Nadagate? L'Affaire Plame?

Don (I-Man) Imus interviewed the Frankster about his Sunday column on Special Prosecutor Lawrence Fitzgerald's foray into the Dickster's office and his #1 stooge, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Frank Rich thinks that there's a flame producing the smoke. Rich's neo-con colleague on the NYTimes Op-Ed page, John Tierney, called this mess Nadagate this AM. We will see. In the meantime, Dub's brain (aka Turd Blossom aka Karl Rove) canceled appearances at 3 GOP fundraisers into this weekend. Is Turd Blossom nervous about the grand jury's findings? Heh, heh. If this is (fair & balanced) anticipation, so be it.

[x imus.msnbc.com]
Tuesday October 18, 2005
Imus: "In your column Sunday, you said it's Bush-Cheney not Rove-Libby. What's that mean?"

Frank Rich of the New York Times: "What it means is, to me there are two stories here. One of the stories, the one that now Washington is focused on is the leak investigation, what if anything Rove and Libby did to punish this guy Joseph Wilson and his wife because they were furious that he was telling the press in ultimately his own op-ed page, piece that a lot of what they had said was bogus particularly about Saddam Hussein having uranium that might have been turned into nuclear weapons."

Imus: "You know what I was just thinking here, let me interrupt you. Rove and Libby, Hunt and Liddy."

Frank Rich: "Well, you make a point because to me that's exactly the point. To the bigger scandal in my view this leak investigation is like the Watergate break-in. The Watergate break-in was a really tiny part of what turned out to be a big political plan by the Nixon administration. It was some people who got caught doing something stupid but when we got the full dimensions of the scandal it was almost an unimportant part of it, that unsuccessful break-in and also from the Watergate building had nothing really to do, it was just the tip of the iceberg. The point I was trying to make on Sunday was this essentially is the same thing. This is an interesting case. We don't know what the resolution is going to be but the real conspiracy in my view and I am talking in the general sense not the legal sense at least at this point is the conspiracy to manufacture a war on false pretenses. And the outing of Valerie Plame is a relatively petty and perhaps even trivial thing but in fact it was like hitting a flea with a sledgehammer to out her because it's not like they were outing the biggest spy in the world but it was a mistake and it showed what they really wanted to cover up which was the larger story, the story which involves the President and the Vice President and the selling of this war with a lot of phony mushroom cloud imagery and everything else in the fall of '02 right through that famous State of the Union speech in January '03."

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Libby Or Liddy?

G.(eorge) Gordon Liddy and I.(rving) Lewis Libby share more than initials for given names. Scooter Libby worked in Leonard Garment's Philly law firm. Garment was the Trickster's lawyer at the end of his rope in 1974. What goes around, comes around. Let ol' Scooter turn slowly in the wind (like L. Patrick Gray); what the hell is it with these initials for given names with Republican true believers? Can Dub be far behind the Trickster in the grand scheme of things? If this is (fair & balanced) anticipation, so be it.

[x Google]

Born Irving Lewis Libby, Jr. on August 22, 1950 in Connecticut, "Scooter" Libby is the current Chief of Staff to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, and also serves as the Vice President's assistant for National Security Affairs. (According to Mr. Libby, he got his nickname the day his father watched him crawling across his crib and joked, "He's a Scooter!")

Rumors in Washington and current editoral speculation center around the possibility that either he or Karl Rove, the chief advisor to President Bush, may have been the administration official who "outed" Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent.

Most recently, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released from prison after agreeing to testify before a grand jury investigating who in the Bush administration leaked the covert CIA operative's name. The release finally came after she obtained a waiver offered by her source.

The Times identified the source as Lewis Libby.

Sometimes referred to as a Washington enigma for the few details known about his personal life, Libby earned his BA from Yale and took his law degree at New York's Columbia University.

He later practiced law in Philadelphia, and subsequently accepted a job offer from his Yale political science professor, Paul Wolfowitz, to work at the State Department from 1981 to 1985.

He then entered private practice for several years before returning to Washington to work again under Wolfowitz at the Pentagon as principal deputy under-secretary of defense for strategy and resources.

For his government service Libby was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Award and the Department of the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award. He also received the Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Award for Public Service.

During the Bill Clinton administration, Libby stayed on in Washington to serve as legal advisor for the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China.

In 1995, he again left government service to become a managing partner at the the law firm of Dechert, Price and Rhoads, where he worked until 2001, when Vice President Cheney named him chief of staff and national security adviser.

In Washington circles, Libby is best known for his co-authoring the Project for the New American Century, promoting a more global role for the U.S. in the post-Cold War era stating that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world."

Libby is also the author of a successful novel, The Apprentice, published in 1996, about a group of strangers brought together inside a small inn while a blizzard rages outside.

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