Friday, October 28, 2005

To My Friends On The Right


Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (L), who says he doesn't photograph well, arrives at his Washington office October 27, 2005. (REUTERS/Micah Walter) Posted by Picasa

We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this actually is an art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of things.

---Carl Gustav Jung

To know that you do not know is the best.
To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

---Lao Tzu

Give me, kind Heaven, a private station,
A mind serene for contemplation.

---John Gay

I like to maintain dialogue with people of conservative philosophies, and several get these dispatches I send to cyberspace from time to time. Apparently a few even read them and sometimes lash back when they get mad. This is OK because usually there are other things at the heart of our friendship...and we just go back to those topics. I'm not being demeaning because there are elements of the conservative view, including the basic tenets of Hobbes, that are very convincing to me. I like best to talk with conservatives because I may be wrong about things and they help me be the first to know when I am.

There are two things I know about conservatives that come to mind this morning. One is they allow more secrecy in planning and government than I like or agree with. They respect the sanctity of the huddle. I must admit the intrusion of television technology onto the playing field can spoil the fun. I do not want to learn what the next pitch is going to be, or what the manager just whispered into the coach's ear. But politics is not a game to me, and if Cheney's energy cronies have carved up the world for their financial gain, using the public office of the Vice Presidency to do it, I want to know!

But the second conservative conviction that I think of today I do agree with and respect tremendously. Conservatives believe in playing by the rules. Fascists don't. They believe in making up rules by "necessity" as they go along. And so conservatives I've been talking to are anticipating the announcements by Fitzgerald today as much as I am. When Miers withdrew yesterday one such associate said to me, "Now we'll get a nominee to replace her so far to the right there won't be a confirmation before Christmas!" His remark helped temper my excitement.

The left is going wild on the Internet at this hour. I understand it. I woke up at 3 and had to get down to the computer to read the news. Some of you write or tell me you like it when I chart where I've been because it saves you time. Google News is featuring well over 2000 entries at this hour on who in the White House is about to be indicted, and an extension of the grand jury investigation for more about Karl Rove. Yahoo is carrying the basic AP story http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051028/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/cia_leak_investigation , but Reuters' Adam Entous kept updating his coverage until after midnight sometime. You can type in www.reuters.com and find yourself with the latest news, but I like Entous' earlier story which appeared on The Boston Globe site last night http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/10/27/leak_case_announcement_seen_friday/ . It also sums up The New York Times story, appearing in this morning's edition, that says Karl Rove will not be charged today because Fitzgerald is looking for more.

Another excellent summary I think is at BradBlog http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001956.htm#comments . There are lots of hyperlinks there to lead your curiosity to the original sources. The most significant I think is the reference to a dispatch from Murray Waas at the National Journal http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1027nj1.htm . Here we learn, "Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
"Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said. " While still at BradBlog, especially those of us in Ohio, be sure to check out his writeup of Tom Noe's 3 count indictment of money laundering for Bush and Blackwell http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001954.htm#comments . Dana sent this out to her list already last night.

If you want to get farther out, brace yourself for Arianna Huffington's blog, which actually is a legion of liberal bloggers http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ . The latest headlines and links to those sites are also there, and lots of photos. Her own entry today is about Macbeth and Bush and how they both lost their mojo. Well...you catch the drift.

The piece that captured most of my attention was an analysis of the whole Bush collapse by Tom Englehardt, who attended both Yale and Harvard and is involved, I guess, in a couple liberal thinktanks and publishing projects. He maintains something called TomDispatch http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml and yesterday put out this essay that TruthOut and a number of others have picked up http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=31576 . Clearly Englehardt is a bit on edge himself , as he chronicles how hard he's been working over the past year for this moment. Yeah well, haven't we all? But further into the piece he gets going~~~

"In all their guises -- in relation to the media, the federal bureaucracy, and other countries -- they actually were dominating isolationists. They took a once honorable Republican heartland tradition -- isolationism -- turned it on its head and thrust it into the world. They acted in Iraq and elsewhere as armed imperial isolationists. Where the elder Bush and Bill Clinton were multinationalists and globalizers; they were ultra-nationalists and militarists, focused only on the military solution to any problem -- and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
"But when you are a cabal, using such close-to-the-breast, not to say mom-and-pop, methods of ruling, and you falter, whether in Iraq or at home, unilateralism becomes weakness. And when it turns out that what you rule is the 'last superpower' and you've sidelined, pacified, or punished large numbers of people in the vast, interlocking worlds of the governmental bureaucracy and the media, your enemies still retain the power to strike back.
"When something closer to the full story of our moment is known, I suspect we'll see more clearly just how the bureaucracy began to do so (along with, as in this week's New Yorker magazine in the person of Brent Scowcroft, the old multinational ruling elite). In the meantime, it's clear that what the potential implosion moment awaited was the perfect storm of events now upon us. If this moment were to be traced back to its origins, I would, for the time being, pick the spring of this year as my starting point and give the mainstream media -- anxious, resentful, bitter, cowed, losing audience, and cutting staff -- their due. The Bush slide has been a long, slow one, as the opinion polls indicate; but like that famed moss-less rolling stone, it picked up speed last spring as the President's approval ratings slipped below 50%, and then in the ensuing months plunged near or below 40%, putting him at the edge of free-fall.
"If there's one thing that this administration and Washington journalists have in common, it's that both groups parse opinion polls obsessively; so both saw the signs of administration polling softness and of a President, just into a second term, who should have been triumphant but was failing in his attempt to spend what he called his 'political capital' on social security 'reform.'
"Vulnerability, it gets the blood roaring, especially when it seeps from an administration so long feared and admired as the 'most disciplined' and 'most secretive' in memory, an administration whose highest officials (as the Plame case showed) regularly whacked their opponents with anything at hand and then called on their media allies, always in full-battle-mode, for support. Probably the key moment of weakness came in August, when Cindy Sheehan ended up in that famed ditch at the side of a road in Crawford, Texas, and the President and his men -- undoubtedly feeling their new-found vulnerability, anxious over an Iraq War gone wrong and the protesting mother of a dead soldier so near at hand -- blinked."

I hope this has helped you with your Friday morning and the announcement to come later today. Enjoy it, especially if it's payday besides! And get your chores done tomorrow.

2 comments:

jazzolog said...

Reverend Michael Jupin is Interim Priest at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church here in Athens, where we are members. I think the Sojourners' petition idea is a good one and I urge you to sign and/or pass it on.

Richard

----- Original Message -----
From: Sojourners
To: MICHAEL JUPIN
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 2:37 PM
Subject: Breaking News: Senior White House Official Indicted

Dear MICHAEL,

In the week we mourned the death of the 2,000th U.S. soldier in Iraq, I. Lewis Libby, vice presidential chief of staff, was indicted today on five felony charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to the FBI in the grand jury investigation into the leak of the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been critical of pre-war intelligence on Iraq. According to news reports, the investigation of White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove will continue.

This case goes well beyond petty intrigue and personal revenge. As people of faith, it is time to raise our voices and demand the truth about actions that - if proven in court - were threads of misinformation and manipulation that pushed our nation into war with Iraq and punished those who discovered credible evidence against it. With the prophet Isaiah we cry out: "No one calls for justice, nor does any plead for truth" (Isaiah 59:4).

The indictment of Libby raises the possibility that top White House officials deliberately attacked someone who questioned the validity of the intelligence the White House used to claim there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq - intelligence that has now been discredited. More importantly, this indictment provokes further questions about whether going to war was simply an honest mistake based on bad intelligence. Are the alleged actions of Libby isolated incidents of revenge, or are they the tip of the iceberg in a conspiracy to mislead the American people into war?

We demand a truly independent commission that will investigate whether the Bush administration deliberately misled our nation into going to war. Although creating an independent commission will not bring back the 2,000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of this war, it will nevertheless be a step toward restoring honesty and integrity to the nation's highest office.

President Bush's administration claimed in the run-up to the war that the primary justification for going to war was the threat of weapons of mass destruction. In March 2005, a commission appointed by President Bush reported that "the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."[1] The commission went on to report that these were simply intelligence failures, but found no evidence of any deliberate attempt by intelligence officials to mislead the administration about the war. In short, they concluded that these were honest - yet highly serious mistakes. We need an independent commission that differs from previous investigations in that members not only focus on errors within the intelligence community but at potential errors within the administration.

We want the truth about why we went to war with Iraq. Help us find it:

This is not a matter of partisan politics, nor of political revenge. It is a matter of uncovering the truth about why we went to war. Sojourners has worked for peace with justice for more than 30 years. We have been consistent and vocal opponents of the war in Iraq, and we take it seriously when voices of dissent become targets of intimidation for political gain. We have a long and consistent history of demanding integrity from our national leaders - from Nixon, to Reagan, to Clinton, and now the Bush administration.

As people of faith, we believe that the authority for governance balances on a commitment to truth when leading a nation into war and putting at risk our lives and those of our "enemies." We will not stand by while our nation's elected officials "trust in empty words and speak lies; conceive evil and bring forth iniquity" (Isaiah 59:4b).

We need your help to get 25,000 people to sign this petition by Wednesday. After you sign the petition, follow the instructions to forward this message to 10 or more of your friends, family, fellow churchgoers - anyone who believes in our call as people of faith to be prophetic voices of truth and peacemaking.

»Click here to sign a petition asking Congress for an independent investigation of President Bush's administration to determine if and how intelligence was knowingly manipulated leading up to the war in Iraq. http://go.sojo.net/campaign/demand_truth/wn5xne8225tmb5m?

Blessings,

The staff at Sojourners

[1] From the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005. http://www.wmd.gov/report/transmittal_letter.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

jazzolog said...

15 Questions for Bob Woodward
by Arianna Huffington

1. If you didn't tell your editor, Len Downie, about the CIA leak because you were so afraid of being subpoenaed, why did you supposedly tell Walter Pincus http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113218886047399621-ujmTbJz7qNhUtKnp1e5T1r1wXtg_20061117.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top ? Did you trust Pincus but not Downie?

2. Why were you afraid of being subpoenaed in 2003? Subpoenas of reporters didn't begin until 2004 http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/11/bob-woodwards-explanation-of-why-he.html . And how would telling Downie lead to your being subpoenaed?

3. What are your ground rules for your books? Since Plan of Attack was published, weren't you free to use the material from your source?

4. Why did you come forward to Len Downie in late October to reveal your source http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111601286.html ? This was supposedly before your source approached Fitzgerald, so what motivated you? Did the source call you or did you have sudden pangs of conscience? Why didn't this occur to you in 2003 or 2004?

5. On October 27, you were on Larry King saying you had no big scoop http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0510/27/lkl.01.html . Was that true or a lie?

6. Why did you criticize Fitzgerald and his investigation without revealing that you had something to hide from him http://mediamatters.org/items/200511160013 ?

7. You said you got permission in writing from all three of your sources to testify about your conversations with them http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501829_pf.html . Two of these sources, Andrew Card and Scooter Libby, have been identified. Can you release their letters? And did Libby write any poetry to you?

8. Why did you say categorically that there was no harm done by the outing of Valerie Plame http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0510/27/lkl.01.html ? How do you know this when the CIA has yet to issue an after-action report http://mediamatters.org/items/200511010002 ?

9. Can you at least tell us some of the atmospherics of your dealings with Fitzgerald?

10. Did the prosecutor indicate that you might be called back?

11. Are you now writing about the Plame affair, and if you are is it for one of your books or for the Post?

12. You've praised Judith Miller's decision to go to jail and offered to do time for her. Still feel that way http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001522373 ?

13. Did you remind your source of the June 2003 conversation and did that prompt him or her to go to Fitzgerald?

14. Had your source testified previously to Fitzgerald or before the grand jury?

15. Is there any chance your source was Bill Casey being channeled from the dead?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/15-questions-for-bob-wood_b_10821.html

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