Marcy Wheeler, writing in her commentisfree blog: Just another obstruction of justice.

There are many unanswered questions about the roles of the president, the vice president, and Libby in the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. Did Bush really ask Libby to take the lead on all this? Did the president declassify Plame’s identity so Libby could leak it to the press? Did Cheney learn – and tell Libby – that Plame was covert? Those questions all point squarely at Bush and Cheney personally. But because of Bush’s personal intervention, he has made sure that Scooter Libby won’t be answering those questions anytime soon.

I tired a while ago of the way Keith Olbermann does an impression of David Strathairn doing Edward R. Murrow; for me, Olbermann’s rants would be more powerful if he just did them straight, without all the sirs and Mr. Bushes and Mr. Cheneys. But with that quibble aside, this latest one, about Bush’s commutation of the Libby sentence, was pretty good: You ceased to be the President of the United States.

Judith Miller sat in jail for 85 doing what she felt was right: protecting the identity of a confidential source. She was released only after her source, Scooter Libby, finally consented to her letting him name him. Libby was subsequently found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements (under oath) and sentenced to 30 months for his crimes, but he won’t be spending one day in Jail, because President Bush commuted his sentence for being “excessive”

Where was Bush’s rubber stamp when Miller was in Jail? And if 30 months is too excessive for Libby’s crimes, how about serving 85 days he took away from Miller because he wasn’t man enough to step up and admit what he had done?

Again, no time to obsess. But one of the more important things to appear in the WaPo in a while is this: ‘A Different Understanding With the President’.

Just remember: Impeach. Cheney. First.

In a postscript to an item on Giuliani’s lack of foreign policy expertise, and Giuliani’s simultaneous belief that he alone is competent to handle the demands of 21st-century foreign policy, Kevin Drum offers the following interesting aside (from Commander in Chief):

By the way, the academic name for this is the Dunning-Kruger Effect [PDF download]. Impress your friends by knowing this! Dunning and Kruger, in a famous series of tests, found that “Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.” Also: “They will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it – be it their own or anyone else’s.”

I tend to view Bush’s pattern of behavior as willful disregard, an intentional act of denigrating real competence due to his own emotional need to deny his inadequacy. But I guess it could just as easily, or more easily, be explained as a completely unconscious process on his part. He might really just believe that he’s competent, and that the toadies he hires based on their willingness to accept and repeat that fiction are also competent. Which doesn’t really change anything in a fundamental way; he’s still an incredible doofus, and a menace to the country as long as he and the people he empowers retain their authority. But the realization might be helpful to me in getting past being really, really pissed off at the guy.

I agree wholeheartedly with Glenn Greenwald’s comments on the al-Marri decision:

Anyone who believes that the President should have the power to order individuals inside the U.S. imprisoned forever with no charges and no process is someone who, by definition, simply does not believe in the political system of the United States.

With the passage of time, more of the real story comes out. Seymour Hersh profiles Antonio Taguba, whom the Army designated to investigate Abu Ghraib. Now that Taguba is retired, he’s spilling the beans about how the whitewash happened: The General’s Report.

The 29% of you who continue to support the Bush administration are really pathetic. I mean that literally: you have my pity.

As hosted by Norm at onegoodmove, Jon Stewart notes Tony Snow’s adroit flip-flop on the issue of whether the White House was (or wasn’t) involved in the firings at the Justice Department: Liar Liar.

I apologize for neglecting lies.com lately. My attention in the last month has turned from the general to the very, very specific; I started a new blog, and have been focusing way too much of my attention on it. The chances that a reader of this site will be interested in it seem fairly small, but here’s a link anyway, for the idly curious: The Sutro Forest Birdcam Blog.

Even so, an occasional item on the antics of the Failure-in-Chief can break through the fog of birdy obsession that surrounds me, and here’s one now: From author Mark Danner, a commencement speech delivered recently to some graduates at UC Berkeley: The Age of Rhetoric.

Danner offers a powerful argument as to the nature of the reality we, and the Bush administration, are inhabiting these days. It’s very, very good. Which is to say, very, very depressing. But important to read and understand, I think.

Sigh. I wonder what the birdies are up to?

Jonathan Chait, writing an op-ed piece in today’s LA Times, does a good job of summing up some of the recent brouhaha over Bush’s politicization of the federal government’s law enforcement arm: Kremlin justice in the U.S.

It’s not about whether Gonzales and his minions lied to Congress and the public. (They did, repeatedly.) It’s not even about whether the Justice Department improperly fired federal prosecutors. (It did, of course.) It’s about whether the Bush administration sought to subvert democracy by turning the federal judicial system into a weapon of the ruling party.

Definitely worth reading, and thinking about.

From reader Robert comes a pointer to this snarky-but-fun op-ed piece by Eugene Robinson: Are they serious?

Gonzales had an op-ed Sunday in The Post that included this positively breathtaking claim: The attorney general of the United States writes that “to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.”

To his knowledge? What on earth does that mean? Is Gonzales in the habit of making decisions without his own knowledge? Does he have multiple-personality issues?

Rove, Wolfowitz and Gonzales are making the last-ditch argument of a cheating husband caught in flagrante: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Alberto Gonzales is due to testify on Thursday, postponed from tomorrow due to the Virginia Tech shootings. I was going to put together a big omnibus reader of all the various Alberto Gonzales items I’ve been consuming, but the invaluable Dan Froomkin at the WaPo has done it for me via his regular bloggy column: Gonzales likely to disappoint.

Judging from his prepared statement and his Washington Post op-ed, Gonzales will continue to insist that, while he doesn’t really know why he fired the attorneys, he simply cannot believe that he did so for improper reasons.

…which is both deliciously snarky and dryly accurate. There’s lots more good stuff in the Froomkin column, so check it out if you’re looking for the latest.

Another Gonzeles item, this one by Justin Rood, and posted at ABC News’ bloggy thingy The Blotter, was this: Is attorney general’s testimony a bad idea?

“It’s suicidal,” said Stanley Brand, one of the top ethics defense lawyers in Washington, D.C. Given the conflicting stories from Gonzales, his aides and top Justice Department officials about why eight U.S. attorneys were fired, and to what extent Gonzales was involved in the process, the attorney general puts himself in criminal jeopardy by testifying under oath, Brand said.

It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for the guy.

Almost.

Glenn Greenwald reviews the interesting pattern whereby the Bush people repeatedly have problems locating important paperwork — at least when that paperwork concerns things they would prefer not to see widely discussed: The Bush administration’s terrible luck with finding documents.

Check out the op-ed in today’s L.A. Times from Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI): Cheney lied. Again. It discusses Cheney’s recent appearance on Rush Limbaugh’s show, and gives a nice summary of the highlights of Cheney’s dishonesty with respect to Iraq and al Qaeda.

Levin’s conclusion:

By all accounts, Dick Cheney is one of the most powerful vice presidents in our history, if you define power as influence over policy. We need to ask ourselves: What does it mean for our country when the vice president’s words lack credibility, but he still wields great power?

I listened to Rush Limbaugh for a few minutes on my way into work the other day (I was stuck in a traffic jam and was patrolling the AM dial trying to find out why). And at this point, I really can only see three possibilities if you choose to listen to his show:

1) You’re aware that he’s completely full of shit, and just listen for entertainment value.

2) You’re aware that he’s full of shit, but you’re so ideologically committed that you believe it’s fine for him to do that. It’s all part of fighting the good fight, and the other side is lying, too, so good for him. Stick it to those liberals.

3) You’re so swaddled in right-wing propaganda that you actually believe Rush is telling the truth.

Have I missed any categories? If anyone reading this actually listens to Rush Limbaugh, can you enlighten me? Thanks.

A minor, but interesting, aspect of the ongoing US Attorney firing scandal has been this statement last Sunday on Meet the Press by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), questioning the qualifications of Carol Lam:

She’s a former law professor; no prosecutorial experience; and the former campaign manager in Southern California for Clinton.

Now, the interesting thing about that is that it apparently is completely untrue: Lam was never a law professor, had lots of previous prosecutorial experience, and was never associated with the campaign of either Clinton. Hatch wasn’t called on it on the show, for which I guess we can thank the kwality of TV “journalism” these days. (Though presumably Tim Russert will have Hatch back on some day and put the quote up on screen, asking him for his response.)

But I guess it could be worse. I’m willing to stipulate that there’s a smallish chance that Hatch was merely in the throes of creeping dementia. And maybe MTP’s failure to point out the falsehood was the result of mere journalistic incompetence. In the case of the following Rush Limbaugh comment from a few days later, though, I don’t see any way around it: The guy was just flat-out lying:

Carol Lam was a campaign manager! These people would normally be made ambassadors, but Clinton put her in as a US attorney.

Um, no. She was not a campaign manager, or anything else, for Clinton, and was appointed as a US Attorney in 2002 by George W. Bush.

If you want to find people willing to tell blatant lies to support your pre-eixsting biases, you can find them. For those of a right-wing bent, Rush Limbaugh serves the purpose nicely. Just don’t expect the grown-ups to pay much attention to your opinions once they recognize where they’re coming from.

A nice roundup is available from Little Thom’s blog: The Logic of Over-the-Top Suspicion.

Update: Interesting followup from Josh Marshall: I become frightened sometimes… It includes this great quote from Orrin Hatch, released today:

My comments about Carol Lam’s record as a U.S. Attorney were accurate, but I misspoke when making the point of discussing politically connected U.S. Attorneys. I accidentally used her name, instead of her predecessor, Alan Bersin, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

Heh. My comments were accurate… except that they were about a completely different person who has no connection with the matter I was actually discussing. Wow, that’s cool. Let’s all try:

Talking to the IRS: Oh, right, yeah. My tax return was accurate… except that it was an accurate accounting of the income of somebody other than me.

Talking to an irate girlfriend: My statement that you have an enormous rear end was accurate… but see, I didn’t actually mean you; I meant Rush Limbaugh.

Talking to a boss: Oh, gee, yeah; that big cash deposit I was supposed to make with our receipts for the week last Friday. I made that deposit, I really did. It’s just that I made it into a different person’s account, rather than the corporate account where it was supposed to go.

From the Washington Post: My National Security Letter Gag Order.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The Bush administration is profoundly anti-democratic. It sounds like hyperbole, but when reading an article like this one, I find myself sincerely believing that Bush’s presidency represents a greater existential threat to our nation and our way of life than a hundred al Qaedas.

A famous truism from the world of open source software development is that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In other words, if you get a large enough pool of people examining a malfunctioning piece of code, there’s going to be someone for whom the solution is obvious.

A nice example of that was provided by Monday’s document dump from the Department of Justice. They released about 3,000 memos, ostensibly to show how the firings of eight US attorneys on December 7, 2007, were not improperly political in nature.

In the good old days, dumping 3,000 memos in the laps of your political opponents might have been a good way to buy some time. Your opponents would have had to read through the memos and figure out what they showed, and what was missing, and by the time they’d done all that the immediate crisis would have passed. You would have had a week or more during which you could have been out there in the media, talking to reporters and appearing on the Sunday chat shows, crowing about how you’d been so open and transparent, and the other guys would only have been able to sputter.

But these days, with folks like the good little muckrakers at Talking Points Memo on the case, it works a little differently. The documents were released late in the day on Monday. By 2:19 a.m. Tuesday, a commenter at TPM had pointed out something very interesting about the document dump: Of the 3,000 memos included, there are none from the 18 days between November 15 and December 4. In other words, during the period when we would have expected some of the most-intense discussion of the December 7 firings, there’s an 18-day gap in the memos.

D’oh!

More about this from Joshua Marshall at TPM: Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18 day gap?

Getting into the meat of what was released, some of the most interesting stuff concerns the brainstorming between various high-ranking Bush appointees at Justice over the reasons for the firings. Kevin Drum summarizes two key points about what the memos show:

• The discussion all seems to be taking place after the fact. If you really did fire these people for performance reasons, shouldn’t there be some documentation of your discussing those reasons before you fired them?
• There were eight US attorneys who were fired. In the case of Bogden, Iglesias, and Lam (and to a lesser extent Charlton and McKay), there seems to be very little substantive criticism of their performance in the after-the-fact discussion. The best they can come up with is vague stuff like “lack of energy” and “underperforming generally” (which contrasts pretty sharply with the glowing reviews these same US attorneys were getting before the firings). So why were these folks on the list? What were the actual reasons for their firing? Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but these are the same US attorneys who had been the strongest in pursuing political corruption cases — including against Republican lawmakers.

More at washingtonmonthly.com: Why were they fired?

In the face of all this, Bush tried to make a deal yesterday with Congress. He’d allow Gonzales, Rove, and others involved in the firings to talk to them. In return, Congress would have to agree to the following:

• The talks would take place out of site of the public, and off the record. There would be no reporters, no cameras, no transcripts.
• The officials would not testify under oath.
• They would only talk about internal communications at the Justice Department, or between Justice and the White House, or between Justice (or the White House) and Congress. They would not talk about internal communications at the White House.
• Congress would promise not to issue any subsequent subpoenas in the matter.

So, summing up, the deal was: No one else gets to know what we say, and we get to lie, and we don’t have to talk about the most important stuff, and you have to promise to leave us alone afterwards.

Allow me to propose the following response:

Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger… and you give me my phone call.

Or, more specifically, “I give you these subpoenas, and you give me your testimony.”

In a way, this US attorney firing story is small potatoes. I can understand the Bush people not giving it much of their attention until recently; it’s penny ante wrongdoing compared to some of the really bad stuff they’ve done.

I was listening to Elvis Mitchell interviewing Rory Kennedy yesterday. (Kennedy is the documentary filmmaker who made Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, which is currently showing on HBO.) And then I was listening to the This American Life episode By Proxy, in which Iraqi translator Basim talked about the impact that Abu Ghraib had on Iraqi attitudes toward Americans.

It brought home to me that we are going to need something like a truth commission to undue the damage of the Bush years. Leaving aside the practical matter of cleaning up all the messes that Bush’s policies have created, we’re going to have to deal with significant collective psychological damage as a result of all the lying that’s been done. I don’t want to go over the top in the comparison, but I honestly think we’re going to need something like what South Africa did after apartheid, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, just to try to heal some of the damage that this man’s horrible, horrible policies have done to our collective sense of what America is, and what it stands for.

The Bush administration is very badly broken code, and it’s going to take a lot of eyeballs to get the bugs out. Congress has started that job, but there’s a lot more work to do before we’re finished.

Update: Following up on the 18-day-gap thing, I found this weblog posting from Shakespeare’s Sister interesting: The hidden scandal within the prosecutor purge. It seems there’s a deliberate avoidance of using email at the highest levels of the White House, presumably to make oversight of the sort Congress is trying to do now harder to accomplish.

Later update: Joshua Marshall & Co. have now found two emails that actually appeared during the 18-day “gap”. So it’s not a complete gap, but rather just a very, very dry spell. My own sense at this point is that it might not be as sinister as their having actually held back emails from that time, but instead could simply be a reflection of the fact that, as noted above, the highest-ranking players routinely avoid the use of email, or at least of email sent through servers subject to presidential records retention policies. So things got really quiet then, at least according to the historical record, because the action had shifted to people who specifically avoid allowing their words to fall into the historical record.

I’d be remiss if I let this one go without linking to it. Kevin Drum (A purgegate primer) doesn’t think much of Michael Kinsley’s (Been Bloggin’ So Long…Lordy, Lordy) comments on the US attorney firings and their aftermath. But say what you will about Kinsley, the guy can seriously turn a phrase:

We’re all in agreement — you, me, the Washington Post, even the Wall Street Journal — that the administration’s response to this controversy has been comically mendacious. Volleys of lies come in wave after wave, like the trench soldiers of World War One. They get mowed down and the administration just sends in more.

There’s actually a larger argument taking place, with Kinsley saying that the Bush people are so reflexively dishonest that we shouldn’t take their lies as an indication that something worse is going on, and Drum saying no, you idiot, that’s exactly what we should take their lies to mean. Either way, though, it’s a cool metaphor.

Check out Doyle McManus’s article in the LA Times today about the risk Bush faces over the continued Congressional investigation into the US attorney firings: Gonzales’ plight puts Bush at risk. It’s fun mainly because of the large number of memorable quotes it contains.

“I want you to be clear here: Don’t go dropping it at the president’s door,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday when asked about Bush’s involvement.

I believe that’s what’s known in the trade as a “non-denial denial.” It musters the sense of outrage required to allow the faithful to sympathize with the unfairly maligned Bush (there are still Bush faithful, presumably), while not actually saying anything specific along the lines of “no, the president was not involved in discussions about whether to fire US attorneys for being unwilling to pervert the criminal justice system to benefit the Republican party.”

See, the problem for Tony Snow specifically, and for defenders of Bush generally, is that there are two separate stories they are trying to advance simultaneously, and the stories are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, they want to maintain that there was nothing wrong with Bush firing the eight US attorneys, because they “serve at the pleasure of the president,” so Bush has the authority to fire them at any time. While Gonzales and Bush have acknowledged that “mistakes were made,” they’ve tried to limit the applicability of those remarks to the misleading statements made by Gonzales in his sworn testimony before Congress. It wasn’t a mistake to fire the attorneys, this storyline goes; it was only a mistake for Gonzales to lie to Congress about the motivations for the firings afterward.

But the president’s supporters also want to make it seem like Bush wasn’t directly involved in the firings. They want to halt the spread of the scandal’s damage, so there’s an effort underway to build a cofferdam around the misdeeds, making them out to be all [former Gonzales Chief of Staff] Kyle Sampson’s fault. Or maybe, if they absolutely have to go that far, Alberto Gonzales’ and Harriet Miers’ fault. Or even, God forbid, Karl Rove’s fault. But absolutely not George Bush’s fault.

But that storyline conflicts with the first. If Bush wasn’t involved in the firings, then they don’t fall under the “serve at the pleasure of the president” language.

It’s all very vexing, I’m sure, for the people in the White House who want to make this story go away. And because those damn Democrats in Congress keep holding hearings, the darned reporters get to keep writing stories about it. Stories with fun quotes like these:

Gonzales and his aides initially told Congress that the prosecutors were fired because their performance was unsatisfactory. But documents released last week showed that officials also discussed whether the U.S. attorneys had been “loyal Bushies,” in the words of one Justice Department e-mail.

Loyalty over competence in the staffing decisions of the Bush administration — where have we heard about that before?

Early reports had indicated that the idea of the firings originated with Miers, but on Friday, Snow said that may not be the case. “At this juncture, people have hazy memories,” he said.

Oh, I’ll bet.

“This is one more chapter in the defense of Karl Rove,” said one leading GOP figure who insisted on anonymity because he was speaking ill of the president’s most powerful aide. “This isn’t accountability, it’s damage control, and it’s protection for Karl.”

But check out this fun quote:

“There’s no suggestion of illegality in anything [Rove] has done,” [former Reagan US attorney Joseph E.] DiGenova said. “He wasn’t the one making inaccurate representations on Capitol Hill. I would think that would trump any demand [from Congress] for testimony.”

Well, right. Karl wasn’t the one making inaccurate representations to Congress. Because Karl wasn’t the one talking to Congress. Now Congress is asking him for his version of events. If he goes before them and comes clean, and there’s no there there, great. Until he does that, though, claims that he’s above reproach because no one’s shown that he’s lied to Congress are kind of silly.

“The incompetence has been amazing,” DiGenova charged. “Managing crises, beginning with preventing crises, is what life in Washington is about…. But these guys didn’t have a plan ready to answer questions once the problem became public. They still don’t have their stories straight.

“There are too many Stepford husbands in this administration: young men who are perfectly coiffed and have great clothes, but very few of them have ever been in a courtroom,” he added.

Haha. “Stepford husbands.” It isn’t explicitly tied to Gonzales, but if there was ever an apt characterization of the guy, with his helmet hair and smarmy smile, and (especially) his slavish pursuit of the personal and political interests of George W. Bush, as distinct from the interests of the nation and the law that one would hope an attorney general would be giving his attention to, that’s it.