Cheney and Other Republican Liars and Hypocrites

Since 2002, no government official lied about the war in Iraq more than Dick Cheney. In a different era, the vice president would have been impeached and sent packing. Cheney's outing of a CIA officer whose husband's factual report on Niger yellowcake disagreed with Cheney's self-serving fantasies should have been enough to send the vice president to jail. Dick Cheney's authoritarian and anti-social character has been on display repeatedly but in no case was it more obvious than when he shot a friend of his in the face with a shotgun and it was the friend who was obliged to apologize. Strange man, Dick Cheney.

I am proud to be yet another blog linking to Larry Wilkerson's article in The Washington Note:

...when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops "the Cheney method of interrogation and torture", the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.

My investigations have revealed to me--vividly and clearly--that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering "the Cheney methods of interrogation", simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.

What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009.

(snip)

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

(snip)

There in fact were no such contacts.

It's a national disgrace that right-wing Republicans continue to coddle such liars as Dick Cheney. But Cheney wasn't the only liar. We have to include such 'stalwart' Republicans as Donald Rumseld, Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzalez, Douglas Feith, and yes, George W. Bush. There were plenty of others. The fact remains that the Bush Administration felt comfortable lying to Congress for eight years. But they didn't stop there. They lied to the American people.

Now Nancy Pelosi is accused of lying about what she was told by an administration that had little credibility. Our country needs a reliable non-political CIA but Bush and Cheney were doing everything they could to politicize parts of the government that had always been nonpolitical and bipartisan. As an example, the Bush Administration promoted people like Dusty Foggo to the number three spot at the CIA:

Foggo is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria after pleading guilty to a single count of fraud as part of a plea bargain. He is the highest ranking CIA officer ever to be convicted of a federal felony.

The fraud was part of a bribery ring that included Foggo's old friend, contractor Brent Wilkes, and former [Republican] Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, both of whom have been sentenced to years in prison.

Court papers filed this week offer the most detailed glimpse yet of Foggo's misconduct, which included getting his mistress hired to a $100,000 a year job at the CIA and steering millions of dollars in CIA contracts to Wilkes.

Even in the CIA there were people under Bush who were feeding at the public trough.

Again, most people in the intelligence community are competent professionals. But Bush and Cheney were not shy about bending the rules and finding people who would do the same. Here's another example of life under Bush by way of Talking Points Memo:

Adm. Mike McConnell came in as the Director of National Intelligence with a rep for being professional and non-partisan, a calling card the Bush Administration has put to its own uses.

(snip)

In his first months as DNI, McConnell did plenty to undermine that rep. He told Congress that three German terrorism suspects had been arrested due to intercepts made possible by the then-new Protect America Act when in fact they were obtained under the old FISA law. Soon after, McConnell offered a especially misleading account to Congress of a supposed FISA Court ruling that had delayed the U.S. from spying on the kidnappers of U.S. troops in Iraq. And throughout congressional debate on a surveillance law he claimed that the debate itself endangered American lives.

Then earlier this year, he suggested that a questioner at a public event at Johns Hopkins was "disappointed" that the U.S. hadn't suffered additional terrorist attacks. And now McConnell has really let lose, framing the Senate debate on the surveillance bill as being between those who think "we shouldn't have an Intelligence Community" and those who do. That has prompted a letter from Sen. Russ Feingold demanding an apology for those false characterizations of the debate.

There were other people besides McConnell who served at Bush's pleasure and thought nothing of lying to Congress. We know Cheney and others were liars. We know they lied to people like Pelosi. Until proven otherwise, I think we already know who the liars are. In the current political climate, Dick Cheney will never be prosecuted and sent to jail for his crimes. At the very least, he should go home and the news media should stop paying attention to a man who lied his way into a war our nation did not need.

Attempt to Whitewash Libby Continues

Let's see. George W. Bush now has a large ranch down in Paraguay. The CEO of Halliburton is conveniently moving to Dubai. The Justice Department has been firing US Attorneys who happen to be Republican but who take their jobs seriously. Bush and Cheney seem to be taking an awful lot of trips overseas as if being home is becoming uncomfortable. And an awful lot of people in the Bush Administration as well as friends of Bush and Cheney are ducking for cover or creating backup plans in case they're indicted for something. Now why would that be the case?

The other diversion in Washington is to pretend that Republicans who are convicted of felonies didn't really do anything wrong; the worst part of that diversion is that there have been a number of people in the media playing along. Ready to take them all to task, Frank Rich has an article in The New York Times on convicted felon Scooter Libby (I made one minor change below to stay focused on the WHIG story which is probably the most overlooked story of the last four years):

A president who tries to void laws he doesn't like by encumbering them with "signing statements" and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn't going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is "pretty much going to stay out of" the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans' political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. ...

...in August 2002, [Libby] and a small cadre of administration officials including Karl Rove formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secret task force to sell the Iraq war to the American people. ...

...WHIG had been tasked, as The Washington Post would later uncover, to portray Iraq's supposedly imminent threat to America with "gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence." In other words, WHIG was to cook up the sexiest recipe for promoting the war, facts be damned. So it did, by hyping the scariest possible scenario: nuclear apocalypse. As Michael Isikoff and David Corn report in "Hubris," it was WHIG (equipped with the slick phrase-making of the White House speechwriter Michael Gerson) that gave the administration its Orwellian bumper sticker, the constantly reiterated warning that Saddam's "smoking gun" could be "a mushroom cloud."

Ever since all the W.M.D. claims proved false, the administration has pleaded that it was duped by the same bad intelligence everyone else saw. But the nuclear card, the most persistent and gripping weapon in the prewar propaganda arsenal, was this White House's own special contrivance. Mr. Libby was present at its creation. He knows what Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney knew about the manufacture of this fiction and when they knew it.

(snip)

Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who served with Mr. Libby on WHIG and is now on the board of his legal defense fund (its full list of donors is unknown), has been especially vocal. "Scooter didn't do anything," she said. "And his personal record and service are impeccable." What Mr. Libby did - fabricating nuclear threats at WHIG and then lying under oath when he feared that sordid Pandora's box might be pried open by the Wilson case - was despicable. Had there been no WHIG or other White House operation for drumming up fictional rationales for war, there would have been no bogus uranium from Africa in a presidential speech, no leak to commit perjury about, no amputees to shut away in filthy rooms at Walter Reed.

Is it too much to ask the most powerful country in the world to hire people who are competent rather than hire people who break laws because they're too incompetent to know how to get the job done? Is it too much to go to war only as a last resort? Is it too much to ask to finish the necessary wars first? Did we really need to privatize so much of two wars so that Bush's friends could take part? Is it really too hard to ask politicians to keep their hands out of the public till? Is it too much to ask Congress and the media to hold a reckless and arrogant executive branch accountable?

More and more Americans are not satisfied with the answers they're hearing from Washington.
Daily Kos has the numbers from CNN via Atrios:

Just on CNN, 69% say there shouldn't be a pardon, 18% say there should be. 52% say Cheney was part of a cover-up, 29% say no.

Now how is it that the American people can catch on to the nonsense coming out of the White House but the media and conventional wisdom are so far behind the times.... and the facts? I've been reading Mark Twain this week. He would have had a lot of fun picking apart this crowd.

Symbolism of Bush's Visit to Mayan Site

The shrillness in the last few days of those who defend George W. Bush, Scooter Libby and the Republican Party suggests a growing crisis among right wing conservatives. The worst of them can't compute. They have been drinking what some critics call the White House 'Kool Aid' for so long that they either believe the nonsense that comes out of the Republican Noise Machine or they're so angry at the world that they delude themselves with word games to somehow twist things in a shape that excuses their failures and the failures of the president. Make no mistake: those who are still powerful among right wing Republicans are like wounded bears—they're desperate and they're dangerous. And their rage makes it impossible for many of them to see straight as their mythological conception of the world falls apart. We can be thankful that many independents, rational conservatives, and a few rank and file Republicans are steadily shying away from the most ideological of the right wingers (that includes, among others, the president and particularly the vice president).

To be honest, I'm not sure what rank and file Republicans think of their leaders these days and I suspect there is a range of views and that some of those views are complicated. But I found an AP article on The Huffington Post that seems symbolic of how Bush and his fellow Republicans are viewed by the world:

Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.

(snip)

Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.

Tiney said the "spirit guides of the Mayan community" decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of "bad spirits" after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. ...

I know Republicans who will sneer at this story as irrelevant or maybe just phony showmanship and that would be their mistake, and an historic mistake at that. Ronald Reagan and the senior Bush made a mistake ignoring the Indians of Central America. In their zeal to deal with communists, Republicans have frequently failed to note that communists are about the only people who pay attention to Indians in Central America. Just as it has been bad foreign policy to have a naive view of the Middle East, it has been a bad foreign policy to ignore people who are often marginalized by those who dominate their country.

Their record was not perfect but Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter understood that fighting communism during the Cold War, or taking on the other foreign policy issues of their era, required winning people over rather than just using military force to impose our demands. Without American involvement and help in post-World War II Europe, any number of countries might easily have gone communist. It was, despite Republican mythology, a cost-effective foreign policy (by the way, as intertwined as they were, it was the totalitarian and ideological nature of communist regimes that tended to come into being that always bothered me rather than specifically a somewhat impractical economic system).

In the early 90s, the senior Bush missed an enormous opportunity to help Afghanistan after the Soviet Union left in 1989; helping Afghanistan might have had far reaching effects and might have forestalled the rise of al Qaida and the Taliban. But the failure to help the Afghans, who after all had been our allies and proxies in the war against the Soviet Union, was an inevitable outcome of a kind of Republican indifference that we have seen too often, especially since Reagan came into office. Having been raised in a conservative community, I have heard Republicans over the years utter a hundred variations of "What's it to me?" or "What's in it for me?" A certain shallowness and the failure to think down the road is something the senior Bush and his son have too often shared. It's something we can no longer afford in our leaders.

But let's get back to the Mayans. Like billions of people around the world, the Mayans do not trust George W. Bush. And that does not help us. Bush's trip to South America is almost a waste of time. If he had credibility, his trip might be useful. But millions of people in South America worry about what Bush is really up to—that anxiety is real and is a direct consequence of Bush's lies and arrogance. And it is yet another sign of a profoundly flawed foreign policy and president.

White House Damaged by Libby Verdict

In Bush's first term, the media and Congress did very little to hold the president accountable. Six years later, there is much to answer for. It appears to me that the Libby trial was only the tip of the iceberg. Nevertheless, it's interesting to hear what a Republican like David Gergen has to say; I don't always agree with him but, more so than other Republicans, he's a reasonable straight-shooter. Here's what what Gergen had to say on Larry King last night:

"Perhaps [defense attorney] Ted Wells never even knew why Scooter Libby didn't want to go on the stand. But clearly, there's something behind this case," Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, told CNN's "Larry King Live."

"Why would Scooter Libby lie, as the jury determined? Why would he not take the stand? Why would the vice president not take the stand? There's clearly something they do not wish to discuss. And I don't know what that is."

Well, Congress needs to find out. As a co-equal branch of government, it is their right and their obligation to find out why a top administration official lied and obstructed justice. Our government (which includes Congress) has still not found out why such a phony case for war was made in the first place, who was responsible for that case and so on. It's also important to remember that Scooter Libby was part of the White House Iraq Group whose special assignment, beginning in the summer of 2002, was to sell the war in Iraq and we know now that sales job involved outright lies. Some paint a sympathetic portrait of Scooter Libby but he was no innocent; he knew what he was doing. It's also important for Congress to find out if a deal was made for a pardon; that may explain why Cheney and Libby were not called to testify. The president has a right to pardon whoever he wants but he does not have a right to obstruct justice or to make deals that essentially buy off a witness. A cloud indeed hangs over the White House.

David Gergen said one more thing that actually seemed odd:

Gergen also said he expected political fallout from the verdict.

"This is an administration that has been mostly free of scandal over the last six years and now they have the taint that they cannot erase," he said. "It has damaged this White House, and I think it's damaged the Republican prospects for 2008 in taking the White House and keeping it."

Gergen is right in a sense that the current administration has been relatively free of perceived scandal but only in the sense that if one doesn't look closely when scandals happen or ignores scandals when they happen or even suppresses them, then the taint is minimized and that is largely what has happened for six years. It should be noted that the lying about the case for war in Iraq happened nearly five years ago; the initial crime of outing a CIA covert operative happened nearly four years ago. In Washington, justice grinds very slowly these days and very conveniently for presidents seeking a second term.

Both political parties are understandably wary of scandal fatigue and perhaps there's something to be said for that but we have a broken government riddled with corruption, cronyism and incompetence. It needs to be fixed; and it can't be fixed if we all get tired of the noise that comes from charges, countercharges, phony posturing by people such as those on cable news or at The Washington Post or the RNC, and of course the endless denials from places like the White House press room. Bush's Department of Justice is increasingly so politicized that it's incapable of investigating even garden variety problems within the administration to any extent.

It's an old problem. Who polices the police? Who in government makes sure the government is honest? If the Department of Justice is rigged to look the other way, that leaves Congress. If Congress won't do its job (as it refused to do under Republicans for six years), that leaves the media. If the media is more worried about access and getting along with conventional wisdom, that leaves the people. If the people aren't paying attention, then... where are we? Ultimately, the American people need to pay attention. It's our lives and our government. And there are consequences. On any day of the week, if one is paying attention, there are consequences all the way from New Orleans to Baghdad.

Bush's Failed Presidency

They lied their way into a war in Iraq and then lied about their lies. That's what the Scooter Libby trial was about in the end. As former ambassador Joe Wilson puts it, the Bush Administration lied its way into a war to pursue a theory [presumably he means a neoconservative theory] that wasn't very good. According to the latest Gallup/USA Today poll, a majority of Americans have had enough; The Raw Story has the numbers:

A record number of Americans now say that the Iraq war was a "mistake" and less than half say the U.S. can win the war, a record low number, according to a new Gallup/USA Today poll released today. Almost 6 out of 10 Americans (58%) want troops to be withdrawn within 12 months and only 13% support sending more.

(snip)

A partisan divide remains. Only 29% of Republicans say the war was a mistake, vs. 84% of Democrats.

If the Republicans are going to rebuild their party and be taken seriously again, a majority of the Republican rank and file is going to have to come to term with Bush's failed presidency. And thanks to the recklessness and incompetence of the current administration, the next president, Republican or Democrat, is going to be spending a lot of time repairing our foreign policy.

Scooter Libby: Guilty on Four Counts

In these corrupt times, after years of corrupt behavior by Republicans, after years of lies, secrecy and outright illegal behavior and constitutional abuse by the White House, the Scooter Libby trial is, in the end, only one trial. Nevertheless, the verdict is in and Scooter Libby is guilty of lying and obstruction of justice. Here's the story from Richard B. Schmitt of the Los Angeles Times:

Former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted today on four counts of obstruction of justice and perjury.

Libby was found guilty of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and one count of making false statements to the FBI. But he was acquitted on one count of making false statements to the FBI concerning his conversations with former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.

(snip)

Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald said he was "gratified by the jury's verdict," but said the investigation was justified regardless of the verdict.

"It's not the verdict that justifies the investigation, it's the facts," Fitzgerald said. "Any lie under oath is serious (especially) in a national security investigation."

Fitzgerald said he does not expect to file any additional charges. "We're all going back to our day jobs," he said.

The trial, the first of a senior White House official in more than a decade, attracted considerable attention. Its backdrop -- the decision to go to war in Iraq -- is one of the defining issues of the Bush presidency. And the case highlighted the cozy interactions between high-ranking officials and big-name journalists, who paraded into court to expose the sometimes sloppy way that information is traded in the nation's capital.

It is good that Scooter Libby has been convicted. It is not good that the White House did not hold anyone accountable for outing a CIA operative. It is not good that Joe Wilson was smeared in an effort by the White House to cover up its lies. It is not good that for over four years Congress has held no one in the White House accountable for the lies that were used to justify war in Iraq. It is not good that Dick Cheney still remains in office despite having a direct hand in the smearing of Joe Wilson, the outing of a CIA operative, and lying to the American people. It is not good that Karl Rove still has his job. It is not good that George W. Bush does not accept responsibility for his behavior and that he seems to believe he is above the law. It is not good that millions of Americans still think Bush is an honest man. It is not good that the mainstream media has done a poor job of covering the Bush Administration and Congress; the media has repeatedly failed in recent years to understand its obligation to its viewers and readers. But the conviction of Scooter Libby is a step in the right direction, though only a small one.

There are still large issues left unresolved. The war in Iraq goes on and I can't help thinking of Wesley Clark on Democracy Now pointing out that Iraq was only one country of several in the Middle East that the Bush Administration was targeting in 2002 in an exercise of reckless overreach. Yes, there are many issues left unresolved but the Libby trial matters and the need to hold accountable Scooter Libby's immediate boss, Dick Cheney, also matters.

The evidence that Patrick Fitzgerald presented left no doubt that Scooter Libby was guilty. Libby's expensive defense team was not enough to get him off the hook. The defense team may still come through for Libby in the appeal process. It's possible that Bush in the final weeks of his presidency will pardon Libby. But the history books will record the facts and they will record Libby's guilt.

The Incompetent and Deceptive Mr. Cheney

Vice President Dick Cheney is discovering the hard way that you can't run away from your problems by taking trips overseas that probably should be handled, in any case, by the State Department. Or, at the very minimum, by someone with credibility (63% of Americans no longer trust Bush—or Cheney, for that matter—on intelligence issues).

The jury for the Scooter Libby trial is still deliberating and could conceivably refuse to convict Scooter Libby of perjury and obstruction of justice despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Money can buy favorable legal results in this country. We've seen that many times now in the last fifteen years. There's speculation that Scooter Libby might have won his case during jury selection, with the help of an expensive gimmick used by some lawyers who employ jury experts who know how to get a jury that has good odds of reaching a not guilty verdict, or, at the very least, a hung decision. That's not justice at work. It's good old fashioned money at work. We don't know yet if the gimmick will work or not, but the longer the jury deliberates, the better it is for the defense.

The problem for Dick Cheney is that nobody is fooled: he's a liar, a political manipulator and an incompetent. Dick Cheney used Scooter Libby to out covert CIA operative Valerie Plame and we know it. Washington is not a comfortable place for Dick Cheney these days. Too many of his fiascos are coming out. But his belligerence and arrogance continues as we hear in this story from ABC News:

Pelosi called Cheney's words "beneath the dignity of the debate we're engaged in and a disservice to our men and women in uniform, whom we all support."

But Cheney is holding firm on his original comments.

"I am not sure what part of it that Nancy disagreed with," Cheney told ABC News during an interview today in Sydney, Australia. "She accused me of questioning her patriotism. I didn't question her patriotism, I questioned her judgment."

Cheney said: "The point I made, and I'll make it again, is that al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home."

If Dick Cheney knows so much about al Qaida, then where was the Bush Administration in the months before 9/11? Where was Dick Cheney when the outgoing Clinton Administration warned officials of the incoming Bush Administration? Where was Dick Cheney when it was obvious there was no significant al Qaida connection when we invaded Iraq in 2003?

Cheney's blunders and deceptions are endless but let's look again at a critical assertion he made in the quote above and that he has made before and think about it carefully. In the above statement, Cheney says: "...al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will." Stop the presses. Think a moment. In late 2001, we had al Qaida on the ropes. It was the United States that was breaking the will of al Qaida. Let's not slip over that point. I'll repeat it again: in late 2001, we had al Qaida on the ropes. It was the United States that was breaking the will of al Qaida.

And then Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got bored with Afghanistan. It wasn't a big enough war for them. They were obsessed with Iraq and were flummoxed when they couldn't make a credible case for war. So they made something up, inserted those sixteen words, and fixed the evidence around a reckless policy and left the war in Afghanistan behind on the back burner. Five years of blunders, incompetence and arrogance on the part of Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld put us at risk of pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. And Cheney wants to compound the error by starting a war with Iran, or tricking Iran into starting that war, or whatever nonsense he has in mind that he hasn't bothered to tell us. What the Bush Administration should be doing is working on a regional settlement that can only come if we talk with all the neighbors, including Syria and Iran.

Democrats have repeatedly called for finishing the job in Afghanistan. Several Republicans Bush and Cheney have chosen to ignore have also called for properly finishing the job in Afghanistan. Various foreign policy experts have warned that putting al Qaida on the back burner was a serious strategic mistake.

Well, this is where we are: Dick Cheney has no credibililty. George W. Bush has no credibility. You will not gain the needed credibility by attacking your critics who have done little more than point out world class strategic blunders that can not go on unaddressed. Whatever imperial games, or neoconservative games, or oil games that the Bush inner circle has been engaging in for the past few years no longer have any credible chance of reaching a reasonable result that will do most Americans any good. From now on, rebuilding our foreign policy, reestablishing our credibility, repairing our military, winding down in Iraq while we do what we can to stabilize the region with talks and political settlements, and finishing the job in Afghanistan are the only goals the Bush Administration should be pursuing. And it is the obligation of Congress, a co-equal branch of government, to keep the Bush inner circle from dragging us into any further adventures. Bush's presidency is over. And Dick Cheney should do the decent thing and resign.

Cheney Turns Up the Arrogance

Cakewalk Cheney is trying to change the subject as the jurors continue to deliberate in the Scooter Libby trial (if anyone has doubts about what the issues are, see Why the Libby Trial Matters). Despite working secretly behind the curtain, Cheney's arrogance has been plain for all to see. I still recall on 9/11 when Cheney was challenged on his authority to tell Congress what to do, he said, "We have the helicopters." That's the kind of statement that invokes images of coups and not the kind of statement that respects three co-equal branches of government. There have been periods when Cheney has watched the tone of his statements, but in recent weeks, he clearly has turned up his arrogant rhetoric as the Libby trial got underway and as it becomes increasingly clear what a failure the Bush presidency is.

The International Herald Tribune has a Reuters story on one of Cheney's latest broadsides:

The U.S. vice president, Dick Cheney, expressed concerns Friday about China's military buildup, and he also questioned whether North Korea would follow through on its commitments in a recent nuclear deal.

In a speech in Sydney, Cheney also stressed the importance of U.S. forces' remaining in Iraq to stop "jihadists" gaining a base from which to spread violence across the Middle East.

(snip)

"The notion that free countries can turn our backs on what happens in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or any other possible safe haven for terrorists is an option that we simply cannot indulge," Cheney said in his speech.

I'm dumbfounded that Cheney would complain that some would turn their back on Afghanistan. That's exactly what the Bush Administration did as it turned to Iraq and gave us a war we did not need and let Osama bin Laden slip away while events in Afghanistan started sliding downhill. The inner circle of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld considered Afghanistan too small for their enterprise and put Afghanistan on the back burner to pursue a more ambitious and radical agenda that has done nothing for the United States except damage our country and our position in the world. Anyone who thinks the removal of Saddam Hussein was worth $2 trillion and the deaths that have resulted and the enormous damage done to our reputation and credibility is a fool, but Cheney thinks it was worth it. That's the nature of right wing authoritarians: they are usually the last to admit they were wrong. The reality is that Cheney's priorities are different than mine and different than those of most Americans.

And look at his arrogance towards the Chinese. We are the most powerful nation in the world but there are limits to our power and clearly Cheney and Bush are not doing such a hot job in Iraq. When you don't have much credibility, serious talks with our economic partners, as the Chinese clearly are, would be what's called for if there are issues to clear up. Instead, Cheney's arrogant posturing is not useful and simply reminds everyone of his poor judgment. Here's what James Fallows has to say in The Huffington Post:

What is clear is that the worst-positioned person to scold China about its behavior is the one who just did: Vice President Dick Cheney. In his speech yesterday in Australia, the Vice President helpfully observed that the satellite test, plus the buildup of China's military (with a budget still a tiny fraction of America's) was "not consistent with China's stated goal of a peaceful rise."

Let's assume, for argument, that China intends to convert its growing economic power into military strength. Let's assume that its strategic and territorial ambitions are at odds with America's. Let's assume that it intends to upset the international order in countless ways. Let's assume a lot of other things that I don't think are true.

Even if all those things were true, there could be no less effective spokesman for American concern or for the interests of international order than Cheney. This is the man who has refused to answer to his own public for -- well, for anything. For his insistence that everything has gone just as planned in Iraq. For his claim before the war that "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." For his claim after the war that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes." For his role, as described in prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's closing statement, as the central, unindicted malefactor in the Scooter Libby case. Even for shooting his friend in the face. ...

Dick Cheney, the man who is accountable for nothing, is the person who will tell other countries what is "consistent" with a peaceful image in the world?

If you haven't spent a lot of time outside the United States recently, you may not been made aware in a painful, humiliating way of how grievously America's moral standing has suffered because of Guantanamo, Abu Grahib, and the general carnage in Iraq. It's hard in general to get non-Americans to listen to lectures about seemly behavior these days. It's hardest of all when the lectures come from the man who, to the rest of the world, personifies America's squandering of the qualities that made it special.

It's been obvious for some time that the blunders by Bush and Cheney make it impossible for the United States to have much credibility when talking to other nations about any number of issues but particularly human rights. Any number of countries are still violating basic human rights and their answer to Bush or Cheney is very blunt and summed in two words: Abu Ghraib.

Did I mention that the Russians are concerned that we're in an arms race and that Stephen Hadley is having to ease their concerns? The most useful thing Dick Cheney can do for the American people is resign.

Why the Libby Trial Matters

The Libby trial is important in ways that the Washington media has avoided to some extent. It is first of all about a corrupt process that led to war, an unncessary war, and then later led to lies, specific lies, by Scooter Libby that are the reasons he is on trial. The smearing of Joe Wilson was designed to hide a corrupt process and, in some respects, what was done by outing Valerie Plame/Wilson has succeeded largely because of the second element that the Libby trial exposes: the complicity of the mainstream press in furthering the aims of the Bush Administration.

What I have said in my first paragraph should not be controversial. Not after everything that has come out in the Scooter Libby trial and elsewhere. But the media and the American public still have a long ways to go to understand what a catastrophe and what a crooked little operation the Bush presidency has been for the last six years and how Congress, particularly under the Republicans, has been subverted far more than at any time since the 1920s. It's worse than that though. It's been obvious for more than 25 years that the media has slowly been falling down on the job and that the Republican Noise Machine has done an effective job of allowing our institutions to erode and to be corrupted even more than usual, far more than usual, over the last twenty-five years, inch by inch by inch.

The American economy is a powerful engine. That is largely a blessing but having such a powerful economy can obscure the growing rot in our corporations, our system of entrenched privilige, and even the manner in which a wink and nod is given to all kinds of behavior that ought not to be accepted (tobacco companies, to mention just one example of many, just won a case based on a ruling that is designed to do nothing more than protect the powerful even when they are quite clearly wrong). I believe in competition and a reasonable free enterprise: it is a shame that too many powerful people do not—they prefer a system that is rigged. And that rigging has been steadily damaging our nation and our future for a number of years now, though George W. Bush and his friends have clearly accelerated the process.

I believe in a government that can help us achieve common aims, that works for the common good, that has a capacity at times to solve problems and I believe that there have been times our government has been able to find very competent people to make sure things get done. However, for more than twenty-five years, we have had people consciously work to undermine, inhibit, obstruct and obscure the effectiveness and even the knowledge that the government needs to function reasonably well. Our government, even in the best of times, is not perfect and it is important to have multiple agencies literally compete with one another to show who can do the best job. Private industry, as run by Republicans, does not qualify though there is no good reason why an honest business can't perform some functions that government would otherwise perform. But outsourcing and privatization in the hands of Republicans and even some Democrats is just an excuse to scam the taxpayer. We have seen and still see it in Iraq. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina, even to the point that the people devastated by the hurricane were just an afterthought while others used the occassion to make obscene profits.

We have a problem in our nation, and the mainstream is no longer the bright shining light on the nation's rot that it once was. Sure, the media has lights, bright lights to scatter on the trivial and to flash back and forth on things irrelevant while more crucial matters remain unknown and unexposed. Sure, the media on occassion does shine a flickering and wavering light on our nation's problems and then it becomes painfully clear most reporters doing those stories barely understand what it is they are covering. There are exceptions but not often.

I'm far from where I began: the Libby trial. Let me quote from Dan Froomkin of White House Watch:

"What is this case about?" special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald asked in his rebuttal to the defense's closing arguments yesterday in the Scooter Libby perjury trial.

"Is it about something bigger?"

And while Fitzgerald never directly answered that second question, he at long last made it quite clear that the depth of Vice President Cheney's role in the leaking of the identity of a CIA operative is one of the central mysteries that Libby's alleged lies prevented investigators from resolving.

"There is a cloud over the vice president . . . And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice," Fitzgerald said.

"There is a cloud over the White House. Don't you think the FBI and the grand jury and the American people are entitled to straight answers?" Fitzgerald asked the jury.

Libby, Fitzgerald continued, "stole the truth from the justice system."

After literally years of keeping his public pronouncements about the case to an absolute minimum, Fitzgerald yesterday finally let slip a bit of the speculation that many of us have long suspected has lurked just beneath the surface of his investigation.

Suddenly it wasn't just the defendant alone, it was "they" who decided to tell reporters about Wilson's wife working for the CIA. "To them," Fitzgerald said, "she wasn't a person, she was an argument."

Valerie Plame was serving her country and the Bush Administration used her to cover up a lie. And they destroyed her career.

There are people in Washington who don't take the American people seriously. They take their privileged friends seriously—and their wealth, they want to be part of the supposed movers and shakers of our society, or even just part of those who hold the conventional wisdom and are in the know when they roast one another on those lame C-Span shows.

Admittedly, there are some, a different crowd, particularly right wing ideologues, who focus their hate and rage on particular groups, maybe because they believe in their rage, maybe because the rage is profitable and good for votes. And that too is evidence that people in Washington can't see 300 million individuals, who according to the US Constitution, are the people and therefore, the government, the nation, and the real source of America's strength and greatness. Ordinary Americans are not abstractions. Very capable people like Valerie Plame are not abstractions. The 300 million people in these United States are real. Not lives to be ruined. Not people to be ignored because they aren't campaign contributors. Not 'resources' for corporate cronies to exploit. Not honorees for a feel good speech that covers up a cynical do-nothing policy.

It's time for the American people to be heard again. It won't be the first time or even the second time that Americans have needed to renew their country and have done so. But the time has come. Whether Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby, is convicted or not, the time has come.

Why the White House Panicked Over Joe Wilson

It's no surprise that the Libby trial shows the White House in disarray even when it's doing message control, one of the few areas where it supposedly knows what it's doing, at least sometimes. Today, Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly goes back in time to July 2005 and reminds us of a more specific reason why the White House panicked over Joe Wilson statements about the phony Niger/Iraq uranium claim that helped make the case for war in Iraq:

...Step back from Plamegate for a moment and ask yourself a broader question: why did the White House react so violently to Joe Wilson's suggestion that the story about Saddam Hussein trying to procure uranium from Niger was false? After all, as conservative apologists never tire of pointing out, Wilson didn't really debunk George Bush's words in the 2003 State of the Union address. Bush said only that Saddam "sought" uranium from Africa, while Wilson merely provided evidence that no uranium ever changed hands. The fact is, Wilson's report didn't invalidate Bush's statement.

So why did the White House go nuts? What were they so scared of that they went into full-blown smear-and-destroy mode?

One of the advantages of living in Orange County is that I have plenty of centrist and conservative acquaintances, and one thing I've learned from them is that even among Bush's own supporters it was the possibility of Saddam getting hold of nukes that really scared them. Chemical and biological weapons were a bit of a yawn. Without nukes, even Bush sympathizers were skeptical about the whole Iraq adventure.

Kevin Drum doesn't specifically bring it up but his post post is suggestive in terms of validating Libby when he says the White House made him a fall guy in order to protect Karl Rove, the architect of the public relations campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq in the first place. In fact, Drum should have pointed out that Rove, in the days after Bush's SOTU speech, was making sure the press got the more detailed version of the Niger/Iraq claim that Wilson indeed debunked. It was never about just sixteen words.

The mainstream media still has much to explain in terms of why it went along with the phony case for war. It was hypocritical, for example, for Tim Russert to give John Edwards the business the other day on Meet the Press over Edwards' admission that he made a mistake on his vote on Iraq in 2002; where was Russert at the time? Russert was pretty much helping the administration make its case for war with far too little close questioning despite available material at the time. It's important to note that one of the things that has come out in the Libby trial is that Russert was considered by the White House as one of their best go-to guys in the press. The mainstream media still has a lot of work to do in terms of cleaning up its act.

Dick Cheney and Joe Wilson's Trip

Larry Johnson of No Quarter has the story on Dick Cheney and the trip taken by Joe Wilson to Niger. Cheney indeed was the cause of the trip and received a report from the CIA; it's always been a red herring about whether Cheney personally sent Joe Wilson—it's was only important that a knowledgeable person was sent and that person was Joe Wilson, the man who eventually blew the whistle when the Bush Administration claimed Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. It's no different than anyone has expected who has been following the story from the beginning, except more of the details are now getting filled in five years after Joe Wilson's original report to the CIA (after his trip) that correctly said there was no Niger/Iraq connection; here's the end of Johnson's long post:

Cheney was given an intelligence report in response to his original query on 12 February, 2002. The report made clear that Niger was playing ball with the U.S. and was not about to even meet with Iraqis, much less sell them uranium. But Cheney and Bush had other plans. They were going to go to war with Iraq regardless of what the intelligence said. But we now have a clear picture that the intelligence community was trying to tell them uncomfortable truths that Bush and Cheney did not want to hear. Just remember that as the U.S. death toll in Iraq continues to soar.

Give it a read. Justice is getting very slow in our country. In 2004, several Republican senators covered up for Bush. And the White House has been very good at creating multiple fabrications to distract attention from the facts and the facts are not pretty. It's just further evidence that the administration, at its highest levels, is run by arrogant, dishonest and incompetent people who dragged the United States into an unneeded war.

The Cheney Problem II

The Scooter Libby trial is focusing attention on Vice President Dick Cheney like never before and the details we are learning are not putting Cheney in a good light. Americans can no longer ignore Cheney's hubris and incompetence but there have been signs for at least four years that much of this actually goes deeper. The problems with the secretive vice president are mounting.

That hasn't stopped Cheney from admitting that the job of Republicans in Congress is to bow to the superiority of the Bush Administration; here's the story from CBS News:

Vice President Dick Cheney shot back at Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who has accused the Bush administration of playing "a ping-pong game with American lives" by sending more U.S. troops into Iraq.

"Let's say I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican," Cheney said. "But it's very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved."

Given his hypocritical bullying of his fellow Republicans and given the facts and behavior of the Bush Administration in the last six years, Cheney's comment has no other fundamental interpretation than this: when it comes to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, Republicans must rubber stamp the incompetence, recklessness, deceptions and abuse of the US Constitution no matter what. That is behavior an overwhelming majority of Americans cannot afford.

Dan Froomkin of White House Briefing is back and has some comments on the Cheney situation:

While Dick Cheney undoubtedly remains the most powerful vice president this nation has ever seen, it's becoming increasingly unclear whether anyone outside the White House believes a word he says.

Inside the West Wing, Cheney's influence remains considerable. In fact, nothing better explains Bush's perplexing plan to send more troops to Iraq than Cheney's neoconservative conviction that showing the world that we have the "stomach for the fight" is the most important thing -- even if it isn't accomplishing the things we're supposed to be fighting for. Even if it's backfiring horribly.

But as his astonishing interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer laid bare last week, Cheney is increasingly out of touch with reality... ...

The secretive Cheney has the largest staff of any vice president in history; in essence, it's a government within a government with little oversight by Congress. Cheney has ignored repeated media requests to interview some of his people and understand his 'unusual' operation. President Bush has, by law, the ultimate authority in his government but it's never been clear how he and Cheney divide up their responsibilities. In the past, some critics have argued that Cheney is the real president while Bush is the public relations man.

Americans have a right to know what's going on in a government that has been elected by the people and why so much behavior is deliberately being hidden from us (Google Halliburton, Iraq reconstruction, defense contracts, and Republican campaign donors just as a place to start). As I mentioned above, Cheney has resisted all attempts to understand his operation; Justin Rood of TPM Muckraker has a story that may begin to peel back the layers of secrecy by revealing some of the people who directly work for Cheney (note that Cheney apparently has others burrowed in various departments around Washington):

Stamped "For Official Use Only," the four-page document lists 81 employees, including six who worked for Lynne Cheney. That's well over the 30 or so names Cheney's office is said to submit routinely to directory services.

The directory shows 23 staffers who worked exclusively on national security and homeland security issues. Meanwhile, three positions were dedicated on domestic policy issues; one of those was vacant at the time of the directory's publishing.

It's not clear how much overlap there is with the list we posted earlier of 41 staffers serving Cheney from the Senate's payroll according to a 2006 report. But at least now we're in the ballpark of the 88 staffers Laura Rozen estimated to be there.

In the next few months, Congress needs to ask what these people are doing. If there isn't cooperation forthcoming from Cheney, Congress should seriously consider cutting Cheney's staff budget in half, investigating Cheney's role in starting the war in Iraq and investigating his obvious interest in widening the war, possibly with Iran.

Since August 2003, when Cheney lied about a nuclear program in Iraq, the media and his fellow Republicans have walked on egg shells perhaps because of Cheney's threats and famous vindictiveness that resulted in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The more the country learns about Cheney, however, the more it becomes obvious that his behavior is unacceptable by any rational interpretation of the US Constitution and that his resignation is long overdue.

Will Cheney Be Sitting Behind Bush Tonight?

At least the opening of the Libby trial hasn't been boring (see Kevin Drum). Both the defense and prosecution make Cheney a central figure in the Leakgate affair that came out of Bush Administration deceptions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (specifically the Niger/Iraq uranium yellowcake story that Joe Wilson debunked). If nothing else, Patrick Fitzgerald may put a number of things on the record, after all.

There are a number of blogs covering the Libby trial so I wasn't planning on doing much but this is a huge story after all and I've been following it since the day I picked up the paper in early September 2002 and read about the famous aluminum tubes just as the campaign to justify the war began; I remember it as a red flag moment—the timing was just too cute (I grumbled for weeks but as I have noted elsewhere, I didn't come out fully against the coming war until February of 2003).

In the excerpt below, I'm quoting from the reliable Steven Clemons of The Washington Note though MSNBC has already updated parts of the story (I dislike this practice, by the way, and prefer major updates to be noted, or simply a new story to be written):

Wow. This just from MSNBC news alert:

WASHINGTON -- Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald used his opening statement in the CIA leak trial Tuesday to allege that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff lied about Cheney's early involvement in the disclosure of a spy's identity.

Fitzgerald said Cheney told his chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, in 2003 that the wife of Iraq critic and former ambassador Joseph Wilson worked for the CIA, and that Libby spread that information to reporters. When that information got out, it triggered a federal investigation.

Think Progress has more specific details about what the prosecution said:

Libby is now on trial for perjury. His defense is that he simply forgot who told him that Plame worked for the CIA. But in court today, prosecutors outlined a powerful case establishing that Libby had reason to remember who told him and motive to cover it up. MSNBC’s David Schuster said today’s revelations from prosecutors are “new and will astound a number of people, even those who have been following this case.” Among the new claims:

– “Vice President Cheney himself directed Scooter Libby to essentially go around protocol and deal with the press and handle press himself…to try to beat back the criticism of administration critic Joe Wilson.”

– Cheney personally “wrote out for Scooter Libby what Libby should say in a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.”

– “Scooter Libby destroyed a note from Vice President Cheney about their conversations and about how Vice President Cheney wanted the Wilson matter handled.”

And here's the story from the defense side from The Guardian:

Attorneys for former White House aide ``Scooter'' Libby said Tuesday that Bush administration officials tried to blame him for the leak of a CIA operative's name to cover up for Bush political adviser Karl Rove's own disclosures.

Attorney Theodore Wells, in the opening statements of I. Lewis Libby's perjury trial, said Libby went to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 and complained that the White House was subtly blaming him for leaking Valerie Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.

``They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb,'' Wells said, recalling the conversation between Libby and Cheney. ``I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected.''

Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. Now that's quite a pair. In Dante's Inferno, in one of the rings of hell, two ambitious thugs whose conspiracy unravelled spend their hours blaming each other for their downfall and they are doomed to gnaw at each over and over until the end of time. I don't wish such a fate on Rove and Libby, but they seem to be wishing it on each other.

Of course Libby blaming the White House for making him the fall guy to protect Karl Rove is a bit of a crock. When Bush, Cheney, Rove and Libby are involved, bad things just seem to happen? I seriously doubt that Bush or Cheney will be impeached because of the politics involved and the failure of the media and the continuing failure of a now Republican minority in Congress to come to grips with a reckless and law-breaking administration, but no one should doubt that the president and vice president are impeachable for any number of things they have done, including committing fraud in making the case for war in Iraq. If not for the protection of a rubber stamp Republican Congress, a number of Bush Administration figures would also have faced prosecution by now.

Perhaps Bush will make a lame crack or two tonight in reference to Cheney or Libby. If Cheney is sitting behind him, it will be one more embarrassment for Bush. And the nation.


Note: I'm still inclined to let other bloggers follow the trial closely but I'll be popping my head in now and then.

The Libby Trial

Murray Waas of Whatever Already! is a journalist covering the Libby trial. Check out his anecdote about the juror who might be excused.

To be honest, at this late stage, I don't expect much from the Libby trial. Think of it. Bush lied to the American people four years ago this month about the Niger/Iraq connection and then they tried to smear Joe Wilson when he exposed the lie. Justice in Washington is very slow these days.