, Carter urged nations to vote against using force to liberate a sovereign nation which had been invaded. And it wasn’t just Republican presidents he undermined. In 1994, against the wishes of the Clinton Administration, he went to North Korea to negotiate a deal on nuclear arms.
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Democrats Just Want Investigations to Prove What They Believe
When the president commissions a bipartisan investigation into an important matter of policy or law or to study a controversy, reasonable people tend to regard the panel’s conclusions as dispositive of the issue at hand. To be sure, some may question the bias of this or that panelist or the panel’s failure to evaluate certain evidence, but barring such evidence of bias, most will look seriously at the results of the investigation.
Similarly, if the Justice Department brings in a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of criminal behavior, most people expect that his investigation will be thorough. Should the prosecutor find evidence to substantiate such behavior, he will press charges. Without such evidence, he won’t issue indictments. And when the investigation is particularly thorough, people will understand that where no indictment was issued, the prosecutor didn’t find enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonble doubt that a crime had occurred.
As Democrats’ hatred of President Bush increased, they have called for no end to investigations of his Administration. They claimed they wanted to find out the truth. But, when those investigations, be they criminal or informational, reach conclusions with which they disagree, instead of finding such conclusions dispositive, they call for still more investigations. Or, as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid did on Tuesday, misrepresent the findings of an investigation to suit their ends.
Like so many Democrats (and others on the Left), Mr. Reid holds that Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation proves something which Mr. Fitzgerald says the investigation didn’t even address. Given that many on the Left found (to borrow the words of one of my most persistent critics) that “Mr. Fitzgerald handled himself so incredibly well,” they should take him at his word that, “This indictment is not about the war.” But, that statement is at odds with the result they wanted his investigation to yield–evidence that the White House twisted intelligence in order to make the case for war.
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Harry Reid Unhinged–Preferring Political Theater to Public Policy
Apparently, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wasn’t paying any attention to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald when he announced the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s then-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby last Friday. As I noted at the time, Mr. Fizgerald stated clearly, “This indictment is not about the war.”
Today, when breaking Senate precedent by calling for a Secret Session under Senate Rule 21 without informing the leadership of the other party (in this case the Senate’s majority party), Reid acted as if Fitzgerald never spoke those words:
The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.
He must have read a different indictment than I did–indeed, different from the one everyone to the right of moveon.org has read. (Or just read a speech he had written long before the indictment was handed down.)
Paul at Powerline thinks Reid needed this special secret session “to prevent the public from witnessing the spectacle of Democrats making fools out of themselves trying to explain the connection between that indictment and pre-war intelligence on Iraq.” Reid’s antics are nothing more than a stunt, really just a temper tantrum — or perhaps a bone to the party’s left-wing activists — to deflect attention from the president’s rebound in the past few days. And from the failure of the special prosecutor to find what they wanted him to find when he investigated the “leak” of Valerie Plame’s name.
In part, Democrats are still mad that Fizgerald didn’t prove their crazy conspiracy theory about Karl Rove. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts called the Minority Leader’s stunt an “unfortunate event” which resulted in Republicans agreeing “to do what we already agreed to do.”
Democrats aren’t just upset over the non-indictment of Rove and the likelihood of Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, they’re furious that the president they revile has once again seized the offensive. They must now be realizing how they failed to take advantage of the president’s late misfortune, his “past two months of much bad news and many missteps.
If Democrats had spent less time staging such media stunts as that today of Senator Reid, spent less time calling the president (& his allies) names, spent less time misrepresenting his record and put more effort into articulating their ideas and putting forward policies to address the problems facing the nation, they might have kept the president on defense. But, as Mr. Reid’s behavior today shows, they’re more interested in political theater than in public policy.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com
For Some Democrats, it’s (Still) All About Rove
In the wake of the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on a variety of charges related to the way he responded to the investigation of the “leak” of Valerie Plame’s name to the news media, many Democrats and some in the media (particularly the folks at 60 Minutes) seem to be regurgitating talking points they had written long before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the indictment.
Based upon what they are saying, one would expect that Fitzgerald had uncovered a vast conspiracy (aggressively led by the president’s heinous henchman, Dr. Evil himself, Karl Rove) to smear Joe Wilson. Yet, when I read the indictment this weekend, I learned exactly what I had gleaned from news reports (and Fitzgerald’s press conference) on Friday that Libby had been indicted on serious charges, but none of them for the underlying (alleged) crime. And Mr. Rove was not indicted. There was no conspiracy. Indeed, before the investigation, there wasn’t even a crime.
Some Democrats, however, seem to have read a different indictment than I. While Mr. Libby has stepped down, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid says Rove should also resign “because of his role in exposing an undercover CIA officer.” Even though, after a lengthy investigation, Rove wasn’t indicted, wasn’t implicated in any crime, Mr. Reid acts as if the president’s longtime aide had committed some great crime. Perhaps that Democrat is just looking to punish him for the great crime of being the “architect” of President Bush’s re-election last fall.
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Fitzgerald, Libby and Liddy
***UPDATED POST WITH TRANSCRIPT OF FITZGERALD REMARKS — 8:37PM***
In this fast-paced world of cable TV and the Internet, I rarely have a day like today. I’ve been in my car driving from noon to about 4:00PM and had nothing else to do but listen and absorb the indictments handed down today in the “Plame Affair.” Dan has devoted a lot of time to this topic recently, but I’ve not had time. But there was so much going on in my brain as I was listening to the pre-indictment coverage, then live coverage of Fitzgerald’s press conference — that I had to sit down and get write before I forgot it all!
Upfront let me state the obvious: Scooter Libby was stupid. According to FOX News Channel (via XM radio), he apparently was a zealot with White House staff in warning them about the contents of their emails and their notes. Yet his own notes contradicted his “compelling story” (Fitzgerald’s words) about how he was last in a long line of phone calls and his sources were all reporters. So while it remains to be seen if Plame was or was not a “covert” CIA operative (the original charge of Fitzgerald), I completely agree with his decision to indict Libby based on the evidence I’ve heard in the indictment. I honestly think that Libby and Rove thought they could “spin” their way out of this story…. but for heaven’s sake, you do not lie to the FBI or a grand jury! Period.
Which brings me to my second thought. Unfortunately, VtheK and Lorie Byrd beat me too it! Fitzgerald made a strong defense of the seriousness of the law applying to public officials and that perjury and obstruction of justice were serious crimes that violate the public interest. (I will post the transcript when I find it.) When I heard Fitzgerald say this, I smiled broadly. He had just indirectly reinforced the credibility of Ken Starr’s efforts and indirectly condemned President Clinton. President Clinton, too, had “thrown up sand” in the eyes of then Independent Counsel Ken Starr. President Clinton, too, had been ‘indicted’ on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. I bet Hillary must have choked at that point in the press conference. And I figured the wacky Lefties who would glorify Fitzgerald must have coughed up some bile on that point as well.
**UPDATED at 8:37… Imagine these words, by Fitzgerald, in the context of the Clinton impeachment…
but if it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on, and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.
FITZGERALD: And I’d say this: I think people might not understand this. We, as prosecutors and FBI agents, have to deal with false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury all the time. The Department of Justice charges those statutes all the time.
When I was in New York working as a prosecutor, we brought those cases because we realized that the truth is the engine of our judicial system. And if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost.
In Philadelphia, where Jack works, they prosecute false statements and obstruction of justice.
When I got to Chicago, I knew the people before me had prosecuted false statements, obstruction and perjury cases.
FITZGERALD: And we do it all the time. And if a truck driver pays a bribe or someone else does something where they go into a grand jury afterward and lie about it, they get indicted all the time.
Any notion that anyone might have that there’s a different standard for a high official, that this is somehow singling out obstruction of justice and perjury, is upside down.
If these facts are true, if we were to walk away from this and not charge obstruction of justice and perjury, we might as well just hand in our jobs. Because our jobs, the criminal justice system, is to make sure people tell us the truth. And when it’s a high-level official and a very sensitive investigation, it is a very, very serious matter that no one should take lightly.
*****
It was also quite telling that Fitzgerald went out of his way to say first, then stress after being questioned, the total cooperation given to him by this Administration. Paul at Powerline has it on the money. This was the “anti-Watergate.” Maybe we have learned something…..
Finally, must all of our scandals have a similar name involved? G. Gordon Liddy, I. Scooter Libby. Weird. At least if convicted, Libby can look forward to a career in talk radio.
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
FULL TRANSCRIPT OF FITZGERALD PRESS CONFERENCE AT THE JUMP….. [Read more…]
“Plamegate”–Still Trying to Figure Out if Rove Told All
Just before bed, I read this curious paragraph in the New York Times about the “Plamegate” investigation:
Three days before the grand jury in the case expires and with the White House in a state of high anxiety, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, appeared still to be trying to determine whether Mr. Rove had been fully forthcoming about his contacts with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist, in July 2003, they said.
I call this paragraph curious because it seems kind of late in the game “still to be trying” to figure out whether a key witness in this case has told investigators all he knew about his contact with reporters.
Granted, unlike Mr. Fitzgerald, I don’t have access to all the facts in this case nor I have heard Mr. Rove’s testimony — or even read a transcript of that testimony. Since Mr. Cooper has been rather forthcoming about his testimony, we know that Rove’s contact with him on the topic was a “brief conversation” during which Rove merely warned Cooper not to “get too far out on Wilson.” To be sure, Rove did not mention this brief conversation in his initial appearance before the grand jury, but when his attorney alerted him to an e-mail he had written confirming the conversation, Rove voluntarily returned to testify.
In a thoughtful analysis of the discovery of that e-mail, the Anonymous Liberal shows how it came to pass that that neither Rove nor his attorneys discovered that e-mail at that outset of the investigation. (Hat tip: JustOneMinute.) Accepting that the White House may not have deliberately withheld this e-mail, this thoughtful liberal concludes:
The question that remains is whether Rove’s failure to mention his conversation with Cooper was the result of a genuine lapse of memory or a purposeful lack of candor. I suspect the latter, but ultimately it’s the opinions of the grand jurors that will matter.
Perhaps, the prosecutor, like this liberal, suspects Rove’s purposeful lack of candor. And that explains what he is still trying to determine at this late date. While I agree with Anonymous’s first sentence, I disagree with his second. As I blogged recently, I suspect Rove’s failure to testify about the conversation was due to a lapse of memory.
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Gone With the Idealism–The Cynicism of Today’s Leftists
This past weekend at the Liberty Film Festival, in addition to the great flicks I saw, I also enjoyed some fascinating panel discussions. My friend Craig Titley and one of my favorite bloggers, Roger Simon, participated in the Screenwriters’ Panel (perhaps more on that anon) while a panel on the Hollywood Blacklist, a diverse array of speakers considered the question, “Was Communism a Threat to Hollywood?” (I wonder if a liberal film fest would include such a mixed group.)
Impressed by the panel, I bought two of the participants’ books, Richard Schickel’s book on Elia Kazan (in large part because that graduate of America’s finest small college is one of my favorite directors) and Ronald Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left. I began reading Radosh’s book just a few minutes after buying and have found it hard to put down.
In the early chapters, he addresses the idealism of the early Hollywood communists. Back then, communism represented a path to build a better world. Some Hollywood celebrities who joined — or were linked to the Communist Party through their associations or their support of causes with which Communists were involved — did so because of their own experiences with poverty. Others signed up because, in the 1930s (until the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939), the Communists provided leadership “in the resistance to fascism.”
In testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1940, James Cagney explained his involvement:
Under the circumstances under which I was raised . . ., I saw poverty on all sides for a long time. Such a thing leaves its impression; you can’t go through life and build a wall around yourself and say “Everything is fine for me and to hell with the other fellow.”
For the 1930s idealists, Communism served as a positive means to address pressing problems like poverty and what we today would call, social injustice. And the first nation to adopt communism, the Soviet Union, became a “mythic homeland of the radical imagination where the future was being born every day.”
Contrast the idealism of the early Communists with the attitudes of today’s leftists. In the 1930s, leftists had a noble vision of a better world. Today, leftists just project a nasty image onto many present-day leaders, particularly President Bush and his closest associates. They seem more interested in trashing their opponents than in putting forward a positive vision of what they would do in his stead.
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“Hillary’s Gonna Be Indicted!”
As I have been reading various articles about “Plamegate” in the past few days, I have noted the conditional nature of the claims of lawyers “close to the case” about Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s intentions on indicting White House officials. In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, we learn that he “may be piecing together a case that White House officials conspired to leak various types of classified material” while the New York Times reports that he “may believe the evidence presented in a 22-month grand jury inquiry shows that the two White House aides sought to cover up their actions” and “Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have been advised that they may be in serious legal jeopardy.” (Emphasis added in all three quotations.)
Reading these latest articles, only one thing seems clear: while some lawyers close to the case seem eager for Fitzgerald to indict, the special prosecutor himself has not yet made up his mind whether to bring indictments. From what we know, it seems increasingly likely that if Fitzgerald brings any charges, they will not be related to the alleged crime he was hired to investigate, but to how certain White House officials handled the investigation. According to the Times, “Among the charges that Mr. Fitzgerald is considering are perjury, obstruction of justice and false statement – counts that suggest the prosecutor may believe the evidence presented in a 22-month grand jury inquiry shows that the two White House aides sought to cover up their actions.”
And although Fitzgerald has not yet made up his mind, speculation is rampant (even among conservatives) that indictments are imminent. All this reminds me of a Republican colleague’s convictions back in the early days of President Clinton’s second term. This man strode into work one day, smiling and expressing confidently, “Hillary’s gonna be indicted.” “When?” we asked, eager to see the then-president’s very partisan wife behind bars. “Any day now,” came the reply. He had no doubt his information was accurate and that then-First Lady would soon be indicted. (My colleague repeated his refrain (about the imminence of her indictment) for several weeks.)
Despite our hopes (and her shady activities), Mrs. Clinton was never indicted and has continued to remain a prominent figure in Democratic politics. It seems a similar thing is going on today about Rove for, in many ways, Democrats think of Karl Rove in much the same way as Republicans think of Hillary. To his (or her) adversaries, each embodies corruption, hunger for power and an eagerness to use that power to advance his (or her) ideological ends. Just as we wanted Hillary to be indicted, today’s Democrats want Rove to be indicted. Wishful thinking on both sides.
But, as Tom Maguire, who has covered this scandal more thoroughly than any other blogger (at least that I have read), observed in a post last night:
Subject to the caveat that most of the leaks have come from attorneys sympathetic to various Administration officials, and keeping in mind that Fitzgerald may have a lot of evidence we have not seen, let me say this – Karl Rove’s problems with the Matt Cooper phone call are trivial, and Fitzgerald will only hit Rove with that if he is desperate to charge Rove with something and is prepared to lose at trial.
In short, based on what we know, Rove did nothing wrong. Still, his adversaries are certain he will be indicted. Not based on evidence, mind you, but based on their conviction that because he is a horrrible, no good, very bad man, he has to be guilty of something. Sounds similar to Republican attitudes toward Hillary nearly a decade ago.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com
No Evidence of Wrongdoing, but Something Smells Fishy about Libby
Not long after posting my previous piece on Karl Rove and Plamegate, a reader sent me a link to this National Journal piece on the hullabaloo. As I read it, i realized how little attention I had paid to the testimony of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff. Perhaps because I was so fascinated by the Bush-haters’s demonizing of Karl Rove, I focused more on that good man’s role in all this than in other aspects of the case.
As I read the National Journal piece and recalled some other things I had read (and heard) about Libby, something smelled kind of fishy. It just seemed odd, particularly Libby’s relationship with reporter Judith Miller. Not only that. Several articles have noted contradictions between Libby’s testimony and that of other reporters (including Ms. Miller) with whom he had spoken.
While the New York Times and others on the left seem optimistic that recent comments from special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald heighten “the expectation that he intends to bring indictments” (as the Times puts it), I think this expectation is merely wish-fulfillment — predicting the outcome of the investigation that they most desire. To me, however, it seems far from clear that Fitzgerald intends to indict anyone. The Times itself reports that “Mr. Fitzgerald has repeatedly told lawyers in the case that he has not made up his mind about criminal charges.”
This morning on Fox News, Fred Barnes said that Fitzgerald’s present indecision suggests that there is “no overpowering evidence of wrongdoing.”
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Karl Rove, “Plamegate” & Discrediting a Dishonest Democrat
While Andrew Sullivan and others on the left hold that Karl Rove (either or his own or through his mischievous minions) leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to the media in order to “smear Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson,” anyone who spends a few moments studying the facts of the case will see that what little Rove had to say (or do) with the matter involved an attempt to steer a reporter away from the story. That doesn’t sound like much of a smear to me. While the President’s enemies think Rove was involved in an effort to retaliate against a critic, at most, he was involved (and tangentially at that) in an effort to discredit a dishonest critic, a man one who lied to the American people in his criticism of the Administration.
Even Andrew’s one-time New Republic colleague (to whom Andrew introduced me in 1991) Jacob Weisberg (via Instapundit) finds that “Wilson’s accusation that administration officials outed his wife to punish him for speaking up was never really credible.” Based on Judith Miller’s account of her testimony, Weisberg suggests that another Administration official, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff, may have leaked the name, not to smear Wilson, but as part of public dispute between the White House and the CIA. Weisberg notes that “Libby’s comments don’t look anything like retaliation against Joe Wilson—especially now that we know that Libby first mentioned Wilson and his wife to Judith Miller three weeks before Wilson went public with his op-ed piece.” (Emphasis added.)
Indeed, as Bush-haters are salivating at the possibility that Rove might be indicted, so certain are they that he sought to slime Mr. Wilson, they ignore how little Mr. Rove actually said to the media about Ms. Plame. Indeed, so far, I have yet to find any evidence that he ever mentioned her name to anyone at all, much less a reporter (before that name became common knowledge).
It seems Rove addressed the matter only two times, once merely acknowledging that he was aware that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. When columnist Robert Novak mentioned to him that “he had learned that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA,” Rove replied, “I heard that, too.” The second time was when Rove warned Time reporter Matt Cooper “not to ‘get too far out on Wilson‘” as it was his wife “who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.”
It is clear from those comments that, as Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin put it, his client “was trying to discourage Time magazine from circulating false allegations about Cheney, not trying to encourage them by saying anything about Wilson or his wife.” But, so eager are Bush’s critics to smear Karl Rove that they read his attempt to kill a story as a strategem to slime an administration critic.
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Capsized Tour Boat Didn’t Have Enough Crew
Boat Did Not Have Enough Crew – CBS News
Let me guess.. the crew that should have been there is stationed in Iraq?
No, wait…. FEMA should have known the boat was going to capsize so they should have had a team in place.
No, that’s not it. The tax breaks for the rich people in Lake George, NY went into fixing up their own homes overlooking the lake and didn’t help the local economy at all so the Bush tax cuts meant the tour company couldn’t hire more staff.
Darn… still not right. I’ve got it! Bush and Cheney didn’t serve in the military so people who could have been hired by the private boat company were so distraught with their un-American administration in Washington that they left the area and moved to Canada.
Oh screw it, it was Bush’s fault anyway.
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
Mary Mapes: MSM’s Poster Child
There seems to be some serendipity in the upcoming release of former CBS News Producer Mary Mapes’ book and media acknowledgment of its own biased coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, in the past two days, at least two leading conservative bloggers (Hugh Hewitt and Powerline) have commented on both topics. Just as the MSM tailored its reporting of the hurricane to fit the story it wanted to tell–that the slow recovery was all Bush’s fault–so did Ms. Mapes tailor her reporting of the president’s National Guard service to fit the conclusion she had reached long before she obtained memos which supposedly confirmed her theory.
Mary Mapes, as you many recall, had been pursuing the story of the president’s National Guard service for five years. Like many on the left, she believed the president’s father pulled strings to get his son a National Guard post so he wouldn’t have to serve in Vietnam and that once there, the future president shirked his duty. But, she could come up with no hard evidence to prove her case until a man she called an “unimpeachable source” came up with documents which confirmed that theory.
Alas (for her), bloggers quickly determined the memos to be forgeries, largely based on the typeface (CBS claimed the memos were from the early 1970s, yet they used proportional spacing typical of computer word-processing programs). The bloggers’ case was strengthened when CBS revealed that the “unimpeachable source” was Bill Burkett, a man with a long history of hating George W. Bush.
Ms. Mapes let her bias, her own belief that Bush had to have shirked his duty, cloud her judgment just as the MSM did in pinning the blame on president Bush for failures in the relief effort in the aftermath of Katrina. Though Dan Rather, Ms. Mapes comrade-in-arms in the Memogate scandal, called the MSM’s coverage of the Hurricane, “one of television news’ finest moments,” in the past couple of days, even the LA Times, an MSM mainstay, has found that coverage to be distorted.
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Cindy’s sixteenth (or is it her eighteenth?) minute
Probably because she was so upset by the fact even CNN devoted too much time yesterday to Hurricane Rita yesterday, thus all but forgetting her rally, Cindy Sheehan, ignored three warnings from police that she — and her cohorts — were breaking the law by sitting in the pedestrian walkway in front of the White House. Had she listened to police, she could have avoided arrest.
In other words, it was a media stunt. Guess she wanted her sixteenth minute of fame. Or is she now on her eighteenth?
In an IM message, Chad of Cake or Death says she’s on her twenty-fourth minute by now. (And tipping my hat to this fine blogger for Cindy’s comment on Rita.)
UPDATE: PrismWarden has pictures while ThatGayConservative notes how even Hillary has dissed Cindy.
GP UPDATE: OneFineJay has some interesting quotes from the “peaceful” anti-war Leftists.
UP-UPDATE: Seems that Cindy’ and her pals announced their intention to get arrested on Sunday, the day before she was arrested. HT: little green footballs.
UP-UP-UPDATE: In commenting on Cindy’s arrest, the Anchoress writes, “it is amazing how much destruction is wrought because of a need to feel loved.” Read the whole thing and Michelle’s post which links it.
If Iraq is like Vietnam, how come the rallies keep getting smaller?
While anti-war activists hoped their rally yesterday would be the “largest peace rally in the nation’s capital since the Vietnam War,” it doesn’t seem they reached their goal. In order to make the rally seem larger than it was, the BBC and other new outlets relied on the organizers’ claim that 100,000 turned out. Little Green Footballs found this picture of the rally at Yahoo and observed that “it looks like the turnout was much less than 100,000 people.”
A reader wrote in to Glenn Reynolds to report the same thing: he did not see 100,000 there either. Jeff Goldstein shows how the MSM has been spinning news of the rally to make it appear larger and more diverse that it actually was.
It seems that every critic of the Iraq war claims that it is another Vietnam, that not only are our troops in the process of losing, but that public opposition is growing. Yet, while polls may show that more Americans oppose the war than did at the time we liberated Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny, the number of those who are fervently opposed to the war does not match that of the Vietnam era.
There were few (if any) large-scale protests when, in August 1964, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution effectively declaring war on the Communist government in North Vietnam. Yet, hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) rallied in cities across the country in 2003 to oppose the impending U.S. (and coalition) war against Saddam’s regime. Even the organizers don’t claim more than 100,000 attended yesterday’s rally. And as I noted above, most observers believe that number to be inflated.
As the war in Vietnam escalated so too did the protests back home, that is, the rallies got bigger. But, as our troops continue to fight the terrorists in Iraq, the size of the rallies has not so increased. Those who follow what’s really going in Iraq know that our involvement there is nothing like that in Vietnam. Although we are experiencing a few setbacks, we are winning the war. And the inability of the anti-war movement to draw a large crowd for their rally yesterday shows that the situation back in the U.S. is nothing like it was in the Vietnam era.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com
WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS!! While you’re here, take some time and browse around at one of the blogosphere’s leading gay conservative voices.
ADDENDUM: Michelle Malkin photoblogged the rally. Her pictures show how uncorked some leftists have become.
UPDATE: Fellow Bear-Flag Blogger Baldilocks (and very nice gal) has pictures from a sparsely attended rally in LA.
UP-UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein provides information suggesting that the MSM is massaging the protest numbers. HT: Instapundit.
UP-UP-UPDATE: PrismWarden provides a picture from the rally that is just too creepy to describe.
UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: California Conservative has pictures from a sparsely-attended (and hate-filled) rally in San Francisco.
UP-UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt provides the details which make my point. The first anti-Vietnam War protest in 1965 brought 16,000 to the White House. In November 1969, more than 250,000 protesters — some estimates went as high as 500,000 rallied against the Vietnam War. In other words, back then, the protests got bigger as the war escalated. Thanks, Hugh.
Does David Brooks read GayPatriot?
Three months ago, I posted Captain Ahab Democrats where I noted that, like Captain Ahab obsessed with the white whale in Moby Dick, many Democrats, notably their hater-in-chief chairman are similarly obsessed with the president, seeing him as his party as the “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them.” Just moments ago, when reading a David Brooks column (linked by Instapundit), I wondered if that columnist reads our blog. In commenting on Senator Kerry’s speech attacking the man who beat him last November for his handling Katrina, he writes:
In the first place, not even Karl Rove’s worldview is so obsessively Bush-centric as John Kerry’s. There are many interesting issues raised by Katrina, but for Senator Ahab it all goes back to the great white monster, Bush. Bush and his crew should have known the levees were weak. Bush and his crew should have known thousands in New Orleans would be trapped. (Did I miss Kerry’s own warnings on these subjects?) All reality flows back to Bush. All begins with Bush, ends with Bush, is explained by Bush and is polluted by Bush, cursed be thy name.
Bill Clinton: Without Class
After returning yesterday evening from an afternoon & evening of socializing and entertainment, I logged on to find another whopper from the master of the whopper, the man who joins Democrats Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson (Democrats as well) as the only presidents re-elected without winning a majority of the popular vote:
It’s like when they issued the evacuation order. . . . That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn’t have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn’t have cars, so they couldn’t take them out.
Yep, while interviewed on ABC’s This Week by his former acolyte George Stephanopolous, Bill Clinton spoke those words. The former president forgot to mention that it was the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans who let his city’s fleet of buses sit idle and so failed to evacuate the less fortunate residents of the Crescent City.
Perhaps, Clinton was upset that many of those affected the hurricane liked the president’s speech last Thursday. Even the woman who managed his designated successor’s presidential campaign was proud of the president and the plan he put forward.
Clinton didn’t just take issue with Mr. Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. He also faulted him for the war in Iraq and other issues. And while I was busying socializing, browsing for books and watching the pleasant flick, Just Like Heaven, a few bloggers weighed in on Mr. Clinton’s lack of class. They pointed out how his criticisms of his successor were at odds with his past statements, made both while he was in office and after he left. This blogger does a good job of fisking the former president’s interview with his one-time aide. (HT: Polipundit’s Lorie Byrd.)
Powerline claims we are entering “uncharted waters” for until now, “former Presidents of both parties have stayed out of politics and have avoided criticizing their successors.” Lorie Byrd has two posts on the topic (calling him a “No-Class Slime” and providing great links here). At National Review Online’s the Corner, K-Lo says Clinton’s working on the “MoveOn crowd for Hill.”
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The willfull ignorance of Bush-bashers — and their media allies
Almost since Bruce’s first post on this blog, we have been faulted for not criticizing the president enough. And while on the whole, we believe he has done a good job, each of us is aware of his faults (and his flaws). I have made clear my opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment (which the president supports) and have taken him to task for failing to follow Ronald Reagan’s vision of federalism. I have not said as much as I would like about his inability to hold the line on federal spending or about his inadquate solutions to deal with illegal immigration and border-control.
While I acknowledge that George W. Bush has been far from a perfect president, I frequently find myself in the position of Roger Simon who asked yesterday: “Am I the only one who likes Bush more every time he is excessively attacked by the mainstream media?” Roger’s “case in point” is Hurricane Katrina. Instead of seeing the Administration’s mistakes in the context of the size of the storm and the accomplishments of federal (as well as state and local) agencies in providing relief (see here for a partial listing of what went right, HT: Powerline), the MSM focus on the mistakes — so as to create a legend of his failure.
As Roger put it, “The willful ignorance of the media in their zeal to get Bush is peculiar.” And adds, “The more these attacks continue in this manner the more Bush will thrive. That’s the way humans react to unfairness.” And perhaps that’s why we have spent more defending the president than dwelling on our areas of disagreement. We see how unfairly the media, particularly the gay media, has treated the president.
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Solar Flare Erupts From Sun…. Bush Administration To Blame
NOAA forecasters on Wednesday observed one of the largest solar flares on record at 1:40 p.m. EDT. The forecasters are predicting significant solar eruptions in the coming days. Agencies impacted by space weather storms may experience disruptions over the next two weeks. These include spacecraft operations, electric power systems, high frequency communications and low-frequency navigation systems
I certainly hope a Solar Flare Incident Commission is formed since it is quite clear that President Bush caused this cosmic event in order to further disrupt search and rescue efforts around New Orleans since he hates black people.
What? What did I say? I’m sorry, I was just listening to Howard Dean talk tonight… so I assume this must be true.
-Bruce (GayPatriot)