Paladin
03-20-2007, 10:10 PM
if you want to see what some common sense can do for you. This guy is an opponent of the Iraq war and still sees things for what they are. I have never heard of him and I don't know mcuh about him, but he sure makes alot of sense.
I wonder how mustangman and black01gt will respond? :rolleyes:
Scandal under every rock?
By Don Erler
Special to the Star-Telegram
An otherwise intelligent woman recently told a coffee group that the Bush administration was "Stalinist." She exhibited no fear of imminent incarceration or execution.
Her perspective is no longer unusual. This president was selected, not elected, in 2000, no matter what the vote recounts and legal verdicts declared. George W. Bush "lied" to get us into war, using intelligence that caused President Clinton to threaten the same and congressional Democrats to authorize Bush's military actions.
Finally, as the current dust-up over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys (who serve "at the pleasure" of the president) demonstrates, left-leaning citizens find "scandal" in nearly everything that emanates from this White House. It's irrelevant to such folks that Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys shortly after taking office, along with 30 more during his two terms. Democrats good, Republicans bad.
And if voters are too stupid to fire them, Republican officials should be incarcerated or politically executed. After all, that was the hope when Lewis Libby was forced through the legal meat grinder. Virtuous Democrats -- surely including the former Clinton official with stolen classified documents in his trousers and the congressman with money in his freezer -- expected to see either Karl Rove or Dick Cheney "frog-marched" into prison when their conspiracy to destroy a foe of this administration was exposed in the Libby trial.
But the Scooter (Libby's nickname) had no motor. There was no scandal, no mystery to solve, no administration conspiracy -- merely a broken man who might have lied about or merely misremembered something of trivial importance.
For readers whose eyes glaze over when confronted with stories of apparently Byzantine complexity, these are the essential facts.
In his 2003 State of the Union address, the president reported that British intelligence "learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." As of today, British (and several other countries') intelligence stands by that report.
But in 2002, U.S. intelligence sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate this British claim. His wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. Some say she had recommended that her husband be sent on the mission, but she denied that in sworn testimony before Congress last week.
According to both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the British Butler report, Wilson's initial report tended to substantiate the Saddam-Niger connection. (Left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens reported that Wissam al-Zahawie, one of Saddam's top nuclear experts, led a 1999 Iraqi trade mission to Africa.)
But Wilson wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times in which he denied that his findings supported the uranium claim; he falsely asserted that the vice president had recommended him for the trip; and he boasted that he discredited certain "forged" documents supporting the British claim. (The documents did not even surface until eight months after his trip.)
Finally, columnist Robert Novak (like me, an opponent of the Iraq war) learned from State Department official Richard Armitage -- a political foe of Cheney -- that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Novak learned her name from Wilson's entry in Who's Who in America.
Because Plame worked for the CIA, and because it violates the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to reveal identities of covert agents, the Justice Department had special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald look into the matter. He learned early on that Armitage had divulged Plame's affiliation, just as he quickly concluded that no law had been broken.
But in our era of criminalizing politics, Fitzgerald managed to convict Libby of lying, largely on the testimony of some journalists whose recollections differed from Libby's. Yet those journalists differed among themselves and, at least in the case of NBC's Tim Russert, have been shown to have faulty memories as well.
No crime, no mystery, no administration conspiracy. True, something similar happened to Clinton. Yet there is a huge difference: Clinton kept his job and his freedom; Libby lost his post and faces mammoth legal bills and up to 25 years in prison.
The criminalization of politics needs to end.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don Erler is president of General Building Maintenance. donerler@sbcglobal.net
I wonder how mustangman and black01gt will respond? :rolleyes:
Scandal under every rock?
By Don Erler
Special to the Star-Telegram
An otherwise intelligent woman recently told a coffee group that the Bush administration was "Stalinist." She exhibited no fear of imminent incarceration or execution.
Her perspective is no longer unusual. This president was selected, not elected, in 2000, no matter what the vote recounts and legal verdicts declared. George W. Bush "lied" to get us into war, using intelligence that caused President Clinton to threaten the same and congressional Democrats to authorize Bush's military actions.
Finally, as the current dust-up over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys (who serve "at the pleasure" of the president) demonstrates, left-leaning citizens find "scandal" in nearly everything that emanates from this White House. It's irrelevant to such folks that Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys shortly after taking office, along with 30 more during his two terms. Democrats good, Republicans bad.
And if voters are too stupid to fire them, Republican officials should be incarcerated or politically executed. After all, that was the hope when Lewis Libby was forced through the legal meat grinder. Virtuous Democrats -- surely including the former Clinton official with stolen classified documents in his trousers and the congressman with money in his freezer -- expected to see either Karl Rove or Dick Cheney "frog-marched" into prison when their conspiracy to destroy a foe of this administration was exposed in the Libby trial.
But the Scooter (Libby's nickname) had no motor. There was no scandal, no mystery to solve, no administration conspiracy -- merely a broken man who might have lied about or merely misremembered something of trivial importance.
For readers whose eyes glaze over when confronted with stories of apparently Byzantine complexity, these are the essential facts.
In his 2003 State of the Union address, the president reported that British intelligence "learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." As of today, British (and several other countries') intelligence stands by that report.
But in 2002, U.S. intelligence sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate this British claim. His wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. Some say she had recommended that her husband be sent on the mission, but she denied that in sworn testimony before Congress last week.
According to both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the British Butler report, Wilson's initial report tended to substantiate the Saddam-Niger connection. (Left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens reported that Wissam al-Zahawie, one of Saddam's top nuclear experts, led a 1999 Iraqi trade mission to Africa.)
But Wilson wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times in which he denied that his findings supported the uranium claim; he falsely asserted that the vice president had recommended him for the trip; and he boasted that he discredited certain "forged" documents supporting the British claim. (The documents did not even surface until eight months after his trip.)
Finally, columnist Robert Novak (like me, an opponent of the Iraq war) learned from State Department official Richard Armitage -- a political foe of Cheney -- that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Novak learned her name from Wilson's entry in Who's Who in America.
Because Plame worked for the CIA, and because it violates the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to reveal identities of covert agents, the Justice Department had special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald look into the matter. He learned early on that Armitage had divulged Plame's affiliation, just as he quickly concluded that no law had been broken.
But in our era of criminalizing politics, Fitzgerald managed to convict Libby of lying, largely on the testimony of some journalists whose recollections differed from Libby's. Yet those journalists differed among themselves and, at least in the case of NBC's Tim Russert, have been shown to have faulty memories as well.
No crime, no mystery, no administration conspiracy. True, something similar happened to Clinton. Yet there is a huge difference: Clinton kept his job and his freedom; Libby lost his post and faces mammoth legal bills and up to 25 years in prison.
The criminalization of politics needs to end.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don Erler is president of General Building Maintenance. donerler@sbcglobal.net