brainrow

Why so many outrageous lies from the right in Rovegate? Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant knows the answer, and explained it on the Al Franken Show:

Modern right wing propaganda, and here I’m using my words carefully, is based on the headline value of assertion as opposed to the lasting value of evidence. And they have learned that they can say anything, and unfortunately, given today’s journalism, it’ll get reported.

From a recent email message:

The root crime here is not the Karl Rove leak story.

The root crime is that a President of the United States lied in an official address to the nation about the necessity of going to war.

I can’t currently imagine a higher crime. Oh,…………. except for lying about being unfaithful to your wife.

Josh Marshall on the real cover-up:

The entire Wilson/Plame story and the Rove/White House criminal probe sub-story are just so many threads thrown off a much larger and more consquential ball of yarn: the administration’s use of fraudulent evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program to seal the deal for war on Iraq with the American people.

That’s where the real cover up is. These are just side stories. So why not cut to the chase and have a real investigation to get to the bottom of that?

Tom Tomorrow on attack dog Sean Hannity:

As I sit here on a sweltering July day, listening to Sean Hannity run through all the Republican talking points over and over again–no crime was committed, she wasn’t even a covert op, Joe Wilson is the real villain here, blah blah blah–I am transported back in time a few years…

[T]his is when I first become aware of Hannity as a radio personality, listening to him on WABC that summer in my sweltering loft space. The big story of the summer concerns several New York City police officers, including Justin Volpe, who are accused of sodomizing a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima with a broom handle, and day after day, Hannity defends Volpe and attacks Louima–regularly referring to the latter as “Lyin’ Louima.”

Except as it turns out, Lyin’ Louima is telling the truth and Justin Volpe and the others go to jail.

And Sean Hannity drops the topic like a burning hot potato.

So whenever I hear him ranting on like this, trying to restructure his audience’s perception of reality so that the obviously guilty party is pure as the driven snow, and the obvious victim actually dirty as sin, I think back to the days of Lyin’ Louima, and wonder–why does anyone listen to this moron? Is there anything any of these guys can get so wrong that their audience will even notice?

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow presents The Republican Guide to Successful Supreme Court Nominations. (Rated ‘R’ for strong language.)

Josh Marshall on the Rove methodology:

Now we can see in full view what we’ve seen again and again in recent years, the favored tactic: terror by grand moral inversion, the lie so total and audacious that it almost knocks opponents off their feet.

John Kerry decorated war hero? No, coward and showboat.

We noted yesterday the great article by Josh Green in the Atlantic last year in which Josh chronicled the tactic as Rove practiced it in races he ran down in Alabama in the 1990s. In one state supreme court race his candidate went up against an opponent who’d developed an impeccable reputation on child welfare issues (he was a former family court judge). Once you understand the pattern, the strategy suggests itself. Rove orchestrated a whispering campaign to spread the word that the man was a pedophile. Like I said, audacious.

And so here now. Wilson, a whistleblower administration officials were trying to punish? A whistleblower calling out White House manipulated intelligence during the lead-up to war?

Not at all. Rove was the whistleblower trying to knock down a campaign of disinformation from Joe Wilson. The audacity of it is enough to knock some people off their feet. Like I said, terror by grand moral inversion.

That is precisely the Rove technique.

It’s time for a thorough airing out of Rove’s career — the Swift Boat attacks, the whispering campaigns, including the lies about John McCain in South Carolina, even the “bug” planted in Rove’s office during one early campaign.

Usually, when one of these stories is discussed, people shrug it off. Politics is a nasty business, and sometimes the practitioners get into the gutter. No big surprise.

It is only when you see the entirety of Rove’s career that you really understand just what Rove is. Understanding that, you start to understand something about the people who hire him. That’s not good for Rove, it’s not good for Bush, and it’s not good for the Republicans now promoting the Rove line.

Time for the whole story.

While we await the launch of the Return to Flight mission of space shuttle Discovery, here is a moving essay on the people who fly these ships. On the final flight of the shuttle Columbia:

Perhaps ten minutes before eight am on Saturday morning, Rick Husband and Willie McCool started to pay attention to the data coming from the left wing sensors. It was 30 degrees warmer than normal in the left wheel well. Not much, considering the 2-3000 degrees on the leading edge of their wings and nose, but something to pay attention to. Anomalies are never good. There are no pleasant surprises in the flying business.

By 7:55 things were looking worse — a lot worse. Unbenownst to the crew, telemetry beamed to the ground showed that readings from the heat sensors in the left wing started to rise, and then dropped to zero. They were failing, in a pattern expanding away from the left wheel well. Tire pressures were way high on the left side, and then those sensors failed too.

Sensors fail all the time. But this was different. This was a pattern, and it was spreading. And something was starting to pull the ship to the left.

I don’t know the words he used, but I can hear the tone perfectly in my head, because it’s exactly the same tone I’ve heard dozens of times on cockpit voice recorders. It’s concern. Alarm, even. But it’s cool. Disciplined.

All right, we’ve got a problem here…

It’s a long piece, well worth reading.

At TPMCafe, a retired CIA officer talks about the damage done in exposing Valerie Plame:

Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover — in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport — i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.

A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O’Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.

The Republicans now want to hide behind the legalism that “no laws were broken”. I don’t know if a man made law was broken but an ethical and moral code was breached. For the first time a group of partisan political operatives publically identified a CIA NOC. They have set a precendent that the next group of political hacks may feel free to violate.

The Bush Administration knows all about the Higher Law. That’s the law they make up as they go along, to suit their convenience.

Yesterday, Al Franken quoted The Note from ABC News:

Whatever else one thinks, these facts are not in dispute:

1. Rove’s attorney has acknowledged that Rove talked about Valerie Plame with Matt Cooper, without mentioning her name, days before the Novak column appeared.
2. Rove (and Rove via McClellan) has repeatedly suggested that he had nothing to do with this story at all.
3. The White House has suggested that any person found to have anything to do with the improper leaking of Wilson’s name to the press would be fired.

From this, Franken arrived at the following conclusion:

So we now know that, according to their own rules, they gotta fire him. They gotta fire him. They got to fire him.

Franken is a very smart guy. I’m surprised that he has somehow missed the fact that these Republicans change the rules at will.

Marshall Wittman says Rove isn’t going anywhere:

Democrats should not get too excited about the presumed crisis confronting Rove. Short of a criminal indictment, Rove is not going anywhere. As I wrote in my blog this morning, for Bush to get rid of Rove, would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.

…

Rove is the nerve center of today’s Republican Party. The White House is already lowering the bar for punishment in the Plame case. Unless, the prosecutor has the goods on Karl, he stays. The President and the GOP has no choice. Rove is the closest in Washington to the indispensable man.

Many critics of the Bush Administration speculate that Bush is little more than a figurehead, and that Vice President Dick Cheney is really in charge. But it may be Rove who really pulls the strings. Former Bush Administration official John DiIulio has said this administration is all politics, all the time:

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” says DiIulio. “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

…

“I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” he writes. “There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff.”

Rove, Bush’s political mastermind, exposed a covert CIA operative specializing in WMDs, endangering the lives of the operative and her sources in other countries, and damaging the nation’s intelligence-gathering abilities on WMDs. Rove did this to undercut a critic of Bush war policies. Nevertheless, Rove will be keeping his high-level government job.

If Democratic leaders can’t get the electorate riled about this, they ought to find another line of work.

Bill Moyers is back on PBS!

I hope there will be repeat showings, because I missed it tonight. I don’t intend to miss it again.

Via Backup Brain: While My Ukulele Gently Weeps. The hosting site is called College Humor, but this is no joke.

Are they letting Jeff Gannon back into the White House press briefings again?

QUESTION: Considering the widespread interest and the absolutely frantic Democrat reaction to Karl Rove’s excellent speech to conservatives last month, does the president hope that Karl will give a lot more speeches?

Josh Marshall raises an interesting question:

I’m curious whether today’s fireworks on the Rove/Plame matter will resurrect any more serious interest in the whole underlying issue of who forged those phoney Niger uranium documents or whether there will be more searching scrutiny into that paste-up job that was last year’s Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on Iraq intel.

As I’ve discussed at various points at TPM, the FBI has gone out of its way not to do any serious investigation into where these documents came from. The interviews they conducted in Italy were cursory. And when the man who actually peddled the documents to the Italian journalist was named publicly in several European papers, they still made no attempt to interview him — even when we brought him to the US under his own name, twice.

Dare we hope that we’ll soon see the unraveling of the whole web of Rove and Pals’ lies and dirty tricks?

Last Friday on the NewsHour on PBS, conservative columnist David Brooks tried to offer an innocent explanation for why a highly-placed White House source blew the cover of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame:

I’ve got an alternate story line, which was if somebody asked the people in the White House, why is this guy Wilson who writes for the Nation Magazine working for the Bush administration, and somebody says, oh, I hear his wife works at CIA; she led us to him. And that’s not a crime; that’s totally innocent. I think that’s an alternate explanation of why they mentioned this woman, Valerie Plame.

There’s a problem with this alternate story line. The exposure of Valerie Plame was not a careless offhand remark. White House officials had been “shopping the story” for a while, looking for a reporter to print it. It was no accident.

Today, according to Talking Points Memo, the White House wants to clam up on the case. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said:

This is an ongoing investigation at this point. The President directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, that means we’re not going to be commenting on it while it is ongoing.

But, apparently, someone managed to sneak a spine into the press room. One reporter reacting to a later McClellan evasion:

It’s not an answer. And you were perfectly willing to comment from that podium while the investigation was going on, and try to clear Karl Rove. Why the double standard? Why were you willing to say Karl Rove was not involved when — and talk at length about it, when the investigation was going on, and now that he’s been caught red-handed, all of a sudden you’ve got a new line?

I’m guessing we’ll soon see new security procedures for the White House press corps. Backbones and guts must be left at the door.

From Media Matters,
Rush Limbaugh answers Bush’s call to “tone down the rhetoric”:

I’m tired of these Democrats acting like they won the election. Somebody needs to stand up and say, “When you win the election, you pick the nominees. Until then, shut up! Just shut up! Just go away! Bury yourselves in your rat holes and don’t come out until you win an election. When you win an election, you can put all these socialist wackos, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, all over the court, but until then, SHUT UP! You are really irritating me.”

Gosh… sorry, Rush. We didn’t know.