AS BUSH BEGS TO BE IMPEACHED, CHENEY REMINDS US THAT HE'S... JUST AS CULPABLE AND JUST AS DESERVING OF CONGRESSIONAL ATTENTION

I want to remind you about why the Irving Libby (aka- "Scooter Libby") trial is important and relevant. But before I do, let me bring up a couple of seemingly unrelated-- at least on the surface-- items. Cheney ran to Fox-TV yesterday to defend Big Government (CIA, Pentagon...) spying-- illegally-- on Americans. Ingenuously, Cheney told an audience of neo-fascist robots (i.e.- people who choose to watch Fox to get a rather unique version of pseudo-reality) that these practices, with no judicial oversight, are "perfectly legitimate activity." They're not.

"Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon has issued hundreds of letters to American banks and other financial institutions seeking information about suspects in counterterrorism or counterespionage investigations... By law, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. are barred from any domestic law enforcement activities." Cheney and the rest of the Bush Regime have a long and sordid history of ignoring what the law allows and doesn't allow. Bush has told the American people and Congress that he doesn't care what they think or what our allies think or what our own military thinks or what anyone who thinks thinks, he's escalating the war in Iraq and he's probably going to attack Syria and Iran-- or at least provoke Iran into getting into a war with us. Classic tyrants, Cheney and Bush feel they are above the law. That's what it all boils down to. That's why Charles I was beheaded and that's why Bush and Cheney have to be impeached and then tried-- even though it will be messy and sloppy and divisive and a real drag.


My pal Bob Geiger watches the Senate like a hawk. Nothing gets by him. And today he found a very interesting press release from Minnesota's very vulnerable, heretofore rubber stamp solon Norm Coleman. Coleman, facing up to a probable electoral drubbing in 2008, is doing all he can to distance himself from the Bush Regime and its unconstitutional policies. He and the Republican governor of his state are at least making a show of complaining to the Regime about endless extensions of Minnesota National Guardsmen in Iraq. Coleman, like a half dozen or so Republican senators, has come out against Bush's "surge." Will he put his money where his mouth is? Oh, sure he'll vote for Carl Levin's pathetic, toothless, "symbolic," nonbinding resolution. But will he actually join the people like Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd and Jack Murtha who are trying to stop the extralegal escalation?

Today Christy at Firedoglake reminds us why the Libby trial is not just meaningful, but vitally essential to all Americans and to our system of government. The insidiousness of the Cheney government-within-a-government has manipulated the United States into the war they crave against a substantial part of humanity. She starts with a passage from David Corn's and Michael Isikoff's Hubris showing that Valerie Plame was not merely a covert CIA agent, but a covert CIA agent working on WMD in Iraq and Iran! Corn explained in "What Valerie Plame Really Did At The CIA in The Nation why this is something all Americans have to understand in order to grasp the seriousness of Libby's and Cheney's crimes against America (treason): Head of the CIA operations group searching for evidence of WMDs in Iraq "Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled…"

Christy references "everything that we know about the Bush Administration's proclivity for overlooking the truth in favor of false inferences that could get them closer to their ultimate goal of invasion and occupation of Iraq." Outing a CIA agent, jeopardizing intelligence and lives of agents meant nothing for unscrupulous, above-the-law power-mongers like Cheney and his outfit-- not if it helped further their goal: war against Iraq, Iran, Syria... anyone who wouldn't buckle under to their vision of an American-dominated world. Christy asked the crucial questions:

...Just how, exactly, am I to trust your word on this, when you blithely put the lives of our national security agents and all of their hard-won allies who risked their own lives and the lives of their families to get information to the US about Iran's WMD programs, only to have that service thrown back in their faces at your convenience?

And another question: was this payback for Joe Wilson alone, a message to others who might speak out against the Bush Administration's false public claims, or was this something beyond that-- a message to those within the CIA who would find information contrary to what those in the Vice President's office so desperately wanted to make their case publicly…on Iran?

Her conclusion is that "this is who is running our nation. This petty, vengeful, nasty cabal of neocon-men headed by Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, David Addington, Karl Rove, the rest of the WHIG, and George Bush. Take a good, long, hard look at them square in the face of who they truly are through the lens of this single case-- and then sit back and wait for the testimony to put an even more dismal picture into play."

I'll be interested in seeing what our Democratic-controlled Congress finally makes of this and what they make of their duty to protect the country from these venal, madmen, this horrific tyrants.