Me: Frank Lynch

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How could this be true? The Washington Post reports that Scooter Libby will defend himself by suggesting that it was someone in the State Department, not him, who leaked Valerie Plame's role as a covert CIA agent to the press.

I suppose it's conceivable that Libby might do that — although it would be odd if it were someone like Colin Powell or Richard Armitage, given how they weren't so aligned with Rummy and Bush on the slippery slouch towards the President's excellent adventure in Baghdad. Bolton perhaps more conceivable. But be that as it may, let's be clear: Libby isn't accused of leaking Plame's name. He's not been charged with that. What he has been charged with is obstructing justice and making it more difficult to determine who did leak Plame's name to the press. And to that charge there is testimony from Tim Russert and Ari Fleischer which suggests Libby's culpability.

Another element which doesn't pass the smell test is this: Bob Novak said he'd heard about Valerie Plame's role in suggesting her husband should be sent to investigate Iraqi yellow-cake purchases from two Administration officials. Granted, he didn't say that was where he first heard that Valerie Plame was CIA: he suggested that info came from "no partisan gun-slinger" — perhaps that could phrase could be ascribed to a company man like Powell or Armitage, who, though they had their policy differences with the White House, didn't parade them when on the talk shows.

Whether or not it was somebody in State, it's meaningless: Libby isn't charged with leaking. He's charged with obstructing justice, and that's different.
Link | | | 10:08 PM | Home

Three years on. Today, you probably know, is the third anniversary of the Bush Administration's initiation of war against Iraq, a war of choice, conducted under — perhaps not completely callous lies, but if not that, willfully, shamefully, arrogantly adopted blinders. The net effect, whether it was from failure to pay attention to internal conclusions that the aluminum tubes were unsuitable for uranium enrichment, or the refusal to listen to highly placed defectors that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear program, or a stonewall against allowing the U.N. inspectors even two months more to more thoroughly inspect for the presence of weapons, is that there are 2,318 U.S. troops dead, and another couple hundred from other countries. Plus at least 30,000 innocent Iraqi casualties by Bush's account.

Sure, democracy is inherently a good thing, I'm all for it. And I'm for it sooner rather than later. If you want to argue for slow progress, put yourself back about 150 years in U.S. history, and argue for transitional freedom for the slaves. Go ahead, try. But if you want fast progress in democracy, you can't just have boots on the ground (and hell, there weren't enough of them as it were), you practically need a cultural infrastructure to promote the concept of loving your neighbor, getting along, and working together. Pollyannaish? Perhaps so. But if cultural change is impossible, that should factor into your plans for the after-war. (And it's certainly not as Pollyannaish as Bush feeling encouraged.) Ooops, I forgot, there were no after-plans beyond eating the sweets and smelling the flowers with which this liberating force was surely going to be greeted.

Lest we forget, today's anniversary is a fairly artificial demarcation of the dates, given how long the Project For A New American Century — chock-full of Bush advisors — had been trying to persuade Clinton to war; and given the efforts of the U.S. and the U.K. to draw Hussein into war with provocative bombing runs in 2002.

Believe it or not, I'm not all that excited about today's significance. It's just another day in a long stream of horrendous actions.
Link | | | 9:02 PM | Home
 

It's all in the URL. If you want a successful Web site, your URL ("universal resource locator," the Web address) does better if it connects to your content. Examples: americanexpress.com, you kinda know where you're going to go. www.whitehouse.gov takes you to — guess...

Okay.

Ready?

gollymisterdouglas.com. You have know what it's about. You have to. It's ALL EB! ALL THE TIME!
Link | | | 10:39 PM | Home
 

OH how I beg to have my suspicions allayed. I am not from Missouri (the "Show Me" state). And while I remember a business trip to Topeka, KS some 15-20 years ago (to visit clients at Hill's Pet Foods, if you really must know), I can't remember the airport I landed in, maybe it was Kansas City, MO, how should I know?

All this is to say I don't have any kind of geographical predisposition to skepticism. No, mine is hard earned from the jolly talk years of "Whip Inflation Now" and "Just Say No." And the positive bias of "Change is Good." So when I read a headline that a supposedly bipartisan examination of our policies in Iraq will be headed by James A. Baker III, and I shiver, I think I owe myself an honest examination of the source of my shivers. As noted in the BBC link, Baker was instrumental in securing Florida's electoral votes for W in 2000. Was that out of loyalty to Bush "Sr" (who supposedly didn't think well of Jr's excursion to Baghdad) or partisanship to a Republican cause?

For better or worse, there's a lot of context to consider here:

• As the 2006 "mid-term" elections loom for all the members of the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, the accepted wisdom that mid-term elections are a referendum on the President looms large. (Kinda weird, if you think about it: wouldn't that also be true when the President is being elected, too? Is the opportunity to scold an actual Presidential incumbent/veep/what-have-you so strongly felt that it spares members of the same party who are running that year? I don't buy the idea that the "referendum on the President" is greater in midterms. How about you? Discuss...)
   
• I don't need to spend a lot of time on how poor Bush's approval ratings have been, dipping down into the mid-30's. And much of that is associated with Iraq.
   
• There still hasn't been an honest examination of how the White House used intelligence on Iraq. A Senate committee promised it would get around to it one of these days after the 2004 Presidential election — even explicitly splitting it off the scope of an examination while making that promise — but it ain't happened yet. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid even took the Senate into closed session in order to ask "where's the beef?" But Majority Leader Bill Frist recently opted to threaten for even further committee partisanship, essentially to guarantee that the "independent" legislative branch could better fall in line with the White House.

So pardon me if my nose sniffs to better understand what smells here: but this activity with Baker at its head starts to smell like more window dressing, a fallacious claim to really care about what's going on in Iraq.

Look, step one is to protect our troops and give them the body armor they need. Step Two is to look seriously about the idea of no timetable on this report? C'mon, that was why the examination of the White House's use of the intelligence was considered "off scope:" don't threaten the Presidential election. Three? Take a hard look at how the WH ignored calls for more boots on the ground.

Don't make Jim Baker the Grand Marshal of some stupid parade, I'm not buyin' it.
Link | | | 11:59 PM | Home
 

Moussaoui Madness. With the sentencing portion of his trial put on held due to witness coaching by the prosecution, it's difficult to believe the Justice Department could screw up anything so badly. But then you remember the fanfare with which Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla; and you remember the misguided effort to court martial the Guantanamo chaplain who, ultimately, couldn't be accused of anything more severe than an extramarital affair or porn on his laptop — in spite of the loud noise the government made about him abetting messages between detainees at Gitmo. And then you remember the innocent man who the FBI swept up in its effort to investigate the Madrid bombings. And then you say, you know, I thought Moussaoui was guilty, and maybe he is still, but there's something going wrong about the procedures.

So we have these really wide nets being cast far and wide, and Bush still wants us to trust him that the White House knows what it's doing by spying on people without warrants, or getting the Republicans to extend the current deadline for retroactive warrants from 72 hours to 45 days.

Why am I not comforted?
Link | | | 10:45 PM | Home
 

Slouching towards tyranny. You may have heard about former SCOTUS Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's speech wherein she warned about the tendencies of demagogues to limit the independent judiciary? There's another write-up at The Guardian, and the Raw Story has a transcript of NPR's coverage. Basically, when you have clownage going on over cases like Terri Schiavo and on top of that Senators like Cornyn trying to say that violence against judges is understandable, you're on a slippery slope. The funny thing is that each branch should be working to protect the independence (and checks and balances) of all three branches: the tripartite structure of our government is laudable, special, and an important underpinning of what makes America a great nation. Anyone who fails to do that is arguing against the Constitution, and arguing against America.
Link | | | 10:51 PM | Home
 

Why you should be charged for online content. Not just at Consumer Reports or the Wall Street Journal, but even your newspaper should charge you. Why? Citing declining circulation, the Washington Post is letting 80 people in the newsroom go. You don't support your own circulation — or circulation in other towns where you don't have a presence — by giving it away for free. It's that simple: it's a circular firing squad.

And naturally, with decreased staffs, the quality is bound to suffer, too. Further eroding reasons to pay for it.

Doesn't anybody understand? It doesn't make sense to put up a web site that's going to hurt you: the eyeballs will not compensate. It's the ridiculousness of the Milo Minderbender proposition (Milo Minderbender can sell his eggs for less than he pays for them because he deals in volume).
Link | | | 8:48 AM | Home
 

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