March 2007: Ladies Against Women

E-mail from Jesus' Best Administrative to Cruella:

I have been invited to speak at a Women's Conference on April 20-21. I need to be sure it will be ok for me to take off 1/2 day on the 20th before I accept.

An event sponsored by these Ladies?

(Image here; backstory here.)

As it comes to an end: Libby Trial Exposes Neocon Shadow Government, reports Sidney Schanberg.

Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial of Dick Cheney’s man, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, is accomplishing what no one else in Washington has been able to: He has impeached the Presidency of George W. Bush. Of course, it’s an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable.

Interested persons can seek out documentation, the existence of which will be filtered from reaching the masses.

Greg Mitchell observes one classic example: Media Reviews Plame's Wardrobe -- But Not White House Coverup.

The verdict is on March 6, and the following day, "Inside the Jury Room...by Denis Collins, Juror #9" appears on Huffington Post (no longer online).

Juror #9 turns out to be a D.C. journo: a former employee of Washington Post—witness Bob Woodward was once his boss—and former neighbor of witness Tim Russert. Judging from the HuffPo piece, Collins' journalism contains a mix of the glib and the shallow that can only have helped his career.

Collins is full of gee-whiz admiration for the big players.
Of former boss, Bob Woodward, he gushes:

I immediately picture a party Woodward hosted at his Georgetown home for the Metro staff about 25 years ago. When I went looking for my girl friend, I found her with some copy aides and reporters in an attic piled high with boxes of files for one of his books.

"Unbelievable," said one of the reporters. "Look at the file labels. This entire box is backup for one interview."

Most players are introduced in a character sketch meant to sound tersely "hard-boiled." Robert Novak:

Robert Novak - Chicago Sun times. Television's "Capital Gang." After all the Ivy Leaguers, here comes a guy who looks like he was spawned in the era of sawdust and cigarette butts on newsroom floors. Might still write with a stubby pencil...

David Addington:

Today we started with David Addington. Attorney. Promoted to VP's Chief of Staff after Libby's resignation. We were impressed by his memory, gravitas, and deliberate way of speaking...

To be fair, Collins also gushes about his fellow jurors, whom he portrays as a fascinating cross-section of Washington middle-class professionals:

...our foreperson Susan, an accounting manager at one of DC's biggest law firms and, more impressive to us, a marathon runner, yoga diva and all around sweetheart...

Kate is 43, the mother aof a 14-month old daughter. She books conventions for hotels, knows a scary amount of pop culture and cracks me up at least three times a day...

The latter are the likely audience for a potboiler courtroom drama, full of lame attempts at hard-boiled prose. It's the normal stuff of magazines and best-sellers, but not so worthwhile as a supposedly authoritative view of this trial. And it's the normal stuff of how information is put through the trivialization filter, before feeding to the masses.

Despite how much the jurors liked that nice regular guy, Scooter, and—if Collins is any indication—how much they were bedazzled by the important people on display, the jury ultimately found Libby guilty on 4 of 5 counts.

Official and media reaction don't differ much from parody: "President's Statement on the Sad, Yet Insignificant Felony Conviction of Low-Level Functionary Scooter Libby."

Sentencing will be in June. In July, Bush will commute the sentence. As a pardon would have removed Libby's Fifth Amendment right to remain silent,
commutation will be the more effective way to make sure Libby stays quiet.

Regarding other regime assaults against justice—and media complicity in explaining them away—Glenn Greenwald posts "The most revealing three-minute YouTube clip ever."

...the video clip of the jovial and dismissive discussion of the U.S. attorneys scandal on yesterday's Chris Matthews Show...is completely typical of how our national media thinks and talks about political matters. But there just is something about this particular discussion and the giggling, vapid participants that is extra vivid and instructive on a visceral level.

...Presumably, even those incapable of ingesting the danger of having U.S. attorneys fired due to their refusal to launch partisan-motivated prosecutions (or stifle prosecutions for partisan reasons) at least understand that it is highly disturbing and simply intolerable for the Attorney General of the U.S. -- the head of our Justice Department -- to lie repeatedly about what happened, including to Congress, and to have done so with the obvious assent and (at the very least) implicit cooperation of the White House. Even the most vapid media stars should be able to understand that.

And yet so many of them do not. They continue to defend the administration by insisting that even if the accusations are correct, there was no real wrongdoing here...

Just as was true for their virtually unanimous insistence that there was no wrongdoing worth investigating in the Plame case -- including the serial lying and obstruction of justice from the Vice President's top aide, one of the most powerful people in the White House -- they also see nothing wrong whatsoever with serial lying and corruption by the Attorney General in this case.

Think about this: there are only two instances in the last six years where real investigations occurred in any of the Bush scandals -- this U.S. attorneys scandal (because Democrats now have subpoena power) and the Plame case (due to the fluke of two Republican DOJ officials with integrity, James Comey and Patrick Fitzgerald). And in both cases, it was revealed conclusively that top Bush officials -- at the highest levels of the government -- repeatedly and deliberately lied about what they did. Isn't that pattern obviously extremely disturbing? And imagine what would be revealed had there been real investigations -- journalistic or Congressional -- of all the other scandals that ended up dying an inconsequential death due to neglect and suppression.

Beltway media stars really aren't bothered by any of this in the slightest. It's how their world works. Initially, they even refused to talk about the story at all, insisting that there was nothing worth seeing here, and were all but forced into writing about it as a result of the tenacious coverage in the blogosphere, led by TPM's Josh Marshall. Their instinct is to lash out at anyone who suggests real wrongdoing on the part of the Republican political machinery that has ruled their town for so long.

There's much more, and it's worth reading.

Glenn's observations are echoed by parody, which is the closest to truth we can get: President Expresses Support for Alberto Gonzales in Super-Boring "Attorneygate" Scandal That Nobody Understands or Cares About Anyway