Isikoff Confirms O'Donnell's Scoop

Read all about it at Editor and Publisher. Michael Isikoff of Newsweek has corroborated Lawrence O'Donnell's revelation last night that Karl Rove was Matthew Cooper's source; however, I do note that nowhere does it explicitly say that Rove was the key leaker of Valerie Plame's name and status as a CIA operative. If he did, then it gets very, very interesting. The last paragraphs in the E&P piece tells why.

According to published reports, Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the case, has interviewed President Bush and Vice President Cheney and called Karl Rove, among others, to testify before the grand jury.

"The breadth of Fitzgerald's inquiry has led to speculation that it has evolved into an investigation of a conspiracy to leak Plame's identity," the Chicago Tribune observed on Friday, "or of an attempt to cover up White House involvement in the leak."

Iraq increasingly looks like Vietnam, and the Chimpie regime looks like it's found its very own Watergate.

O'Donnell Makes It Clear: It Was Rove

There's no misinterpreting this statement from Lawrence O'Donnell. But why did this have to come out over a three-day weekend? In any case, watch all the players carefully. Rove is clever, and this could be just an elaborate ploy to actually defuse something else. However, my hope is that Rove is as susceptible to his own arrogance and power as other powerful men have been and will bring about his own ignominious and disgracing downfall. Cross your fingers, say your prayers, burn your sage--whatever it takes. I anxiously await tomorrow's papers, as O'Donnell declares

I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow.

Coming on the heels of Chimpie's weak Iraq speech last Tuesday, this administration is looking more and more like it's, to borrow from Dick "I Kill Your Kids for Oil" Cheney, "in its last throes."

Oh, Could It, Could It, Could It Be True???!!!?!?!?!?

With the screaming heads on the McLaughlin Group on TV tonight, with me poking at my laptop and not paying a lot of attention, I thought I heard Lawrence O'Donnell say that Time magazine's notes which are being released will corroborate that Karl Rove was the source of the Valerie Plame leak. What? No, too good to be true, maybe he just meant that it could be inferred or something. But then Daily Kos has the link to the transcript of the show and sure enough, I heard right.

Cross your fingers. Is it possible that Karl the Genius is going down?

Imagine Justice This Sweet

Read the following piece from an article about desertion thus far into 2005 which appeared today in the Stars and Stripes, the overseas newspaper of the US military. Think about Crusader Bunnypants aka Chimpie the Warrior as you go.

Questions and answers about military desertion ...
Q: What is the difference between AWOL and desertion?

A: A servicemember who is not officially on leave, and fails to report to his or her training or duty station is Absent Without Leave (or UA, Unauthorized Absence, in the Navy and Marine Corps).

On the 31st day that a servicemember fails to report to his or her training or duty station, the member’s AWOL status changes to Dropped From Rolls (DFR), or desertion.

Q: Does the U.S. military go looking for deserters?

A: No, the services do not have the manpower to hunt down deserters, except in rare instances — such as members thought to possess top-secret information, or who are suspected to have committed a serious crime.

Q: How do deserters get caught?

A: The services send the names of all deserters to the National Crime Information Center, a nationwide database circulated to civilian law enforcement offices and other government agencies. Deserters can be identified by something as simple as a routine traffic stop.

Q: What happens when deserters get caught or surrender?

A: They are “returned to military control” or sent back to their parent service.

Now imagine that someone happens to do a search of the National Crime Information Center's database of deserters and the name George Walker Bush came up. And imagine that because the law is the law, Chimpie is "returned to military control." He wakes up in a bivouac in the Anbar region of Iraq a few days later. Busted back to E1, he is now under the command of an officer whose unit has been patching together armor for their Humvees from scrap salvaged from dumps. Three quarters of the men are wearing body armor sent from family and friends. They also have recently learned of some "irregularities" in Halliburton's accounting.

The platoon sergeant sticks his head in the door.

"Drop your cocks and grab your socks, boys. We're headin' out. Bush, you'll be on point."

How sweet it would be.

Why We Fight . . . for Plutocracy!

It's nice to know that the burden of responsibility for financing the republic has shifted so dramatically to the poorer people among us, just like Jesus would have liked. From the New York Times:

The chances of having a large income but not paying taxes on any of it are growing, according to the data, issued in the Internal Revenue Service's annual report to Congress on well-to-do Americans who live tax free. About one in every 436 high-income Americans paid no taxes in 2002, up from one in 531 in 2001 and one in 1,010 in 2000.

Yes, this is what El Presidente Chimpie means when he talks about the "sacrifice" being "worth it." For his class, giving the ultrarich new means to weasel out of taxes while siphoning off the energies of the poor through an illegal and incompetently run war is the perfect sort of sacrifice that he's used to.

But there's one fatal flaw in Chimpie's scheme, and that's that the rich still are a tiny minority, and as the wheels fall off his wagon in the form of exposure of his lies and shameless rhetoric, more and more average Americans in both red and blue states are thinking that he deserves to be stripped of office.

In Red States (those carried by Bush in the 2004 presidential election), support for impeachment reaches 36 per cent. In Blue States (those where Democratic nominee John Kerry won in the last election), 48 per cent of respondents believe the president should face charges.

The 36 percent in the Red states is quite startling to me, because according to the Bush view, those states contain nothing but gun-wielding, god-fearing, gay-hating, war-loving born agains, and if over a third of them are already calling for Chimpie's scalp, as the revelations and bodies mount, all that wrath they aimed at gay marriage and Terry Schiavo's husband is going to find a newer and juicier target in El Presidente.

Geez, I feel like dancing all of a sudden. And Chimpie is feeling the heat. If you recall, on September 17, 2003, he said, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th attacks." Yet in his speech on Tuesday, he repeated September 11 over and over and over while supposedly adressing the need to be in Iraq. This, to me at least, is a sign of desperation on his part, because he is trying to reconstruct an appeal to emotion for September 11 to get support for his illegal war in Iraq. But living as he does in his insular little bubble, he doesn't realize that even something as horrific as that attack cannot be squeezed over and over for the same effect. The polls show it. He even dared to trot out the name of Osama bin Laden, who as far as I know is still thumbing his nose at us because Bush's hardon for Iraq diverted necessary resources out of Afghanistan, taking the pressure off bin Laden, al Qaeda's core and the Taliban.

Of course, that only concerns you if you believe Chimpie gives a shit about anything except the continuation of the oligarchy that he was so lucky to be born into. There is no price too great for him to have us pay so long as his class retains power.

"Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder," he said.

I wonder if he's actually talking about the United States and not Iraq. Of course, what does this child of privilege know about hard work, despite his claims to the contrary?

Have Jenna and Barbara signed up yet? They could at least shovel some rubble or something, you know, as a sign of "sacrifice."

Chimpie Role Models on LBJ

I really am speechless after Chimpie's address Tuesday night. I think his tactic now is to just bore the shit out of us with the same platitudes. His audience has really shrunk, I think, because they get the gist, you know, ruthless killers, freedom, terror, democracy, blah blah blah. When the drinking games become common, you know your speeches are getting too well worn; in fact, wouldn't it be a hoot to have Bush give his speech in front of an arena of people hoisting bottles of tequila at every designated word or phrase?

Anyway, I just can't bring myself to analyze that text yet again. Here's an easier way to do it. Just compare Chimpie's rhetoric to that of Lyndon Johnson's at a point in the Vietnam war when we only had had 400 young Americans killed.

Here's Bush:

As Iraqis grow confident that the democratic progress they are making is real and permanent, more will join the political process. And as Iraqis see that their military can protect them, more will step forward with vital intelligence to help defeat the enemies of a free Iraq. The combination of political and military reform will lay a solid foundation for a free and stable Iraq.

Here's LBJ:

Our objective is the independence of South Viet-Nam, and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves-only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.

In Vietnam it took 58,000 American lives and between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese. So far in Iraq we have 1740 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead. Vietnam spanned a decade. We're only into our third year in Iraq. In both cases we had been fed terrible lies about the reasons for war, its progress, and our actual goals. LBJ finally decided not to run for office again when he realized that the cat was out of the bag, but Nixon managed to keep it going long enough for the death numbers to double. Chimpie shows no shift in his perceptions, so you'd all best settle back and let the bodies pile up until even the braindead recognize how badly they have been led. And, sadly, history shows us that that is usually a long, long and costly time.

This is what you get when chickenshit chickenhawks get the war mania. A sociopath like Bush isn't even capable of empathy with those who are truly suffering because of his hubris, but he's learned to mouth the words over and over and to ignore anything to the contrary. He's yet to attend a military funeral, but he never shies from standing up the very men and women he is willing to sacrifice as props for his robotic recitations of the same old words.

Better Late than Never, But Not for 1700 Americans or Tens of Thousands of Iraqis

Okay, so now they get it.

A record 57 percent say the Bush administration "intentionally exaggerated its evidence that pre-war Iraq possessed nuclear, chemical or biological weapons," according to the poll.

It was the first time a majority said the administration "intentionally misled" the public, the survey said.

Who knew Americans could be so fallible? Well, P.T. Barnum, H.L. Mencken, and Karl Rove, but only the last one actually was able to translate that into the deaths of so many.

I appreciate that no one likes to admit he's a sucker, so this is actually quite a startling poll, because it means that Americans can no longer rationalize away how baldly they have been lied to and how terribly our brave military has been used.

I'm curious to see what happens after Chimpie prances around Ft. Bragg tonight to try again to abuse our soldiers as a cheap emotional tool to cover his mendacity and incompetence. No president in my lifetime has ever so blatantly hidden behind our armed forces even as he ran from them in his youth or tries to destroy them now.

George W. Bush, America is learning to hate you for the cowardly, ignorant, dishonest shithead you truly are. You can't hide behind our warriors and even Jesus isn't going to cover for you any longer.

This Ought to Make It "Mission Accomplished," eh?

According to Reuters:

As part of a newly honed White House focus on Iraq, Bush will travel to an army base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on Tuesday to deliver what his aides are billing as a major speech on the conflict.

Gee, I thought that El Presidente Chimpie thought about Iraq "every day; every single day." You'd think that he'd be "honing" his "focus" on a continuing basis. I hate to be impatient, and patience is a virtue, but since his triumphant landing and prance aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln over two years ago, the crotch-enhanced dress-up queen's message just hasn't seemed to have reached the insurgents . . . or some of his own party.

Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is angry. He's upset about the more than 1,700 U.S. soldiers killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Iraq. He's also aggravated by the continued string of sunny assessments from the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's recent remark that the insurgency is in its "last throes." "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

Now, according to Daily Kos, Cheney, as another lying mouthpiece for the whole Bushit echo chamber and propaganda machine, is going after Hagel, which just delights me, given that Cheney is a fucking chickenshit chickenhawk and Hagel is a decorated Vietnam veteran. And even though he doesn't carry the weight of a Chuck Hagel, Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones, a Republican Congressman from North Carolina, has now also turned against Bush's little lying war.

"If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong," he is quoted as saying. "Congress must be told the truth."

I wish he'd gone a little farther, adding, "And after Congress gets the truth, we're going to impeach the bastards, remove them from office, indict them on war crimes, and then convict them. It should not be long before they meet their maker at the gallows in the Hague." But still, for the guy who wanted the word "French" excised from American menus, this is quite a turnaround.

Of course, Karl Rove can send his thugs around to "correct" those errant Republicans to keep them in check, but it's going to take more than a Bush charm offensive, with or without the Village People attire, to reverse this:

Barely one in five Americans -- 22 percent -- say they believe that the insurgency is getting weaker while 24 percent believe it is strengthening. More than half -- 53 percent -- say resistance to U.S. and Iraqi government forces has not changed.

On the other side of the world, the sparkling victory given to the Iraqi people fails to impress them.

It is not just the political violence, the bombs and assassinations, and all the security measures taken to suppress them, that bother many people in Baghdad and other badly-hit areas.

It is also straightforward criminality and the feeling that there is no authority controlling the streets.

Perhaps this is what Bush meant while mugging beneath his "Mission Accomplished" banner. In chaos, one finds opportunity. Just ask Halliburton, ask Bechtel, ask the weapons manufacturers. Add to the unnecessary slaughter of Iraqi civilians and the deaths of Americans for a lie the crime of war profiteering and I'd say there's more than enough for these scummy liars to swing from the city gates.