I completely

understand Dimdahl’s concerns about being hauled off to court “solely for partisan effectiveness”. If that were all it takes, he’d be

serving a life-sentence. Instead, we are sentenced to his continued braying. That he admires DeLay says volumes about them both.

In this excerpt, I’ve left out most of the anti-liberal hawing after the opening ad hominem attack — talk about hewing to a script,

John! Yeah, yeah, ‘Republicans are the party of ideas’ — like teaching only creationism in the Christian Republic of America; like

letting corporations do anything they want and pay nothing for what they do (through taxes or the courts); like making the Executive a

dictator and the courts a rubberstamp. Big Ideas from the self-designated Deep Thinkers. Ego-serving bullshit.

I am intrigued by

Dimdahl noting “a wily prosecutor could indict a stone.” Wow. Sounds like the “justice” system tilts towards the prosecution. Next thing

you know, Republicans will be lauding Trial Attorneys (instead of just hiring them in droves).

Press on through Dimdahl’s dreck

to read an excerpt from Buckley. The two are master bloviators and both favor legalization of marijuana (finally, we find common ground

between the Left and the Wrong). But Buckley takes the White House smear campaign more seriously (and confesses to being a CIA alumnus).

mjh

ABQjournal: Since When Is Party Loyalty a Crime? By John Dendahl, For the Journal

Bereft of anything resembling an

idea, and spectacularly unsuccessful at demonizing their opposition with nasty rhetoric, the left has now turned to criminalizing

conservatives. …

The Libby indictment may be the most bizarre of all. …

Many lawyers have noted that a wily

prosecutor could indict a stone. … [T]his is no mission to excuse ideological allies if they have broken laws while

serving as public officials.

Conversely, if the threat of being hauled into criminal court now hangs over an officeholder

pretty much solely for partisan effectiveness, we are all in a world of hurt.

William F. Buckley on Patrick Fitzgerald’s Investigation on National Review

Online
Who Did What?
Covert questions.

The hot-blooded search for criminality in the matter of Cheney/Libby/Rove has not

truly satisfied those in search of first degree venality. …

The importance of the law against revealing the true professional

identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby

affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got

themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted. …

The great question here is Robert Novak. It was he who published, in his column, that Mrs. Joseph Wilson was a secret

agent of the CIA. I am too close a friend to pursue the matter with Novak, and his loyalty is a postulate. What was going on? If there

are mysteries in town, that surely is one of them, the role of Novak.

It is here that Buckley amazes me

the most. He’s too close to Novak, the one who knows the most, the most obvious tool of the Radical Right, too close a friend to ask

him: who told you? mjh

—–

By the way, the title given to

Dimdahl’s piece (“Since When Is Party Loyalty a Crime?”) is further evidence the Journal should fire the headline editor. When you hear

left and right gripe about Journal bias, it often starts with a headline. Maybe an article does manage some balance, but headlines

establish the tone. This one is more dismissive of matters than even Dimdahl himself. mjh

I can’t add anything to this indictment of a shallow, image-conscious man in over his head. And I

don’t just mean Brownie. mjh

Winners of Katrina contracts defend deals By HOPE YEN,

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

[E]-mails show that Brown, who had been planning to step down from his post when the storm hit,

was preoccupied with his image on television even as one of the first FEMA officials to arrive in New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde, was

reporting a crisis situation of increasing chaos to FEMA officials.

“My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look

fabulous – and I’m not talking the makeup,” writes Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of public affairs to Brown on 7:10

a.m. local time on Aug. 29.

“I got it at Nordstroms,” Brown writes back. “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go

home?” An hour later, Brown adds: “If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god.”

A

week later, Brown’s aide, Sharon Worthy, reminds him to pay heed to his image on TV. “In this crises and on TV you just need to

elbow.”

Small wonder Bush and Cheney want the CIA exempt from rules limiting torture. Aren’t you the least

surprised the CIA runs a prison system?

Will we recognize when we cross the line from “a strong executive” to a

dictatorship? mjh

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing

Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11
By Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writer

The

CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according

to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up

by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan

and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and

former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in

the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even

basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with

overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

NOW. Transcript. October 28, 2005 | PBS

BRANCACCIO: Former

House Majority Leader Tom Delay wrote a letter yesterday to supporters. And he said it’s all linked, the allegations of financial

impropriety involving Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Fitzgerald investigation. His quote to his constituents, “We are

witnessing the criminalization of conservative politics.” What do you make of that?

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: I would

respectfully disagree. I think we’re looking at when you do something illegal you get caught. And this is what’s

happened with Scooter Libby, at least, the allegation.

There’s enough there that the prosecutor feels that he can make a case and

from all that we’ve seen in the notes that– that Scooter Libby took that tell one thing whereas his– testimony at the grand jury was

something different which is kind of mind-boggling in the first place. That tells you that there’s something real here. And that’s

about illegal activity. …

I can’t imagine a thought process that said to Scooter Libby, “Go ahead and say to the grand jury

that you heard about Valerie Plame first from the press when you have your own notes that you know are being turned over under discovery

that show that you heard it from the Vice-President.” I don’t understand the thinking the went into that. It’s going to be very

interesting to see how they handle this and what the Vice-President does. Because this is his right hand person. And clearly he didn’t

act without– the Vice-President being very involved in whatever he did.

What the ‘Shield’ Covered Up By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Has anyone

noticed that the coverup worked?

In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby last week,

Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and “we would have been

here in October 2004 instead of October 2005.”

Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush was

reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors,

in the special counsel’s apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.

As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White

House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak

campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant

strategy to slow the inquiry down. …

Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some kind of lone

operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual caution. …

What exactly transpired in the meetings between

Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set

these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter.

Democrats

in the Senate did what they had to do to get their Republican colleagues to act responsibly. Boo-hoo for poor Dr Frist and his hurt

feelings. He lashes out like a dittohead.

GOP Angered by Closed Senate Session
Meeting Reopened After

Two Hours By Charles Babington and Dafna Linzer, Washington Post Staff Writers

Democrats forced the Senate into a rare closed-door

session yesterday, infuriating Republicans but extracting from them a promise to speed up an inquiry into the Bush

administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons in the run-up to the war.

With no warning in the mid-

afternoon, the Senate’s top Democrat invoked the little-used Rule 21, which forced aides to turn off the chamber’s cameras and close

its massive doors after evicting all visitors, reporters and most staffers. …

Republicans condemned the Democrats’ maneuver,

which marked the first time in more than 25 years that one party had insisted on a closed session without consulting the other party.

But within two hours, Republicans appointed a bipartisan panel to report on the progress of a Senate intelligence committee

report on prewar intelligence, which Democrats say has been delayed for nearly a year. …

The usually unflappable

majority leader, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), was searching for words to express his outrage to reporters a few minutes later. The Senate “has

been hijacked by the Democratic leadership,” he said. “They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no

ideas.” Never before had he been “slapped in the face with such an affront,” he said, adding: “For the next year and a half, I

can’t trust Senator Reid.”

“They have no ideas”? How about the idea of pursuing the Bush administration

with one tenth the zeal they showed in attacking Clinton? How about some spine and ethics instead of party-only loyalty. mjh

Reid said he was forced to seek the closed session to spur action on the investigation. “The

only way we’ve been able to get their attention is to spend 3 1/2 hours in a closed session,” he said. “It’s a slap in the face

to the American people that this investigation has been stymied.”

Rockefeller said Democratic requests for information

related to the investigation are routinely denied or ignored, and he suggested that the Senate Republican leadership was under orders

from the Bush administration not to cooperate.

“Any time the intelligence committee pursued a line of inquiry that brought us

close to the role of the White House in all of this in the use of intelligence prior to the war, our efforts have been thwarted

time and time again,” Rockefeller said. “The very independence of the United States Congress as a separate and coequal

branch of the government has been called into question.”