Gene Lyons' Must Read re Scooter Libby: "Too Clever By Half"

[flpoljunkie]

http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg§ion=Editorial&storyid=135124

Fortunately, Scooter Libby has a second career to fall back on. He’ll need one. The recently indicted former White House aide’s first novel, “The Apprentice,” was published in 1996. Set in Japan, it came billed as a creepy political thriller with exotic sexual overtones. Some reviewers found the sex a lot creepier than the intrigue, but that’s a matter of taste. Libby’s present dilemma is less subjective. It should be obvious to anybody who’s seen three episodes of “Law & Order.” Basically, Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s got him by the—well, Scooter’s in an extremely vulnerable position, and the prosecutor’s squeezing him. Either he rolls over and tells the unvarnished truth about the White House scheme to leak the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame or he’s looking at serious time in a federal penitentiary.

<>In retrospect, President Bush may have given the game away at the beginning.

“I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is,” he told reporters on Oct. 8, 2003, “partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. You tell me : How many sources have you had that’s leaked information that you’ve exposed or had been exposed ? Probably none.”

Less than a week later, Fitzgerald claims, Libby falsely told FBI agents that NBC newsman Tim Russert had told him about Plame’s CIA identity. But Libby was only half as clever as he thought. See, Fitzgerald didn’t need to make Russert testify about what a source told him, only what he told a source. No U. S. court would shield that from scrutiny. Risky, sure. But remember, these are the same geniuses who believed their own propaganda about a cakewalk into Iraq. The White House simply cannot afford to let Libby go on trial. Nor could Bush get away with pardoning him before the 2006 congressional elections at the very earliest. So look for Libby’s lawyers to employ every imaginable stalling tactic to postpone his day of reckoning as long as possible. Or he might roll over. Much tougher guys have flipped. As for Karl Rove, identified as the so far unindicted “Official A,” who also spoke to the media about Plame, here’s the question : Did Rove lie if he told Bush he had nothing to do with it, or was Bush deceiving the American people when he denied knowing the guilty party ? Either way, why is Rove still working at the White House ?

[truthisfreedom]

1. the leaky ones are always wet... and the wet ones always short-circuit.

libbey is so yesterday's news.

[flpoljunkie]

2. Libby not quite yesterday's news. He will be arraigned tomorrow.

Am not sure what you mean in the rest of your post, either regarding "leaking and short circuiting."

[PurityOfEssence]

3. Reading George Bush quotes is like listening to tone-deaf people sing

That quote in there to the press is so grammatically catastrophic that it hurts the eyes to read. It makes me wince like nails on a chalkboard or piety from an evangelist.

What kind of a battered, whiskey-soaked and coke-addled brain does this nobody have? It's the equivalent of sirens on the street, designed to stop one in one's tracks. The thought's been advanced before that this is deliberately scripted to drive people insane, but the guy's just so obviously charred that it's a wonder people are even able to dress and feed him.

A little bit goes a looooong way:

"You tell me : How many sources have you had that’s leaked information that you’ve exposed or had been exposed?"

[candice]

4. Hey, that's Phillips-Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School speaking..

not good PR for these corporations

[PurityOfEssence]

5. Yep, him got a M-B-A; the question is whether he can spell it

It certainly does show the cheapening of credentials and the willingness of supposedly august institutions to sell their name for nothing more than cash.

Let's take a minute here to praise the University of Texas for turning him down for its law school; they showed some honor. Even after a threatening letter to induce them to reconsider, UT refused to admit him.

[Supersedeas]

6. Why is Rove still working at the WH?

[PurityOfEssence]

7. It's just another all-purpose "fuck you" from Junior to the rest of us

He's the commander in chief; he doesn't have to explain. The world is his oyster and the rest of us are merely grains of irritating sand. He doesn't do testimony.

They make up the reality, and we just have to knuckle under and swallow it.

[robbedvoter]

8. Here's the exact quote;

"I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation".

Also, if anyone doubts that he was an author of this mess, I found this testimonial:


http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/16/tsurumi/in...

Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy."