Check out the Cobert Report’s site at Comedy Central. Begins at 8:30pm PT / 11:30pm ET.
Tonight’s guest: NBC Dateline‘s Stone Phillips.
Show Description: What The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is to evening news, The Colbert Report is to personality-driven pundit shows. Colbert brings his sarcastic charm to a half-hour report, tackling the important issues of the day and telling his guests why their opinions are just plain wrong.
Give this WH photo a caption!
Listen/watch at C-SPAN or White House live video. (Afterwards, this will morph into an Open Thread.)
BELOW, breaking news! Patrick Fitzgerald has arrested the original CIA leaker:
Joe Wilson “was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.”
NYT columnist Frank Rich, as usual, is spot on — I’m beginning to think of him as a national journalistic treasure — beginning with the title of today’s piece, “It’s Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby” (sub. only, via Daou Report).
It didn’t matter at all to the WHIGs that their sales points and marketing techniques to sell the Iraq war were weak, dishonest, even laughable to anyone in the know. Or that real people would die! No matter. Make the sale.
Blake [Alec Baldwin, mocking]: “The leads are weak.”
The fucking leads are weak? You’re weak.
— Glengarry Glen Ross, IMDb
The WHIGs’ marketing campaign for war is weak? No matter. Close the sale! Towards the end, Rich writes:
It’s long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were “not involved” with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as “Bush’s brain,” he wasn’t smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald. (Emphasis mine.)
See, this is usually how dishonest salespeople trip themselves up: They’re so narcissistic and greedy, that they themselves — like their hapless sucker clients — sometimes fail to read the small print.
For a backgrounder snapshot of every member of WHIG, the bastards who sold the Iraq war to the people, the media, and Congress — with photo, infamous quotes, and “dish” — visit my “Glenngarry Glenn Rove.”
P.S. Frank Rich’s fine work is now subscription-only but you can read long excerpts at AfterDowningStreet.
These are a few of my impressions of the NYT’s article.
But Mr. Sulzberger and the paper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, knew few details about Ms. Miller’s conversations with her confidential source other than his name. They did not review Ms. Miller’s notes. Mr. Keller said he learned about the “Valerie Flame” notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday.
As I’ve said for some time in posts and comments here, I’ve had a “gut” hunch that Judith Miller lied or withheld key information from the NYT, which hampered her editors and publishers’ realistic appraisal of her case and how they represented her case to the paper’s readers.
Once Ms. Miller was jailed, her lawyers were in open conflict about whether she should stay there. She had refused to reopen communications with Mr. Libby for a year, saying she did not want to pressure a source into waiving confidentiality.
Judith Miller’s attorneys — Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment specialist also representing the NYT, and Bob Bennett, a criminal attorney, both spoke on September 30, independently of each other and on different talk shows, about their communications with Joseph Tate, Scooter Libby’s attorney. Neither Abrams or Bennett ever referred to the other in interviews that day.
Their lack of referral to each other, and seeming independent work on contacts with Tate, lead me to believe that the two men were competing for the limelight or did not get along. Such discord on a legal team can adversely affect clients, in this case both Ms. Miller and the NYT.
But in the end, saying “I owed it to myself” after two months of jail, she had her lawyer reach out to Mr. Libby. This time, hearing directly from her source, she accepted his permission and was set free.
Wrong. Just plain wrong. Judith Miller’s attorneys weren’t the ones successful in reaching out to Joseph Tate. It was Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s September letter to Tate that got the ball rolling, reported the A.P.’s Peter Yost yesterday. (Yost: “It was Fitzgerald’s letter to Libby’s lawyer in September that helped resolve the impasse over Miller, resulting in her testimony.”)
“W.M.D. – I got it totally wrong,” she said. “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them – we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.”
Judith Miller perpetuated easily disproved lies that have led to the deaths of almost 2,000 American soldiers, the injuries of tens of thousands, and the injuries and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqs. She has NO excuse. She did the worst job possible for a highly influential newspaper that affects how news is subsequently reported around the world.
More BELOW:
Read MoreThe Miller Case: From a Name on a Pad to Jail, and Back (Printer-friendly version of an 8-page story)
By DON VAN NATTA Jr., ADAM LIPTAK and CLIFFORD J. LEVY
ALSO UP:
Judith Miller’s “My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room” (Printer-friendly version of an 5-page story)
My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson’s wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.
My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson’s wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or “operative,” as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003. (Mr. Novak used her maiden name, Valerie Plame.)[…..]
During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak’s article. He also asked whether I thought Mr. Libby had tried to shape my testimony through a letter he sent to me in jail last month. And Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Cheney had known what his chief aide was doing and saying.
My interview notes show that Mr. Libby sought from the beginning, before Mr. Wilson’s name became public, to insulate his boss from Mr. Wilson’s charges. According to my notes, he told me at our June meeting that Mr. Cheney did not know of Mr. Wilson, much less know that Mr. Wilson had traveled to Niger, in West Africa, to verify reports that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium for a weapons program. …
Jerry Policoff is reading both documents. I may have to leave. Please start reading and provide your feedback here. Hopefully, Jerry will lend his considerable expertise to a review of the two articles.
NOTE: There are also two timelines: Judith Miller and The Leak Inquiry
