Author: Greg Saunders

Ummm….I told you so. Two weeks ago when everyone was buzzing about The National Journal report that Rove lied to George Bush, I wrote:

I don’t doubt for a second that Murray Waas’ sources are correct about what the grand jury has been told, but let’s be serious here. What’s the more likely scenario? Karl Rove lying to the Patrick Fitzgerald or George W. Bush?

And it turns out, Rove didn’t lie to Bush after all :

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.
. . .
A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

“Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way,” the source said.

But here’s something to chew on. What if both stories are correct? On the surface, they seem contradictory, but let’s look at that National Journal piece again (emphasis added) :

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.

Isn’t it equally plausible that both of these stories tell different sides of the same story? Let’s assume for a moment that Murray Waas’ sources didn’t lie to him about what Bush and Rove told Fitzgerald. If that’s the case and today’s story is also true, then we’ve got a President who’s in “cover your ass” mode. Regardless of whether or not the President was under oath, lying to federal prosecutors seems like a pretty clear case of obstruction of justice.

Of course, proving the President’s involvement is another matter entirely. Can Fitzgerald prove that the President lied? If the rumors are correct that someone in the Administration has “flipped”, then there’s a good chance that the President’s “displeasure” towards Rove was well known within the White House. After all, this is a President who wears his heart on his sleeve getting pissed at his most trusted advisor over an issue that everyone was talking about. This wouldn’t just get the rumor mill buzzing, but would likely lead to some communications within the White House about the President wanting everyone to get their shit together. Remember, the big news out of today’s scoops isn’t just when the President found out but his anger that his team “did a clumsy job”. A single saved email along these lines and some fibbing by the President about what he knew and when he knew it could be all the rope Fitzgerald needs to hang Bush out to dry.

Ummm….I told you so. Two weeks ago when everyone was buzzing about The National Journal report that Rove lied to George Bush, I wrote :

I don’t doubt for a second that Murray Waas’ sources are correct about what the grand jury has been told, but let’s be serious here. What’s the more likely scenario? Karl Rove lying to the Patrick Fitzgerald or George W. Bush?

And it turns out, Rove didn’t lie to Bush after all :

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.
. . .
A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

“Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way,” the source said.

But here’s something to chew on. What if both stories are correct? On the surface, they seem contradictory, but let’s look at that National Journal piece again (emphasis added) :

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.

Isn’t it equally plausible that both of these stories tell different sides of the same story? Let’s assume for a moment that Murray Waas’ sources didn’t lie to him about what Bush and Rove told Fitzgerald. If that’s the case and today’s story is also true, then we’ve got a President who’s in “cover your ass” mode. Regardless of whether or not the President was under oath, lying to federal prosecutors seems like a pretty clear case of obstruction of justice.

Of course, proving the President’s involvement is another matter entirely. Can Fitzgerald prove that the President lied? If the rumors are correct that someone in the Administration has “flipped”, then there’s a good chance that the President’s “displeasure” towards Rove was well known within the White House. After all, this is a President who wears his heart on his sleeve getting pissed at his most trusted advisor over an issue that everyone was talking about. This wouldn’t just get the rumor mill buzzing, but would likely lead to some communications within the White House about the President wanting everyone to get their shit together. Remember, the big news out of today’s scoops isn’t just when the President found out but his anger that his team “did a clumsy job”. A single saved email along these lines and some fibbing by the President about what he knew and when he knew it could be all the rope Fitzgerald needs to hang Bush out to dry.

That grumbling you hear out east is a minority party slowly waking up from its decade-long hibernation :

Key Democratic sources say Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other House leaders are putting the finishing touches on what arguably will be Democrats most detailed “positive” election-year agenda since the party lost power more than a decade ago. Pelosi has been coordinating with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), key Democratic strategists, advisers and outside interest groups on the policy platform as well as the party’s broader 2006 message.
. . .
An early draft of the agenda outlines the specific initiatives House Democrats will pledge to enact if given control of the House. Leaders have been working on the document for months, and have already started encouraging Members to unify around it and stick to its themes.

Among the proposals are: “real security” for America through stronger investments in U.S. armed forces and benchmarks for determining when to bring troops home from Iraq; affordable health insurance for all Americans; energy independence in 10 years; an economic package that includes an increase in the minimum wage and budget restrictions to end deficit spending; and universal college education through scholarships and grants as well as funding for the No Child Left Behind act.

Democrats will also promise to return ethical standards to Washington through bipartisan ethics oversight and tighter lobbying restrictions, increase assistance to Katrina disaster victims through Medicaid and housing vouchers, save Social Security from privatization and tighten pension laws.

This all sounds good, but vaguely familiar. I agree with the vague outline here, but I’d advise against presenting a laundry list without making the fiscal insanity of the GOP leadership a central issue. I’ve seen Democratic leaders propose bold plans like this plenty of times. The problem isn’t the plans themselves, but the fact that the public doesn’t really pay much attention.

Writing in the NY Times today, Walter Cronkite has a good idea on that front. (via MyDD)

The key to a Democratic success in next year’s Congressional election is clearly in the party leadership’s coming up with a campaign that does not concentrate on the Bush administration’s failures but offers alternative programs to fix what it believes is wrong with the Republican agenda.

A suggestion by which the Democratic Party could command the greatest public attention for its positive agenda: It could within weeks call an extraordinary midterm convention to draw up its platform.

The convention would not need to be expensive. The delegates could be those who attended the 2004 convention. Their meeting would be open to the public and of course the press.

In sharp contrast to the secrecy of the Bush administration, it would let the public, if only remotely, share in the construction of the Democratic platform.

Of course that last line is the rub in this particular plan. If the public barely pays attention to the current quadrennial conventions already, why would they care about a lefty pep-rally that the major networks wouldn’t even bother to carry live?

The answer to that is to have the convention a purpose beyond being a stadium-sized cheering section. Publicly play up the minor divisions within the party ranks (ie. how quickly we should get out of Iraq and what method to use to provide universal healthcare) to provide a little suspense in the lead-up to the delegates’ vote to approve the party platform. Use the convention to actually construct (in Cronkite’s words) the Democratic platform. Have the speakers from competitive Senate and House races, along with potential 2008 Presidential nominees, give keynote speeches about the various aspects of the Democratic message. And write off the inevitable complaints from GOP stalwarts as the “bitter complaints of an out-of-touch party that’s been corrupted by a decade in power”.

Most of all, stop being such chickenshits and let everyone talk. The conservative Democrats will still offer more progressive ideas than anything currently coming out of Washington and the super-liberal Dems will at least show than Democrats aren’t completely devoid of emotion. The Democrats have a golden opportunity to offer the public something different. Don’t blow it by focus-grouping your hearts, guys.

After James Dobson spent the last week bragging about the insider information he received about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, the Focus on the Family founder went to the airwaves yesterday to cover his ass (via C&L):

What did Karl Rove say to me that I knew on Monday that I couldn’t reveal? Well, it’s what we all know now, that Harriet Miers is an Evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life, that she had taken on the American Bar Association on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion, that she had been a member of the Texas Right to Life. In other words, there is a characterization of her that was given to me before the President had actually made this decision. I could not talk about that on Monday. I couldn’t talk about it on Tuesday. In fact, Brit Hume said, “What church does she go to?” And I said, “I don’t think it’s up to me to reveal that.”
. . .
We did not discuss Roe v. Wade in any context or any other pending issue that will be considered by the Court. I did not ask that question. You know, to be honest, I would have loved to have known how Harriet Miers views Roe v. Wade. But even if Karl had known the answer to that and I’m certain that he didn’t, because the President himself said he didn’t know, Karl would not have told me that.

In other words, though his certainty about how Miers would rule on Roe is the reason for his endorsement, it never even occurred to actually ask about Miers’ views on abortion. Hey James, is lying a “family” value?

To translate my feelings about Dobson into a phrase easy for his followers to understand, I think the man’s getting way too big for his britches. It’s one thing to be outspoken on your own radio show about a political issue, but let’s not forget that Dobson also participated in the Administration’s conference calls to conservative activists as well. He’s gone from objective bystander to fully-integrated cog in the spin machine.

Dobson’s part-time job as a Bush shill is just the latest attempt to fully integrate himself into the political establishment. He wants to be an insider so bad it hurts, as you can tell from the first two paragraphs of his official biography :

For James Dobson, the stakes on November 2, 2004 — Election Day — couldn’t have been higher. The renowned child psychologist, best-selling author, popular radio host, and founder of Focus on the Family had devoted his entire life to the preservation of the family, and now all he held dear seemed to be hanging in the balance. Although he had rarely before campaigned in a way that could be considered strictly partisan, this election year Dobson had become convinced that he had no choice but to jump into the political fray with both feet. And when he did, he determined to give all he had for the cause.

By the time the 2004 campaign was over, Beltway heavyweights from Tom Daschle to Arlen Specter, media pundits, Democratic operatives, Focus on the Family listeners, and Dr. Dobson readers from coast to coast had gained a much better appreciation for who Dobson was and what he could accomplish.

Dobson seems keen on reinventing himself as a kingmaker in the Pat Robertson mold, and he’s already had good practice in using his multimedia empire to go after Big Brothers Big Sisters, Procter & Gamble, Disney, Macy’s, and Microsoft. The Miers nomination is just the latest test to see if Dobson’s homophobic armies can be mobilized to support political friends as efficiently as they’ve been used to destroy corporate enemies. There was a time when political activity was seen as an unseemly diversion from “God’s work”, but selling Jesus to the already-saved doesn’t feed the ego the way it used to.

Considering the direction that Dobson is steering his career, I think it’s just a matter of time before his hubris brings him down. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if God’s humble servant eventually finds himself brought down by a scandal. Real or fake, white collar crime or sexual affair, at some point Dobson’s activism is going to catch up to him. I can’t wait to see it.

I’m not doubting the reliability of Murray Waas or his sources, but I’m shocked that anyone would actually believe this crap :

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.

During the same conversation in the White House two years ago-occurring just days after the Justice Department launched a criminal probe into the unmasking of Plame as a covert agency operative-Rove also assured the president that he had not leaked any information to the media in an effort to discredit Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Rove also did not tell the president about his July 2003 a phone call with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, a conversation that touched on the issue of Wilson and Plame.

I don’t doubt for a second that Murray Waas’ sources are correct about what the grand jury has been told, but let’s be serious here. What’s the more likely scenario? Karl Rove lying to the Patrick Fitgerald or George W. Bush?

Considering the connections the White House has at both the Justice Department and the CIA, they had to know that the shit was gonna hit the fan before the investigation officially started and that should have given them more than enough time to get their stories straight. After all, the first thing they teach you in “Criminal Conspiracies 101” is that you should always protect the boss. It’s especially true in this case since “the boss” has the power to pardon anyone who ends up getting in trouble along with the plausible deniability of being “in a bubble” and “completely retarded”. Assuming the indictments, trials, and convictions happen at a reasonable pace, we can start expecting those pardons after the mid-terms. Trust me, this article is just evidence that the fix has been in since Day One.

And before you starting thinking I’m a conspiracy theorist or something, I’ve got two words for you: Iran-Contra.