Dicked

Bend in the Road, Healdsburg, CA 2007

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Scooter Libby trial, you’re a little late to the party. But if you love your country, you might want to tune in.

Bring your barf bag.

Cause you'll be getting a pretty good glimpse into the damage our government is doing to our nation's soul.

S.O.L. takes what she can get but is personally not happy about this trial's reason for being. It's not big enough for us. It’s like watching Barry Bonds batting against Little Leaguers.

We did not follow our mother’s advice and go to law school so we're not really clear on why one of Bush’s minions is on trial for lying to the F.B.I., when there is the unresolved question of outing Valerie Plame and breaking a major big deal federal law. What we’d rather see, what this country deserves, is someone’s head on a stick. We do not consider it asking to much for that special someone to be Dick Cheney.

You see, this is why it’s just so damn hard to believe in God.

If we’ve learned anything in the last few weeks it’s that the Bush White House is a breeding ground for liars and cowards and one-issue nincompoops and (mostly) guys who just don’t have any use for the truth, much less that quaint little ol' thing we call the Constitution.

If you’re a Republican and you support these guys, you are part of the problem. Normally, S.O.L. is happy to give people the benefit of their beliefs. We know a lot of smart people who happen to disagree. But come on now people, there is a mountain of evidence testifying to how fucked up these people are and how little they care about pesky things like laws or human decency or even human life. You can say it’s just business as usual in Washington but we would like to be the first to disabuse you of that notion. These guys make dirty pool seem classy. These things happen somewhere else and we're the first to scream about justice. Happens here and it's just politics as usual.

Everything you need to know has been spelled out for you during Libby’s trial, and for once without the Karl Rove/Fox News spin doctors during their usual number on the facts. It’s as if we live in a world now where facts don’t even matter and all we have left is the spin. (In the world of Fox News, there aren’t facts. There is only “versions” of the facts or “two sides to the story”. Well, we say this without irony and with absolutely no sense of superiority, but we think that anyone who still buys into Bush’s bullshit is either blindly loyal or blindly stupid. That’s a fact, too.)

The reason there is even a trial at all is because the Bushies were trying to cover their asses, most notably the Don himself (Cheney) who is permanent chair of the Department of CYA. S.O.L. knows he’s our vice president and we’re suppose to show him respect but using his title but we think respect ought to be earned. We would like to show him the inside of a jail cell.

One of the numerous, bald-faced lies that the White House was shilling in trying to sell the American public on going to war in Iraq, was that Saddam Hussein’s government had tried to buy yellow cake uranium in Niger as recently as 2002. This claim was said many times by Cheney and other Bush officials, and the President repeated it in those famous 23 words in his State of the Union Address in January 2003.

Well, it's not their fault. Intelligence gathering is an art, not a science. We've been wrong before. Shit just happens, right? No problem really, except these fuckers were telling us that Saddam was getting ready to nuke the shit out of every woman, child and puppy in the entire United States, even though they knew it was a lie. And you thought George Washington’s was a whopper.

How did they know? Because back in 2002, former ambassador and current Republican Joseph C. Wilson, went to Niger, discovered the story was bogus and told them. You know, he actually put it in writing. Six months later, this was what Bush said in the State of the Union:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Administration supporters (like this "columnist") have cited sources that claim that Bush & Co. had reason to believe the statement above was true (even though the White House eventually admitted it shouldn't have included those words in the speech). But while some sources said the yellowcake story might have merit, numerous others did not buy it. This included the CIA director, Wilson and intelligence officials.

The real fun is how the other thing unraveled.

It was, in fact, Cheney himself who supplied the rope that is about to hang his trusty lapdog from a post, twisting alone in the wind (until Bush pardons him).

Cheney was so certain that the Niger yellowcake story was true, that his office asked the C.I.A. to investigate its validity. That's how Joseph Wilson got sent to Niger. Oops. Lucky for us it's all part of the public record, thanks to Scooter Libby's trial.

Sidney Blumenthal, reporting from the trial at salon.com** today, wrote this about the prosecution's closing argument (emphasis added by S.O.L.):

Vice President Dick Cheney, who was angered at Wilson's public revelations concerning the falsehoods about the justification for the invasion of Iraq, a CIA mission put in motion by Cheney's own inquiries, which particularly enraged him. Cheney tasked Libby to learn about Wilson's wife, the CIA operative, so that Wilson's trip to Niger could be traced to her and not to Cheney's initial request to dig up information about Saddam Hussein's seeking yellowcake uranium for nuclear weapons.

You know damn well it gets better.

The prosecution went on to argue that Libby was doing Cheney's bidding in trying to find a way to discredit Wilson. S.O.L. wants to pause here for a general inquiry: let's agree that there is nothing unusual in politics about attacking one's enemy. But what kind of person attacks the enemy by sending his boy to do the dirty work for him, and then what can we say about this person when he orders said synchophant to go after his enemy's spouse?

Apparently, that would be one Dick Cheney.

Not only a liar. But a cowardly, heartless bastard willing to chuck one of his most trusted confidante's into the pit of hell. Well, I suppose coming from a man who shot his friend in the face, this is behavior that's to be expected.

But wait, there's more. From the Washington Post from August 11, 2005:

The 2002 mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney on Feb. 12 for more information about a Defense Intelligence Agency report he had received that day, according to a 2004 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. An aide to Cheney would later say he did not realize at the time that this request would generate such a trip.

Libby went to State and the CIA to try to dig up anything he could find on Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, according to trial witnesses (the very officials he hit up for dirt). Libby, with Cheney's blessing, constructed a lie out of it that they hoped would cover up the real reasons for the Niger trip, and tried to sell this bill of goods to several different journalists, including the New York Times' Judith Miller who was already buying every other lie the Bushies were telling about Iraq.

As a former journalist who took pride in being actually fair no matter what side of an issue she was on, S.O.L. has only ice in her heart for Miller who is a stain on the face of journalism.

Moving, on ... the fact that their own stoolie didn't write about the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson connection was a pretty good indication how transparent their story was but did that stop them? By God, no!

Good thing the Prince of Darkness was ready to come to their rescue. Libby and Cheney discovered what S.O.L. has known for years -- there is always an ass-kisser waiting in the background to kiss ass. They are like cock roaches. No matter how many you kill, there is always another one lurking under the Formica.

How much are we outraged? Let us count the ways.

Robert Novak, the so-called journalist who revealed Plame's name in his column, is still working and not in prison.

Scooter Libby is on trial and not Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby.

And no one's on trial for breaking a federal law by revealing the name of a covert operative for the CIA just to get back at her husband for -- stop me if you've heard this before -- telling the freaking truth. Really and truly, fuck me.



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