And it Begins.

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: Jhhnn
You're asleep at the switch, rainsford. the article starts out saying that the NYT times said that Fitzgerald said there was no crime... a whole chain based on conjecture from the NYT in the first place. Fitzgerald has said no such thing. Don't get chumped. You're hip to the rest of it, however- just keep in mind that the whole deal is about muddying the waters, protecting the identities of the leakers and of deflecting blame from those who've lied to the grand jury on behalf of those leakers...

I was talking about his comments on Harkin's case, I believe the NYT conjecture was about the Plame case. I can certainly believe the NYT got it wrong there.

 

[Jhhnn]

My mistake, rainsford. And, yeh, the rightwing spin on the Harkin case is typical, particularly referring to it as wiretapping, when it was nothing of the kind...

And this isn't about Earle, or DeLay, or the vast leftwing conspiracy, zendari, although the mewling from the rightwing is similar in both cases. It's really about good christians being mercilessly persecuted for their faith in the lord jebus, right? Nevermind the smears, lies, deceit and arrogant contempt for the rule of law exhibited by the alleged perps in both cases- they're on a mission from God, which makes everything OK...

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: zendari

Originally posted by: NJDevil

Originally posted by: zendari
Fitzgerald pressured by Howard Dean

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is urging Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to bring indictments in the Valerie Plame Leakgate case, saying he won't accept any other result.

Dean was asked Sunday by ABC "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos: "If [Fitzgerald] finishes his investigation without bringing indictments and without issuing a final report, will you accept that as the end of the matter?"

"No," Dean shot back. "Because I fundamentally don't think these are honest people running the government."

The top Democrat said that regardless of whether Fitzgerald brings any indictments, it's clear the White House engaged in a cover-up

"The evidence is very clear [that] half the stuff the president told us about Iraq - the weapons of mass destruction, the trip to Niger, the purchase of uranium and all that stuff - we know that's not true," Dean said.

"What got [Karl] Rove and [Lewis] Libby in trouble is that they were attacking, which the Republicans always do, attacking somebody who criticizes and disagrees with them."

Dean said it is "a fundamental flaw in the Bush administration - the personal attacks on people for meritorious arguments. They never make the argument - they always make the personal attack."


I'm glad Mr. Howard Dean believes in his fantasy world of vigilante justice instead of the proper rule of law.

Guilty by default according to the Democrats.

Where do you get vigilante justice from? He's making a hypothetical claim, yes, but no where in that article does it mention that is pressuring Fitzgerald at all. The first sentence:

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is urging Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to bring indictments in the Valerie Plame Leakgate case, saying he won't accept any other result.

is misleading. It is stating that Dean is urging Patrick, but what he's relaly doing is saying he won't accept a non-indictment result. Nowhere is there any evidence of him actually "urging, forcing, coercing" etc.

So Dean doesn't believe in proper justice from a grand jury?

Just like millions of people disagreed with the OJ verdict.

It doesn't matter what Dean thinks about this case, unless he ends up on a jury, which would be impossible at this point, given the statements he has made.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: zendari
Fitzgerald pressured by Howard Dean
I'm glad Mr. Howard Dean believes in his fantasy world of vigilante justice instead of the proper rule of law.

Guilty by default according to the Democrats.

vig·i·lan·te ( P ) Pronunciation Key (vj-lnt)
n.
One who takes or advocates the taking of law enforcement into one's own hands.

More of your delusory pap? Yeah, I clearly read Howard Dean advocating taking justice into his and the Democrats' own hands.

Get a life. Take a good reading comprehension course. And start on the path of speaking truth instead of fantasies.

 

[totalcommand]

Here is a new article from the NYTimes. There is a particular part of interest - that Repubs will have a hard time portraying Fitzgerald as partisan because Bush himself has praised the investigator:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/polit...3878cbd9535b7&ei=5094&partner=homepage

October 24, 2005
G.O.P. Testing Ways to Blunt Leak Charges
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 - With a decision expected this week on possible indictments in the C.I.A. leak case, allies of the White House suggested Sunday that they intended to pursue a strategy of attacking any criminal charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecutor.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, is expected to announce no later than the end of the week whether he will seek indictments against White House officials in a decision that is likely to be a defining moment of President Bush's second term. The case has put many in the White House on edge. [Page A15.]

Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., who is Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, have been advised that they are in serious legal jeopardy. Other officials could also face charges in connection with the disclosure of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer in 2003.

On Sunday, Republicans appeared to be preparing to blunt the impact of any charges. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program "Meet the Press," compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."

Ms. Hutchison said she hoped "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."

President Bush said several weeks ago that Mr. Fitzgerald had handled the case in "a very dignified way," making it more difficult for Republicans to portray him negatively.

But allies of the White House have quietly been circulating talking points in recent days among Republicans sympathetic to the administration, seeking to help them make the case that bringing charges like perjury mean the prosecutor does not have a strong case, one Republican with close ties to the White House said Sunday. Other people sympathetic to Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said that indicting them would amount to criminalizing politics and that Mr. Fitzgerald did not understand how Washington works.

Some Republicans have also been reprising a theme that was often sounded by Democrats during the investigations into President Bill Clinton, that special prosecutors and independent counsels lack accountability and too often pursue cases until they find someone to charge.

Congressional Republicans have also been signaling that they want to put some distance between their agenda and the White House's potential legal and political woes, seeking to cast the leak case as an inside-the-Beltway phenomenon of little interest to most voters.

"I think we just need to stick to our knitting on the topics and the subjects the American people care about," Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, said on "Fox News Sunday."

The case, which traces back to an effort by the White House to rebut criticism of its use of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq, has grown into a crisis for the administration that has the potential to shape the remainder of Mr. Bush's second term. Democrats signaled Sunday that they would use the inquiry to help weave a broader tapestry portraying the Republican Party as corrupt and the White House as dishonest with the American people.

"We know that the president wasn't truthful with us when he sent us to Iraq," Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said on "This Week" on ABC. "What got Rove and Libby in trouble was because they were attacking, which the Republicans always do, attacking somebody who criticized them and disagreed with them. They make the attacks personal. They go over the line."

Beyond introducing a Web site for his office last week, Mr. Fitzgerald has given no public hints of what, if any, action he might take. Whatever he decides, he is expected to make an announcement before Friday, the final day of the term of his grand jury. In the past, the grand jury has met on Wednesdays and Fridays.

His silence has left much of official Washington and nearly everyone who works at or with the White House in a state of high anxiety. That has been compounded by the widespread belief that there are aspects of the case beyond those directly involving Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that remain all but unknown outside of Mr. Fitzgerald's office. Among them is the mystery of who first provided the C.I.A. officer's identity to the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who published it on July 14, 2003.

The negative effects on Mr. Bush's presidency if his senior aides were indicted, said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington, would be as great as the positive effects of Mr. Bush's handling of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"This is the most important turning point for his administration in terms of turning down and losing support," Mr. Thurber said.

A weakened White House, he said, could lead to further infighting among the conservatives who provide most of Mr. Bush's legislative, grass-roots and financial support, and could leave the administration with even less political clout to sway Democrats in Republican-leaning states to back Mr. Bush's agenda. In the Senate, Mr. Bush has depended on support from at least a few Democrats to push through many of his major initiatives.

Republicans acknowledged the problems facing the White House but said Mr. Bush would ultimately be judged on whether he produced results in addressing the issues of most concern to the American people.

"If you look at poll numbers and things like that, we face challenges," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee. But even in the last few months, he said, the White House has made "tremendous long-term progress" on a variety of fronts.

He cited the referendum on a constitution in Iraq, signs that the economy remains strong and what he characterized as evidence that Mr. Bush's signature education legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act, is producing measurable results.

Mr. Fitzgerald has been focused on whether there was an illegal effort at the White House to undermine the credibility of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who became a critic of the administration's Iraq policy by his dismissive comments over the possibility that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium fuel from Niger.

The prosecutor has sought to determine if the effort against Mr. Wilson involved the intentional identification of his wife, Valerie Wilson. Mr. Fitzgerald has tried to find out whether Bush officials violated the law that protects the identities of undercover officers like Ms. Wilson or sought to impede the inquiry by misleading investigators or providing false information about their actions.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Looks like the liberal press is trying to fluff Fitzy. I guess we can expect to see more like this as the case comes closer to a close and the left is desperately hoping somebody will be frog-marched.

/sarcasm

 

[NJDevil]

Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
Looks like the liberal press is trying to fluff Fitzy. I guess we can expect to see more like this as the case comes closer to a close and the left is desperately hoping somebody will be frog-marched.

/sarcasm

Haha. I enjoyed that. I find it kind of cute that you've said things like that, but without being sarcastic. Glad to see you're not going along with newsmax on this one .

:beer:

 

[Darkhawk28]

And it looks like the right-wing f*ckwads are trying to figure out a way to discredit Fitzgerald. Alas, they'll find he saw a nude girl once back 35 years ago or something. Barring that, they'll do what they normally do... make sh*t up.

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
Looks like the liberal press is trying to fluff Fitzy. I guess we can expect to see more like this as the case comes closer to a close and the left is desperately hoping somebody will be frog-marched.

/sarcasm

Actually President Bush has been equally guilty of "fluffing" Fitzgerald, if you consider making neutral-to-favorable comments about him "fluffing." What's your opinion of him, or are you just here to troll?

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Originally posted by: DonVito

Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
Looks like the liberal press is trying to fluff Fitzy. I guess we can expect to see more like this as the case comes closer to a close and the left is desperately hoping somebody will be frog-marched.

/sarcasm

Actually President Bush has been equally guilty of "fluffing" Fitzgerald, if you consider making neutral-to-favorable comments about him "fluffing." What's your opinion of him, or are you just here to troll?

Why ever would I troll in a troll thread?

 

[totalcommand]

Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken

Originally posted by: DonVito

Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
Looks like the liberal press is trying to fluff Fitzy. I guess we can expect to see more like this as the case comes closer to a close and the left is desperately hoping somebody will be frog-marched.

/sarcasm

Actually President Bush has been equally guilty of "fluffing" Fitzgerald, if you consider making neutral-to-favorable comments about him "fluffing." What's your opinion of him, or are you just here to troll?

Why ever would I troll in a troll thread?

This isn't a troll thread ye dumbhat. You're the one trolling in here.

On a side note, it looks like Republicans will be attacking Fitzgerald as "criminilizing politics", which I personally think is a good strategy if they want their arses handed to them.

Honestly, lying to cover something up like the outing of a U.S. undercover agent is much worse to me than lying to cover up something like an affair.

 

[Pabster]

I don't have anything against Fitzgerald.

The only thing I find funny is the OP citing NewsMax for the source.

 

[totalcommand]

Originally posted by: Pabster
I don't have anything against Fitzgerald.

The only thing I find funny is the OP citing NewsMax for the source.

Well, I had been asking Zendari if there was any dirt on Fitzgerald, and was given this link.

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: totalcommand
Well, I had been asking Zendari if there was any dirt on Fitzgerald, and was given this link.

Fair enough. I just suspect that if someone else had started a thread and cited NewsMax as the source it would be trolled and flame-baited rather quickly.

 

[totalcommand]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: totalcommand
Well, I had been asking Zendari if there was any dirt on Fitzgerald, and was given this link.

Fair enough. I just suspect that if someone else had started a thread and cited NewsMax as the source it would be trolled and flame-baited rather quickly.

Sure, but I'm not using NewsMax as a source of actual information, but as an example of Republican tactics.

Regardless, it (surprisingly and to their disadvantage) looks like they will not be using this tactic.