Skank

Clinton to Dems: Don’t Fear Tough Issues

Why does he even have to say this:

Democrats can’t be afraid to talk about hot-button issues, including abortion, and should fight back against personal attacks from conservatives if they want to regain power in Washington, former President Bill Clinton said Saturday.

“You can’t say ‘Please don’t be mean to me. Please let me win sometimes.’ Give me a break here,” Clinton said. “If you don’t want to fight for the future and you can’t figure out how to beat these people then find something else to do.”

Or this:

Clinton also criticized political reporters and authors for failing to use reason and common sense in their writing and failing to dig deeply into stories. Instead, he said, reporters let officials get away with saying things that aren’t true so stories include comment from both sides.

It’s time for the neutered leaders of the Democratic Party to put up a fight or shut up and get out of the way for someone who will. I’m sick and tired of their cowardice. Who will lead a renewed group of junkyard dogs into battle against Republican hyenas?

Maeve in her Halloween costume.

Theora Jones TPM Cafe brings up an obvious point that thhe MSM seem too obtuse to comprehend:

The Vice President told Scooter about Plame’s status. Therefore, when newspapers reported that Scooter had told the grand jury that he’d learned about Valerie Plame from reporers, Cheney knew that Scooter was lying to the grand jury!

So, why did the Vice-President allow Scooter continued access to national secrets when he knew for a fact that Scooter was lying to a grand jury investigating a leak of national secrets?

Wasn’t it the Vice-President’s responsibility to protect national security by, informing investigators of this fact? Did he? Wasn’t it his responsibility to, at the very least, have Scooter’s security clearance revoked? Shouldn’t he have fired him? Shouldn’t he have done SOMETHING?

I mean, if this were a cashier working in the White House gift shop, accused of stealing from the till, if you were his boss and you knew he was lying to investigators, the very least you would do is reassign him to a job where he wasn’t handling any money! What, when it’s national security at risk, those rules don’t apply anymore?

Can someone please explain why, knowing what he did, the Vice President trusted Scooter Libby with the nation’s most valuable secrets?

Why? Because it was his idea in the first place? Seems about right.

Bob Cesca: Let Scooter Exonerate Himself:

Scooter Libby, former assistant to the President of the United States, had the following to say in a statement regarding his indictment Friday: “I am confident at the end of this process I will be completely and totally exonerated.” That’s going to be difficult when the White House forces him to enter a guilty plea in order to prevent a very ugly trial: a trial which will involve Cheney, Rove, and maybe even the president himself testifying under oath.

So what’s it going to be?

I’m with Libby. I’ll take the trial, even if it’s in exchange for the possibility of Libby being exonerated by a jury and set free. Here’s why.

Read it all. Beautiful.

Paul Begala writes about The False Moral Superiority of the Bush White House:

The plain fact is that after a seven year non-stop investigato-rama, no senior Clinton White House official was ever even charged with wrongdoing. Much less indicted. Much less convicted. In fact, the highest-ranking Clinton official to be convicted of wrongdoing in connection with his public duties was the chief of staff to the Agriculture Secretary. Betcha five bucks you can’t even name the Clinton Agriculture Secretary in question, much less his chief of staff. Unlike Nixon (whose Watergate crimes were manifest), unlike Reagan (whose White House was corrupted by the Iran-Contra crimes), unlike Bush 41 (who pardoned White House aides and Cabinet officers before they could testify against him), Bill Clinton presided over the most ethical White House staff in decades.

And yet George W. Bush campaigned on a pledge to “restore honor and decency to the Oval Office.” He spoke of moms and dads on the campaign trail who showed him photos of their children and asked him to give them a president their kids could be proud of.

We all knew what he meant. With a wink and a nod he told us he wouldn’t cheat on Laura. And after he took office Mr. Bush and his henchmen smeared the Clintonistas, falsely accusing them of vandalism and theft. They told the press that in this Oval Office the gentlemen would wear suits, the ladies, skirts. And no more paper coffee cups. Nothing but the finest bone china. The Bushies even claimed moral superiority because of their punctuality. Everything was designed and marketed to stress the virtue of the Bushies and the vice of the Clintonians. And it worked. In the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency, one major media figure told my wife and me to our faces that the difference between the Clinton crowd and the Bush team was that, “They’re just better people than you are. They’re more loyal to their President, more patriotic, less self-interested and ambitious. They’re just better people.”

Now we learn that these Better People have turned the White House into a criminal enterprise. And that the purpose of that enterprise was to mislead the country into going to war. 2,000 Americans killed. 15,000 horribly wounded. $200 billion gone. And a Muslim world — and a non-Muslim world, for that matter — that hates our guts. Al Qaeda is recruiting terrorists faster than we can kill them. And there is no end in sight.

But thank God there were no blow jobs. They really are Better People.

The Bushie crowd’s hypocrisy knows no end.

Weldon Burger over at Betty the Crow News rips into former Clinton official Lanny Davis for a moronic op-ed at the NYT:

The information about Plame wasn’t “out there:” it was about as far “in there” as one can get without resorting to a proctologist to get it out. It was in the vice president’s office, the state department’s intelligence branch and the CIA. Libby wasn’t
“pushing back” against rumors: he was “screwing” an administration critic for so publicly “discrediting” an already rickety core administration “claim” about Iraq that the White House felt compelled to “renounce” it. And if every senior White House official — calling Cheney’s chief of staff and national security advisor a “political aide” is pretty cute — who learned the identity of a covert CIA agent from the vice president of the United States and promptly leaked it to the press was prosecuted, I suspect our jails could handle the traffic with room to spare for Davis if he did anything even remotely as sinister as that. With a bit of luck, we’ll find out.

Davis plays the equivalency game: for every Republican sin, he has to offer up a counterweight Democratic one. But Republicans have owned the government for five years now; there is no equivalency. There are no powerhouse Democratic lobbyists under indictment, if only because Tom DeLay has been so successful in purging Democratic lobbyists from K Street. There are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders under indictment, if only because there are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders. Democrats didn’t out a covert CIA agent; Democrats didn’t drag the nation into an illegal war based on bogus intelligence (although more than a few are complicit in the effort); Democrats didn’t institutionalize torture or strip US citizens of basic constitutional protections.

There is a national security issue here. Republicans are demonstrably more corrupt than Democrats. Hell, this isn’t even the only occasion on which the administration have blown the cover of a secret intelligence asset from purely political motives: in August of last year, the administration infuriated British and Pakistani intelligence services by leaking the name of a highly placed al Qaeda informant in order to justify an increase in the terror alert level, and in the process ruining counterterrorism operations in Britain and Pakistan.

For going on 40 years now, Democrats have gotten their asses kicked when it comes to hardball politics. Lanny Davis and Libby/Rove are emblematic of why. If Davis wants to wish a pox on both parties’ houses, he should probably wait until Democrats get a house.

A handy compendium of treasongate post-indictment posts:

http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2005/10/big-dick-big-squeeze-and-smoking-gun.html

http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2005/10/john-dean-says-scooter-is-cheney.html

http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2005/10/patrick-fitzgerald-david-radler-and.html

Good articles archived here– http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Ditto– http://rawstory.com/

http://billmon.org/archives/002312.html

http://billmon.org/archives/002311.html

http://billmon.org/archives/002308.html

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/28/morris-cheney/

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/28/earth-to-fox/

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/10/exposed.html

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/10/libby_as_a_fict.html

Let Armando from DKs answer the question.

We Know Who Outed Plame

One of the most frustrating things I keep hearing on these idiotic cable shows is the line that even now we don’t know who the leaker of Plame’s identity was (I mean all of em, including Olberman.) Honest to Gawd if another person says that I am going to toss my TV. Were they NOT watching Fitzgerald’s press conference? Did they NOT read the Indictment? Let me help them now. From Paragraph 14 of the indictment:

On June 23, 2003, LIBBY met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. During this meeting . . . Libby informed her that [Joe] Wilson’s wife might work at the CIA.

Paragraph 17 of the Indictment describes Libby telling Miller again that Plame was a CIA agent on July 8, 2003.

Paragraph 21 of the Indictment describes Official A (Karl Rove) as confirming to Robert Novak that Palme was a CIA agent during the week prior to July 11, 2003 (presumably after July 6.)

Paragraph 23 of the Indictment describes Libby telling Matt Cooper that Plame was a CIA agent on July 12, 2003.

Paragraph 24 of the Indictment describes Libby telling Judith Miller again on July 12, 2003 that Plame was a CIA agent (apparently Judy Miller has a faulty memory and could not hold the thought in her head).

So who outed Valerie Plame? Libby and Rove. Is that too hard to understand?

Read the rest of the article.

A Good Start to the cleaning out of the DC cess pool that the White House has become.

Stuff on my cat.