I wasn’t a regular watcher of Meet the Press, but I always thought Russert was the best of the Washington Bureau chiefs. He moved through the political scene but with grace. What made him different from most other political reporters was that he was interested in policy and issues – not tripping up politicians and getting two sides to fight. I doubt that NBC will be able to find someone of his caliber to replace him.
Having read the pontifications of a number of my friends about the merits of the articles of impeachment against Bush by Kuicinich (which, BTW, I find to be an empty gesture), I noted that one of the most popular charges was that the administration outed Valerie Plame, I assume the conviction of Lewis Libby being the prima facie evidence of the administration’s guilt in the matter. However, I maintain that is not the case, and Lewis Libby was wrongfully prosecuted in the first place.
Valerie Plame was first mentioned in a column by Robert Novak, writing about the charge in a New York Times editorial by Joe Wilson. Explaining why he had brought up the subject of Wilson’s wife, Novak wrote:
This story began July 6 when Wilson went public and identified himself as the retired diplomat who had reported negatively to the CIA in 2002 on alleged Iraq efforts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment. Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush’s policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one.
During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA’s counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: “Oh, you know about it.” The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.
As it turns out, the “senior administration official” was Richard Armitage (who, as Novak said, was not an active partisan nor was even a supporter of the Iraq war), not Lewis Libby. In fact, Armitage had almost immediately confessed to letting the fact slip in the interview with Novak. Despite the fact that the source of the leak had already turned himself in, an independent prosecutor, Fitzgerald, was appointed to look into the leak – the leak that had already been confessed to by Armitage.
When reporters were going to prison for keeping their sources confidential during the investigation, Novak was suspiciously absent. Did he turn on his sources? Well, as it turns out, no – the sources released him to talk to the Fitzgerald. In an interview (on Meet the Press, I think), Novak said that while all administration officials had signed confidentiality waivers, releasing reporters from their anonymity agreements, Novak went into the meeting with Fitzgerald intending to fight. He didn’t give blanket waivers much credibility – no one would dare refuse to sign them. However, Fitzgerald presented him with just two waivers – one for Armitage and one for Rove (who was his confirming source). At that point, Novak knew the jig was up, so to speak.
Where, then, did Lewis Libby enter into all of it? He played the shadowy political game of press-manipulation (the same one all politicians play), and got burnt. He couldn’t remember where he first heard of Plame’s status, and told prosecutors he heard it from Tim Russert. Turns out that wasn’t the case. I don’t know how it’s relevant to anything, as Fitzgerald already knew who the sources for the Novak column were. So he was prosecuted and convicted for lying about a crime that was already solved. Fitzgerald was on a fishing expedition and Libby screwed up. He wasn’t involved in the leak under investigation, and he didn’t hinder the investigation, which already knew who was responsible. I think Fitzgerald just needed to prosecute *someone*.
Now, some have said that it’s karmic that the Bush administration be prosecuted for obstructing justice when there was no crime committed – after all, that’s what Bill Clinton was impeached for in ‘98. Kenn Starr was investigating Whitewater and ended up charging Clinton with lying about a tryst with Lewinsky – how are those even remotely related? Well, as with most thing involving the Clintons, it’s convoluted.
While it’s questionable as to whether or not the Clintons committed any crimes regarding Whitewater, there were certainly crimes committed, as a number of people went to jail – amongst them Webster Hubbell. After the investigation got started, Hubbell got a very lucrative consulting job (lots of pay, little work), which got him away from the administration. The job was setup by a man named Vincent Jordan, a known associate of the Clintons. Starr felt that Hubbell was being paid to be silent. In 1998, Vince Jordan’s name re-appeared, this time for getting a job for Monica Lewinsky, and that she was caught lying about her affair with the President in the Paula Jones lawsuit. It was that connection – Vince Jordan providing jobs for witnesses in investigations against the President – that caused Starr to ask for and receive permission to investigate the Lewinsky matter.
Convoluted, yes. But the world, and especially politics, is a complicated place. Now you have a proper primer on the facts and arguments surrounding the “outing” of Valerie Plame.
Oh, and as to the subject matter of the original charge by Joe Wilson – that the Iraqis were never interested in yellowcake uranium in Niger and that the British dossier on the matter was wrong – turns out that it’s Wilson that’s probably wrong. The Butler Report (the British investigation into the matter) stood by the original report. Additionally, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report concluded that, regardless of Wilson’s trip, it was reasonable to think that Iraq was looking to acquire uranium from Niger.
I’ve been bombarded by misconceptions about Republicans and conservative ideology recently. This is a post by Victor David Hanson over at National Review that illustrates quite well, I think, the sort of mindset that most conservatives have. Granted, it’s nominally about Obama, but I’m not posting it because it’s particularly insightful about the Democratic contender but because it shows how conservatives think:
A common trope of many pundits is that when they travel overseas now, they begin to tingle when those abroad, especially in the so-called former Third World, press them on Obama’s chances. Then the now banal theme follows: the Middle Easterner, African, South American, etc. tells the American pundit that he can’t believe an America would pick a (fill in the blank) — former Muslim, person of color, man with Hussein as a middle name, etc. — and that suddenly this liberality has restored his faith in the United States.
Then the pundit, straining to be fair, usually says he doesn’t know whether Obama could change things as much as his foreign admirers imagine, but at least this is an exciting time (finally) to once again be American. Indeed, the argument that an Obama presidency would appeal to our critics overseas and prove our liberality is becoming a powerful reason to vote for Obama for many of our elites.
Aside from the obvious point that we should not pick our presidents on the basis of whether those in mostly autocratic, non-democratic societies approve, there is something very tribal and racialist about all this chauvinism.
If a white male Christian of European ancestry were suddenly a likely successor to the Mubarak dictatorship, or were next in line to take over the Mugabe kleptocracy, or were stealing Venezuela from Hugo Chavez, or were going to be elected the next leader of South Africa, it would be of less than zero importance to me, and I would hope to other Americans of similar backgrounds. And I think most of us would shudder should an Englishman or Australian say “I just hope your next President is another white male Christian like McCain.” I was in Greece in 1988 when the socialist liberal Greeks went ga-ga over Mike Dukakis solely on the basis on his shared ethnic background and it seemed pretty absurd, especially when many promised they would change their dark view of Reagan’s America if a Greek-American were elected President.
So, one, I don’t see what is so great when a foreigner tells an American journalist that his view of America might change should we elect a person closer to his own perceived racial or religious self-image. Seems instead illiberal, tribal, and retrograde. And two, if Egyptians, Iranians, Congolese, or Bolivians want real changes in their own lives, then they should look to their own autocratic systems, not the United States that can do little to alleviate their mostly self-inflicted miseries other than to continue to shell out hundreds of billions in petrodollars and ever more humanitarian aid.
I was watching Special Report with Brit Hume, and there was a piece on Jim Johnson, the controversial member of Obama’s VP search committee. The McCain camp’s attempt to highlight the issues surrounding Johnson came from the RNC’s liason to the McCain campaign, Carly Fiorina. I was floored. I hadn’t heard from her since she was booted from HP for driving the company into the ground. What the heck are the Republicans and McCain thinking?
I finally got around to loading up Mass Effect, and right off the bat a couple annoyances crept up that I think others that are playing the game on the PC would be interested in. First off, if you encounter problems with saved games, and your “My Documents” folder is pointed to a non-standard location, you’ll need to go into the <My Documents>\BioWare\Mass Effect directory and create a “Save” folder. For some reason the installer didn’t create one, and the the game wasn’t programmed to create one on the fly. Create that and you’ll be able to save games.
Next was the buggy shadows in the game, and the reason I like computer games over console games – the ability to tweak settings you normally aren’t suppose to be able to. The dithered shadows always drove me nuts when I saw it on the XBox360 version, and was one of the first things I looked for when I installed the game and saw they were still there. Turns out it’s a known problem with the Unreal 3 engine, and that a work-around was already discovered for it. User homerdog came up with the following solution that worked for me:
Additionally, if you feel your card can handle it:
Lastly, I always disliked the fake movie grain they put into the game. You get that grain with a crummy transfer to high-def – it’s not a selling point and I have no idea why you’d want to actually *add* it. Luckily, that’s an easy fix. It’s in the Options -> Graphics menu selection of the game.
FYI, I currently have the settings on the game maxed out, and I’m not noticing any appreciable lag on my 8800GT. Your mileage may vary.
This story makes my head hurt. Feinstein, who’s the Senator from the state Chevron is headquartered in, is defending Chevron’s ability to do business in Burma (by operating oil fields) against Senator McCain, who seeks to penalize Chevron for working with the junta there. I haven’t made my mind up on the issue yet, but I was under the impression that Democrats were all pro-Human Rights anti-Big Business exploitation, especially the liberal ones from California. And I thought McCain would be pragmatic, realizing that forcing Chevron out wouldn’t actually solve anything and just hurt an American company.
I don’t know why, but apparently my Wordpress blog layout just plain breaks which it comes to YouTube videos being displayed on Firefox running under Vista. I’ll have to get around to fixing it, but it doesn’t appear to affect LiveJournal too much. Weird thing was that it worked just fine under XP – and Opera and IE don’t have a problem with it. Hrm.
UPDATE: Turns out it was a corrupt HTML embed of the Pachebel video. It is now fixed.
I’m going to be doing a bit of computer maintenence on my main box (upgrading to Vista 64-bit), so I wanted to get a bit off my chest before I go dark for a day or so.
I’m convinced that Obama is completely unprepared to become President and doesn’t know it. When Bush became President, he certainly knew he wasn’t a genius and surrounded himself with very smart people. Obama isn’t thinking that way – and every time the political opposition points out he’s wrong (which is what political opposition does), he digs in and tries to rationalize his position. His position regarding meeting with Iran, North Korea and Hugo Chavez is the principle case in point. His ignorance was compounded by his appeal to history, stating that JFK met with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missle Crisis. Kennedy met with Khrushchev before the Cuban Missle Crisis, and as The Weekly Standard lays out, Kennedy’s inexperience and naiveté actually caused the Soviets to press the young President hard. The result was that Kennedy needed to push back – which he did in South Vietnam, beginning our involvement there. One could look again at Carter, a foreign policy novice whose policies were a reaction to Vietnam – his pacifist administration saw the beginnings of radical Islam. Constrast those with the beligerent policy of Reagan, whom the Soviets feared confrontation with, and I’d argue that the tough (but willing to negotiate when the time was right), firm approach is obviously the better. But Obama won’t do that – he’s convinced of his own genius and infallibility. Should he be elected, I think America is going to be headed into a disaster. But ultimately, I think it’s a disaster we can survive.
John McCain, on the otherhand, could destroy the conservative movement, much like David Cameron is destroying Thatcherite conservatism in Britain. Right now, McCain is supporting a bill authored by Joe Leiberman to create a cap-and-trade system. And having read George Will’s analysis of it, it’s one of the most vile things I’ve ever come across. Congress is planning on creating a public-private corporation, not unlike The Corporation for Public Broadcasting or MITRE. Will cites Lieberman as estimating that the total value of the cap-and-trade system would be $7 trillion. A publically funded monopoly with control over $7 trillion dollars in our economy (as comparison, the largest company in the world, ExxonMobil, has annual revenues of just over $400 billion). With the ability to hire lobbists. And make investments. And hire marketing agencies. Once created, it would wield unrivalled power, and be answerable to no one. Would Congress step in to control it should it get out of hand? Not when it’s the only thing between us and environmental armegeddon (or so their marketing would tell us). Besides, what politician would bite the hand that fed it – or don’t you think that some of that $7 trillion would find itself as largesse upon the 535 members of Congress.
McCain is making three major arguments to me in order to vote for him: He’s against ear-marks, he’s for judicial conservatives, and he’s hawkish in foreign policy. I believe him to be leagues better than Obama on the last one, but I don’t believe him on the second and the third pales in comparison to the monstrosity he’s creating right now in Congress. Any good he can do in regards to earmarks pales compared to the harm he’s doing in the name of the environment right now. I’ve had to put up with defending a Republican who’s created bad policy for the past 8 years, and watched the Republicans wallow in the excess of power. I can’t stand another 4 years of it. Better that Obama win and be a disaster than see McCain completely destroy the conservative soul. At least with Obama in the White House, the Republicans can get to fighting against terrible ideas rather than being forced to support them.
Well, OK, not every song, but I didn’t realize just how heavily used it was as a basis for music. Rock, pop, punk, etc all seem to have very popular songs that “borrow” the chords from Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. I guess that’s why certain songs seem to be so familiar, even if I haven’t heard them before.
I generally try to stay ignorant about the finer points about music because I think that ignorance is bliss on that front, because now I’m going to be listening for those same chords in all the music I listen to on the radio. Thank goodness it doesn’t seem to really apply well to Electronica (well, maybe house music . . . but I don’t see how it would work with trance).
