HE ALWAYS SEEMED LIKE SUCH A NICE GUY

By Noah

This passed week has seen the conviction of Scooterboy Libby on four felony counts, including lying about revealing the identity of a United States covert intelligence agent, AND a spin move from the right and their enslaved tools in the media that is so titanic and awe inspiring in its scope and magnitude that it may be the biggest of all time. Talk about shock and awe, this was an obviously meticulously planned in advance juggernaut executed with the kind of precision that only the New England Patriots can rival in getting to the Super Bowl so many times. The key word was PARDON. It wasn’t GUILTY. Make PARDON the issue, not the GUILT. It was a classic miss-direction play. With the Republicans, when it’s their crime, it’s never about the crime. Instead, it’s "blame the accuser" (a Grand Jury) or "blame the victim" (the rest of us). Make someone/something else is the issue. Don’t look behind the curtain. Don’t peel away the layers. A pardon provides "closure." "Let’s just go on and walk away from something truly ugly and sinister." "Keep the lid on." "Nothing to see here, folks. Go back to your homes."

So, we heard endless spew about how the jury was confused, how the case should have never been brought to trial, how a truly professional, by-the-book, Mr. Chips of a prosecutor named Patrick Fitzgerald must obviously be part of the dreaded "liberal conspiracy" that hides under every bed in America. The worst of the media (FOX and Fiends) even led with the fact that Scoots was found NOT GUILTY on one felony count. To the Republikooks, THAT was more important and a much bigger deal than being found guilty of the other four. Hell, those other felony counts were barely worth mentioning! Don’t DWELL on those. If you do, you must be a, gasp... LIBERAL.                                                                                                                                             

However, even this discussion in itself distracts from a larger issue. It pulls us away from the larger issue, which is why did Scooter Libby lie in the first place? What was the purpose of the lying? Was something much bigger being covered up? If he had been honest, would more questions have been asked, like what was the reason for blowing an agent’s cover and what was behind THAT curtain?

The answer can be found in the desire by a group of neoconartists who run our now sick and dying government. The capsule explanation is this: Before So-Called President Bush was appointed to his most recent job failure, he stated back in Texas that he would go to Iraq and finish the job his father, (in his blurry eyes), should have done. He would spend his political capital and go to Iraq and get the man who tried to kill his daddy. Comic book stuff really, but, it’s a comic book, one "man’s" fantasy, that we all have to live in now and feel the effects of for the rest of our lives. Keep in mind Dubya said all of this BEFORE 9/11, before the actions of a MADMAN so damaged this country. The question is which madman are we talking about? Just to "make it perfectly clear," as another nut once said, we’re talking about our madman here, GWB.

Once he was appointed and our country was attacked, the game so carefully laid out in 1997 by The Project For A New American Century (a band of neocons which included founding member Scooter Libby, no minor, bit player he) was on. Dubya used the attack and fear of terror itself as an excuse to go to Iraq, just as Osama bin-Laden knew and hoped he would. Strange bedfellows? Common goals? You decide. 

A problem arose, though, in the form of former Ambassador Joe Wilson. He was sent to Niger to check out a report that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake, a chief ingredient in atomic bomb making. Wilson came back with an answer the Bushies didn’t want to hear and that was that there was nothing to the report. Wrong answer, Joe. It gets better. The whole original report was cooked up by Italian Intelligence with forged documents, including a receipt for the purchase of the yellowcake (like Saddam or anybody else would want something on paper for such a transaction!). The Italian PM gave the report to Bush as a gift during  a visit to Washington. I guess just bringing a new Ferrari wouldn’t do. Anyway, the report was immediately debunked by our people and Wilson confirmed the debunking. Bush went with it anyway in his "16 famous words" (his 18 minute gap) in his very next State Of The Union Speech.

Wilson went public and in the eyes of the administration had to be punished. What was the sick twisted punishment to be visited upon Wilson and us all? Our current administration deliberately blew the cover of a United States Intelligence Asset, a covert CIA employee, Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. That’s a crime, folks, and Irving Libby was the willing instrument. So what if he wasn’t the one playing the instrument? Dubya’s daddy himself is on record as saying that anyone who outs an agent is guilty of treason.  But, let’s step back to the middle of the last paragraph; lying us into a war, lying to the whole country, lying us needlessly into over 3100 America deaths, let alone the thousands of maimed U.S. soldiers, presenting information as fact that you have been told is not true and doing it in your State Of The Union speech, even having the gall to present the already discredited intelligence as new information now from British intelligence sources (a fresh coat of paint for the lie), THAT’S TREASON. It is a HIGH CRIME. It is IMPEACHABLE. 


Cutting the benefits of service families is nothing new under Bush. He’s done it before and he did it before the last election even if the media kept relatively silent about it. Privatizing Walter Reed and just turning it into just another big business profit center and cutting benefits further in the newest budget is not impeachable. It’s just heinous and dispicable. It’s the work of the lowest kind of human, soulless vermin you can find. Talk about war profiteering, you make your money on how many young Americans lose their limbs! We no longer provide service to those who serve and sacrifice, we look at each soldier as a potential profit item. That’s way  beyond name, rank, and serial number. In fact, it’s pretty damn immoral, but, hey, there isn’t a morals clause in the Presidential contract. Oh wait! There is. It’s in the Constitution, that scrap of paper a President swears to uphold during the inauguration ceremony. Oh well, we know what So-Called President Bush thinks of the Constitution. Has anyone bothered to check the toilet paper in the White House? Has anyone bothered to add up just how many taxpayer dollars the likes of Halliburton, KBR and the rest of the Bush-Cheney ass-buddies have been able to loot from the U.S. Treasury on the backs of one little lie or two? That’s all on top of the hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars, if not a TRILLION dollars of taxcut for the wealthy money that has left the country for secret bank accounts in places like the Caiman Islands since Bush seized power. And, just why is Halliburton moving to Dubai anyway? Hmmm. More money to the Middle East. Less for you, and higher gas prices too! Impeach. Convict. Imprison! Any Congressperson who doesn’t vote for those three words is an accomplice, plain and simple.

So, you see, this is what Libby’s Lie was all about. It was part of a coverup of a bigger lie. The name of one of our intelligence assets was leaked and he lied about the leaking. Who knows what contacts of Valerie Plame may have even lost their lives. We do know that our intelligence network in IRAN was destroyed, all by the outing of Joe Wilson’s wife as punishment for Joe Wilson. The punishment was an effort to make an example of Ambassador Wilson and all who would get in the way of THE PLAN.

It was "we don’t need your stinking truth; there’s money to be made." There’s oil in them thar fields! The 16 words bought time. They brought acquiescence from the public who were not only misled by the speech but by carefully orchestrated press propaganda campaigns such as that run by the New York Times with their reporter Judith Miller and her editors in the lead. Impeach. Convict. Imprison, and then let’s have an investigation of the media who supported the scum, put them on trial and throw them in the dungeon, never to be seen again. Start with the two dailies in Washington and the New York Times. No pardons for any of them either. Look where pardoning Nixon got this country. It told a whole generation of young people, a whole generation of adults, and last, but certainly not least, it told future generations of politicians that they can do anything they damn well please and they can get away with it, with a nice pension, too! It tore apart the social fabric.

So here we are at this point. We will hear some Congressional testimony this week from Valerie Plame herself. Hopefully, the full story and its ramifications will start to soak into the public consciousness and the even denser minds of our media hacks and Bush enablers. In the meantime, we have to suffer through smarmy gameshow hosts like Chris "Nerfball" Matthews asking "why would Libby lie?" God, is he that stupid? If he isn’t, the reason he has to ask is much darker and sinister. Last week, he even had on a juror from the trial  who was among those who felt Libby should be pardoned. Apparently, the jurors felt that Cheney and Bush themselves should have been brought in to testify-- not a bad idea, but Fitzgerald is going by the book. The jury saw that Libby was not the main engine of what happened. For that, at least one juror seemed to think it wasn’t all Libby’s fault and that, because of that, he should be pardoned, regardless of committing a crime.

The point by many of the Repugs has been that, after all, he’s such a nice guy! They just might also be afraid that if he didn’t get a pardon and the $3,000,000 that Mary Matalin has raised for him, he might talk. He might turn "state’s evidence" if he isn’t taken care of.  Look at him there all dressed up in his nice suit! Such a nice guy; clean too, like Obama.

The human race’s ability to be played and to be naïve is a thing of wonder. They always dress you up for your court show anyway, but, hey Libby wears a suit to work everyday anyway. He knows THE PRESIDENT. He is somebody. Yeah, well, so was OJ and they said that Son of Sam guy was such a nice guy, too. They always say it.

Here’s something the media conveniently forgot to tell us about Scooterboy. In 1996, he put out a novel he wrote called "The Apprentice" (nothing to do with Donald Trump). In the book, Libby conjured up, just for starters, an incest scene between two uncles and their niece, a discussion among some hunters about whether they should have sex with a freshly killed deer while it’s still oh so nice and warm (does Libby ever go hunting with his boss Cheney? Hmmm.), and, a story about a young girl who’s kept naked in a cage with a bear who is then stimulated to rape her so that she can be trained to be a prostitute (man, with the Repugs, it always comes down to sex, doesn’t it?). Sound like a nice guy to you?  Sounds like a life’s work for a shrink, to me. This is no nice guy and no amount of Charles Krauthammers and William Buckleys is going to change that. NO PARDON. I vote for 30 years in the hole. Better yet, throw him in a backyard swimming pool filled with piranha and two 30 foot anacondas. Oh hell, just throw him in the cage with the bear! As for Bush and Cheney, convicting them and throwing them in prison would go along way towards restoring our image in the world and our belief in ourselves as a nation. IMPEACH. CONVICT. IMPRISON!