Rush: Dem's are all liars, so it's OK to lie

When I was in school, my teachers never let me get away with the excuse, "But everybody else was doing it, too!" I was taller, and louder, and they usually saw me first. And they always punished me when I got caught. Eventually, I learned my lesson. It's too bad that as adults we forget....


The Rush Limbaugh Show
March 8, 2007

RUSH: Michael in Columbus, Ohio. Hello, sir. You're next on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Good afternoon. Congratulations on your success and your excellence, Rush. How are you doing?

RUSH: Fine, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Good. Here is the short of it. You know we've got a serious issue in this country, and where you disappoint, today with your Libby rants -- and I get it. I know where you're lined up and I appreciate your viewpoints. But whether it was Martha Stewart, whether it was Bill Clinton, whether it's Scooter Libby, there's no more room in my life -- and there should be no more room in the government and in the leadership and the elite of this country -- to accept lying to get your way. Scooter Libby didn't do anything wrong up until he decided to not be straight about what happened. That applies to all three names that I just mentioned, and there's plenty of others -- and where you disappoint for me, at least personally, is your unwillingness to look that straight in the face and say, "Unacceptable."

RUSH: See, this is very selective. Do you realize how many liars could have been called and put under oath by the independent counsel and weren't?

CALLER: I do. I get that. I get that.

RUSH: No, you don't get that. You're being very selective and you're trying to tell me that I am basically constituting or putting up with and allowing lying and then am mad because my guy gets caught at it, i.e., Scooter Libby. You're going on with what we ought to be attacking here is the culture of lying. I am trying to! The Democrat Party is living a lie, a series of lies, and you would be better served (and so would the country) if people like you would focus on that, because the Democrat Party is in the process of ruining this country and terribly disrupting your life.

Buchanan: Libby 'Martyr of the War Party'

May Allah bless Pat Buchanan!

Martyr of the War Party

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Updated 03/06/2007 ET

HumanEvents.com

The conviction of Scooter Libby on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice is first of all a human tragedy.

A man who served his country at the highest level, who sat in every morning at the senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, has been dishonored and disgraced, and will be disbarred. Unless his conviction is overturned, or he is pardoned, Libby will go to prison. His life will end with an obituary that declares in its headline and lead paragraph that he was a convicted Dick Cheney aide.

Yet, this was a narrow case. Libby's convictions call to mind Martha Stewart's, who went to prison for lying to investigators about a crime she did not commit. Libby has been convicted of lying about the outing of a CIA classified officer, a crime for which no one has been indicted.

Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was outed as a CIA "operative," was no longer covert and had not been so for half a decade when her name was pushed out of the White House to the press. Joe Wilson, her husband, target of the White House vendetta, yet contends that not only was her career destroyed, a crime was committed -- and that is why the CIA demanded an investigation.

Yet it was an arrogant and stupid thing Libby did. He lied to the FBI, to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, to the grand jury. He fabricated a story about where he learned about Wilson's wife, when, as sworn testimony proved, he learned it from Vice President Cheney and was himself moving it to the press.

However, this was about a larger issue than the narrow question of whether Libby lied about leaking the role of Valerie Plame in having her husband sent to Niger to investigate a report that Iraq had been seeking "yellowcake," a critical component in a uranium enrichment program.

That larger issue is this: Were we misled, were we deceived by our government, as the White House made the case for invading and occupying Iraq? Did neoconservatives at the Pentagon cherry-pick the intelligence, stovepipe it to the vice president's office and Libby, and then feed it to sympathizers and collaborators in the media, to stampede our country into a war against a nation that, no matter how odious its regime, did not threaten us, did not attack us and did not want war with us?

In short, were we lied into a war in Mesopotamia that is breaking our Army, has crippled an administration, and has bled and divided our country as it has not been since the days of Vietnam?

And why has the Democratic Congress, on taking power in January, not begun a broad investigation into how we got into this war?

This is the dog that didn't bark. And the reason the dog is silent suggests itself. The Congress, in voting President Bush the authority to take us to war against Iraq at a time and place of his own choosing, failed to do its duty by the Constitution. In October 2002, to get the issue off the table for the election and give themselves political cover against the Rovian charge they were tying the hands of the commander in chief in the War on Terror, a Democratic Senate -- Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, Daschle, Biden, Reid all assenting -- voted Bush the blank check for war that he cashed in five months later.

The dilemma a Democratic Congress faces in any investigation into whether we were lied into war is that Congress would be investigating why a Democratic Senate failed its constitutional duty to determine the necessity for war.

And, lest we forget, the media, too, played a supporting role in pushing this nation into an unnecessary war. [GASP! Not the Lib'rul Media full of bearded, Ivy League, tofu-eating, Mao's-little-red-book carrying pinkos!? -- J] Columnists and commentators assured us there was a nexus between Saddam, al-Qaida and 9-11, a "Prague connection" between Muhammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence. We were told Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was working on nuclear weapons, that enrichment of uranium was being done secretly around the country, that if we did not act now, we faced a nuclear-armed Iraq that would surely transfer atomic weapons to al-Qaida terrorists. Said Condi Rice, our proof of WMD might well come in the form of a mushroom cloud above an American city.

Scooter Libby will not lack for legal defense funds as he pursues his appeal, and there will be demands for his pardon before Bush goes home. For Scooter is a martyr of the War Party. Scooter did what he had to do to get us into this war. Then he did what he felt he had to do to discredit Joe Wilson, because Wilson was out to discredit the White House case for war. And in the end, we are unlikely to know the truth of why it was we went to war. For that record is sealed in minds and souls.

O'Reilly comments on Libby...And gets it right!

I'm still sort of dumbstruck that I have nothing major to criticize in this "Talking Points Memo" from Bill O'Reilly. I wonder: Am I going soft?...

Should You Care About the Scooter Libby Verdict?
By Bill O'Reilly

March 7, 2007 | FOXNews

Outside of the partisans on both sides, most Americans don't care about Scooter Libby and don't know what he did. So the question becomes should you care? And the answer is yes.

Here's what happened in layman's terms:

President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address that according to British government Saddam Hussein tried to get uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa. Now that was true. But it was also true that Saddam failed to get the uranium.

A guy named Joseph Wilson who investigated the uranium deal for U.S. intelligence then wrote an article saying that the president over-hyped the Africa story. Subsequently Mr. Wilson allied himself with the anti-Bush left.

Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, apparently didn't like what Wilson was doing and told some reporters that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA. In some cases, it's crime to out a CIA employee.

On July 14, 2003, columnist Robert Novak, a FOX News contributor as well, wrote about Ms. Plame's CIA job and the investigation began into who leaked the information to Novak and other journalists.

Mr. Libby told a grand jury he did not provide info about Ms. Plame. But today a jury decided that he lied. Thus Scooter Libby was convicted of four felonies — basically obstruction of justice and lying under oath. So that's the deal.

"The Factor" didn't cover Libby very much because I had no idea what happened. Unlike the left-wing press, including elements of The New York Times and NBC News, who convicted Libby even before the trial began, we avoid speculation and try to be fair in our analysis. When we don't know something, we tell you.

Partisans on the right were also at fault. Some of them acquitted Libby before the trial even started.

The entire case reminded me of Ken Starr and Paula Jones. President Clinton got into trouble for failing to tell the truth under oath as you know, just as Libby has. Interesting to see how the left in both cases handled it. Right?

Now all Americans should demand those holding political power tell the truth about everything. The jury says Scooter Libby lied under oath — that's unacceptable.

Talking Points is tried of the partisan nonsense and also tired of powerful people not following the rules the regular folks have to follow.

Scooter Libby has paid a huge price for his deceit. He played the revenge game against Wilson and it all went bad. Which reminds me of an old Chinese proverb: When seeking revenge, bring two shovels.

And that's The Memo.

Libbygate: Now on to the REAL story

For various reasons, I don't agree with trying to impeach Bush for anything. That's not why I'm posting this article. I'm posting this because it puts the whole Libby-Wilson-Plame affair in context. The context of lying to the American public in 2002-03 about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. These weren't "honest mistakes" or "bad intelligence." Far from it. Read on!...

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Libbygate: Now to the Real Story

So Scooter Libby has taken the fall.

Three and a half years and a long bloody war after he and a gang of war-mongers in the White House and Blair House, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, set out to undermine and trash the reputation of an Iraq war critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Libby has been found guilty of perjury, lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice by a Washington jury.

Now maybe special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and what passes for journalists in the mainstream media can get down to the real business of finding out just why the entire White House smear operation was unleashed upon a minor state department official and why they went so far as to violate federal law and expose his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame, in the process destroying her entire network of contacts for monitoring the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

Because that's what this whole Libby story is really about.

The whole focus of the media in this case has been on the narrow, inside-the-Beltway question of who leaked information about Plame to the media.

Entirely forgotten or ignored has been what this leak was all about to begin with.

For that, you have to go back and look at what Wilson did in the first place that so enraged or frightened the Vice President and the President.

And that was to go to Niger, one of the poorest nations in Africa, to prove conclusively that there was no truth to a set of forged notes on the letterhead of the Niger embassy in Rome, purporting to be receipts for 400 tons of Niger uranium ore allegedly being sought by Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Wilson knew those documents were cheap forgeries--the name of the mines official on the papers was someone who hadn't been in office for years--but he went to Niger anyhow, just to make doubly certain that no such purchase attempt had been made.

None had.

So the real question then is, who is behind those forged documents?

There is an interesting story here--and an important mystery to be solved.

As it happens, way back in early 2001 there was a pair of burglaries at the Niger Embassy in Rome and at the home of the Niger ambassador. Police investigating the crimes found that the only things stolen were official stationery and some official stamps, used to make documents official. A cleaning lady and a former member of Italy's intelligence service were arrested for the crimes. They were odd burglaries to be sure, since there is precious little one could use, or sell, such documents for, given the country involved. I mean, it might make sense to steal official stationery from the French Embassy in Rome, which a thief might use to finagle a pass to the Cannes Festival. But Niger?

Jump to October 2001. A few weeks after the 9-11 attacks, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, accompanied by his ministers of defense and intelligence, made a visit to the White House. There he reportedly handed over the forged Niger documents (they were on Niger government stationary, and had Niger government stamps!), which appeared to be receipts for uranium ore, made out to Saddam Hussein. Now forget the matter of why either Hussein or Niger's government would want paper receipts for such an illegal transaction, and forget the matter of how Hussein would have transported 400 tons of yellow dust across the Sahara to his country without somebody noticing. The simple fact is that Bush's own intelligence experts at the CIA and State Department promptly spotted the forgeries, and they were dumped.

We know this because we know, from the likes of onetime National Security Council counterterrorism head Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, that Bush was pushing for war with Iran almost as soon as he finished reading My Pet Goat following the attack on the Twin Towers. Surely if the White House had even thought those Niger documents might be legit, they would have leaked or broadcast them all over creation.

They didn't. The documents were deep-sixed, and mentioned to no one.

But according to some dedicated investigative reporters at the respected Italian newspaper La Repubblica , they resurfaced before long at a very suspicious meeting. This meeting occurred in December 2001 in Rome, and included Michael Ledeen, an associate of Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith and a key figure in the White House's war-propaganda program, Larry Franklin, a top Defense Intelligence Agency Middle East analyst who later pleaded guilty to passing classified information to two employees of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), convicted Iraqi bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress, and Harold Rhode of the sinister Defense Department Office of Special Plans, that office set up by the White House and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under Feith's direction to manufacture "evidence" to justify a war on Iraq. Also at this peculiar meeting were the heads of the Italian Defense Department and of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency.

According to La Repubblica, it was at that meeting that a plan was hatched to resurrect the forged Niger documents, and to give them credibility by recycling them through British intelligence.

And that is what Bush was referring to when, in his 2003 State of the Union address, he famously frightened a nation by declaring, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Bush lyingly implied that this was new information, when in fact he knew--had to know--that the "evidence" in British hands was the same set of documents he had been offered by Berlusconi almost a year and a half earlier, which had been declared to be bogus.

No mainstream American media organization has pursued this story, or even published the details as reported in Italy. Most Americans, consequently, don't even know what a grand lie Bush and the White House perpetrated upon them and the Congress in order to win approval for an attack on Iraq.

Perhaps now that Libby has gone down for his part in this grotesque crime, some editor will ask the obvious question: Why did the White House and the Office of Vice President go to such extraordinary lengths to attack Wilson and his wife? And more importantly, who was behind those Niger embassy burglaries and the forged uranium ore sale documents? And what was OSP doing meeting in Rome in December 2001 with the head of Italian intelligence?

Make no mistake: this whole story has the odor of a "black op" designed to target the American people.

If so it was an act of high treason.

It is not just Libby who should go to jail for this crime. It is the president and vice president.

At this point, what should happen is that Fitzgerald, with Libby in the bag, would take the next step and hold the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence recommendation over the convict's head in order to try and win from him a promise of cooperation with the prosecution. Because Libby knows who was behind all this.

That's the way prosecutors go after criminal syndicates and conspiracies, but Fitzgerald has folded his tent, reportedly saying that he plans no further prosecutions.

That means it's up to Congress, which should take the cue and initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney based on the evidence of crimes and obstruction that came out during the Libby trial testimony.

And of course, it's up to the media, which if they were still doing their job, would be all over this story.