Tag: Scandals

McCain: Listen to What I Say But Ignore What I Did

Trish

As each of the Republican front runners in the 2008 presidential campaign competes for the favor of evangelicals — and falls short of their harsh, parochial judgement — we hear the same sanctimonious defense: “But my private life doesn’t influence my public service.”

John McCain is the only the latest in a string of GOP hypocrites that includes Rudy Guiliani and Newt Gingrich.

John McCain, who remarried one month after his 1980 divorce, said Friday that the personal lives of White House hopefuls shouldn’t become an issue in the 2008 campaign

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who remarried one month after his 1980 divorce, said Friday that the personal lives of White House hopefuls shouldn’t become an issue in the 2008 campaign.

“I would like to see this campaign conducted on past record and ambition for the future,” McCain told reporters after a fundraising luncheon in Charlotte, N.C. “I would hope that gossip — or, quote, ‘family issues’ — would not enter into this campaign.”

Well golly, straight talkin’ John, that sounds good. Almost as good as you sounded when you voted to convict Pres. Clinton on impeachment charges for attempting to hide an extramarital affair back in 1999.

The President’s offenses were committed to cover up private not public misconduct. Therefore, if he thwarted justice he did so for the perfectly understandable and forgivable purpose of keeping hidden an embarrassing personal shortcoming that, were it discovered, would harm only his family and his reputation, but would not impair our system of government.

This, too, is an appealing rationalization for acquittal. But it is just that, a rationalization…

The President’s defenders want to know how can I be certain that the offenses, even if true, warrant removal from office. They are not expressly mentioned in the Constitution as impeachable offenses. Nor did the founders identify perjury or obstruction as high crimes or high misdemeanors. Were an ordinary citizen accused of perjury in a civil proceeding he or she would in all likelihood not be prosecuted or forced out of political necessity into a perjury trap.

No, an ordinary citizen would not be treated as the President has been treated. But ordinary citizens don’t enforce the laws for the rest of us…

Presidents are not ordinary citizens. They are extraordinary, in that they are vested with so much more authority and power than the rest of us…And accordingly, regretfully, I must vote to convict the President, and urge my colleagues to do the same.’

Gee Johnny, here you’ve been living all ordinary and stuff, and now you want us to elevate you to superhuman perfection with our votes. No wonder cousin Jon calls you — derisively — “St. McCain.”

Newt Was Committing Adultery While Pushing Anti-Gay Marriage Act

Jon Ponder

In the fall of 1996, while the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was being debated, four politicians who were key to its becoming law were adulterers, including two who were involved in adulteries while the bill was being debated.

Gingrich dumped second wife Marianne in 1999 after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis. She should have seen it coming. Newt famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

The world has long known that Pres. Clinton, who signed the bill in September 1996, was having an affair at the time with Monica Lewinsky. But now, for the first time, then-House Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich has acknowledged that he was having an affair with his current wife, Calista Biseck, while he was married to his second wife, Marianne.

Gingrich confessed his adultery in an interview this week with James Dobson, a professional homophobe who heads Focus on the Family, one of the nation’s most virulent anti-gay organizatons.

Sources say the affair had been ongoing at least three years (and possibly for five years) prior to his divorce in 1999. In any case, it is clear that while Gingrich was cheating on his wife, in his role as Speaker he put the passage of DOMA at the top of the agenda for the House six weeks before the 1996 presidential elections.

And that was the real point. DOMA was a cynical election-year ploy devised by Republicans to drive a wedge between Pres. Clinton and his supporters in the gay community. DOMA presented Clinton with two bad options. If he vetoed it, Republicans would use it to enflame their homophobic base. If he signed it, he would risk dampening support from gays on election day. In the raw calculus of politics, Clinton chose the least risky option and signed it.

The other two adulterous politicians were recently retired Sen. Bob Dole, who was the GOP presidential nominee that year, and who had admitted to having an affair while married to his first wife — and then-Rep. Bob Barr, who first proposed DOMA, and who reportedly was unfaithful during at least one of his three marriages.

Gingrich apparently dumped second wife Marianne after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis in 1999. In true Newt fashion, the Speaker notified his wife that he was ending the marriage during a phone call while Marianne was with her family celebrating her mother’s 84th birthday. Marianne Gingrich should have seen it coming. Gingrich famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

Gingrich is considering running for president in 2008.

Gingrich Got Blown While Attacking Bill Clinton’s Blowjobs

Trish

Good lord.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

“The honest answer is yes,” Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. “There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There’s certainly times when I’ve fallen short of God’s standards.”

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton’s infidelity.

Because…?

Please Understand: Perjury Is Not a Crime When Republicans Do It

Jon Ponder

Conservatives are outraged about the fact that Scooter Libby was convicted on four counts of lying to a grand jury and to FBI agents. Why? Because, they say, Libby is a good and loyal soldier in their cause and, besides, his perjury is a side issue from the revelation of the CIA agent’s identity. They believe Libby should be pardoned immediately.

On “Hardball,” on the day the verdicts were announced, Ed Rogers, the soul of soul-less rightwing authoritarianism, was so upset about the verdict he started to cry. “I am mad about this!” he yelped.

But wait — wasn’t it these same conservatives who drove the nation into the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton nine years ago over something really trifling, and tawdry to boot: a perjury about sex?

Conservative bristle at the comparison between Libby’s unimportant perjury and Clinton’s lie, which, as they said back then, posed a threat to our republic. If all this makes your head spin, hang on. It is actually quite simple to explain:

  • Libby was lying to protect the vice president and, thus, America.
  • Pres. Clinton was, you know — a Democrat.

This explains why the same Republicans who railed about “the rule of law” and moaned “What will we tell the children?” in 1998 are now yapping about legal technicalities and whining that the perjury is moot because there was “no underlying crime.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-South Carolina) who was one of the House members who prosecuted the Clinton impeachment, summed up his party’s laws-are-for-Democrats point of view on the Libby verdict:

“When it came to the grand jury, he gave false testimony allegedly about his interaction. But the underlying charge that started this investigation never materialized. So you have to put it in that perspective…It’s a bad story but it’s a different story than the way it started.”

Sen. Kay Baily Hutchinson (R-Texas), who, during the Clinton impeachment said, “Something needs to be said that is a clear message that our rule of law is intact and the standards for perjury and obstruction of justice are not gray,” has changed her tune. On “Meet the Press” last Sunday she said:

“I certainly hope 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.”

On MSBNC’s “Hardball” on Tuesday, the day the verdicts were announced, Ed Rogers, the soul of soul-less rightwing authoritarianism, was so upset about the verdict he started to cry. “I am mad about this!” he yelped.

Yesterday, on the same show, Kate O’Bierne, the right’s Mother Superior on all things, said, with a straight face that she believed the jury was simply wrong — that Libby had simply forgotten, then remembered, then forgotten, then remembered again that he originally learned the covert identity of the CIA agent from his boss, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, not NBC’s Tim Russert.

The rightwing press in lockstep is calling on Pres. Bush to pardon Libby. Despite his having been tried in a court of law by a jury of his peers, they say justice was not done.

This is an amazing display of rightwing hypocrisy — so egregious that you might think they would be ashamed of it. But they aren’t, because in their worldview, they make and enforce the laws, but they are not subject to them. Rules do not apply to them. It’s just that simple.

Update: Here we have the conservative mindset in its full fantastical flower. I happened up this logic-torturing screed written last September by Mark Levin, a girly-voiced troglodyte who made a name for himself as a frequent and fervent pro-impeachment talking head during the Clinton wars. In what follows, he provides talking points for fellow delusionists on how to square the circle in being critical of Libby’s perjury conviction while believing that Pres. Clinton committed a serious crime. It is a wonder to behold:

[…]

U.S. Attorney Says He Felt ‘Pressured’ By GOP Pols

Jon Ponder

At congressional hearings yesterday into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Dept. last Descember, David Iglesias, who was the federal prosecutor in New Mexico, accused two GOP members of Congress from the state — Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson — of trying to pressure him on investigations in the Albuquerque office.

Asked by Schumer if he felt pressured by [Rep. Heather Wilson’s] call, Iglesias replied: “Yes sir, I did.”

Iglesias, a Republican, said the motivation of both Domenici and Wilson was political.

About Sen. Domenici:

…Iglesias told senators he felt sickened when Domenici hung up on him after being told that indictments in a corruption case against Democrats would not be handed down before the November elections.

“He said, ‘Are these going to be filed before November?'” Iglesias recalled. “I said I didn’t think so. And to which he replied, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ And then the line went dead.”

Iglesias said he received the call from Domenici at home on Oct. 26 or 27 and that it lasted two minutes, “tops.”

“I felt leaned on. I felt pressured to get these matters moving,” Iglesias testified. Asked by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whether such a call was unusual in Iglesias’ experience, the former prosecutor answered, “Unprecedented.”

About Rep. Wilson:

Iglesias told the panel he received a call from Wilson in mid-October in which she asked him about sealed indictments a topic prosecutors cannot discuss. Wilson’s question “raised red flags in my head,” Iglesias said.

“I was evasive and nonresponsive to her question,” Iglesias told the panel, saying he talked generally about why some indictments are sealed. “She was not happy with that answer. And she said, ‘Well I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.” The call ended almost immediately, Iglesias said.

Asked by Schumer if he felt pressured by that call, Iglesias replied: “Yes sir, I did.”

Other testimony revealed that the U.S. attorney in Arkansas was let go only to be replaced by a protege of Karl Rove named Tim Griffin, who has since decided not to stay on in the position because of the “partisan circus” around his appointment.

The committee also released an email from one of the fired prosecutors to his colleagues recounting a phone conversation he’d had with a a senior Justice official in February warning him to keep quiet about the firing or risk becoming the target of a Bush administration smear campaign.

When Will Cable News Report on the U.S. Attorney Scandal?

Jon Ponder

Now that Anna Nicole Smith’s body has been buried (for the time being anyway) maybe the cable news channels can find time to do in-depth reporting on the Bush administration’s mass firing of U.S. attorneys last December.

With no underlings to blame for the firings, the White House will resort to its next best trick — they will launch a coordinated smear campaign against the prosecutors as early as Monday morning.

If nothing else, they could cover a hearing into the matter announced by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee for Tuesday at 2 p.m. Four of the fired prosecutors — Carol Lam of California, David Iglesias of New Mexico, H.E. “Bud” Cummins of Arkansas and John McKay of Seattle — have been subpoenaed to appear.

Bush officials say they are surprised about the uproar over the firings — and shocked, shocked, I tell ya — that the Dems would say the dismissals were motivated by politics. True to form, however, the excuse they offer for the purge — that the prosecutors all had poor performance records — does not square with reality on the ground. In fact, the fired attorneys appear to have been well-respected, competent and independent. Several had just received exemplary performance reviews, and none have been reported to have had bad reviews.

Democrats suspect that it was the prosecutors’ independence that led to their dismissals — that the White House judged them as not toeing the Bush line sufficiently, and now intends to replace them with Republican hacks.

In a dismaying and rather unbelievable turn of events, Democrats also recently learned that a heretofore overlooked provision in the Patriot Act grants Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzalez the power to fill the vacancies without Senate approval. (Didn’t anybody read that bill before they signed it?)

On top of all this, there are the charges of political meddling in investigations. In New Mexico, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney who was fired, has said that two Republicans from the state’s congressional delegation tried imprpoperly to influence an investigation into a Democratic politician. He says he received calls last October from a senator and a House member — and that because he would not accede to the pressure, the senator urged the Justice Dept. to fire him.

Today the Washington Post reported that Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, has admitted he made a call to Iglesias, but says he called simply to inquire about the status of the investigation, but did not threaten or pressure Iglesias, which would have been an ethics violation. However, Domenici also admits he did recommend that Iglesias be terminated.

Iglesias also said he would name the senator and the representative (assumed to be Heather Wilson) if asked during the hearings, so Domenici’s admission — released into the Sunday news void — was done preemptively to soften the blow on the ethics charges.

The knee jerk reaction of the Bush White House is to pin blame for controversies and scandals on their flunkies. But they are on the record as having signed off on the dismissals, although they insist it was all just routine.

With no underlings to blame, the White House will have to rely on its next best trick — a coordinated smear campaign against the fired prosecutors, which could start as early as Monday morning.

Testimony in ‘Denver Three’ Case Reveals White House Deceptions

Jon Ponder

Last month, testimony in the Scooter Libby trial revealed that former White House spokesman Scott McClellan knowingly lied when he told reporters that neither Libby and Karl Rove had anything to do with leaking of the name of a covert C.I.A. agent. This week, testimony in another court case, this one in Denver, has exposed another deliberate on-the-record lie by McClellan, as well as the legally questionable practice of White House operatives allegedly impersonating Secret Service agents at public events.

Results of a separate investigation into whether White House staffers impersonated Secret Service agents were swept under the rug by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver.

The case concerns the expulsion by White House operatives of three non-Republicans, Leslie Weise, Karen Bauer and Alex Young, from a January 2005 appearance by Pres. George Bush in Denver. The event was taxpayer-funded, and the three taxpayers had tickets. Nonetheless the “Denver Three” were escorted out of the area by volunteer Republican Party operatives. Later, men dressed like Secret Service agents told them that they were tossed out because they had arrived in a car with a bumper sticker that read, “No More Blood for Oil.”

On March 30, 2005, McClellan blamed the expulsion of the three suspected liberals on the Republican volunteers:

… I did look into that a little bit more yesterday … My understanding is that it was a volunteer involved in that matter. My sense is that the volunteer thought that these individuals, these three individuals were coming to the event to disrupt it. And those individuals — I think if you look at some of the early news reports even said something to that effect.

Questioned under oath last week, the volunteers said their orders came from the White House staff members. Reporters contacted the staffers who both said they were following White House policy:

A former White House official who ordered three activists expelled from a 2005 Denver public forum with President Bush says it was White House policy to exclude potentially-disruptive guests from Bush’s appearances nationwide.

The former official, Steve Atkiss, revealed the policy today in an interview after two volunteer bouncers identified him and a current White House staffer, Jamie O’Keefe, as the officials who ordered the so-called “Denver Three” activists sent away.

Atkiss is now a U.S. Department of Homeland Security chief of staff.

McClellan cast blame on the volunteers knowing that they were just following orders — knowing all along that it that suspected dissenters were always barred from Dear Leader’s presence.

An earlier investigation in the matter revealed that the Secret Service agents were actually White House staffers:

The Secret Service later investigated whether a Republican volunteer committed a crime of impersonating a federal agent. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver declined to press charges, giving no explanation.

Swept under the rug.

Ann Coulter Calls John Edwards a ‘Faggot’

Jon Ponder

Ann Coulter at the rightwing CPAC creepfest today:

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

We really need to hear what the Cheneys think about this — not just Mary and her spouse, Heather Poe, but the parents, Dick and Lynne.

Incompetence: Cheney Even Screws Up Off the Record Comments

Jon Ponder

Vice Pres. Cheney gave an interview to reporters traveling abroad with him earlier this week with the understanding that they must say their source was a “senior administration official,” not Cheney himself. But even this he screwed up — big time. Here’s a partial transcript:

That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn’t know what I‘m doing, or isn’t involved in it.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The reason the President wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border — a threat to Afghanistan, clearly, in our efforts there, the Taliban, cross-border operations; a threat to Musharraf and his government…

Let me just make one editorial comment here. I‘ve seen some press reporting says, “Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.” That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn’t know what I‘m doing, or isn’t involved in it. But the idea that I‘d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.

I would describe my sessions both in Pakistan and Afghanistan as very productive. We’ve had notable successes in both places. I‘ve often said before and I believe it’s still true that we’ve captured and killed more al Qaeda in Pakistan than anyplace else. And I think we’re making progress in Afghanistan.

My sense of it was Karzai was more positive and optimistic than I‘d seen in my recent visits. That doesn’t mean that there’s no threat. That doesn’t mean — no rosy scenario. There’s a hell of a lot of work to be done…

Q You’ve spoken … though, about some of the things that Speaker Pelosi and Representative Murtha have said how that does play to the hands of —

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I was asked by one of your colleagues.

Q But your answer was very articulate.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I responded very carefully.

Q And you suggested that they make — they lend comfort to terrorists, essentially.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: No, what I said was that that the al Qaeda strategy is based on the notion that they can break the will of the American people. They know they can’t beat us in a stand-up fight. But they do believe — and I think there’s evidence to support this — that they can, in fact, force us to change our policy if they just kill enough Americans, create enough havoc out there. And they cite Beirut in 1983; Mogadishu, 1993, kill Americans, America changes its policy and withdraws. And Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri believe this. They talk about it. It’s not a mystery.

And my point was that if we follow what I believe Speaker Pelosi really wants to do in terms of withdraw, that that would validate the al Qaeda strategy. I was very careful in those words I selected. I didn’t say “give aid and comfort to terrorists.” I didn’t say “unpatriotic.” I said it would validate the al Qaeda strategy….