- Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.
"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the president's confidence."
- Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday, July 12, 2005.
The two quotes above and a few of the following thoughts were borrowed from an Op-ED column writen by Frank Rich, the rest are from me. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but his column today was exceptionally good.
So far I've made three posts about Karl The Fascist Pig Rove's treasonous act of the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. Rove has commited a felony and should stand trial, and when found guilty, be sentanced to a federal penitentiary.
I do believe Rove is guilty, but I don't believe he acted alone. I think everyone in the White House who has political connections to or is a staff member of George W. Bush has had a hand in this up to and including Bush himself.
You see, this all started with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who is from the opposite side of the political aisle of Bush. Wilson was sent to Niger in February 2002 to check on reports that Saddam was purchasing weapons grade nuclear material. Wilson came back with a report that he was not, that the original report was bogus. But Bush didn't like Wilson's report and continued to push the lie that Saddam was building nuclear weapons which would be a threat to our safety and security.
Bush wanted to go to war with Saddam so bad that he was willing to tell any lie so he could get the backing of the American public. It is not just Rove who is responsible for this scandel, the largest amount of blame lays with the group of arrogant bastards that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted this country's finite resources, human, financial, and others, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. This is why the stakes are so high for Bush and his cronies. This scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the outing of a C.I.A. operative.
Bush would do anything to be able to get his way so he could go to war, because he wanted to be "the war president." So in March, 2002 V.P. Dick Cheney planted the idea, during a CNN interview, that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons" at that time. Cheney went on to repeat this same charge in May, 2002 on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August, 2002 and on "Meet the Press" again in September,2002. Sometime during this time period the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.
By September Bush was freely using the u-word (along with his infamous "nucular"), too, at the United Nations and across the US. He kept saying how Saddam only needed a small amount of uranium to cause the destruction of America. This is when, out of view of the civilian population, the whole idea of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by people with more official power than Wilson. In October, 2002, as Congress deliberated authorizing war against Iraq, the National Intelligence Estimate was delivered to Congress, which included the State Department's report that a British report of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa was very highly doubtful. The White House also recieved an assessment from the CIA that same month that determined the evidence of Saddam purchasing uranium from Africa was weak and overblown. There were also questions raised by some analysts at the State Department as to the legitimacy of some documents that had surfaced in Italy that were supposed to be proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. These turned out to be blatant forgeries. The Bush administration's propaganda and rhetoric had been hammered constantly for more than five months by then and there was no way to stop the march to war.
Once Bush and his rich fascist friends had us locked into war, and no WMD's were found, the original plot line was dropped in favor of the "We're fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here" line of propaganda. The warning signs about the uranium claims were forgotten. We were told it was all the C.I.A.'s fault because of their faulty information, or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new reasons to justify the war. The Bush administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has been so quick to smear anyone on the inside who chooses to contradict the official line of propaganda about how we got into this mess in Iraq. Former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke both have felt the wrath of the Bushevik's.
So you see, the Bush administration as a whole has opened a "pandora's box" that it can't close or control. Coverup is now the name of the game and it doesn't matter who has to take the fall as long as it is outside of the loyal inner circle. Wilson and Plame were just a small part of the larger coverup. This administration is filled with corruption. This group of rich bastard fascists make the Nixon administration look like Cub Scouts on a weekend retreat.
IT'S TIME TO TAKE THE GOVERNMENT BACK!!!
POWER TO ALL THE PEOPLE, NOT JUST THE RICH FEW!!!
1 comment:
"You see, this all started with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who is from the opposite side of the political aisle of Bush. "
Actually I'd say this _started_ when Bush's people decided to make up stories they knew were false to defraud the American people and Congress into a war on false pretenses.
I have to take issue with characterizing Ambassador Wilson as being "from the opposite side" unless we are here dividing politics between Bush's clique and everyone else.
There is a lot about Wilson's career I don't know. But I am under the impression, correct if wrong, that until this very incident, Wilson himself was a lifelong Republican and a loyal one at that. Why else would this Administration have assumed he'd play along? And didn't Bush's father send Wilson to Iraq to face down Saddam Hussein after the latter invaded Kuwait and the previous patsy Ambassador, April Glaspie, had been removed after serving her purpose? Up till that day Hussein had been treated as a US ally, one whom the Reagan Administration (specifically, men like Donald Rumsfeld, Poppy himself, and the whole supporting cast of neocon nutjobs now back in power) had given a downright unseemly amount of support. I always believed that in fact the Gulf war of 1991 was something Bush Srs people ginned up (probably with Hussein's connivance) to give themselves a boost in the polls.
So when I say that Wilson was a Republican I don't mean to compliment him. They have been horrible all of my lifetime. But Jr has taken it to new lows so awful that even staunch loyalists--those who have retained some concept of reality and accountablity--could not stomach it. So I suppose Wilson has at least left the R party, though I would not assume he has actually become a Democrat.
His _wife_, I have read, paid a substantial chunk of change to the Gore campaign in 2000. But so what? It is hardly unknown for husband and wife to have political differences. I believe that Wilson, like a lot of other Republicans, gave full support to Bush Jr in 2000, expecting "their kind of people" would be better, for them anyway, than Gore.
As a radical myself I'd much rather the American people would just take over our government and throw all these rascals out. But unless something drastic happens, realistically Republicans will retain much power. We should welcome those who are principled enough to admit their own party has been taken over by lunatic zealots whose program spells doom. We should not play along with the Rovian rewriting of history that pretends Wilson was some kind of disloyal secret agents of wicked liberals. As far as I know he was no such thing, and if he supports us "wicked liberals" _now_ that probably has something to do with the criminal extremes his former party has sunk to, not to mention the very personal attacks on his family they are carrying out.
From our point of view Wilson is _better_ than a Democrat--that would make his actions too easy to explain as cynical partisan maneuvers, which is what Bush Jr is trying to have people believe now. No, Wilson, like Popeye, said "this is all I can takes and I can't take nummore" and we need to encourage as many other Republicans to feel free to come out and say that so we can get rid of the Shrub. They probably are less likely to act if they think all they would be doing is putting the Democrats back in power. So let's be accurate and reality based. It is complex and ambiguous but the truth is our strength.
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