This Is Going to Come up Again
During their love-in last night on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann asked Joe Wilson the following questions regarding the forged documents that led to his Nigerien vacation (visit link from preceding post):

Do you know from even dating back to your trip to Niger where those documents came from? Was that, could that have been a forgery by somebody in this country, in this government? Was it necessarily international? Do you have any conclusions or theories?"

Wilson replied with lawyerly language (emphases mine):

"At the time that I was briefed, before I was asked to take this trip, the documents were not in the hands of the U.S. government to the best of my knowledge. I was briefed that an officer, a U.S. officer, had either seen the documents or had been briefed on their existence. And my briefing was based upon the transcript or his report about the existence of those documents. And that's what precipitated the Vice President's query that the CIA follow up on this that led to my trip, but also led to two other reports being done at roughly the same time -- one by a four-star Marine Corps general for the Defense Department, and a third report being done by our ambassador on the ground in Niger. All three of us concluded that there was nothing to that particular allegation. But as to the providence [sic] of those documents, where they came from, I didn't know until I read about it in various articles by Mr. Hersh and Dana Priest of the Washington Post."

What is Wilson talking about? Is he talking about what his wife called "this crazy report" about Iraq talking to Niger about the sale of some yellowcake? I'm not too sure, but let us not forget the following excerpt from the Report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article (“CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data: Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid,” June 12, 2003) which said, “among the Envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’” Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong” when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have “misspoken” to the reporter when he said he concluded that the documents were “forged.” He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.

This is going to come up again, you know. Wilson can't keep his story straight and tools like Olbermann aren't going to press him too hard to do so, anyway.

I think there's some truth to the notion that the anti-war Left is searching for martyrs. They are doing their damnedest to make Wilson and his wife into victims crushed by the Bu$hitler Imperial War Machine, Inc. ---and it's just stupid. The Wilsons are willing partisans who were angling for this job from the start. They are propagandists who are only in it for the fame and fortune.

"Mining Questions"
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who is as much a shill for the Left as any jackass on FOX is for the Right ---and you damned well know it--- was on his little cable access program last night, throwing softballs to Joe Wilson. One of which elicited the following (emphases mine):

Well, first of all, my wife was determined by the Fitzgerald investigation to have been covered by American law covering the protection of classified officers. So I don't believe that there's any other, anything more to say on that. Mr. Fitzgerald looked into it. He has indicted people. He has said that she was a classified officer.

Classified officer? Oh, there he goes again! Oh, sitting on the settee with our scones and our classified officers!

But what happened to Valerie Plame being covert? Is Wilson coming off of that and using Fitzgerald's characterization in a sleight of tongue because he knows that her status was actually not covert and hadn't been for a long time? Lots of stuff is classified in Washington ---and politicians, bureaucrats, military men and women, and reporters trade in it all the time. Do we want to make those communications punishable crimes now, too?

Wilson also rhetorically posed himself a question he commonly gets from his critics:

And, by the way, there are those who ask, 'Why did they send somebody who wasn't a WMD specialist?' The issue on the table was not weapons of mass destruction. Uranium yellow cake is just the ore that comes from crushing the rock. This was a mining question, and it was a question of how the ore gets transported and sold and how a government that's participating in the mining operation, in this case, the Niger government, might make a decision as to whether or not to sell that ore to a foreign government."

Yep. Selling otherwise innocuous rocks to a murderous regime under UN sanctions that may or may not have wanted to transform those rocks into fissible nuclear material was really just a matter for miners and shippers.

I mean, was that a joke that Wilson was trying to tell, but without a laugh from the audience?

Good
Mood:  a-ok
I heard from a commenter at the Leftist blog Eschaton that Aaron Brown is leaving CNN. Good. I don't like Brown. I think he's a smug and smarmy prick.

A Generation from Now, the Notre Dame Cathedral Will Be a Mosque
Overrun and outproduced, the Euro-dhimmis will continue to know only destruction and degradation at the hands of their guests:

PARIS, France (AP) -- Violence erupted for a sixth night Tuesday in the troubled suburbs northeast of Paris with police firing rubber bullets and tear gas as they faced down gangs of youths in Aulnay-sous-Bois, according to witnesses.

A store set afire in the nearby suburb of Bondy, France-Info radio reported.

No trouble was immediately reported in Clichy-sous-Bois, where rioting began last Thursday following the accidental deaths of two teenagers.

These Muslims are unassimilable enemies. Why is Europe committing cultural suicide? What sort of treasonous garbage thought that such influxes of aliens was part of a tenable policy?

[Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy recently referred to the troublemakers as "scum" or "riffraff," and in the past vowed to "clean out" the suburbs.

Even within the conservative government, there were critics.

Such "warlike" words would not bring calm, Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag said in an interview published in the daily Liberation. He told the paper that he "contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics."

No, you inexcusably stupid bastard: your country is going to be submerged by the Submitters.

While re-establishing order demands firmness, "it is in fighting the discrimination that victimizes youths that order is re-established, the order of equality," said Begag, raised in a low-income suburb of Lyon.

The president of SOS-Racism, an anti-racism group, called Tuesday for a "massive investment plan" to cure suburban ills.

Yep. There's only one way out of this hell: pay tribute to the Moors and Saracens.

Note to Republican Senators
You're going to get the associate justice you were wanting, so you can go ahead and shut up now about how the right to reproductive choice isn't in the Constitution. All that does is remind people like me why it's such a damned shame that the Democratic Party has no character or coherency because it refuses to stand up for American exceptionalism and the promotion of liberty and free markets and free peoples.

Which is why I won't vote for them again until they do.

Sloppy-mindedness
I realize that this is a sort of petty thing to remark upon, but read the opening paragraph in this CBS News story from earlier today:

(CBS) A federal indictment alleges that Vice President Cheney's now-former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby committed perjury during, among other things, a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.

Well, considering that Matt Cooper is neither a jury nor a judge nor a prosecutor, how can Libby have committed perjury by talking to him?

The more interesting part of this story is that, in the very next sentence, we find that Cooper is "not so sure" that Libby committed whatever would be the actual equivalent to perjury when he made the mistake of talking to Cooper in the first place. (Emphasis mine.)

[CBS News personality Harry] Smith pointed out that the indictment apparently alleges that Libby told the FBI and the grand jury that it was reporters, "people like you (Cooper), presumably," who told him Plame's identity. "Could you discern that from your conversation," Smith asked Cooper, "That you suggested it, he confirms it?"

"Yeah," responded Cooper. "I suggested it. He confirmed it. But there was no suggestion, I guess as alleged in the indictment, that he went ahead and, you know, talked to me about how he heard it and such. So, I think you've got a situation where the prosecutor is accusing him of several cases of perjury and obstruction of justice, and you're going to have witnesses or the people who work most closely with Libby in the White House and, potentially, reporters testifying in this case."

This is just incredibly fucking weak. Fitzgerald spent two years on this?

Oh, and the first namby-pamby Leftist I hear complain about the anti-media attitude or silent treatment shown by this Administration in the wake of this nonsense is going to get groin-punted.

Intense
Now Playing: "Lay, Lady, Lay" by Bob Dylan
I just got back from seeing North Country at the Alamo Draft House on South Lamar with a couple of family members, and just wanted to note for you that it is a very intense movie. A large and interesting cast with lots of genuinely interesting emotional arcs. It's not my usual kind of movie, but it was damned good and I recommend it to anyone with a conscience.

Justice Cornyn?
I think John Cornyn, the junior United States Senator from Texas, is a good man and I hope he is on the short list for the next nomination to the Supreme Court. If not now, maybe when Justice Stevens or some other Justice steps down in the next couple of years.

But I think he'd be a great choice for tomorrow morning's announcement ---and I hope the President does the deed. After all, Cornyn already told George Stephanopoulos this morning that he'd "take that call" if it came.

Let's hope so.

And let's also hope that this pisses off some yankees about how Texocentric this White House is.

A Palpable Hit
Mood:  loud
Tina Fey, who is very hot, had the best line last night on Saturday Night Live when she reported during "Weekend Update":

"A new poll shows that 66 percent of Americans think that President Bush is doing a poor job of handling the war in Iraq, and the remaining 34 percent believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church."

Snarfalicious!

Not Fade Away

Restoring Honesty, Part 1
In May 2003, at about the same time that he became an adviser to the John Kerry presidential campaign, Joe Wilson also became a rat bastard in the service of New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof. Wilson fed Kristof his own version of the events surrounding his vacation to Niger in February-March 2002, including the factoid that he had been sent there on account of Vice President Dick Cheney.

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger.

That's cause-and-effect. To anyone reading that sentence, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that Cheney sent Wilson to Niger.

Why does this matter? Because it demonstrates that Wilson was using an editorial writer at probably the most powerful newspaper in the world to advance the notion that Dick Cheney and/or his staff were directly involved in sending Wilson to Niger.

But that isn't what happened.

What Do You Tell a Woman with Two Black Eyes?
Mood:  don't ask
Nothing. I done told her twice. This is from Australia, folks:

POLICE are being advised to treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits.

Officers are also being urged to work with Muslim leaders, who will try to keep the families together.

Women's groups are concerned the politically correct policing could give comfort to wife bashers and keep their victims in a cycle of violence.

The instructions come in a religious diversity handbook given to Victorian police officers that also recommends special treatment for suspects of Aboriginal, Hindu and Buddhist background.

Some police officers have claimed the directives hinder enforcing the law equally.

Police are told: "In incidents such as domestic violence, police need to have an understanding of the traditions, ways of life and habits of Muslims."

They are told it would be appreciated in cases of domestic violence if police consult the local Muslim religious leader who will work against "fragmenting the family unit".

Jesus Christ!

(Hat tip to Charles Johnson.)

Gristleheadedness
Now Playing: "Happy" by the Rolling Stones
Last week, before the Libby indictments were issued, professional shitstirrer David Gergen made a strange observation (emphases mine):

"It's not that the abuse of power here is anything like Watergate or Iran-Contra even," says Gergen, now the director of Harvard's Center For Public Leadership. "Rather it is, if indictments come, they may be of the people closest to the president and vice president of the United States. And they will re-open the wounds of Iraq, and people will ask the question, if indictments come, were we led into Iraq by criminal means?"

Gergen is making the same stupid connection between the (supposed) outing of Valerie Plame and the War for Iraq that other dumbasses, like Joe Wilson and Chris Matthews, keep making as well.

That is to say, we went to war before poor little Valerie was "outed." Are we clear on that yet? Gergen is clearly linking the indictments to some bullshit notion of "criminal means" that supposedly led us to war months before Bob Novak finally put two and two together ---which, not incidentally, was Number One on Joe Wilson's wish list. After all, you can't be a martyr if no one nails you.

You just know there's some dishonest shit going on when Democrats are [fretting] about national security and the integrity of the intelligence community. This from the party of Frank Church and Ted Kennedy and John Kerry? Get the hell out of here!

Stillwaterloo?
Mood:  down
If this clown they've got doing the color commentary on TBS for the UT-Oklahoma State game makes reference to a "perfect storm" one more time, I'm going to turn the sound off.

Man...this isn't looking too great.

"Not Common Knowledge"
Mood:  smelly
I have read the Libby Indictment and was interested by the following:

[...] Valerie Wilson was employed by the CIA, and her employment status was classified. Prior to July 14, 2003, Valerie Wilson's affiliation with the CIA was not common knowledge outside of the intelligence community.

Now, this is Patrick Fitzgerald's way of saying that Bob Novak is a rat bastage. Okay, whatever.

But "not common knowledge" is a weaselly way of avoiding the fact that Plame's employment status was not the Great Official Secret that all these [patriotic] and pro-intelligence communitarians on the Left claim it was. Did Fitzgerald alight upon that phrase at the suggestion of the FBI agents he sent to interview the Wilsons' neighbors Monday night? One of her neighbors, David Tillotson, said that he knew Valerie Wilson "very well," but then helpfully added:

"Did we know anything about her position before the story broke? Absolutely not."

Then it's settled. This guy knew her very well...except for that one part where he didn't actually know what her job was. One suspects that this guy is just the sort who would have all his "economic consulting on an international basis" done by Brewster Jennings. You know: just hang around a mailbox until someone drops by to keep up the appearance that Brewster Jennings was an actual company when five minutes online will tell you otherwise.

I'm obviously no lawyer, but this "not common knowledge" stuff cannot be a legal standard, can it? If Plame's classified status with the CIA was, in any way, compromised or expired or otherwise ill-tended, then what the hell was this investigation about, anyway?

Just So
Two years ago, Patrick Fitzgerald said:

"This case is not about a whistle-blower. It's about potential retaliation against a whistle-blower."

Today, Michael Barone writes (with my emphasis):

Note what Libby was not charged with: violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. To violate that act, the agent whose identity has been disclosed must have been serving abroad within five years of the disclosure. According to a book by Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, Plame had not served abroad since 1997, more than five years before the 2003 disclosure. So the act was not violated by anyone. This was an investigation of people who were telling the truth about a person, Joseph Wilson, who was telling lies.

Just so.

"Official A"
If you read through today's indictment of Lewis Libby, you'll see a reference to a senior White House employee whom Patrick Fitzgerald calls "Official A".

It's no wonder who this person is:

Late Friday, three people close to the investigation, each asking to remain unidentified because of grand jury secrecy, identified [Karl] Rove as Official A.

No need to adjust your set, friend. What you've just read is the limit of irony: it's a news report ---based upon leaks of classified information--- about a set of indictments brought against a very powerful man whose underlying "crime" was leaking classified information.

If you need me, I'll be busy slapping my face a la Curly Howard.

(Hat tip to Duncan Black.)

No Report?
This came up a few days ago when the Democratic leadership on the House Intelligence Committee and others sent Patrick Fitzgerald a letter asking that he release a report of his investigation, even if no indictments are handed up (or, is it down?). But Loudmouth Matthews and Dr. Greenspan's wife are saying that he won't do it. But didn't we know that wasn't going to happen? Fitzgerald is just a prosecutor, not one of the "special" kind that took down Clinton.

Fitzgerald is not allowed by law to issue those findings since grand juries sit in silence.

I certainly have no problem with him telling us everything he found out. Let it come on down. Break the law, Paddy! You know you want to!

On the Spot
I really enjoyed how the Associated Press put it when reporting on the reaction to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's recent suggestion that the Car Swarm People be the ones to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth (emphasis added):

CAIRO, Egypt - Arab governments remained silent Thursday as international condemnation grew over a call by Iran's new president for Israel to be destroyed.

Despite the silence, analysts in the region said Tehran's Arab rivals may quietly be pleased to see the radical regime further isolated by its extremism.

However, some Palestinians — who would have the task of destroying Israel according to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — rejected the remarks.

"We have recognized the state of Israel and we are pursuing a peace process with Israel, and ... we do not accept the statements of the president of Iran," Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said. "This is unacceptable."

Yeah, that would be quite the "task," right?

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but the Israeli approach to the Car Swarm People ---just as the Coalition approach has been to the enemy in Iraq--- is one of almost incredible forbearance. Got that? If it were the desire of the Israeli people to destroy tens of millions of Arabs, it would happen. And if these practitioners of the so-called Religion of Peace (and Submission) push the Israelis to the point of having to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, it will not go well for them.

Always remember that Americans and Russians never nuked each other because we both love life too much. But with these people who love death like the Mohammedans do? They don't have the same restraints. Therefore, their ideology must be dealt with if life on Earth is to succeed.

Taunting in Your General Direction
If the New York Times isn't wrong about this, then Karl Rove will not be indicted. Which means that this story stays inside the Beltway and stays off the majority of the public's radar screens. Because nobody knows who Scooter Libby or any of those other guys are.

Oh, well. Better luck next time, Democratic losers.

Oh, and fuck George Tenet.