Mar 22 2007
Liberals Cave And Lie To Base
Maxine Waters claimed at an anti-war rally at the end of January she would not vote one more dime for the Iraq war. Apparently she lied. Apparently Princess Pelosi’s threats to pull her coveted committee seats and chairwomen slot were enough to make her and three other avout anti-war activists vote to fund the war for one more year.
A little lesson on government is in order. Any law passed this right now will only effect funding for this fiscal year (which ends in September). The budgets for the government’s fiscal year for 2008 (which runs from Oct 2007 through September 2008) will not be voted upon until later this summer. So while the money is through August, nothing is really binding until Congress passes the 2008 budget – and that will not be done for months.
So all that BS about pulling troops in August 2008 and stopping funding then? Meaningless. Absolutely, legally, meaningless. So did the Dems dump their liberal base? Damn straight. All that language about a pullout is media PR pretending. And if the House Bill does by some quirk of two-faced-lying-to-the-base pass it will not see the light of day of the Senate or the veto pen.
So it was better, and much more honest, to have the Dems just vote their convictions than vote another vacuous, meaningless deception. Both would end up not passing, but one would have been a message of conviction instead of one of cowardness. The only losers in this was not Bush – who is standing strong – or the Reps. The losers were all those naive anti-war activists who honestly thought their time had come. PT Barnum was right.
Speaking of lies – a final word on the Valerie Plame outing:
CIA Director Michael Hayden authorized a statement read by Henry Waxman at a congressional hearing on Friday, March 16, 2007 which states in pertinent part:
Soothie/Ken/Whoever You Are! –
Don’t expect the knucleheads among the posters here (a remarkably robust subset) to knuckle under to reality. For the most part, this here is a reality-free zone. Silly, silly Sooth . . .
sooth:
Hayden never said that the law was broken. I think that people think covert is a title or something, it is a legal status and under the law she was not covert. And Hayden never said Plame was covert in that sense.
And if she was then they should have gone after Armitage and not Libby anyway. But then again she does not know her own status and apparently does not care because she and her blowhard of a husband created this situation.
Tom Maguire who knows more about this than you do makes this distinction quite well.
But the important thing for Plame is not her status, which she herself does not know, it is her book deal and movie deal etc. She is making millions of this scam.
Now back on the subject at hand, after lying to the base, lying about earmarks, ranting and raving and acting really stupid the Democrats think they have bribed and threatened enough members to pass their newest version of the Iraq surrender plan.
What a crock. No wonder their approval rating is lower than Bush’s.
This is just a little bit from Tom’s site and it makes it plain that things are not as simple as Soothie thinks. Which is obvious since no one was tried for the crime he/she insists happens:
Here is the lead from Bob Novak’s new piece, with emphasis added:
Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra could hardly believe what he heard last Friday on television as he watched a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. Rep. Henry Waxman, the Democratic committee chairman, said his statement had been approved by the CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden. That included the assertion that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative when her identity was revealed.
As House Intelligence Committee chairman when Republicans still controlled Congress, Hoekstra had tried repeatedly to learn Plame’s status from the CIA but got only double talk from Langley. Waxman may be a bully and a partisan. But he is no fool who would misrepresent the director of Central Intelligence. Waxman was correctly quoting Hayden. But Hayden, in a conference with Hoekstra Wednesday, still did not answer whether Plame was covert under the terms of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
No, we are not surprised since we pointed out the obvious weakness in Waxman’s statement last Friday, but here is a quick recap. From Waxman:
But General Hayden and the CIA have cleared these following comments for today’s hearing.
During her employment at the CIA, Ms. Wilson was under cover.
Her employment status with the CIA was classified information prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958.
At the time of the publication of Robert Novak’s column on July 14, 2003, Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment status was covert.
This was classified information.
Fine, the CIA considered her to be “covert” as per their own internal classification scheme – who doubts it, and, from a legal perspective, who cares?
Sorry, that was a rhetorical question – every lefty blogger covering the hearing whooped and declared victory with Hayden’s statement as read by Waxman; I’ll toss in Christy Hardin Smith of firedoglake as an example. Read her carefully and try to identify any hint at all that Hayden’s statement was not definitive as to Ms. Plame’s legal status.
On the legal question what Waxman conspicuously did not say was anything like “The CIA Counsel has reviewed Ms. Plame’s confidential file as well as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and concluded that she qualifies as “covert” under that statute.”
The WaPo covered the fact that “covert” is used in the non-legal sense:
Some news stories created initial confusion over Plame’s status by suggesting that disclosure of her name and employment may have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. That law, passed in response to disclosure of the names of CIA officers serving overseas by former CIA employee Philip Agee, made it a crime to disclose the names of “covert agents,” which the act narrowly defined as those serving overseas or who had served as such in the previous five years.
“Covert agent” is not a label actually used within the agency for its employees, according to former senior CIA officials. Plame, who joined the agency right out of Pennsylvania State University, underwent rigorous spycraft training to become an officer in the Directorate of Operations. (The term “agent” in the CIA is only applied to foreign nationals recruited to spy in support of U.S. interests.)
Besides all than when she showed up at Democratic fundraisers with her loud mouth husband and let him yammer all over the pages of the NYT she compromised her own status far more than anyone else did. But then again, I think that is what she wanted.
Geeze – yeah, Terry – what was I thinking – I should have known YOU know more about Valerie Plame’s status than the head of the CIA does.
The guy sp[ecifically said:
Case closed.
What’s the matter, Sooth? Don’t want to talk about the actual TOPIC OF THIS THREAD? I guess the idea that Democrats have discarded the hardcore drop-Iraq-like-a-hot-potato crowd like a used Kleenex is too unpleasant for you to discuss, so the rest of us need to stick to a topic you’re more comfortable with, like how the other party is all liars and crooks and criminals. Because Valerie Plame just hasn’t been discussed enough at this point, so Sooth has to seize every chance he can get to bring her up. (Scooter Libby? Who’s he? And why haven’t we heard about him before? Oh, and here’s something I bet almost no one in America has ever heard before — he was indicted on perjury charges. Betcha didn’t know that, see, because nobody ever talks about this, it’s Washington’s most closely-guarded secret, which is why we need to hijack threads on OTHER topics to talk about it.)
Aitch748 —
yada. yada. yada. oi, but you can yada!