I know you've complained before about me using a medley of news stories instead of one long post. Tough. Here's some stuff I've just got to say.
Bill Clinton's a Commie Bastard
The real headline reads, "Elián González, 11, calls Castro 'friend,' 'father'". WTF? When I was a kid I used to call my mom's old college friends, "Aunt Whoever", but there were no headlines about it. If you read the whole story, it comes out that Janet Reno (and actually US child custody law) made the right decision, sending Elián back home to his father. Elián is happy living at home, especially since he has become somewhat of a local celebrity. He's certainly better off than being used as a political tool in Miami, used to try to get the US government to turn Cuba into the 51st state, or turn Miami into a province of Cuba or whatever it is they want. The Truth is that if Castro were really that bad that a boy calling him a "friend" is so horrible, then we would have had US marines conducting "regime change" 90 miles south of Key West. But the reality is that Cuba isn't much of a threat anymore since its former patron, the USSR, ran out of money. He's just a mean dictator that deposed our mean dictator almost 50 years ago.
Bush's New Nickname: Slippery George
The Valerie Plame case won't go away. Originally, Bush promised that anyone in administrationtion who was "involved" in the affair would be terminated. A few months ago, the shocker was that Bush confidant Karl Rove was one source, but he still works in the White House. Yesterday, another source is confirmed as the VP's chief of staff "Scooter" Libby. No word yet on when the firings will commence.
Jews are Anti-Christian Bastards
If the real title ("Jews attack Southern Baptist evangelism") isn't quite as inflammatory, it's close. Basically, this is not new news. The Anti-Defamation League (which I've criticized before for having poor timing) is sick and tired of official Southern Baptist attacks on Judaism. It's bad enough to get blamed for Arabic terrorism and to be accused of pulling George Bush's strings, but then the Southern Baptist Convention has targeted us for extinction. If there's any consolation, at least they're not doing it at gunpoint, like the Nazis did. Still, why the need to make Jews look like the evil aggressors? Again.
Does She Still Look Good on your Posters?
I don't want to take anything away from Ashley Smith. The poor woman was invaded upon by mass murderer and rapist Brian Nichols and not only survived to tell the tale, subdued him and turned him in to the police. She's a brave woman and a hero, and nothing can take that away from her. But she became a poster woman for the religious wingnuts who couldn't get enough of the dubious tale that she turned him from a savage to a saint merely by talking to him about God and Jesus. It turns out that it also took Crystal Meth. So anyone out there looking to go to downtown Fallujah carrying only a King James should pack some crack, because preaching to someone with a gun pointed at you isn't necessarily the best personal safety precaution I can recommend.
God Wants Us to Stop Learning
This is one of my favorite responses to the Religious Right's efforts to Christianize America. Slate extends the "ID" theory, which says that some creatures and plants are so complex that they cannot be explained by any natural phenomena. If it's good enough to have students stop learning evolution, why stop there? "You know those damn theoretical gaps and conundrums that send microbiology graduate students into dank basement laboratories at 3 a.m.? They don't need to be resolved at all. Go back to bed, sleepy little grad students. God fills those gaps." "What accounts for the phenomenon of spontaneous remission in some cancers? With intelligent design, we don't ever need to find out. Years from now, we'll all lie in our hospital beds while ID-trained doctors hold our hands and assure us that we are merely dying of God." Since everything we don't know yet is "unexplainable", it's clearly the direct result of the hand of God. So we must stop trying to look further and learn things, and just accept everything the way it is. That's OK - I wasn't really looking forward to a Treo running Windows. I know that my phone runs on God instead.
17 comments:
The person Rove mentioned Plame to already knew she was undercover, and it's hard to break a secret to someone who already knows. As far as Libby goes.... Wait until you hear what Miller has to say before you indict him. It's interesting that she sat in jail for however long to protect a source that waived his right to protection, specifically mentioning her. Makes you wonder if perhaps she was protecting someone else, but got sick of jail. I think the main thing that the new stuff has revealed is that Judith Miller is a dumbass.
Oh, and Bush originally said anoyone who "broke the law" would be terminated. Whether any laws were broken is far from determined.
Whatever you might say about Ashley Smith, it looks like the whole thing has really turned her life around, so good for her.
I really like this posting format, despite what others may say. Perhaps it's my add flaring up.
If I also attack Southern Baptist Evangelism, does that make me Jewish enough that I can tell my boss I can't work overtime on Saturday?
From now on, I will procede to call anything I don't know "god," like when I forget the name of something or encounter a new concept...in fact I may start using "god" much the same way as the smurfs used "Smurfy" and "smurf."
Oh, and Bush originally said anoyone who "broke the law" would be terminated.
No, that was his second position. Originally he said anyone who leaked the name, whether they'd broken a law or not, would be fired.
Here's his original statement on
September 2003, which simply says if they leaked the name, they'd be dealt with:
THE PRESIDENT: Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action
He reiterated his promise to fire anyone who'd leaked the name in
June 2004:
QUESTION: Given -- given recent developments in the CIA leak case, particularly Vice President Cheney's discussions with the investigators, do you still stand by what you said several months ago, a suggestion that it might be difficult to identify anybody who leaked the agent's name?
THE PRESIDENT: That's up to --
QUESTION: And, and, do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found to have done so?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Bush made repeated claims to fire anyone who was involved in the leaking, with no reference to breaking the law. He only started qualifying his statements that fall.
The person Rove mentioned Plame to already knew she was undercover, and it's hard to break a secret to someone who already knows.
And how do you know this? You don't know the name of the person Rove mentioned Plame to, but you're able to tell what was going on in their mind?
And as far as the favorite conservative talking point goes, that there was no crime committed here -- do you really think a U.S. Attorney would spend over a year investigating this, send Judith Miller to jail for three months, and start indicting people, if there wasn't a crime? Is this another "partisan witchhunt" like the DeLay investigation?
We can, however, agree that Judith Miller is a dumbass. It was her press-whoring for Ahmed Chalabi that convinced so many people that Iraq had WMDs and the invasion would be a cakewalk.
Ben, here's another example of the administration's original stance on the Plame case. A press statement by Scott McClellan from
September 2003
Q: Scott, has anyone -- has the president tried to find out who outed the CIA agent? And has he fired anyone in the White House yet?
McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, that's assuming a lot of things. First of all, that is not the way this White House operates. The president expects everyone in his administration to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. No one would be authorized to do such a thing.
[...]
McCLELLAN: The president has set high standards, the highest of standards for people in his administration. He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.
I'm going to bow out on this one for now since we, all of us, know nothing as far as the facts go. Fitzgerald, the prosecuter, has not to my knowledge ever even said exactly who or what he is investigating. Just assume I take the opposite position from y'all on this, starting with the fact that Plame definitely hasn't been stationed outside of the country in the previous few years, and thus was not undercover in a way that to blow her cover was illegal. And it was Robert Novak that Rove supposedly broke the cover to, I thought that was common knowledge. And now I'm done with this thread before I get flamed too much.
Ben, how can you say nobody knows any facts, presumably with a straight face? Maybe you're trying to be sarcastic on a written medium, I don't know. But it's pretty clear that Otto Man, for one is fairly familiar with at least some important facts of the case.
Irrefutable facts:
1) Rove leaked Plame's identity
2) Libby leaked Plame's identity
3) Bush announced that he would fire anyone involved in the Plame affair
4) Nobody has been fired
5) After it became known that Rove and Libby were involved, Bush changed his statement (flip flopped?) to say he would fire anyone who broke the law in relation to the case.
... the fact that Plame definitely hasn't been stationed outside of the country in the previous few years, and thus was not undercover in a way that to blow her cover was illegal.
Really? You have to be posted outside the country to have your NOC status protected? Do you have any proof to back this up, or is this just another claim you're pulling out of thin air?
Because
this guy seems to disagree with you, Ben. But what would he know, what with his 20 years of CIA experience?
Fine, one more entry. And feel free to check out ben.sleepingfeet.com for my Plame roundup.
Your facts are not irrefutable. Rove did not leak anything to Novak. Rove was not aware that Plame was "covert" since she made no effort to hide her CIA employment, and all he did was confirm to Novak that Plame recommended her husband for the Niger trip.
Libby, as far as we know so far, did not leak anything. Until Miller has testified on it, we don't anything there. Don't y'all find it at all strange that she spent three months in jail for nothing? She already had a waiver from Libby, and her counsel was assured by Libby of such.
If there was no leak, it's tough to be involved. I wonder where all this outrage was when Sandy Berger committed a felony by stealing documents from the archives and shredding them. That's why this is definitely a partisan witch hunt. Because y'all only get pissed off when you think you can make the Bush administration look bad, but you ignore potentially far worse felonies on the left.
Leak or not, this did not in any way endanger Plame or national security. If so, then she's already be dead, seeing as she was on the cover of a magazine and did the talk show circuit. If I felt I was in danger due to exposure, I wouldn't then expose myself more. The only irrefutable fact here is that the actions taken by Plame, her husband, and Judith Miller make little sense if the truth is as y'all say it is.
"'The term “covert agent” means –
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency -
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States;'
That's from a secondary source, I'm unable to find the actual statute, but this seems pretty clear. She wasn't serving outside the U.S. And another statute says that Rove would have had to have been aware that the CIA was hiding her status for it to be illegal. Thus if he found out by any other way than the CIA saying, "Hey, she's secret," then her certainly didn't break a law.
Gee, Ben, the fact that you only listed the (A) part made it seem like there might be more to the statute (which is 50 USC Section 246). And, hey, there is:
(4) The term ''covert agent'' means -
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency -
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or
(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and -
(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or
(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or
(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.
Now, I know you have the ability to see all and know all -- which is how you're able to tell us just what Rove, Libby and company said in their private phone calls -- but can you believe that maybe, just maybe, Plame was involved in one of these categories? Especially since Larry Johnson (link above) says she is?
Put differently, Ben, could you answer one simple question -- if Plame wasn't covert and therefore there was no law broken, then why has FitzGerald spent so much time and money investigating this?
I clearly said I couldn't find the original source of what I cut and pasted. The source I found only had the A portion.
I'd like to know why Fitzgerald has spent all this time on it, too. But as far as I know, he has yet to name anyone, Rove, Libby, or anyone else, as the focus of his investigation. A nice conservative fantasy would be if he announces, "We're indicting [insert Democrat here]."
I love how Larry Johnson says that Wilson didn't lie about his wife not being involved in choosing him, and then says his wife recommended him. Sounds like a lie to me, too. And how he brings it all back to the WMDs meme. I wonder what all those Kurds that were killed with chemical weapons think about the fact that those weapons that killed them never existed? Whatever. I don't why I keep writing about this when I said I was done. Until Fitzgerald tells us who his target is, it's all just speculation anyway.
But as far as I know, he has yet to name anyone, Rove, Libby, or anyone else, as the focus of his investigation. A nice conservative fantasy would be if he announces, "We're indicting [insert Democrat here]."
No one's been indicted yet and no names have come out because FitzGerald is running this by the book. (Unlike, say, Ken "Leakmaster" Starr.) Indictments are surely coming, so don't count your chickenhawks before they hatch.
And as far as I can tell, the entire conservative ideology is a nice little fantasy. I'm still basking in our discussion of federal poverty rates, when I used facts and figures and you used "stuff my mom told me."
I love how Larry Johnson says that Wilson didn't lie about his wife not being involved in choosing him, and then says his wife recommended him. Sounds like a lie to me, too.
Read this slowly: Plame didn't pick him. Plame was asked by the White House to provide names and she recommended him, much as others they contacted surely made their own recommendations. The choice was made by the White House.
By your logic, Bush didn't select his Supreme Court nominees. The ABA did.
I wonder what all those Kurds that were killed with chemical weapons think about the fact that those weapons that killed them never existed?
Are you just trying to sound stupid now?
Here's what Johnson said: "At the end of the day, Joe Wilson was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was the Bush Administration that pushed that lie and because of that lie Americans are dying."
Clearly, he's noting that there were no WMDs in Iraq during the build-up to the current war -- when the administration said there were WMDs and sent Joseph Wilson to Niger to check on the yellowcake lie that stands at the heart of the Plame case.
The Kurds were gassed in 1988, a full fifteen years ahead of the 2003 invasion. Just because he had them then doesn't mean still he had them now. Johnson isn't arguing that WMDs never existed, and to suggest otherwise shows you need to work on your reading comprehension.
It's been nice talking to you, Ben. If you're representative of today's young conservative, I'm assured that liberalism has a bright future.
Wilson said his wife was not involved with choosing him. Since she recommended him, I'd say that's an involvement. That's just semantics, and is a non-isseu anyway. Whatever, screw it, the Plame thing is a useless non-issue. Sure, Rove may end up gettign fired over it, but he already won Bush two terms in office and his job is done. None of it endangered national security, you jsut want to make the amdinistration look bad. Congrats, but they still kicked your ass two elections in a row.
As far as poverty goes, the poor int eh US are still better off by far than much of what is considered middle class in Europe. That's one reason why there are so many poor people who are fat in the U.S.
I need to work on my reading comprehension? Guess they need to
rework the GMAt since I got 98 percentile on the verbal section. Anyway, the passage you quote in no way says anything about "now." It very specifically says, "At the end of the day, Joe Wilson was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Where does that say now? It says "were," which is very different than "are." Thanks for the English lesson, though. Try again next time, but again, this is a pointless semantics arguement.
And BTW, I consider myself a libertarian, I am not a politician, and I've NEVER (notice how that covers now, and before now) been a good debater. Thankfuly there are much more skilled people to do that. Besides, what does your side have going for it? Besides Obama, there's no Dem politico under 50 worth the shit on my toilet paper.
At any rate, I know you guys like to say that the whole war was predicated on WMDs, but that is definitely not true. That was one of several reasons Bush named, and just because one may or may not be valid does not invalidate the others. Iraq is slowly becoming more peaceful, and will soon be a democracy, hopefully a good one. Isn't it strange how the left always seems to love massmurdering tyrants? Saddam and Stalin for starters. I thought you gusy are supposed to favor freedom and democracy? If the future of liberalism is getting ticked off when someone tries to get rid of mass murderers, then conservatives (and libertarians) have a great future!
You know what else is funny? Up until my crack about your English skills, the only two people that I have seen make personal insults on here are you and Scott, and he has the right since it's his blog.
So Miller's testimony, from what I have read so far, exonerates Libby.
Where's Otto Man when you need him?
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=107538
Looks like it wasn't just my "mom" who said FEMA money given to evacuees was being spent on non essential stuff. Of course Otto Man will probably never read this, but just remember... He was wrong, I was right. And I didn't insult him, either.
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