July 26, 2007

FBI DIRECTOR SAYS GONZALES LIED! Oh, wait, no he didn't... but we wish he had

Hatched by Dafydd

Here is the shock headline from AP: "FBI Director Contradicts Gonzales"... the perfect "gotcha" by the elite media against the Bush administration, the smoking gun that could bring down the president -- just the way the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon.

And this is the entirety of AP's explanation of the staggering charge... which, if true, could lead to Gonzales' indictment, firing, disgrace, and possibly prison time for perjury and contempt of Congress -- all of which four Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee plus the Democratic Majority Leader devoutly believe Gonzales (and Bush, Cheney, and Karl Rove) deserves:

The head of the FBI contradicted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' sworn testimony and Senate Democrats requested a perjury investigation Thursday in a fresh barrage against the truthfulness of President Bush's embattled longtime friend and aide.

Wow, now there's specificity! Upon close examination, however, it appears that this is not a report... it's their own conclusion; AP concludes that Mueller's testimony and Gonzales' testimony are in conflict... and rather than report that "Gonzales Contradicts FBI Director," they decide to report it the way they did.

The New York Times is more forthcoming:

The dispute over the truthfulness of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales reached a new intensity today as the F.B.I. Director, Robert S. Mueller 3d, contradicted Mr. Gonzales’s sworn testimony before a Senate committee.

Mr. Mueller told the House Judiciary Committee that the Bush administration’s secret eavesdropping program was the main topic at an encounter in the hospital room of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on March 10, 2004, contrary to what Mr. Gonzales told a Senate panel on Tuesday....

In his testimony before the Senate panel on Tuesday, Mr. Gonzales said the subject in the hospital room was “intelligence activities” under debate in the administration, but not the secret eavesdropping program.

But Mr. Mueller contradicted that version of events today, several hours after four Senate Democrats called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether Mr. Gonzales perjured himself before Congress.

Even the Times dances around the real question; the reader really has to dig to find out the trivial nature of the supposed contradiction: The real question is -- exactly which "secret eavesdropping program" was the "main topic" of a four year old conversation?

The particular program that the Times means, and what they think Mueller meant, is the NSA-al Qaeda international telephone intercept... the one which the Times itself deliberately blew in December 2005. For future reference, we shall refer to this particular program, per la Casa Blanca, as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

After two years of the Justice Department's routinely certifying the legality of the TSP -- and, according to Gonzales, other intelligence programs that have not yet been leaked -- then-Attorney General John Ashcroft suddenly fell ill. While he was in the hospital undergoing gall-bladder surgery, his assistant, James Comey, was in charge.

At that moment, the annual request for continued Justice Department legal certification came from the White House... and Comey, without waiting for Ashcroft himself to come back to work (there was no particular urgency about the request), took it upon himself to refuse, on behalf of the Department of Justice, to certify that some NSA covert-surveillance program was legal. Comey did not supply any reason for the abrupt denial.

Then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales worried that this may have reflected Comey's own discomfort with the program or programs, rather than the attorney general's. So Gonzales, who understood that Ashcroft was out of surgery and recovering, hied himself off to the hospital to ask him whether Comey spoke for the AG or just for himself.

Here is where it gets murky: current Attorney General Gonzales explicitly said that the main topic of his conversation with Ashcroft was not the TSP but a different, similar NSA program. He says there was no "internal dissent" about the TSP.

But along comes FBI Director Robert Mueller:

Mr. Mueller was testifying at an F.B.I. oversight hearing when he was questioned by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas.

“Did you have an understanding that the conversation was on T.S.P.?” the Congresswoman asked, using the shorthand for terrorist surveillance program.

“I had an understanding the discussion was on an N.S.A. program, yes,” Mr. Mueller replied, using the abbreviation for the National Security Agency. A moment later, he added that the discussion was on the warrantless eavesdropping program “that has been much discussed, yes.”

The conflict in accounts could be significant, because Mr. Gonzales’s critics have accused him of trying to convey the false impression that the N.S.A. program had spawned no serious dissension within the Bush administration.

Let's drill down a bit here...

  • Did Mueller testify that the discussion was about TSP? No, he never said TSP; he said "an N.S.A. program" which had been "much discussed."
  • So Mueller testified that the conversation was about a much-discussed NSA program? Actually, not even that much; he testified that that was his "understanding."
  • What is the difference? Very simple -- yet evidently too tricky for either AP or the Times to get into explicitly: Robert Mueller was not present during that hospital discussion. His "understanding" was formed ex-post facto by subsequent conversations with other people.

Mueller arrived later, after the discussion was over and Gonzales was gone; he talked to Attorney General Ashcroft. Somehow, he gained the impression that the main topic of conversation was about the TSP. But he did not gain that impression from hearing the conversation himself but from talking to Ashcroft.

  • Oh, now I get it... so Mueller testified that Ashcroft told him that was the subject of the conversation? No; nobody has reported that Mueller so testified... not even the Times. Only that his conversation with Ashcroft left him with the impression that the "main topic" was the TSP.
  • Well what exactly does the Times say about what Mueller said was the source of his understanding? They don't say.

You don't say! So on the basis of the gut feeling about the topic of a conversation that the feeler did not in fact witness, four very liberal Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- Charles Schumer (D-NY, 100%), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA, 90%), Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI -- no rating as yet; he replaced "Republican" Lincoln Chafee) -- plus Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%), have demanded a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate Alberto Gonzales for -- perjury!

There are many possible ways to square the two testimonies (before two different committees) without resorting to the absurd claim of perjury:

  • Mueller may have been told by Ashcroft a different program; but since it didn't mean anything to Mueller, and since more than four years have passed -- during which the TSP received extraordinary attention in the elite media -- Mueller's memory may have been contaminated without him even knowing it.

This is actually a very common phenomenon that we have all experienced: As I believe Isaac Asimov said once, We all tend to remember things, not the way they happened, but the way they should have happened. It's precisely the reason we sequester juries and certain witnesses in court trials: To avoid their memories being tainted by exposure to news and discussion.

But there are other possibilities as well:

  • Ashcroft -- knowing he was in an unsecured location where the walls could have ears, likely did not actually name the still secret program. He could have said merely "a secret NSA surveillance program"... and Mueller may have leapt to a conclusion.
  • There could have been multiple topics covered in the conversation; Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft may honestly differ about which of several topics was "the main topic" of the discussion.
  • There may still be confusion, even now, over what, exactly, Mueller meant by his testimony.

On that last point, consider this earlier AP version which (sourcing trouble alert!) NewsMax.com reprints:

"Did you have an understanding that that the conversation was on TSP?" asked Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. TSP stands for terrorist surveillance program.

"I had an understanding the discussion was on a NSA program, yes," Mueller answered.

Jackson asked again: "We use 'TSP,' we use 'warrantless wiretapping,' so would I be comfortable in saying that those were the items that were part of the discussion?"

"The discussion was on a national NSA program that has been much discussed, yes," Mueller responded.

So if we assume (a) that NewsMax did not literally fabricate this quotation, and (b) that AP actually knew what it was talking about, and (c) that AP was not subtlely trying to undermine the Democratic attack on Gonzales, then we must conclude that Mueller did not, in fact, "[add] that the discussion was on the warrantless eavesdropping program 'that has been much discussed, yes.'"

All that the earlier AP piece claims is that Mueller testified that the discussion was on "A national NSA program that has been much discussed." The indefinite article, not the definite... or as Richard Dreyfus says in the movie Jaws, "you caught a shark, not the shark."

In any case, "discussed" by whom? Nobody asked Mueller, he did not volunteer what he meant, and AP is silent; we don't know whether he meant "much discussed" by the elite media -- or (for example) "much discussed" in various congressional committees. In other words, even the phrase "much discussed" is ambigous.

If the Senate Judiciary Committee were really interested in finding out whether there is even a contradiction between Mueller and Gonzales, then before screaming for a special prosecutor, they could subpoena Mueller and point-blank ask him -- in secret testimony, away from cameras -- whether he means that his "understanding" was that the main topic was the TSP; and also exactly what gave him that impression. Then subpoena private citizen John Ashcroft and ask him what he remembers it being about.

Finally, according to earlier accounts (I would love a link to this), Gonzales actually offered to tell the Senate J-Com exactly what program he remembers the discussion being about... but Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT, 95%) actually turned Gonzales down. He demanded that the attorney general reveal the program to the committee in open session with TV cameras rolling.

That is, "Leaky" Leahy demanded that Gonzales "blow" a hitherto undisclosed classified anti-terrorist program.

If Democrats really wanted to get to the bottom of this, they could subpoena Mueller, Ashcroft, and accept Gonzales' offer to reveal exactly what program he thought the discussion was about. Then they could ask Ashcroft whether, with prompting, Gonzales might be right... and ask Mueller whether, after having his memory jogged, Gonzales may be accurate and truthful.

Then, if everyone but Gonzales says it was about the TSP, you might have a basis for a referral; but even then, I would be skeptical, since perjury requires the intent to deceive... and this could be an honest misremembering by Gonzales, Mueller, or Ashcroft.

But the J-Com Dems chose not to take this route; they didn't want clarity, they wanted a headline. Thus, on the basis of impressions and feelings, four ultra-liberal Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee plus the Majority Leader -- each of whom is on record as hating Bush and all that Bush has done in response to 9/11 -- demand that a new "Patrick Fitzgerald" be appointed to prosecute Gonzales and attempt to put him in prison and ruin his life.

This is the politics of personal destruction... Democrat style.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 26, 2007, at the time of 4:40 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this hissing: http://biglizards.net/mt3.36/earendiltrack.cgi/2288

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference FBI DIRECTOR SAYS GONZALES LIED! Oh, wait, no he didn't... but we wish he had:

» Gonzales, Intelligence, and Perjury: the Penultimate Word from Big Lizards
Today, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales received his best testimonial yet from the pen (all right, word processor program) of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell (all right, from some flunky who actually does the typing). Our previous rep... [Read More]

Tracked on August 1, 2007 5:05 PM

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Colin

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that these jerks are going to end up blowing another NSA program? From this point on, the media focus is going to be on "what's the other program?", and either some Senator, some staffer, or some Bush-hater in the IC is going to leak to the NYT or WP the exact nature of this previously-undisclosed program.

The above hissed in response by: Colin [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 26, 2007 6:19 PM

The following hissed in response by: cdquarles

Colin,

I second your motion. Pat "Leaky" Leahy has a history of blowing sensitive programs/info.

The above hissed in response by: cdquarles [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 26, 2007 6:45 PM

The following hissed in response by: Seaberry

Colin,

I third your motion. Dafydd broke that down quite well.

The above hissed in response by: Seaberry [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 26, 2007 7:13 PM

The following hissed in response by: hunter

How pathetic. I am waiting for Gonzales to pull one of those speeches like the one that brought down McCarthy and really let the dhimmies have it.
Only the media will probably report it as 'criminal AG refuses to cooperate with brave democrats'.
We are watching truly irresponsible people, mostly dhimmies, work hard to wreck this country.
And the fools may succeed.
Leahy is not even trying to be sincere, and Schumer would not know how.
Jackson Lee is just reading lines someone wrote for her.
This is disgusting, and it is time for the President to stomp it out a long time ago.

The above hissed in response by: hunter [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 26, 2007 8:45 PM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

I don't know which is more disturbing, the preoccupation with witch hunts on the part of the Democrats, or the willingness of some on the right to aid them.

The above hissed in response by: Terrye [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 3:54 AM

The following hissed in response by: Davod

Terrye:

Redstate is an ideal place to view the republithugs at their best:

It is time to take Fredo out

These idjits take, without verification, every scrap the MSM and Democrats spit out and then attack the object of the villification.

I do believe some have lost sight of the big picture.

The above hissed in response by: Davod [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 5:39 AM

The following hissed in response by: howardhughes

The Gonzolas Gala may yet turn to bite the Democrats as the public gets tired of Lead-head Leahy, scheming Schumer and specious Spector beating up on a kindly appearing Hispanic for what reason no one seems to understand. What next. Maybe take the President to court because his dog soiled the Oval Office carpet? The Senate is indeed becoming a joke to the world and these three bozo's play starring roles in the comedy.

The above hissed in response by: howardhughes [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 6:48 AM

The following hissed in response by: Big D

But you see, if Bush = Hitler then it all makes sense. Wouldn't you do anything in your power to get rid of...Hitler? Lie? Cheat? Grandstand? C'mon, we're talking about Hitler here! For God's Sake HITLER!

It is sad to watch the mentally ill wield this much power.

The above hissed in response by: Big D [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 9:24 AM

The following hissed in response by: S.B.

Subpoenas are not something that congress should just go and issue whenever they want. A subpoena is supposed to be something that you use when bush or Gonzales or Bolton or Miers refuse to cooperate with earlier request. When the administration does not cooperate until it gets a subpoena, (and sometimes not even then,) it gums up the process, hinders transparency, and gets in the way of justice! As far as information not being appropriate for disclosure, Congress can keep their mouth shut just as well as anybody else. But unlike anybody else, they have a constitutional right to know. Bush just doesn’t want to be accountable because he knows that he has broken the law.

The above hissed in response by: S.B. [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 10:37 AM

The following hissed in response by: Big D

Ah, S.B. You are at door to enlightenment, but you refuse to see. Perhaps you should educate yourself on the concept of a "perjury trap."

Here is how the scam works. You haul in a bunch of people to publicly testify to congress on...well what they testify about really doesn't matter. Hopefully some complex secret government program that they have trouble being completely forthright about in front of the cameras. You threaten them with all sorts of nasty consequences to frazzle them as much as possible. You call them back several times to give them more opportunities to contradict themselves. You ask them about events and conversations that occurred months, or better yet, years ago. Hopefully undocumented stuff so you can create a he said/she said contradiction.

Eventually someone will mess up. Whap! Perjury to congress no less! Whether they actually did anything illegal is suddenly beside the point. The testimony itself was a crime!

The Bush administration has repeatedly offered to testify to congress on anything and everything in private, but you see, that is not what this is all about. Perjury requires formal public testimony.

McCarthy did more or less the same thing in the 1950s that we are seeing now. Ruining lives, forcing people to name names, all for activities that were often not even illegal. But illegallity was not the point in those hearings, and it isan't here either.

Sadly the Edward R. Murrow's of today are busy egging the Senate on.

But it is all for the greater good, so that makes it okay, right? You've been told that Bush = Hitler, right? He's the most arrogant abuser of power in our nation's history, right? So who cares who gets squished and abused, as long as Bush and Cheney are prevented from serving out the last year and a half or so of their term.

Right?

The above hissed in response by: Big D [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 1:29 PM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

What law has Bush broken? The problem with the Bushbashers is they begin with the premise that Bush has broken the law and then they set about the witch hunt designed to create said broken law.

In fact it is the kind of thing Joe McCarthy used to do in the early 50's until his own party yanked him in because he was getting out of control.

Well, it is time to yank someone in again.

So, once again, what law has Bush broken?

The above hissed in response by: Terrye [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 2:25 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

S.B.:

As far as information not being appropriate for disclosure, Congress can keep their mouth shut just as well as anybody else. But unlike anybody else, they have a constitutional right to know.

Actually, wrong on both counts:

  • Congress is notorious for leaking classified information, as you might expect from a body of 535 people, half of whom violent oppose everything the Executive is doing -- and each of whom, Republican or Democrat, believes he would make a better president than whoever currently occupies la Casa Blanca.
  • And no, Congress emphatically does not have the "constitutional right to know" the private advice that the president's closest advisors give him (or even each other). That's why we have the legal concept of "executive privilege."

There is voluminous caselaw on the second point.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 2:48 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Big D, Terrye:

Will you guys please stop slandering Joe McCarthy? In fact, McCarthy in the 50s (and Nixon, et al, in the 40s) were pursuing real, actual crimes: Soviet infiltration of the American government under FDR... which today, even leftist historians admit was rampant.

If you want to see some of the voluminous evidence showing that, at core, McCarthy was right, read Ann Coulter's book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. If your knowledge of the era and its investigations derives mainly from what you were taught in public school (including public university) -- or even most private schools -- you will be staggered.

You can also read McCarthy and His Enemies, by William F. Buckley, jr. and Brett Bozell -- though we know much more today than we did in 1954.

McCarthy was basically right: he was a bit ham-fisted as an investigator (Nixon was much better)... but Congress had every right (in fact, the duty) to use its oversight powers to ferret out the actual Soviet spies who had been invited into the Executive branch by Red Frank Roosevelt.

And Congress today would have the right to investigate actual allegations of criminality in the Bush administration. Except they're not: They're investigating why the president, who has complete authority to hire and fire U.S. Attorneys, chose not to extend the tenures of nine of them when their first terms ran out.

Nobody has even seriously alleged an underlying crime; certainly not one that would meet the test of United States v. Nixon to overcome the presumption of general and specific executive privilege.

Please don't fall into the Democratic trap of using poor Joe McCarthy as an all-purpose poster boy for some power-mad thug; he is far more sinned against than sinning.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 3:11 PM

The following hissed in response by: JenLArt

Dafydd, excellent!
I can only add that because of Nixon's success on the HUAC, the Left had to get serious payback and this was (the largely cooked-up Media monster of) Watergate.

The above hissed in response by: JenLArt [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 27, 2007 8:48 PM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

Dafydd:

I read a lot about joe McCarthy in David McCullough's book on Harry Truman. I do not doubt that there communists in the State Department, in fact being a communist was a tad chic back in the day, but McCarthy's tactics did nothing to aid his cause.

In fact he spent more time using that fear of communism to harass the Truman administration than he actually finding and ferreting out honest to God communists. That is why his own party turned on him.

That is not slander. That is just a fact.

The above hissed in response by: Terrye [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2007 3:25 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Terrye:

In fact he spent more time using that fear of communism to harass the Truman administration than he actually finding and ferreting out honest to God communists. That is why his own party turned on him.

That is not slander. That is just a fact.

Like Rick Blaine, you've been misinformed.

David McCullough is a pop historian; like Truman Capote, a "non-fiction novelist." McCullough is superficial and dramatic.

He's also fairly liberal. It's no surprise that he would take the side of the subject of his book, Harry Truman, versus the senator that every Democrat knows is the personification of evil.

McCarthy was an alcoholic whose first great cause in the Senate was Social Security; when that passed, he looked around for another cause and found anticommunism. But that doesn't mean he was wrong; in fact, I cannot think of a single person he named as a Communist who was not, in fact, a Communist.

The Left has lied about McCarthy the same way it lied about Reagan and currently lies about President Bush. Do you actually think Stalinists were less prone to mendacity than today's Hollywood weenies?

Honestly, you need to read more about this subject -- and from a different perspective than you have done so far. By design, cunning, or dumb luck, Joseph McCarthy latched onto one of the gravest threats that ever faced the American government.

It's not just that there were a few Communists here and there: Stalin had an organized conspiracy to infiltrate Stalinist agents into the highest levels of the American government... and under FDR -- whose ideas on Communism are accurately summed up by the movie Mission to Moskow, made under a direct order from Roosevelt to Jack Warner, from the bestselling memoirs of FDR's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies -- Stalin largely succeeded.

I understand you're a moderate Republican; that doesn't mean you must reflexively denigrate anticommunists like McCarthy, Nixon, and Kefauver, Buckley and Bozell, Rand, Reagan, and Heinlein.

There really, really was a largely successful Communist conspiracy, stretching back to the 1920s, to infiltrate and seize control of entire departments within the USG. And were it not for people like McCarthy (and Truman, for that matter), we might have found ourselves in the same political bind as the French today, where the Communist Party of France is one of the most powerful political forces in that otherwise free country.

No matter what David McCullough (or Harlan Ellison) says.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2007 6:03 AM

The following hissed in response by: Seaberry

McCarthy never even scratched the surface, he only was able to see or point out the obvious ‘full-grown-plants’, and may have not even known about the ‘Seeds-of-Communism’. Sure, he saw some government and movie industry ‘full-grown-plants’, but the school systems went basically unnoticed, and it was the school systems that cared for ‘young-sprouts’, and prepared them for jobs in government, unions, media, etc. I don’t know what generation of ‘seeds’ that Dan Rather and Stephen Glass were in, but this Scott Thomas Beauchamp and Elspeth Reeve are probably great examples of the new class of ‘full-grown-plants’.

The saying goes, “a socialist is only one step from being a communist”, but Nick Cohen suggests that socialists may be sandwiched in between communism and fascism, and that many of the socialist leaders have chosen fascism. Certainly, at the very least, the dividing line between all three of them is rather thin…

Nick Cohen's new book is entitled, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way:

According to Cohen, this claim is now invalid. The collapse of socialism in the Eighties and the rise of what he calls Islamic fascism have changed everything. Cohen asserts that the left's hatred of America means it is no longer able to tell the difference between right and wrong. It suffers from the syndrome identified by Bertrand Russell 80 years ago, a belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed. This dogma has led left-wing writers and activists to make fellow cause with bigots, murderers, terrorists, gay-bashers, women-haters and the most dangerous kind of anti-semite.

The above hissed in response by: Seaberry [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2007 9:00 AM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

Dafydd:

I don't know, but the book by McCullough on John Adams was very good.

And my feelings about McCarthy are not only a result of the book he wrote on Truman. It is not as if I never heard of the man. I grew up in the 50's.

BTW, McCullough did not portray McCarthy the way you said he did, it was not just about Truman vs McCarthy. As far as that is concerned McCullough did not give the impression that there were no communists, only that McCarthy was not doing a very good job of finding them and that in the process of looking he was making life difficult for Truman who was not a communist. In fact Truman like Bush had to take hell from just about everyone.

My only point is that McCarthy's tactics were not only not successful, they backfired on him. So much so that he has become a poster boy for the 20th century witch hunt.

The above hissed in response by: Terrye [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2007 4:13 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Terrye:

My only point is that McCarthy's tactics were not only not successful, they backfired on him. So much so that he has become a poster boy for the 20th century witch hunt.

The same can be said for Ronald Reagan; but that doesn't make him unsuccessful. In fact, both Reagan and McCarthy were targeted by the forces of leftness, not because they were unsuccessful, but because they were successful.

McCarthy was taken down in a hit job by attorney for the Army Joseph Welch, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, using the infamous line, "have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

Terrye, do you know what prompted that plaintive cry from Counselor Welch? What were you taught in school or at home about that seminal moment?

This exchange has been mischaracterized as part of one of the most vicious smear campaigns the elite media and academe has ever undertaken... probably second only to the vilification of Whittaker Chambers.

I will be quite surprised if you know what actually occurred... I sure didn't until reading the Coulter book (she went back to the actual transcript of the hearing, rather than rely upon later liberal revisionism).

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 28, 2007 6:44 PM

The following hissed in response by: Big D

Er.

I brought McCarthy up as an example to fellows like SB - Libs revile McCarthy and yet resort to similar (and worse) tactics when it suits them. But principals are just the moral clothing we wear, to be discarded when fashions change. At least of you're a Democrat.

How many movies has Hollywood made about HUAC? 10? 15? They are still making them. 'Tis a strange obsession. I doubt any of them have ever made money - but they assuage liberal feelings.

My take on McCarthy - correct on most counts, but thuggish in execution. Oh yeah, and the Rosenbergs were guilty. Just thought I'd mention that. Did you know that Julius Resenberg's agent code name was "Liberal"?

The above hissed in response by: Big D [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 30, 2007 10:04 AM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

I do not read Coulter.

The above hissed in response by: Terrye [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 31, 2007 4:43 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Terrye:

I do not read Coulter.

Well, that's a bit of a drawback when she happens to have written the best compilation of what we currently know about an important era of American history.

But why don't you read Coulter? I assume you don't like her, but don't you read books by people you dislike or even despise, if those books contain valuable information?

I've ploughed my way through some of Marx and Lenin, much of Antonio Gramsci, some of Keynes' the General Theory, and even some of Jimmy Carter's writings. I read the NYT and the Washington Post, I read speeches by Schumer and Leahy, and I even try to untangle the bizarre syntax and Tourette's-like outbursts from the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

I sometimes have to turn pages with one hand while pinching my nose with the other; but betimes, even people I hate say things I ought to know they're saying.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 31, 2007 5:53 PM

The following hissed in response by: DaveR

Can someone just explain to me, using simple words, why it is a TERRIBLE THING for Gonzales to visit Ashcroft in the hospital, but it is perfectly okay for Mueller to do so, by his own admission, only a few minutes later? I must have missed some critical distinction.

And why is the Director of the FBI so evidently obfuscating in his testimony? He makes Gonzales sound like Mr. Straight-talk!

The above hissed in response by: DaveR [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 5, 2007 10:03 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for hissing in, . Now you can slither in with a comment, o wise. (sign out)

(If you haven't hissed a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Hang loose; don't shed your skin!)


Remember me unto the end of days?


© 2005-2009 by Dafydd ab Hugh - All Rights Reserved