As poor Scotty talks to Keith, Richard Clarke reminds us that poor Scotty used to merrily dish out the abuse that's being heaped on him now

It was interesting last night seeing poor Scotty McClellan spend most of the Countdown hour with Keith Olbermann. (There's a complete transcript on the Countdown website.) The rest of the hour was filled out with an instructively complementary interview with onetime Nixon White House Counsel John Dean.

It was also interesting, later in the evening, to see counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke (flogging his new book, Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters) with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show recalling how when he published his 2004 book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, which accused the Bush administration of screwing up the anti-terrorism effort, he had been attacked with almost exactly the same talking points that McClellan is hearing now: disaffected former official, was totally out of the loop, never said those things while he was here, is just trying to sell books in an election year.

Of course back then Clarke heard the talking points from White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

I still don't hear much news in the "revelations" in poor Scotty's book, or for that matter in the interview. I think I got the circumstances pretty much right yesterday. The discovery that both Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had just plain lied to him when they told him unequivocally that they had not leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA identity seems to have gotten the poor boy's attention like being thwacked over the head with a two-by-four. After that wake-up call, he began to see the people around him rather differently.

The poor sap had entered the service of George W. Bush believing him to be what he had pretended to be as governor of Texas: a bipartisan uniter who could bring people together. Of course he wasn't really that in Texas either, but it was still possible for simple souls -- or complex ones with devious agendas -- to believe it. That's who he thought he was following to Washington, and even after 9/11, he really believed in, and was inspired by, Chimpy the Prez's supposed plan to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East, and any other damned place that got in his way.

I just don't think poor Scotty has much more to tell us about the Bush regime. Is he really telling us anything we didn't know about the regime's singleminded and ruthless pursuit of its vicious partisan agenda? The significance of his witness is that it comes from someone that close to the center of power.

John Dean also suspects that poor Scotty doesn't have much more to tell us, for the obvious reason that press secretaries really don't know very much about policy-making or the inner workings of an administration. In fact, the nature of the job dictates that the less they know, the more effectively they can sell what they do know to the media they service. The press secretary is briefed to know exactly what the administration wants him/her to pass on, and nothing more. This way he/she isn't put in the position of having to hide or lie about things he/she isn't supposed to talk about. (Conspicuously, when Keith tried to press the discussion beyond the few matters that have already been discussed, it usuallly turned out that it was an area poor Scotty had never been briefed on.)

Nevertheless, Dean agreed with Keith's suggestion that with the passage of time, Scotty may find that he has more to tell us. In his own case, once he had absorbed the beating he took from his former colleagues and friends over his congressional testimony laying bare some of the Nixon administration's grubbier secrets, he began to realize that other things he had witnessed and taken for granted might actually have larger significance.

The difference, of course, is that Dean as White House counsel really was often part of the policy-making (or at least policy-enforcing) apparatus. Poor Scotty was thought of and used as a tool. In that capacity he had the misfortune, as I suggested yesterday, of having a shred of decency that was both (a) absent from his regime predecessor and successors and (b) unsuspected by his regime overlords.


A CLARIFYING NOTE ON THE BUSH REGIME PRESS FLACKS

Just to be clear on this matter of White House press secretaries being basically out of the policy-making loop, it seems reasonable to assume that while this model applied to poor Scotty's dismal predecessor, Ari Fleischer, and to the incumbent, Dana Perino, it was probably not the case with poor Scotty's immediate successor, the unspeakable Tony Snow. I doubt that he would have taken the job under those conditions.

Snow brought conservative movement cred of his own to the job, and I suspect was permitted rare access and input for a press secretary. After all, since he had already established himself as one of the most accomplished liars and propagandists in the modern communications business, he could be trusted to bamboozle the docile White House press corps.

Even so, I doubt that our Tony would have lasted much longer in the job even without his health considerations. I suspect that the regime policy-makers were coming to find him a bad fit for the job. The last thing they needed or wanted was more opinions. They had all the opinions they needed, thank you very much.

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Is there any "debate" about the Bushies' systematic plundering of the National Guard? Haven't they merely lost another bet that it wouldn't matter?

By Monday morning, equipment was finally rolling into Greensburg, Kansas.

"I have said for nearly two years, and will continue to say, that we have a looming crisis on our hands when it comes to National Guard equipment in Iraq and our needs at home."
--Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, late Tuesday

"There's a lot of stuff available."
--White House Lying Scumbag Tony Snow, after rattling off a list of equipment currently possessed by the Kansas National Guard (hey, he's just paid to be a lying scumbag, not to know anything about how an actual state might need to respond to an actual disaster)

The strange headline on the solid report in this morning's New York Times reads:

KANSAS TORNADO
RENEWS DEBATE
ON GUARD AT WAR

Debate? Is there really a debate? When Chimpy the Prez decided to compensate for what surely must be the World's Smallest Penis by shocking and awing Iraq, the thieving sycophants who planned his war always made it part of their strategy to plunder the states' National Guard forces. They did it, we've always known it, and there have always been people--including a number of governors, not least among them Governor Sebelius--who've been screaming bloody murder about it, warning that the day would come when we would pay the price in Guard unpreparedness.

The Bush regime's response was: "Fuck you."

Is this what you would properly call a debate?

As Susan Saulny and Jim Rutenberg report in the Times:

For months, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and other governors have warned that their state National Guards are ill-prepared for the next local disaster, be it a tornado a flash flood or a terrorist's threat, because of large deployments of their soldiers and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, last Friday night, a deadly tornado all but cleared the small town of Greensburg off the Kansas map. With 80 square blocks of the small farming town destroyed, Ms. Sebelius said her fears had come true: The emergency response was too slow, she said, and there was only one reason.

"As you travel around Greensburg, you'll see that city and county trucks have been destroyed," Ms. Sebelius, a Democrat, said Monday. "The National Guard is one of our first responders. They don't have the equipment they need to come in, and it just makes it that much slower."

For nearly two days after the storm, there was an unmistakable emptiness in Greensburg, a lack of heavy machinery and an army of responders. By Sunday afternoon, more than a day and a half after the tornado, only about half of the Guard troops who would ultimately respond were in place.

It was not until Sunday night that significant numbers of military vehicles started to arrive, many streaming in a long caravan from Wichita about 100 miles away.

And as the Times team (which included reporters all over the country) also reports:

Two recent reports have raised questions about Guard preparedness. An independent military assessment council, the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, released a report in March that stated: "In particular, the equipment readiness of the Army National Guard is unacceptable and has reduced the capability of the United States to respond to current and additional major contingencies, foreign and domestic."

Another report, released in January by the Government Accountability Office, concluded that the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have "significantly decreased" the amount of equipment available for National Guard units not deployed overseas, while the same units face an increasing number of threats at home.

Actually, it makes sense that it's equipment more than personnel that's at stake in the Bush regime's plundering of the National Guard. Heavy reliance on National Guard and reserve units has certainly helped the regime wage war on the sly, since that's made it unnecessary for its war machine to be knocking on Middle America's doors for soldiers, and anyway, when it's not with regard to personnel that the regime is attempting to fight a war on the cheap.

After all, the heavy reliance on manpower provided by the famous contractors is surely wildly more expensive than equivalent military personnel would be. But by "appropriating" heaps of National Guard equipment, that's that much less money the regime has to squeeze out of Congress in emergency appropriations to fund its Middle East fun.

Wasn't it that pompous fraud then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who told us that you go to war with the military you have? Now we know that that includes "with the equipment you can steal from American states."

Interestingly, the Times report notes:

Last year, all 50 governors signed a letter to President Bush asking for the immediate re-equipping of Guard units sent overseas. But officials in several states, including Kentucky, Minnesota and Texas, said Tuesday that they were not facing equipment shortages.

It just so happens that, apart from the governor of Kentucky being a known crook and the governor of Texas being a known dimwit, all three of those governors are Republicans. This raises the even more unsavory possibility that the Bush regime has been targeting the ferocity of its raping and pillaging of the states' National Guard units on political grounds.

But the main storyline is simple: The Bush regime knew exactly what it was doing to the National Guard, thought it could get away with it, and now as usual is trying to bully, lie, and bluff its way through. There's even that hint that Uncle Karl Rove has sent the good folk of Kansas--and perhaps other states as well--a message that this is what happens when you elect a governor of the Devil's, er, "Democrat" party.

Governor Sebelius has never shown signs of being a pushover, though. I like to think that the regime slimeballs may have met a more formidable opponent than they're used to on the domestic political front. I sure hope she crushes their balls--and Chimpy's tiny penis too, if anyone can find it.

BUSH REGIME SAYS "TRUST ME"-- AS THEY CONTINUE TO LIE AND TWIST LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW

It looks like the Bush Regime will do anything to prevent Rove from getting on a witness stand and taking an oath to tell the truth before he testifies. I wonder why. (Just kidding.) One of their techniques is to try to claim that the demand for sworn testimony from presidential advisers is "unprecedented" and "highly unusual in any White House." This is patently absurd, especially coming from Bush's chief liar, Tony Snow, who was at the head of the pack baying for sworn testimony from Clinton's White House. The hypocrisy from this crew never ceases to amaze. I don't see how anyone can take them seriously since nothing they say is ever true. Henry Waxman, however, does take them seriously and he issued a letter yesterday to set the record straight (as if any of them cared a whit for truth or reality) and showed how under his predecessor as the House Oversight Committee chair, Dan Burton (R-IN), issued 1,052 subpoenas targeting Democratic Party or Clinton administration officials. Waxman points out that the Clinton Administration officials serving in the identical capacities in which Miers and Rove served and serve Bush, were cooperative and did testify before Congress on the record and under oath. "141 individuals who worked in the Clinton administration, including top advisers to the president, spent 568 hours in deposition before the [Oversight] committee staff."

Meanwhile "Democrats angrily rejected Bush's offer to grant a limited number of lawmakers private interviews with the aides with no transcript and without swearing them in. Republicans counseled restraint, but at least one, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, backed the"... Senate Judiciary Committee joining the House Judiciary Committee in authorizing subpoenas for recalcitrant Regime criminals who refuse to appear voluntarily.

The big buzz on the case today-- well, one of the big buzzes-- is that "three of the eight federal prosecutors ousted by the Justice Department as poor performers ranked in the top 10 for prosecutions and convictions by the nation's 93 U.S. Attorneys, an analysis of court records shows. Court records covering the last five years show large volumes of immigration cases helped U.S. attorneys Paul Charlton of Phoenix, Carol Lam of San Diego and David Iglesias of New Mexico consistently place in the upper tier among their peers. The analysis includes each U.S. attorney's per capita record of prosecutions, convictions and prison sentences." But did anyone ever take the Regime's after the fact lies about "poor performance" seriously?

Snow job du jour was on Good Morning America: "Do you want Karl Rove on TV or do you want the truth?" I guess the two concepts are incompatible? Earlier Snow had threatened Congress that if they issue the subpoenas Bush's "reasonable"-- all Regimites have been instructed to never use the word "offer" in regard to this case without prefacing it with "reasonable"-- offer is "withdrawn."

But Snow wasn't the only one of TV. The good guys put up Patrick Leahy (on both NBC's Today and CNN's American Morning where he paraphrased John Lennon: "All I want to know is what the truth is" and "All I want to know is if prosecutors were manipulated." Yesterday Schumer said something similar on CNN's Situation Room: "The president says he wants to get to the truth. Well, then what's wrong with an oath and what's wrong with transcripts?... Our goal-- get out the facts, get to the bottom of it." Later on Countdown Schumer turned the Regime's obsession with The Godfather (Bush calls Gonzales Fredo and everyone calls Bush Sonny): "To paraphrase The Godfather, the president has basically given us an offer we can't accept. ... Any lawyer worth his salt will tell you, no legal proceeding is worth the paper it's written on unless there's a transcript, unless there's sworn testimony. And if the White House wants to get to the truth, and I hope they do, that's the obvious way to do it."


UPDATE: DID BUSH USE THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE TO KILL THE DELAY INVESTIGATION?

Our old pal Nathan Wilcox thinks so. He explains why over at the Burnt Orange Report. "In the fall of 2005 dominos were falling fast in the Jack Abramoff investigation. And they were falling in one very clear direction, closer and closer to Tom DeLay." One DeLay henchman after another was being rolled up by the Feds-- crooks like Michael Scanlon, Tony Rudy, Ed Buckham... But suddenly it stopped-- dead cold. "...Something very fishy did indeed take place. The lead investigator [Noel Hillman] was given a Judgeship, a new investigator with connections to the GOP machine was appointed and presto...no more momentum in the investigation." There's more at the link-- and it gets worse.

IF A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST WILL BUSH HEAR IT-- IF IT DOESN'T FALL ON HIS HEAD?

In the L.A. Times this morning, Richard Serrano reported that "Senior Justice Department officials began drafting memos this month listing specific reasons why they had fired eight U.S. attorneys, intending to cite performance problems such as insubordination, leadership failures and other missteps if needed to convince angry congressional Democrats that the terminations were justified." The lists were put together as part of the massive Bush Regime cover-up they are attempting-- poorly-- to perpetrate in front of the eyes of a suddenly more awake American Congress, media and public.

As Harry Reid pointed out yesterday, lying, half-truths, secrecy, cover-up, deception have been the hallmarks of the Bush Regime since it's first days in power. That's why Rove-- the worst of the entire lot of these criminals-- must be compelled to tell the truth... or face prosecution.

So, appropriately, the House and Senate committees looking into the cascading scandals emerging from the Bush DoJ have rejected Bush's offer to let them have an informal, off-the-record chit chat session with the criminals involved with turning American Justice on its head. Replying to his bluster about "fishing expeditions" and "executive privilege," they voted this morning to issue subpoenas to the offenders.

On the House side, Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said his staff is still negotiating with the Regime and that he would hold off on serving the subpoenas while negotiating was under way. Today's CongressDaily points out that "the decision to delay serving the subpoenas put off a constitutional showdown between the executive and legislative branches that would probably end up in court. But the ceasefire might not last long; shortly after Conyers spoke, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said the offer to allow private interviews but not sworn testimony was not negotiable."

It is no coincidence that one of the strongest voices on the committee opposing subpoenas was that of Florida's most crooked congressman, Tom Feeney, who was part of the culture of corruption bunch along with Duke Cunningham, Duncan Hunter, Virgil Goode, John Doolittle and Jerry Lewis, who had the most to gain from the firing of U.S. Attorney Carol Lam. He insisted that subpoenas should not be considered unless the committee turned up even more evidence of criminal behavior of the part of the Regime. Apparently he doesn't understand clearly understands the purpose of an investigation.

Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., said clearing the way for subpoenas put the committee in a position of strength as it negotiated with the White House on access to Rove and others. Democrats contend the prosecutors were fired for political purposes, a view that Feeney seemed to have trouble taking seriously. "I am shocked, just like in 'Casablanca,' that politics might have been involved," Feeney said. Cannon told reporters that Democrats might end up agreeing to Fielding's offer because issuing subpoenas would be a time-consuming process, especially if President Bush followed through on his vow to invoke executive privilege and challenges the subpoenas in court. Democrats "should take what they can get for now" and consider serving subpoenas later in their investigation, he said.

Oh, and speaking of Fox propagandist White House whatever they call him Tony Snow, he had a very different outlook on all these when the crime wasn't the mere destruction of the Justice system of the United States but the very serious matter of an adult president getting a bj from an adult woman. John Aravosis refers us to some quotes from Snow in the Chicago Tribune way back when Clinton was perpetrating real crimes against the Republic-- and impeachment was on the table.

"The wall of separation between Mr. Clinton and his deeds remains strong because minions have stuck to their alibis. But now comes an episode in which the Man from Hope stands alone. It is his recent attempt to claim executive privilege for counselors Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"Mr. Clinton can't blame his lawyers for this latest feint. He alone can assert the privilege. The maneuver places him at the heart of his administration's ongoing effort to use executive privilege as a way of concealing the truth about whether the president exposed himself....

"Earlier in this administration, then-White House legal counsel Lloyd Cutler decreed that the White House never would assert privilege in the face of a criminal investigation. He merely was reiterating long-standing executive-branch policy along those lines. President Ronald Reagan didn't invoke privilege in Iran-contra, and neither did President George Bush.

"But precedent is gone, and Mr. Clinton wants to protect conversations about a chubby intern from Hollywood. In so doing, he becomes the first president since Richard Nixon to use executive privilege in a criminal inquiry.

"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.

"Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.

"One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold the rule of law.''

UPDATE: OVER ON THE EXTREME RIGHT, NO SYMPATHY FOR GONZALES... OR BUSH

Today's Evans-Novak Political Report isn't exactly brimming over with good news for the Regime. "It is impossible to find a Republican on Capitol Hill who believes either that Alberto Gonzales will survive as attorney general or that he should survive. That typifies the poor congressional relations of the Bush Administration that are rooted in arrogance. And this from the crew that likes these folks! Others are less kind-- including more and more former employees coming out of the woodwork with the horror stories we all knew were there.