After struggling through 30 minutes of stone-cold lies from Condoleezza Rice on Meet the Press, time for a breath of real air on an historic day in which a cancerous epidemic of fairy tales is set to unfold. Over the course of the afternoon there will be adequate time to reflect on the here-to-the-moon stack of the unacceptable revelations of the past week. We will analyze Donald Rumsfeld’s command post view-from-the-moon, and assess Cheney’s progress in designing the new Iraqi parliament (he’d make a great Vice), as well as some of the Veep’s business-related priorities in the oil-fields of Oman following updated and expanded guidelines for torture in undisclosed location. Finally, taking the stage tonight to discuss the “actual big news of the day,” being imagined in Iraq, our very own PresidentBot George the W.th Bush.
Meet the Press (link to MSNBC video | transcript) | Crooksandliars
As Marty Kaplan documents, Secretary Rice painted herself unaccountable and without semblance of a clue as to her participation in criminal activities, declaring “I am not a lawyer” no less than three times.
She shrugged off Russert when he asked if she’d testify under oath, but when reminded that she was National Security Adviser to the President in October 2001, when Bush began to secretively wiretap domestic persons in violation of the 4th Amendment, she said:
“Tim, I’m not going to talk about my role as national security adviser, which, of course, is not a constitutionally confirmed role, and I’m sure that there will be issues there…. My concerns were the president’s concerns at the time, that he’d be able to use his authorities to detect and thereby protect the country from a terrorist attack.
Translation: Condi implies that she can lie about her former role, which was not protected by a Constitutional oath, regardless of her more recent swearing-in as second in succession. Irregardless, she was just catering to the president as implored by her CEO mandated hand-puppetry clause; is completely innocent and unaware of these “issues” that she is “sure” will lead maybe even to Supreme Court.
Russert poses the Supreme Court question to which Condi sadly replies with the air of utter helplessness that has come to define her political decline:
“I don’t know, Tim, this is not my call.”
It is tragic, and reminiscent of the fate of W’s first Sec. of State, that Rice’s youthful wisdom and drive would be so completely muted by the BushCo Machine. And if she was forced to do anything illegal, nobody told her and how would she know anyway: “Again Tim, I am not a lawyer….”
firedoglake’s got the dirt on Condi’s FISA cluelessness as stated on the show.
Finally – we get the lie to top all lies with a cherry on top. Yes, its “you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me” time as we bring you: It wasn’t just about WMD… it was about Iraq’s role in 9/11:
Now, yes, much of the intelligence was wrong. But that Saddam Hussein was a threat, I think, is incontrovertible, because even–as someone who had used weapons of mass destruction before against his own people and against his neighbors, in whom we were still in a kind of suspended state of war, flying no-fly zones to the north and the south, him shooting at our aircraft, his continued threat to the region and to his neighbors–and this horrible dictator, who was filling mass graves, sitting in the world’s most volatile region, a region out of which this ideology of hatred that we experienced on September 11 had come–and, by the way, paying suicide bombers to go in and commit atrocities in Israel as well–he was a threat. After 17-plus resolutions, after 12 years, it was time to take care of Saddam Hussein.
Which begs the question: After how many years will it be “time to take care of” Osama bin Laden? after all, isn’t HE the at-large leader of al-Qaeda, the “stateless group” so tricky that it requires our president to illegally monitor peoples on “American territory” to save us from anything but ourselves?
SpinCounter:
Secretary Rice mentioned “9/11 Comission”: 3 times (scout prime fact-checks this reference).
she abused the september [the] eleventh date, or “9/11” (a voice, event, September 11, …taught us…, “what we learned from…,” “before we saw the twin towers and the Pentagon go down.” etc): 10 times
Number of days in the history of American democracy in which preemptively investigating U.S. citizens without probable cause and official authorization has been considered legal: Today would be Day 4.
Extended Remix:
Stop the Bleating contends that its hard to “fathom what it must be like to be responsible for protecting the life of every man, woman and child in a country of nearly 300,000,000 people”.
At the same time, stb queries: “If a sitting president orders possibly illegal activities and then declares those activities classified…. is the decision solely the government’s to make and, if so, would you be comfortable with a Hillary Clinton or Al Gore administration wielding that much unilateral power?”
Mahablog chronicles the world wide web…. of LIES in “They Hate Us for Our Freedoms.”
Several bloggers, including proteinwisdom, assert that the constitutionality of this type of surveillance is debatable as it lies in a grey area. Besides, is it REALLY that surprising?
Fafblog‘s got the memo, “there’s no war in warrant”:
In case you haven’t been paying attention, most of America disapproves of America’s war in Iraq and disapproves of America’s president. That means America is providing aid and comfort to America’s enemies, and that can only mean one thing: America is guilty of treason.
The main point of partisan debate is rooted in this post by Al Maviva at Cold Fury, (“Much Ado About Nothing,” is the title of the very active thread) and Glenn Greenwald’s critical take on the statute which all but subpoenas the Prez. Ezra Klein simplifies the issue in a spot-on 2 graf perspective post.
EXTRA CREDIT: Plucked this gem from John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press Review :
“THE LORD JESUS CHRIST IS GOING TO COME ON TIME IF WE JUST WAIT.”
–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; cited in Harold Bloom, ?Reflections in the Evening Land? (Guardian, December 17)
Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray today published two documents at his website despite a ban imposed by British officials. Murray, whose book regarding these documents has been blocked for months by the UK Foreign Office, recently likened Uzbekistan to North Korea in this Guardian article.