An Inhuman Understanding
This may get a little discursive, so bear with me.

The Bush-haters ---who not-so-secretly envy the President's Architect with a worshipful, asphyxiated shade of green--- are convinced that, when Karl Rove remarked upon Valerie Plame to Bob Novak and Matt Cooper and probably some jailbird somewhere, he did so as a fully automatic chapter-and-verse-spouting legal analyst ---and not as a natural-minded person who responds naturally to the natural flow of human conversation.

Which brings to mind my belief that the Bush-hating Left are essentially children in their understanding of human nature and in their weird certainties of plots and of omniscient and omnipotent enemies. They are also childlike in their sheer ignorance of factual truth.

The Left often fixate on points of legality with hobgoblinish consistency because they do not have the moral imagination to preserve themselves in the long-term by sacrificing what they see as the absolute protections of the law now. For example, we know who our enemies are in this war against the Islamofascist murderers. We know who their sympathizers and enablers are. These people aren't real Americans or real Britons or anything else that we recognize as fellow citizens and allies. These people are outsiders and do not belong. And if the law must be made to work against them, then that is a necessity that cannot be avoided and should not be made into a source of shame. Because it won't always have to be that way. Because we know enough to know what we will stand for, being Americans.

We know who our enemies are. But the childlike Leftists refuse to acknowledge this. They are too ideologically committed to their hatred of this President and of the people who support him to ever confront the problems with Islam. Do you ever hear any of these Leftists and liberals criticize the practices of Islam in any meaningful way? Of course not. That would be culturally incorrect. And if there's anything that a Leftist holds dearer than his adherence to spiritual communism and countercultural arrogance, it's his fashionable correctness. Never mind that he is a poser who holds all people in contempt; the important thing is for you to know he's above judgementalism and other oppressive Christian and conservative habits.

So you don't see these Bush-haters support the fight our troops are in to secure the blessings of democratic and economic reforms in the middle of the Muslim world. That's because they know better. They know of some other way for us to transform our relationship to the Muslims. But they won't tell us because ---underneath it all--- they know that they are the real obstacles to human and civil rights around the world when they refuse to acknowledge the necessity of confronting evil. They know that the sacrifices our military is making every minute of the day is helping to reshape the Muslim Middle East with the liberating ideas that our culture has triumphed by. These Leftists know that they own a stake in this, too, but they want to see how far they can undermine our strengths before the weight of the edifice comes down on them in a great crushing cloud of victimization. They want that validation more than they treasure their own country. That's a fact.

And, so, anything these losers on the Bush-hating Left can do to harm this Administration, they will. Even in the face of inconvenient facts. Even to the extent of blaming this President for everything from the atrocities of 11 September 2001 to the very behavior of a murderous mujahideen plaguing Iraq.

We know who the enemy are. We know who their sympathizers and enablers are. Why pretend any longer?

Call them out and crush them. If we're feeling especially generous, we might give them a museum some day.

What a Nice Group(ing!)
Now Playing: "Valerie" by Steve Winwood

Liz Claman

Rainy Car
Now Playing: "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel
This is the best picture I've seen on the web today. Except for maybe some pictures of large-breasted women I was looking at earlier. Go here for the full explanation.

(Hat tip to NTodd.)

Tarnation!
Mood:  d'oh
This'll wake you up. Cliff May is suggesting that Joe Wilson used David Corn to out his own wife in this entry in Corn's blog at The Nation.

The Nation?

Well, I'll be!

The first reference to Plame being a secret agent appears in The Nation, in an article by David Corn published July 16, 2003, just two days after Novak’s column appeared. It carried this lead: “Did Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security — and break the law — in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?”

Since Novak did not report that Plame was “working covertly” how did Corn know that’s what she had been doing?

Corn does not tell his readers and he has responded to a query from me only by pointing out that he was asking a question, not making a “statement of fact.” But in the article, he asserts that Novak “outed” Plame “as an undercover CIA officer.” Again, Novak did not do that. Rather, it is Corn who is, apparently for the first time, “outing” Plame’s “undercover” status.

Corn follows that assertion with a quote from Wilson saying, “I will not answer questions about my wife.” Any reporter worth his salt would immediately wonder: Did Wilson indeed answer Corn’s questions about his wife — after Corn agreed not to quote his answers but to use them only on background? Read the rest of Corn’s piece and it’s difficult to believe anything else. Corn names no other sources for the information he provides — and he provides much more information than Novak revealed.

This ought to be fun to watch go down.

Nonsense
Matthew Cooper, in his own words, on Karl Rove:

"This morning, in what can only be described as a stunning set of developments, that person agreed to give me a personal, unambiguous, uncoerced waiver that I could speak to the grand jury."

Cooper wants everyone to believe that he would have gone to jail if Karl Rove hadn't given him a specific waiver of confidentiality. Horseshit. His lawyer should have told him that the waiver that Rove signed back in 2003 was adqeuate, despite Cooper's supposed belief that what Rove signed then was coerced.

I mean, what the hell is going on here?

Have Some More Rope-a-Dope, Bitches
Mood:  hug me
Uh, isn't grand jury testimony supposed to be secret until the person who testifies discloses it? Who is "this person" we keep hearing about?

WASHINGTON — Although Joseph Wilson and many Democrats have spent the last week saying Karl Rove leaked the identity of a CIA operative to journalists, it may have been the other way around, according to sources familiar with grand jury testimony.

Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, testified to a grand jury that he talked with two journalists before they divulged the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, but that he originally learned about her from the news media and not government sources, a person briefed on the testimony told The Associated Press.

The person, who works in the legal profession, told AP that Rove testified last year that he remembered specifically being told by columnist Robert Novak (search) that Plame, who is Wilson's wife, worked for the CIA. Days earlier, Wilson, a former ambassador, had written a harsh critique of the Iraq war that was published in the New York Times.

Not that I'm complaining. I just thought this stuff was supposed to be kept under their hats.

It's probably just Luskin.

The Rope-a-Dope Is Accomplished in Six Stages ---and the Seventh Brings Return
Now Playing: "Chapter 24" by the Pink Floyd
With Wolf Blitzer on CNN yesterday, Joe Wilson, who is a liar, had this exchange:

BLITZER: [...] the other argument that's been made against you is that you've sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you've tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.

What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you?

WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.

BLITZER: But she hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before that?

WILSON: That's not anything that I can talk about.

One extremely stupid interpretation of the quote I emphasized above is that Wilson meant that Plame ceased to be a clandestine officer by virtue of Novak's disclosure. If Wilson meant to say that, wouldn't he have said that she ceased to be a clandestine officer or that Novak caused her to not be such an officer anymore?

It's hard to believe that Wilson's telling the truth here since it absolutely cuts the giblets from his [charge], but he is: Valerie Plame had not been an undercover agent posted abroad for some six years by the time of the Great Outing.

Go read the IIPA and see what that means for Karl Rove, you smegma-chewing felch-monkeys.

You're Not the First to Think That, Mickey
Get a load of the Kausfiles from yesterday:

Isn't this an obvious point that hasn't been made about Joseph Wilson and the Rove/Plame controversy: If you accept an assignment to investigate possible WMD-related activity in Niger on behalf of the CIA, and your wife works at the CIA, shouldn't you think before you make your CIA mission the subject of a high-profile New York Times op-ed piece that there might be the eensiest weensiest chance that in the course of the ensuing controversy your wife's CIA connection might come out in public? How could Wilson not have expected his wife's job to become the buzz of Washington in fairly short order? ... However serious her outing was--and there are those eight redacted pages to worry about--doesn't Wilson bear some substantial responsibility for it as well as whoever in the administration eventually "outed" her to reporters? ... You can't have it all, we are often told. When you marry a covert CIA agent, maybe there are some things you have to give up. Like going on Meet the Press to talk about the CIA! .. Update: Alert reader J.B. notes that, at the time of Wilson's op-ed, Plame was apparently identified by name as his wife on at least one Web site. That means anyone who dealt with Plame abroad (or wanted to call into question the loyalty of a foreigner who dealt with her) could Google her name and discover that she had a husband who--Wilson's op-ed revealed--had undertaken an assignment for the CIA. Not exactly great cover, even before the controversy the op-ed generated. ...

Wilson is a media whore who outed his own wife. Why is that so hard for some to understand?

Nauseating
I can't even watch the interview Wilson did for the Today show with that Gangel woman. What an astonishing joke! Did Madame Couric explicitly instruct her to not ask anything of any substance or to challenge him in any way? Outrageously flimsy [journalism].

It's like Big Media is having to introduce the public to this liar and his wife all over again so that they can get up enough human interest to finish porking the Administration. Shouldn't they have gauzed up the cameras some? Maybe put some strings in to heighten the effect? All that's left now is for Plame herself to make her big interview debut and cinch Madame Couric an Emmy.

This is fucking sordid. And I daresay that the consequences of the overreach are going to be of Ratherian proportions.

LOLygagging
I literally laughed out loud when I read this post by Mark Krikorian over at NRO:

ZIONIST GO HOME!

---and take us with you! The Washington Times had a story today on Bedouins suing the Israeli government to let them move from Gaza to Israel proper after the impending pullout. And Daniel Pipes’ column in the Sun last week was on “Palestinians Who Cling to Israel.” Apparently, when Barak suggested turning the Arab-majority portions of Jerusalem over to the Palestinian Authority in 2000, a survey found that 70 percent of the Arabs in question preferred the Zionist Entity. Conclusion: if the descendants of Palestinian Arab refugees ever got their “right of return,” they really would erase the Jewish state, but not because of politics, but rather for the same reasons Mexicans want to come here – rule of law and economic opportunity.

Obviously, the Jews are so crafty that they've actually managed to trick the Car Swarm People into liking them enough so that when these surveys are done, it will politically embarrass the PA.

A Question for Bush-Haters
Is there now any point at which the President might announce his nominee to the Supreme Court that won't cause you to immediately accuse him of trying to distract the public from the Get Rove Carnival?

Lucy Ramirez, You Got Some 'Splaining to Do
Mood:  on fire
With thanks to Justin Levine, check out this story and this one, too, to get a handle on le who might have supplied the forged documents that the morons on the Left still think were the basis for believing that the Saddamites were in the market for yellowcake.

Those forgeries were not the basis for the British claims.

Lying by the Numbers
Here's a list of Joe Wilson's biggest lies from the RNC's website.

I guess it's on, eh?

Lie Number One is "Wilson Insisted That The Vice President’s Office Sent Him To Niger"

Why is that important? Because, along with Lie Number Two, one can clearly see that Wilson's intent was to inflate the importance of his assignment and to lay it all in Dick Cheney's lap. That way, he could cry later about how he had warned the Administration against going to war over the WMD issue, but that they had ignored him.

Loser.

Absurdity
Now Playing: "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" by the Beatles
Did you happen to see Time magazine's international editor Michael Elliott on Charlie Rose's show a couple nights ago? I can't remember how it went, exactly, but the idea came up that the bomb materials used in London last week may have come from Iraq.

Got that? If we're looking for this afternoon's reason to undermine the War for Iraq, why don't we insinuate ---mere days after the atrocities were committed and without any plausible or serious reason for it to even occur to someone to think it--- that those explosives may have been spirited out of Iraq? You know: from one of those ammo dumps that our forces allowed to be looted because they either failed to gain instantaneous omniscience of all dangers everywhere in a war zone or because things were so much safer for the world when Saddam Hussein was in power and this is what we got coming to us.

My contempt for shit thinking is insurpassable.

Googling for Accuracy
The image you see is a screenshot I took this morning from the Google news page, featuring a Washington Post story about the infamous liar Joe Wilson demanding that Karl Rove be fired.

Who knew Wilson is also a CIA agent?

Can we get Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate this treasonous outing of a great American?

Eschatological
Courtesy of the floor of Eschaton's stables, get a load of this nutty...uh, brown...goodness from some Leftist clown named Steve Simels:

As optimistic as I am about what's [sic] Fitzgerald's doing -- and in this week's sea change in media coverage -- all of that can easily be trumped if there's a big terror attack at home.

Did I say if?

Jesus, Simels. Shouldn't you be wearing a tinfoil hat? You think that this President would stage a terrorist attack on his own country to distract the media and the public from a manufactured scandal over what Karl Rove said in a phone call a couple years ago?

Don't think that Black won't ban you, too. Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground are known to have recently purged such paranaoiac crap from their own little stalls. I'd be more careful to keep your insanity in check.

(Oh, and now Big Media is okay by you? What a fickle little rodent you are.)

Knucklingunderheads
I don't know too much about the politics of the guy who runs The Daily Howler, but when I saw this post over at Eschaton ---and sniffed around the remarkably bitter comments that followed--- I knew I had to check it out:

First, Wilson never seemed to understand the simple logic of the Niger matter. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush uttered those famous sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Six months later, Wilson published his famous New York Times op-ed piece—and quite literally, he didn’t say a single word about Bush’s actual claim. What happened on Wilson’s trip to Niger? “It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place,” he wrote—and his statement was surely right. But Bush never said a transaction took place; he only said that uranium had been sought. But from Day One, Wilson didn’t seem to grasp the logic of the claim he thought he was refuting. None of this stopped him from the grandiose, self-puffing claims that have characterized his woeful performance from that day to this.

Second, Wilson didn’t seem to understand the basic logic of his own report to the CIA. As Orin noted, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported on this matter last summer—and the unanimous committee (nine Reps, eight Dems) savaged Wilson’s performance (for example, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/20/04). Indeed, the committee found that Wilson’s report bolstered suspicion that Iraq sought uranium.

Now, in an update to his post, Bob Somerby acknowledges something that Eschaton's Duncan Black obviously regards as significant: in a 10 July 2004 Washington Post story by Susan Schmidt that details the ways in which the Senate Intelligence Committee slams Joe Wilson as a liar, there is a correction, which the Committee's own Report (pp. 43-44) validates:

In some editions of the Post, a July 10 story on a new Senate report on intelligence failures said that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV told his contacts at the CIA that Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from the African nation of Niger in 1998. In fact, it was Iran that was interested in making that purchase, but no contract was signed, according to the report.

While it's important to get the facts straight, it's also important to not gloss over a very interesting concession here that Black is clearly making: Iran, too, has been seeking nuclear materials for many years now in contravention of the authority of the IAEA. Why would they be doing that? Were they doing something they knew would not be tolerated by the rest of the world?

And doesn't Black understand that his petty reminder of a correction in a single story published a year ago is irrelevant to the larger question of Saddam's interest in procuring uranium? The Committee's Report is clear about that.

Even though Leftist liars refuse to admit it.

Boldfaced Minds
Claudia Rosett, no slouch herself in making the connections between Saddamite Iraq and the al-Qaeda network, helps to spread the word of Stephen Hayes' and Thomas Joscelyn's crucial new NRO piece by talking it up in today's Opinion Journal from the Wall Street Journal.

It's really important for people who advocate war in Iraq to stand up and insist on its necessity to those who do not know the facts ---especially when this Administration so routinely fails itself at making that case to the public.

As Rosett recounts (with emphases added ---because I'm a didactic bastage):

Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn take some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, they list connections--with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam's regime.

Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn raise, with good reason, the question of why Saddam gave haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the men who in 1993 helped make the bomb that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center. They detail a contact between Iraqi intelligence and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, the year before al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers. They recount the intersection of Iraqi and al Qaeda business interests in Sudan, via, among other things, an Oil for Food contract negotiated by Saddam's regime with the al-Shifa facility that President Clinton targeted for a missile attack following the African embassy bombings because of its apparent connection to al Qaeda. And there is plenty more.

Yep. But if we leave it up to the fucking [mainstream media], all we're going to hear about is missing and attractive white girls, shark attacks, and how awful Karl Rove's crime against Valerie Plame and our national security is. This issue of Saddamite Iraq's ties to the jihadists, however, is the real one ---and people need to be paying attention.

Get It Straight
As John Hinderaker at The Power Line reminds us, one of the lies that Joe Wilson told in his infamous op-ed in the New York Times was that he was sent to investigate the yellowcake claims in Niger by Vice President Cheney's office. That isn't true. Here's what Wilson wrote:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

Hinderaker observes (with my emphasis):

This was another lie by Wilson, as Cheney pointed out at the time, and as the Senate Intelligence Report confirmed. Contrary to false statements made by Wilson and his wife, it was Valerie Plame who suggested her husband for the Niger venture, and the Vice-President's office had nothing to do with it. This is precisely what Karl Rove told Matt Cooper, but the Times demurely fails to quote Cooper's email to that effect.

As usual, the Times's editorial will sound plausible only to the uninformed.

If Karl Rove is the Devil, he is in the details.

Why does any of this matter? Because this wasn't just nepotism ---"just" a CIA employee getting her husband an assignment for which he wasn't qualified--- but a scandalous abuse of this Administration by a couple of disaffected partisans who wanted to manufacture their own angle on the question of this war. For fortune? Probably. For fame? You bet your ass.

Oh, and keep reading Hinderaker's post. It's got a juicy surprise on the back end.