A few months ago, I was raked over the partisan coals because I didn’t join in on the wagon-circling of Tom DeLay. That’s the problem, whether it be a Bill Clinton, or any politician you suspect of being down right potential slime. If you have to stick your neck out for someone, you want to make damn sure it’s for the right person and the right cause.
Author’s note: If you haven’t been following the Karl Rove-CIA spy thing, this story has more plots and sub-plots than an Aaron Spelling drama during sweeps. I’m going to jump around….
Now I don’t know Karl Rove and I’ll probably never meet him. I’ll never receive a “Thanks, Bob” for being in his corner. But besides being the one Republican liberals have collectively wanted to suffer a stroke since November of 2000, the man hasn’t done anything blatantly unethical, so I have no reason to doubt his probity. Can’t say that about the other cast of characters playing head games with national security.
What’s most hilarious about the whole Karl Rove-Valerie Plame-Joe Wilson tale is the timing (I’ll get to that soon enough) and how Democrats feel they, for once, have the moral authority to lecture Republicans about honesty.
(cricket sound effect for 4 seconds, 15 frames….)
At a press conference with New York Senator Chuck Schumer, Wilson said, “I believe it is time for Karl Rove to go and time for this president to live up to his promises that anyone involved in this leak would be fired.†After all, President Bush did say that he would fire anyone who leaked information about Mrs. Plame’s identity.
Rove spoke to Time magazine’s Matt Cooper about Wilson’s wife, while warning the reporter about Mr. Wilson’s false claim that he was sent to Niger by Vice President Dick Cheney to document Saddam’s attempt to acquire Nigerian uranium for his nuclear weapons program. It turns out Cheney had nothing to do with it, Valerie got him the assignment, and the Senate Intelligence Committee found a memo she wrote proving such.
Wilson all by himself concluded and publicly stated that George W. Bush blatantly lied to the nation during his 2003 State of the Union Address when he said “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.†British intelligence to this day stands by that assertion.
I can’t image what kind of person I’d be if I were devoid of conscience. As that trait applies to both Clintons, Dean, Begala, Moyers, Stephanopoulos, Matthews, Olbermann, and Blumenthal, that’s the only way these particular people could get off lecturing us today about honesty.
The real issues at play here have been purposefully clouded over by the joyful noise of hammering White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. The subsequent unqualified analyses of body language appear to matter most to the Sunday morning talk show freaks and the network news/Helen Thomas lemmings in the Washington press corps.
If one looks beyond the partisan BS, the truth behind the story is in plain view….
“A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an “undercover agent,” saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency’s headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
“She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat. Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this.”
- Fred Rustmann, covert agent from 1966 to 1990, to The Washington Times
So was she really “under cover”, and if not how could her cover be blown? What’s wrong with this picture right off? That simple question should be a slam-dunk.
“Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under “nonofficial cover” — also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson — also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
“In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn’t been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.â€
Her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a loyal Democrat, Kerry supporter, wrote the book “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir.†With that, camera magnet Senator Schumer claims national security (we should feel violated and scared) has been breached because of Valerie Plame’s outing.
Before I continue, have you noticed conservatives tend to write “how to” books while liberals tend to write about themselves, and at some point portray themselves as some kind of sympathetic victim? Just an observation….
During a recent press conference with camera hog Schumer, a reporter asked, “Ambassador Wilson, would you address some of the questions about your own credibility? The Republicans are saying that you have changed your story, that originally you said the Vice President had sent on you this mission, that turned out to not be true. Can you address those questions, and not just about your wife, but about yourself?â€
I would’ve placed the answer to that question right here, however Wilson went into this condescending recitation about honesty, the RNC, and steered clear of any attempt to answer it.
Does your head hurt yet?
“It now turns out, according to multiple published reports, that columnist Robert Novak did not learn about Plame’s CIA connection from Rove.
“If anything, it was the other way around: Novak called the White House and asked Rove if he’d heard anything about Plame working for the CIA. Rove then responded that he’d “heard the same thing” — from another journalist. And newly disclosed e-mails show that Time magazine’s Matt Cooper approached Rove about Plame, not the other way around.
“The first writer to refer to her as working covertly (notes Clifford May on National Review Online) was David Corn, Washington correspondent of the far-left magazine The Nation, in an article three days after Novak’s column appeared. Which raises the question of how Corn, who went into a great amount of detail about her specific job, got the information — because you can rest assured it didn’t come from Karl Rove.
“In fact, as May — a former New York Times foreign correspondent — points out, all the evidence suggests strongly that Corn’s secret source was… Joe Wilson.â€
- New York Post, July 16, 2005
That doesn’t surprise me. But in yet another spin-off of this whodunit, New York Times reporter Judith Miller languishes in jail for not revealing her source in this matter. Liberals, despite the fact they claim to champion women’s rights, haven’t met one they wouldn’t kick to the curb. Knowing the New York Times as we do, if Miller could prove that Rove was her source, they’d have ratted him out in a heartbeat and Miller would be doing the morning network talk show circuit. Katie Couric would be near orgasmic every time Miller mentioned Rove’s name.
With that, Miller is obviously protecting… a Democrat, and most probably a real juicy one at that. Should Miller survive her stay in prison, the identity of her source will make Deep Throat seem like a senile old man in comparison.
Mutilating “Bush’s brainâ€, as Amy Goodman-types refer to him, would surely bring deity status in the liberal world to whomever brings down Karl Rove. The problem is Wilson wasn’t good enough at lying and his story is unraveling around his ankles.
So why do I consider this all an orchestrated misdirection? (I’ve always believed a good columnist leaves the reader a few “ifs†to ponder.)
Last Thursday, a Chinese general was quoted saying that China is prepared to use nuclear weapons against the United States if we “attack” during a confrontation over Taiwan.
The mainstream media hasn’t spent much time on this one. Wouldn’t want to worry the soccer moms and distract from that evil Rove….
“If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons. If the Americans are determined to interfere (then) we will be determined to respond. We will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.â€
- General Zhu Chenghu, professor at China’s National Defense University
Seems to me that would be the more appropriate national security issue to be discussing rather than a CIA desk agent.
What do we do while China continues to use that kind of language? Conservatives like myself made a big deal over the Chinagate scandal during the Clinton years that’s created this mess.
Quick review: The Chinese “space program†used to be cheap. Not just in dollars but in quality. That’s why people who wanted to put satellites up in space went to places like China. However, once the satellite was on the rocket, no promises.
Bernard Schwartz, Clinton pal and chairman of Loral Space & Communications, donated more than $1 million to the DNC, making him the committee’s largest donor. The Clinton administration with suspicious timing proceeded to, despite vehement warnings from his own intelligence and national security agencies, issue more than 350 waivers, largely beginning in 1996, to transfer American supercomputer technology to China. Before Clinton’s authorizations, China had received few clearances because those computers could be used to develop advanced nuclear weaponry.
In order to save money, Schwartz and Loral also taught China how to keep their rockets from crashing and basically shaved close to twenty years off their technology learning curve. China’s rockets can now carry satellites into orbit and those same rockets can be quickly refitted to carry thermonuclear weaponry. Republicans screamed bloody murder, as these kind of careless, politically expedient decisions almost always tend to come back later and bite us in the ass.
So at one point Chinese missiles couldn’t hit the side of a barn, then they were carrying sophisticated payloads into space, every time. China General Xiong soon after made headlines when he told a US academic: “Americans care more about Los Angeles than Taiwan.” That in response to Clinton’s sending two aircraft carriers to the western Pacific to counter Chinese missile tests off Taiwan.
Someone saw this coming and we’re now watching a who’s-more-serious-about-national-security reality series. Certain people who thought they were in the clear, will have a lot of explaining to do when Taiwan issues their next middle finger to Beijing and we have to decide whether to back their independence or risk a nuclear confrontation and back off.
Joe and Valerie who…?
