chefmike
03-07-2007, 09:19 PM
Vice's squad takes the hit!
NY Daily News
The government got Scooter Libby yesterday, got an underboss to the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney. They got Libby on four of five counts against him in the end, got him for lying about how the name of a CIA agent was leaked to the media. These were small lies folded into the much bigger ones that got us into the war in Iraq in the first place, a war Cheney wanted more than anybody and became obsessed with justifying.
Libby is convicted now, even though he will probably never serve a day of time, even though he may be able to drag the whole process out until George W. Bush pardons him. Libby is convicted and Cheney should have the grace to resign. Except that this vice president has no grace, or sense of honor, just contempt for all those who disagree with him, about weapons of mass destruction or anything else.
So when a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson came back from Africa in 2002 and dismissed reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium there as a way of building those weapons of mass destruction, dismissed them prominently in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times newspaper, this White House went after him as if he were as much of a threat as Saddam.
Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked as a CIA operative and before long her name was in a Robert Novak column. And now something that began with a busy week of gossip and leaks and whispers in the summer of 2002 ended yesterday with the conviction of Scooter Libby for lying to the FBI and perjuring himself and obstruction of justice.
Libby is not the first underboss to take a fall like this, just the one who took a fall yesterday for the sitting vice president of the United States, one who was the chief architect of a war built on lie after lie after lie, all the way to Building 18 of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the shabby way the military heroes of this country and war have been treated there.
Cheney should go the way Kevin Kiley, the former commander of Walter Reed, now the surgeon general of the Army, should go. Libby's crimes deal with the runup to the war. Kiley is about the true cost of the war. Now everything runs together, the new lies and the old ones. As you watched Kiley trying to talk his way around the conditions of Building 18 in front of Congress, what you really saw was all of this President's men. You saw Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, saw Michael Brown of FEMA and Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security.
You know what's amazing about this administration? They couldn't find a way to get Bernie Kerik on their team. He would have fit right in with these guys.
Libby just happens to be the liar who got prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald of Regis High School, New York City. Here was one of the jurors who listened to Fitzgerald quietly make his case, a man named Denis Collins, standing in front of the courthouse and sounding as if the wrong man had been on trial, for the wrong crimes.
"Where's Rove?" he said. "Where are these other guys?"
"[Libby] was ... the fall guy," Denis Collins said.
Finally, Collins said, "[Libby] was tasked by the vice president to go out and talk to reporters."
About a war built on lies.
It all started with the ones about weapons of mass destruction and when Joe Wilson wouldn't play along, Cheney and his people went after him and it made about as much sense as Richard Nixon's men going after Lawrence O'Brien, the head of the Democratic National Committee, trying to get something on O'Brien or the Democrats by bugging their offices at a place called the Watergate.
O'Brien shouldn't have mattered to Nixon. Wilson should never have mattered this much to Cheney. Clearly Fitzgerald didn't have enough to go after Cheney, or Rove. So Libby is the one who got fingerprinted as a felon yesterday. They got an awful lot of underbosses in the Nixon administration before he finally realized he was through and resigned in the summer of 1974.
You wonder if it will happen sometime this summer for Cheney. Maybe he can say he is quitting for medical reasons, instead of saying it is for the good of George Bush or his party or even the country.
Maybe he starts moving for the door right now. Cheney was treated this week for a blood clot in his left leg, called a deep venous thrombosis. The outgoing vice president was not treated at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he really belonged, where the verdict on the lies of Iraq is handed down every single day.
NY Daily News
The government got Scooter Libby yesterday, got an underboss to the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney. They got Libby on four of five counts against him in the end, got him for lying about how the name of a CIA agent was leaked to the media. These were small lies folded into the much bigger ones that got us into the war in Iraq in the first place, a war Cheney wanted more than anybody and became obsessed with justifying.
Libby is convicted now, even though he will probably never serve a day of time, even though he may be able to drag the whole process out until George W. Bush pardons him. Libby is convicted and Cheney should have the grace to resign. Except that this vice president has no grace, or sense of honor, just contempt for all those who disagree with him, about weapons of mass destruction or anything else.
So when a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson came back from Africa in 2002 and dismissed reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium there as a way of building those weapons of mass destruction, dismissed them prominently in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times newspaper, this White House went after him as if he were as much of a threat as Saddam.
Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked as a CIA operative and before long her name was in a Robert Novak column. And now something that began with a busy week of gossip and leaks and whispers in the summer of 2002 ended yesterday with the conviction of Scooter Libby for lying to the FBI and perjuring himself and obstruction of justice.
Libby is not the first underboss to take a fall like this, just the one who took a fall yesterday for the sitting vice president of the United States, one who was the chief architect of a war built on lie after lie after lie, all the way to Building 18 of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the shabby way the military heroes of this country and war have been treated there.
Cheney should go the way Kevin Kiley, the former commander of Walter Reed, now the surgeon general of the Army, should go. Libby's crimes deal with the runup to the war. Kiley is about the true cost of the war. Now everything runs together, the new lies and the old ones. As you watched Kiley trying to talk his way around the conditions of Building 18 in front of Congress, what you really saw was all of this President's men. You saw Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, saw Michael Brown of FEMA and Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security.
You know what's amazing about this administration? They couldn't find a way to get Bernie Kerik on their team. He would have fit right in with these guys.
Libby just happens to be the liar who got prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald of Regis High School, New York City. Here was one of the jurors who listened to Fitzgerald quietly make his case, a man named Denis Collins, standing in front of the courthouse and sounding as if the wrong man had been on trial, for the wrong crimes.
"Where's Rove?" he said. "Where are these other guys?"
"[Libby] was ... the fall guy," Denis Collins said.
Finally, Collins said, "[Libby] was tasked by the vice president to go out and talk to reporters."
About a war built on lies.
It all started with the ones about weapons of mass destruction and when Joe Wilson wouldn't play along, Cheney and his people went after him and it made about as much sense as Richard Nixon's men going after Lawrence O'Brien, the head of the Democratic National Committee, trying to get something on O'Brien or the Democrats by bugging their offices at a place called the Watergate.
O'Brien shouldn't have mattered to Nixon. Wilson should never have mattered this much to Cheney. Clearly Fitzgerald didn't have enough to go after Cheney, or Rove. So Libby is the one who got fingerprinted as a felon yesterday. They got an awful lot of underbosses in the Nixon administration before he finally realized he was through and resigned in the summer of 1974.
You wonder if it will happen sometime this summer for Cheney. Maybe he can say he is quitting for medical reasons, instead of saying it is for the good of George Bush or his party or even the country.
Maybe he starts moving for the door right now. Cheney was treated this week for a blood clot in his left leg, called a deep venous thrombosis. The outgoing vice president was not treated at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he really belonged, where the verdict on the lies of Iraq is handed down every single day.