The Plamegate Cheat Sheet Why I've Become a Political Blogger (again) since the Libby indictment

Introduction: A little less than a year after 9/11, the Bush Administration abandoned its pledge to get Osama Bin Laden, got bored with re-building Afghanistan, and began to beat the drums for war in Iraq. The build-up was predictable and inevitable, perhaps, but as the Bush Administration began to present evidence, critics emerged all the world, communicating via the Internet, about the charges Bush was making against Saddam Hussein. Somehow, both Houses of Congress ignored those facts for Bush's "facts" and voted to allow the President war powers to conduct his charade on October 12, 2002.

The invasion began in March of 2003.  From October 12, 2002 until the day that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation leaked the possibility that he might indict Karl Rove in Plamegate, the mainstream press in this country has virtually ignored all but "the official story" of what the war was all about. Fitzgerald's investigation turned a "dull war" into a live news story, and since then, the mainstream press has actually begun talking about what a lot of people already knew and were talking about on the Web. The actual indictment of Scooter Libby created a crack in the fabric of reality that the White House propagated and the press mostly ate up without reflection, remorse, or regret. If ever there was a time to HAMMER at every last factoid in this scenario without fail, that time was now.

Earlier tonight, a friend wrote to ask me what I was trying to prove with the statements and links I've been sending out. Here is the cheat sheet. Read it if you're still unsure what this is all about:

The Bush administration created the "evidence" that brought us into war. That's the issue. Period.

 Without a doubt, the Dems are to blame for caving into "bad intelligence" that (I believe) the Bush administration willfully created.

I wrote about that issue here:

http://gregoryp.blogspot.com/2005/11/democrats-cant-hide-from-their_15.html

and here: (just today)

http://gregoryp.blogspot.com/2005/11/who-is-scooter-libbywhere-is-hillary.html

I don't believe that Scooter Libby is a criminal, per se - I still, however, believe that if *anyone* in the Bush White House thought that Valerie Plame was fair game over the "sins" of Joseph Wilson, then we need to know *who* made the decision to out her to Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, and *who* was the fall guy who actually did the deed. Even William F. Buckley agrees with me on that point:

  http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200511011324.asp

"The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted." - William F. Buckley, National Review 11/01/05

You'll note in the above links that I simply *do not* have a candidate for 2008. Clinton is out, as is Biden, Kerry, Dodd, Daschle, etc. They chose to ignore the same facts I had access to - Scott Ritter's treatise on the actual state of the Iraqi state and their weapons programs (Ritter was a UN inspector) - and go with Bush's trumped-up nonsense instead. I also believe the war should be ended, but like most sane people think an "immediate pull-out" is ill-advised. Where the war goes at this point is not the issue I'm addressing - it's how and why the war got started in the first place, and what the Administration did in a feeble attempt to silence legitimate critics of the war.

I stand by the belief that George W. Bush (or Dick Cheney) cooked up this war for reasons of revenge, oil, Halliburton contracts or some other weird nefarious reason that we haven't even uncovered yet. They knew they'd find nothing (though *perhaps* George Bush did not - I'm more than willing to believe he's a puppet in this whole charade and as clueless as everyone else as to why we're really there) and just hoped that the press and the public wouldn't notice. That issue didn't really blow up until Patrick Fitzgerald began hinting he'd be handing out indictments. Finally, after THREE YEARS this is actually NEWS - and I just want to hammer at it and hammer at it until the truth is actually known.

cheers

gregoryp(tm)

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