Say it again

and again and again. Say it with me: Culture of Corruption.

shhhhhh

OK, this is not strictly kosher, copyright-wise. But Frank Rich's op-ed today is SO awsome that it seems crazy that you cannot read it because of TimesBloodySelect. (btw: I just went ahead and got TimesFuckingSelect and I think it might be worth it to not have to deal anymore. It comes out to $4 a month or so. Just pay it and stop thinking about it.) So here, with a few paragraphs cut to make it more or less legal, is the entire article. Don't say I never gave ya nothin':

GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime...

...What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration...

...If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

btw

the dems say they just might filibuster alito after all.

fucking retard

I don't really think a post is necessary.

In other news

You know, Abramoff could be much, much bigger than Plame. After all, it's the money that brought Capone down (not to mention Delay). Greed blinds, apparently. They say it may be the biggest scandal to hit the Hill in a 100 years. And by "they" I mean that alarmist rag The New York Times.
Money quote, before this article disappears:

Scholars who specialize in the history and operations of Congress say that given the brazenness of Mr. Abramoff's lobbying efforts, as measured by the huge fees he charged clients and the extravagant gifts he showered on friends on Capitol Hill, almost all of them Republicans, the investigation could end up costing several lawmakers their careers, if not their freedom.
"I think this has the potential to be the biggest scandal in Congress in over a century," said Thomas E. Mann, a Congressional specialist at the Brookings Institution. "I've been around Washington for 35 years, watching Congress, and I've never seen anything approaching Abramoff for cynicism and chutzpah in proposing quid pro quos to members of Congress.

Hadley

Hadley Hadley.

Woodward's source. But maybe after Iran-Contra I just don't trust anyone NSA?

If not, Cheney Cheney Cheney.
Notice how the WH is sending Cheney to do their shit work. They say he is being distanced from Chimpy. Rumors that he will step down and Condi will be appointed VP. I say: never happen. Condi's a lesbian. Really. C'mon, you knew that even if you didn't know that.

Fitz (omg! So my boyfriend - Azulita and I locked in a deathmatch for his sweet love) has a new Grand Jury doncha know.

What does it all mean? Frankly, we are pretty clueless. We are as confused as we were in the first days of Judy Judy Judy and the aspens turning. But this ain't even half over, kids.

Funny thought: if they make a movie of this (All the Preznit's Men?) can Redford play Woodward again? That would be awsome.

baby steps

i've been sorta out of the game for a while here - sorry - working and stuff. so much to report that it was getting a little intimidating.
so instead i'll just say:
can you fucking believe what is going on right now? the entire bush administration in going down like a pile of flaming shit! they are stabbing each other in the back, saying crazy things, losing votes, and every day going down, down down in the polls.
politics doesn't get any more interesting than this.

and as to the republican talking point about how we can't blame them for the war because the dems voted for it too, and the dems thought there were wmds too, and everyone thought so and don't blame them don't blame them don't blame them. well, hans blix didn't think there were wmds. so, um, that's not really everyone, is it? scott ritter didn't think there were wmds. and he should know, seeing as how it was his job to find them.

How meta...

"I won't stand for the Swift-boating of Jack Murtha," said Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

This also made my day:

Democrats privately acknowledged that they were seeking to escape a political trap set by the Republicans to box them into an unappealing choice: side with Mr. Murtha and face criticism for backing a plan that American commanders say would cripple the mission in Iraq or oppose their respected colleague and blunt momentum for an overhaul of the administration's Iraq policy.

House Democrats greeted Mr. Murtha with a standing ovation on Friday as he entered the chamber.

Africa 1, USA 0

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

This lady (the one on the left) rules. And the girl next to her is the cutest. More than half the electorate in Liberia is women. Go girls!-- she beat a big soccer star! First African woman president ever!

Indeed, when supporters of Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, a onetime United Nations official and Liberian finance minister, marched through the broken streets of Monrovia in the final, frantic days of the campaign for Liberia's presidency, they shouted and waved signs that read, "Ellen - she's our man."

R. Kelly

Trapped in the Closet. Discuss.

why i think fitz is fucking brilliant

OK. I can admit it. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get a shiny new Rove for Fitzmas. But I've been thinking about this for a while. And now I think this could be totally awsome.
Follow me here:
Libby is going to trial. A regular old criminal trial (federal version). Which the regular old media can get transcripts of, which are public record. Cheney, Rove, all of them, are gonna have to testify under oath. And we're gonna know what they say. And either they've all been telling the God's honest truth from day one, or they're gonna be busted. And they're gonna be scared, because no one knows how much Fitz knows. So they won't know which lies he'll catch them on. And what other people are going to do. So even if Fitz is not involved in Libby's trial, he's still got his grand jury, and he can call someone on back and be all, why'd you say this to me, and then say this at Libby's trial?

A year ago

A year ago today the Bad Thing happened.
We here at BBD we stationed at our usual posts, having perfected the right blend of panic drops, strawberry and whisky (first tested during the World Series) to keep us from feeling the pain too much.
Return of the Kane was the episode of Veronica Mars that day.

A year on, where are we?

This ScAlito fellow is a fucking nightmare, but almost worth it to hear the sad, ridiculous Republicans trying to claim that people are calling him "Scalito" because they're anti-Italian. Really - this is a bonafide GOP talking point. It doesn't really get more pathetic than that. I suspect he will be confirmed, unless there's some sort of nanny situation. I'm not happy about it, but it's worth pointing out that he is not, apparently, as bad as some. And really, what the fuck did you expect? We knew that the Chimpster was goingto get his own little court when he was re-elected. That's one of the big reasons we wanted him out. And lo, it has come to pass. Tragic, but not unexpected. Get your abortions while you can, girls.

In Iraq it's the same shit, different year. That place is FUBAR and I have no idea what to do about it.

And the Dems? Well Harry Reid, the pro-life mormon from Nevada most likely to look like your grandfather just said to the world yesterday, "Never underestimate the size of my cojones."

And the thing that gets me really excited about the closed Senate stunt (and it was a stunt, and a mighty good one) is that it means they were planning. They realized the GOP is weak and they planned something. Imagine! Our Democrats, planning. Gives me a happy glow.