I regularly post on a couple of Yahoo boards. It's a good way to see what the RW spin is for the day, because several of the RW posters repeat the daily talking points with a great deal of predictability. I can also keep tabs on what "the left" is saying in reply.
I'm here to tell you, folks, if what I saw tonight is any indication, we're pissing this Rove/Plame thing right down our collective legs.
We have the DSM. We have MUCH more.
And I'll tell you all about it, below the fold.
We have DOCUMENTED EVIDENCE that the President radically increased the bombing of Iraq and targetted radar installations to prepare for invasion, BEFORE JR114 was passed.
We have a President who misapproprated funds, MILLIONS of dollars budgetted by Congress to be used to fight the REAL war on Terror in Afghanistan, to prepare the ground for his invasion of Iraq. This was not ony before JR114, it was money that was EARMARKED for Afghanistan, and him using it for Iraq was ILLEGAL.
We have a GOP that pushed JR114 JUST BEFORE THE MID-TERM ELECTION, in order to force the Democrats to vote before all the facts were in, and either appear "weak on terror" or lose elections. (Along the same lines, we have a GOP congress that kept voting open until 4AM on a Sunday morning to strongarm the votes for a medicare bill under false pretenses, an INTENTIONAL and DOCUMENTED under-estimate of the true costs, just give the GOP another issue to run on at the mid-terms.)
We have a President who told us, in the constitutionally-mandated SOTU address, that "Saddam Hussein has sought significant quantities of uranium...from Africa" EVEN THOUGH HE KNEW IT WASN'T TRUE and within days/weeks of Wilson's column stating that the WH KNEW it wasn't true, the headlines were that the "WH BACKS OFF ON THE 16-WORDS!"
We have a WH that launched a push-poll smear campaign against Spineless John McCain in 2000, against Max Cleland in 2002, and against Kerry in 2004. Does it honestly stretch ANYONE'S imagination that they might have been trying to smear Wilson for exposing the truth about them?
We have a crotchety old columnist who said, IN WRITING, "TWO senior administration officials" told him about Mrs. Plame. Not "ROve." "TWO senior administration officials."
We have a President (who's FATHER proclaimed disclosing the identity of a CIA operative as "the highest form of treason": "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors." - George H.W. Bush - April 1999) who told us that he would fire anyone involved in the leak of Valerie Plame's name. We also have NO ONE fired!
We have a LAW that requires the President to know who the NOCs are. (SEC. 603. [50 U.S.C. 423] (a) The President, after receiving information from the Director of Central Intelligence, shall submit to the congressional intelligence committees an annual report on measures to protect the identities of covert agents, and on any other matter relevant to the protection of the identities of covert agents. The date for the submittal of the report shall be the date provided in section 507. http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/laws/iipa.html )
This is NOT rocket science, folks. The questions are not, "was Plame a NOC for 5 years before she was outed?", or "Did Wilson lie about who sent him?" or "Was Rove involved?" ROVE WAS CLEARLY INVOLVED. HE PUT IT IN WRITING!!! And he's running around Bush's WH, the same WH that is LEGALLY MANDATED to know who our NOCs are, with enough security clearance to do it again. Because Bush won't turn on his friend WHO MIGHT BE A TRAITOR!
The GOP didn't go after Monica for adultery. We shouldn't hang every bit of our credibility on whether or not Rove is techically guilty. It's not about "the best charge we can get Rove on is perjury." I don't need "double super secret background" connections to know he confirmed, at the very least, the outing of an agent involved in finding the very same things that Bush couldn't find (but later joked to his "base" about not finding) in Iraq.
This is "the blue dress." This is the last straw in breaking the credibility-camel's back. We're finally seeing some cracks in the wall of plausible deniability that the WH has so successfully built. Let's not focus on who made those cracks. Let's split them wide open.
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This is (almost) all from memory. I may have left a few things out. I can supply links to ANY of these "documented facts" later, if necessary. If something like this has been diaried before, I apologize for the duplicate. But I don't apologize for driving the point home. "We shouldn't piss this down our legs. Not again."