Category Archives: Politics: The Party of Sleaze

TomPaine.com has produced a handy guide to the perplexed that lays out in graphical fashion the various connections between participants in the various DC scandals.

John Dean is a cautious and pessimistic about the Special Prosecutor:

FindLaw’s Writ – Dean: Waiting For The Valerie Plame Wilson Grand Jury The Big Question Is Whether Dick Cheney Was a Target

While I may be letting the air out of some rising balloons, I think Fitzgerald’s silence has fed speculation that postulates indictments way beyond the realistic potentials.

The really big fish in this case is the Vice President. And I have little doubt, based on my knowledge of the case, and of the way Cheney typically operates, that a case could be made against him.

But Fitzgerald is an experienced prosecutor, and that means only if he found himself confronted with an exceptionally egregious case (the equivalent of Spiro Agnew’s taking payoffs from Maryland contractors in his Vice Presidential Office), would Fitzgerald consider indicting Vice President Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, James Moore (author of “Bush’s Brain,” a book about Karl Rove), thinks this is The Most Important Criminal Case in American History, well bigger than Watergate, because he thinks Karl Rove is responsible for the so-called ‘Yellowcake Forgery’:

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.

I think Dean puts a little too much weight on the theory that (apparent) purity of motive might save the day for some under investigation. That’s very close to the theory that was supposed to excuse Watergate. I don’t think it will wash this time either.

But I disagree with Moore too: I think if Fitzgerald doesn’t indict, or doesn’t indict higher-ups, many people will accept it. I for one am prepared to give Fitzgerald the benefit of the doubt unless it seems very likely that foot soldiers are unfairly taking the rap to protect their bosses. And, strange at it may sound to conservatives, while I think Democrats should as a matter of tactics be prepared to milk any indictments for all they are worth, I personally will take no joy from the fact of them. It would actually be preferable — if it were the truth and not a smokescreen — to find out that the Plame leak was a rogue operation by someone rather than a concerted strategy by a gang of goons. There would be no joy, rather the reverse, in learning that one’s fears that the nation is indeed run by a gang of goons could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Moore does remind us of an interesting question: someone faked those documents that claimed to show Iraq was dealing to get uranium. Who faked the papers that surfaced in Italy has never been explained. But Moore’s answer seems based on the theory that nothing is beyond the power of Rove, and it will take more than that to get me to believe the false documents were a US government disinformation operation (aimed at the US public) run out of Rove’s office with the Scooter & Co. as the cut-outs.

If that were true it would indeed be the crime of the century, but I think Moore has mislaid his skepticism. If I had to pick a prime suspect for the forgery, I’d say it was the Iranians, perhaps via their triple-agent Chalabi. History may show that the Iranian’s use of Chalabi to get the US to attack their regional enemy was the greast spy ploy in history since the Germans put Lenin on a train to Russia. It seems at least as likely that the neo-cons were duped by crude forgeries because they wanted to believe them. (Worse than a crime, a blunder.)

Regarding my previous post, Eric Muller asks “if Fitzgerald’s got the goods on the veep, why would he refrain from indicting?”

My point is more modest: at this stage of febrile speculation, with the number of indictments rising from rumor to rumor (4 … 10…24…), it’s time to manage expectations downward so that whatever happens can’t be spun as “less bad than expected”.

In fact, wouldn’t it be just like Rove to be leaking the inflated totals just to be able to say afterwards, ‘see it was only three of them’ or something of the sort?

Plus, trying to get people on record as to the resignations of unindicted co-conspirators covers the bases for the indicted ones too. And even if anyone says no resignation needed, you can always go back to them if there turns out to be any substance to the rumors.

Yet again, there’s excitement in blogland about the possible indictment of Vice-President Cheney, and yet again it doesn’t seem based on much more than smoke, rumor and wishful schadenfreude.

My only contribution to this fest is this: Rather than ask, ‘Will Cheney resign if indicted,” far better to ask, “Will Cheney resign if named as an unindicted co-conspirator.”

PS. Do note, please, that the rumor as to who would replace Cheney is the person I picked as the leading candidate to replace him.

The internets are rife with wild ghoulish speculation that the Vice President might be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Plame prosecution. (Or worse?) We know so little about what is actually going on in Fitzgerald’s office — contrast this professionally run operation to, say, the Ken Starr ethics-free horror show — that all such speculation strikes me as wildly premature.

So let’s indulge in some even more wildly premature and irresponsible speculation in the nature of a parlor game: suppose Bush suddenly needs to appoint a new Vice President due to the unavailablity or resignation of the current incumbent. Who gets the nod?

The 25th Amendment provides, in Section 2, that “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

The GOP has a majority in both chambers, but it would obviously be desirable to have a candidate who gets a less bumptious reception than seems to be facing Ms. Miers. That might mean a Senator, a popular governor, a member of the Cabinet, or an elder statesman. (Or, given who is doing the appointing, not.) Unless the person named was somehow disqualified by age they would immediately have a giant advantage in race for the poisoned chalice of the GOP 2008 Presidential nomination.

An additional complicating factor here is that some believe that Bush promised Sen. McCain tacit support in 2008, or at least the absence of support for rivals, in order to get McCain’s full backing in 2004. But they don’t like each other much, and I somewhat doubt that Bush would choose McCain to be so close to the levers of power.

A popular governor like Jeb Bush would be a possibility, but that nepotism thing might be a little too cronyist to work. And that might also violate the deal with McCain, if in fact it exists.

Leave your ghoulish speculation in the comments. I’ll name my name below. Names should be people Bush would be likely to like, easily confirmable, and either likely to raise GOP fortunes, or boneheaded in a plausible way.

Update: Just to clarify, given the first comment, the point of this game isn’t who Bush should pick, it’s who he would pick. Thus criticizing a choice as too sycophantic or not sufficiently reality-based completely misses the point.

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As the whole world probably knows by now, a Texas grand jury indicted Majority Tom Delay this afternoon. Not only did I read about on a gazillion blogs, one more triumphalist than the next, but someone here came by and dealt me a photocopy of the indictment from a little stack.

I agree the public information makes the guy look guilty, but can I just be a dissenting voice here and say that there is something about the chortling that I don’t like. Even really vile politicians are entitled to a fair trial. As private citizens we are allowed to rush to judgment — only officialdom must act on the presumption of innocence — but there’s still something to the idea that we should leave our minds open to the idea of innocence. (And I’ve never liked conspiracy prosecutions without a charge for an underlying offense, and I’m not minded to start liking them now, even when the cause is jurisdictional rather than lack of evidence.)

The other thing that bugs me even more about this is the casual way in which everyone seems to accept the idea that this conspiracy prosecution is necessary because the local Texas DA who would have sole jurisdiction over the underlying election law finance offenses would never prosecute them. Seems that as of a couple of weeks ago at least, the district attorney in Fort Bend County, John Healey Jr., has never investigated DeLay or TRMPAC, and had no plans to do so. Many articles on the subject blandly reported that this was because Healey, a Republican, has no desire to harm the head of the state GOP. (If anything has changed recently, I can find no sign of it.)

Even Florida DAs are not quite that brazen about their political loyalties and fears. Where’s the outrage?