(UPDATE: Here is someone who thinkg the NYT bombshell on Cheney is a Dud)
Rush Limbaugh made this prediction about the New York Times in regard to the Plame issue:
I know exactly what's going on at the Times. They're throwing Judy Miller overboard and they are beating themselves up in advance for coming out. They are going to nuke this White House. They're going to get back nerve's good graces by single-handedly leading the charge to take out this administration, and they're going to set themselves up as credible because they're going to have thrown one of their own overboard who collaborated with the White House, Scooter Libby, on all of this phony weapons of mass destruction intelligence -- and, of course, it was all a lie. It's going to come down now that it was all lies. It was all lies from the beginning, we're not going to hear anything about the fact that there were multiple national intelligence sources from Great Britain, the UK, around the world that we trusted on this. We're going to forget the fact that there were weapons of mass destruction used by Saddam Hussein. It's going to come down to Bush lied and people are going to say, "Yeah, well, Clinton lied and you got him for contempt, but that was only about sex. This is about 2,000 lives."
And now we the NYT reporting this:
The New York Times reported late Monday that Vice President Cheney has been directly linked to the so-called "Plamegate" scandal involving the disclosure of the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer.
The paper reported that Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby "first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003."
The paper sourced their story to "lawyers involved in the case."
The Times said that notes taken by Libby differ from his own testimony before the grand jury as to when he first learned of Plame's identity.
"The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war."
Cheney apparently discovered details of Plame's CIA work after he questioned then CIA Director George J. Tenet about her husband, Ambassador Wilson.
But even if Libby or Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity as a CIA officer they may not have committed a crime.
"Disclosing a covert agent’s identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent’s undercover status," the Times said.
Limbaugh also understands the same Democrat game plan that I understood earlier:
So we have a successful, apparently successful, manipulation of the criminal justice system here that is designed to exact political retribution because they can't do so at the ballot box. You know, whatever charges this prosecutor makes, or brings, if any, are going to be used to undermine the war effort and to bring the president up on impeachment charges for lying. I'm telling you this is what I fear. I've been saying they're going to try to impeach him for two years or so now, and this is why this is going to become a battle royale, and our side better be ready for this. This is about much more than just an indictment over hair-splitting memory recollections -- and that's what this is if there is no violation of this espionage act. If there's no crime here that anybody committed by revealing the name of Valerie Plame, then there was no crime. So we've got some crimes that were created in the investigation of a non-crime. So we've got, apparently, a cover-up of a non-crime -- and as I say, you get people as you bring them up four times, four hours each to the grand jury, their lawyers aren't in there so you've got memory lapses, memory recollection problems, hair-splitting at times. These are going to now be called crimes, perjury, obstruction of justice, and so we've got the criminal investigation process leading to crimes where the original investigation's purpose shows nothing. This is all based -- now, I'm just trying to get ahead of the loop here where this is all based -- on assumptions. We'll see how it all plays out in the coming days.
Let me rebut Limbaugh's point that the Democrat’s premise is that Clintin only lied about sex, whereas Bush lied about something important...Iraq’s WMD. Let me remind the lying left about this CNN report from December 16, 1998:
From the Oval Office, President Clinton told the nation Wednesday evening why he ordered new military strikes against Iraq.
The president said Iraq's refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors presented a threat to the entire world.
"Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons," Clinton said.
So why would Bill Clinton be making the same alleged lie about Iraq’s WMD that the Democrats are alleging President Bush did? Could it be because of this December 16th, 1998 event:
A motion sponsored by Democrats to adopt a censure resolution as an alternative to the proposed impeachment was defeated on December 8. On December 11 and 12, the Committee approved four articles of impeachment for presentation to the full House, and on December 16 released its full Report supporting its recommendation http://www.house.gov/judiciary/icreport.htm. After debate, the House approved two of the Articles alleging that the President had provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury regarding the Paula Jones case and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and that he had obstructed justice through an effort to delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence of evidence related to the Jones case.
It doesn’t look like Clinton was only a liar about sex does it? Perhaps he lied about Iraq's WMD in order to take attention away from his lies about sex? And Limbaugh further points out the love Democrats have for their liars:
The Wall Street Journal today has a good piece on this whole special prosecutor case, and as I just mentioned to you, they say that this is all about Iraq, and the second-to-last paragraph here is pretty telling. "The temptation for any special counsel who has only one case to prosecute is to show an indictment for his money and his long effort. But Mr. Fitzgerald's larger obligation is to see that justice is done and that should include ensuring that he doesn't become the agent for criminalizing policy differences. Defending a policy by attacking the credibility of a political opponent, Mr. Wilson, should not be a felony," and that pretty much cuts to the chase here, because what Scooter Libby -- and, again, all this is based on sketchy reports of people who are said to be "familiar with testimony" and so forth, and we really don't know all that the prosecutor knows. We probably know very little of the total that the prosecutor knows, despite all these leaks. But basically what you have here is you have a guy who's set himself up with his wife to go over to Niger for the purposes of undermining the war on Iraq and the war on terror for the purposes of undermining the Bush administration.
He comes back; he lies through his teeth about things. His initial report, verbal to the CIA, pretty much confirmed the reason he was sent over there. That's been twisted around. People forget about that. He didn't issue a written report. There wasn't one for the vice president to read. The vice president didn't send him over there. (Wilson) came back, said he did. The vice president was not up to speed day to day on what he was doing over there. This appears to have been an end run, which I think goes to show you what a great desk jockey his wife is. I mean, this babe pulled this off. This babe has got some muscle. She's got some sort of bureaucratic skills. It took her two times but she got her husband sent over there, and the CIA was out there trying to protect itself, cover-its-own-rear-end mode because all the negative publicity that has attached to it from the 9/11 attacks and so forth. Then you've got Bush trying to reform it. Publicly Bush was as supportive of the CIA then as he is today, but apparently behind the scenes he was upset, understandably so, but heads didn't roll. They should have, but they didn't -- and so there were all kinds of efforts by the CIA to undermine and protect itself at the same time. So this Wilson guy comes back and for a while it's pretty quiet after he gets back and all of a sudden here comes this New York Times op-ed that he writes which is full of lots of lies. We've chronicled for you for this program the legion of lies that were cataloged in the Senate Intelligence Committee, Select Intelligence Committee, bipartisan committee. None of that seems to be remembered; none of that seems to be a factor in all of this. The guy is angelic. There's something about liars that Democrats like. They love Bill Clinton, and especially liars that can get away with it.
And you can thank the NYT and the rest of the MSM for letting Democrats get away with lying...even about alleged lies regarding Iraq's WMD. The bottom line is that both political parties believed Saddam had WMD. The Democrats are just out to stop the Republicans from doing something they will not do...stand up to our enemies.
