The Forkes Report

Tim's Favorite Blogs

Eschew Obfuscation
IM Earthling
Silk Road
The Huffington Post
Media Matters
American Progress
Citizens For Ethics
Crooks And Liars
Common Cause

Media Matters

Blog Directories

Saturday, January 27. 2007

Scooting Over the Union

The Historic Moment

Lately I’ve just been goofing off … not completely though. I’ve taken on a labor of love, helping to manage my nephew’s band One Theory. They have a page on MySpace if you’d like to check it out. Great band; they play metal, thrash metal, the kind I like — unbridled aggression.

My work ethic has to get back in line though, so much going on, so little time — unless I cut back on the goofing off …

The president’s State-of-the-Union speech has come and gone, and the pundits are still talking about it, as well they should. I’ve watched it three times now, trying to glean something hopeful from it.

The thing with this president is, He can be very sincere, especially when he talks about bipartisanship, but obviously, by his actions concerning Iraq, bipartisanship is just another word.

History About to be Made

He did start the speech on a high note when he paid tribute to the momentous occasion of the first State-of-the-Union with a woman Speaker of the House. It was an emotional moment and it was, without a doubt, a sincere pronouncement:
 “And tonight, I have a high privilege and distinct honor of my own — as the first President to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madam Speaker.
 In his day, the late Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. from Baltimore, Maryland, saw Presidents Roosevelt and Truman at this rostrum. But nothing could compare with the sight of his only daughter, Nancy, presiding tonight as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Congratulations, Madam Speaker.”

He said kind words for the speedy recovery and return of Senator Tim Johnson and Representative Charlie Norwood, again, very genuine in his emotion, and then the president launched into his speech.

His address, which was 48 minutes long, was taken up primarily with domestic issues. The real topic on the table, the bone everyone has been gnawing on for weeks now is Iraq and that bit of news he saved for the end.

Basically, the president set out an agenda which highlighted first those things on which he can make strides with the Democratic Congress, things like immigration and lobby reform, but as the night wore on, you could see the president’s policies drift further from that of his political foes, until the end, when the subject of Iraq was finally mentioned, and the president had finally distanced himself from even his political allies.

Why he insists on escalating the war — I’m sorry, it’s not an escalation, it’s an augmentation — when 70% of Americans, and about 64% of Congress oppose it is beyond explanation, other than he’s trying to save face so he doesn’t have to pull the plug; let the next president have that dishonor.

Does he really think the situation is winnable in Iraq? How are we to define “winning”? The same old questions, the same non-answers. Back to that “augmentation.” Condi Rice and Team Bush must take Congress and the American people for stupid. But it’s par for the Bush course. Do something the people don’t want and call it something else.
 The Healthy Forests initiative allowed more logging on public lands.
 The Clear Skies program allows business to spew out more pollution.
 And probably the most egregious doublespeak is his proposed dismantling of the Head Start program which has consistently been shown to save 3-4 dollars for every dollar invested in children; and it’s helped more than 20 million children and their families since implemented in 1965. What does he call it? “Opt In.” Which means the states themselves will have to pay for Head Start.

So his plan to stay the course in Iraq is called something else now, a “surge,” an “augmentation.” And maybe it’s not stay the course if he’s actually escalating the war.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby

The real kicker though is that on the same day of the State-of-the-Union, the trial of Scooter Libby got under way in Washington. In his opening remarks, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald laid out what everyone’s been waiting to hear and what he said points a finger directly at the vice president’s office. Indeed, the testimony from witnesses, from the VP’s office and the C.I.A. show that Cheney was putting immense pressure on people to provide intelligence to support starting the war in Iraq.
 Here’s a little sidebar to this I didn’t know: in 2004, Bush’s first press secretary Ari Fleischer approached Fitzgerald with a deal to testify for a grant of complete immunity. It seems Fleischer was giving information about Valerie Plame to reporters so to keep his butt covered, he went for the deal and and Fitzgerald reluctantly accepted.

Ari Fleischer

There’s little question that Libby will be convicted, but the testimony from one of Libby’s former colleagues, Cathie Martin, who had been the vice president’s press secretary at the time the outing of Valerie Plame took place, not only buttressed the prosecution’s case — she said “Scooter” and talked about Valerie Plame being the wife of Ambassador Joe Wilson with her and the vice president days before Libby claimed he heard about Plame’s connection to Wilson and the C.I.A. — but she also implicated Cheney in the plan to out the C.I.A. officer’s identity. Apparently, according to Martin’s testimony, the vice president himself wrote some of the memos that were then passed on to reporters. In other words, Vice President Dick Cheney was eyeball-deep in the plan to discredit Joe Wilson and reveal his wife’s identity in the process — and when the poo-poo hit the fan, Cheney and Rove threw Libby under the bus, in Washington insiderspeak.

We’ve always been told there were co-conspirators in the plan, most of us presuming Karl Rove to be the primary conspirator, but now we find out the primary — the most prominent of the leakers — was the vice president.

Currently he isn’t under indictment, but when this trial concludes, can we expect to see charges filed against Mr. Cheney? The flipside of course is that the president can always grant pardons to Libby and Cheney — and Rove if he is indicted — sort of like his Daddy did when Elliot Abrams, Cap Weinberger and a slew of other Reagan Administration officials were about to be indicted for their roles in the Iran-Contra scandal.

You can download the entire transcript of the State-of-the-Union speech Here.

Posted by Tim Forkes in NEWS and POLITICS at 00:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

(Page 1 of 6, totaling 6 entries) » next page