Originally posted by HatMan:
I probably should stay out of this, too. But I'll take one more (hopefully the last) try at a few points:
Come on, Paul, this is fun! I love political debates. I could do it for hours on end. I've enjoyed the give and take.
Speaking of checking sources... You state that Plame's husband is a publicity hound and then take his own self-glorifying book as a reliable source? Plame was outed by Novak, who was tipped off by Karl Rove. And her actual job was covert nuclear inspection... finding evidence of production of nuclear materials for WMDs. She went to Africa looking for the presumed source of Saddam's supposed WMDs, and when she reported that the supply lines weren't there, she was outed... essentially a public firing.
I will have to correct you here since a few of your facts are off. The reason why I said her husband outed her was because of his eagerness for publicity. Everybody in town knew she was the one who had sent him to Niger. And everybody knew Valerie Wilson, which is how she introduced herself. She and her husband were very big on the Washington party circuit so just about everyone in the press knew her. Andrea Kramer of NBC, plus a few other reporters came out and said they knew her and what she did. She was an analyst in the WMD division, not a spy. She was well known long before any of this Niger stuff came about, so there wasn't any necessity in outing her. She'd already been outed.
She had been classified as covert many years ago at the lightest classification, meaning she was no James Bond. She went abroad a few times, but after a few years, she and Joe wanted to come home and stay home. Six years before the whole incident, they came back to the US to stay. The source of this? Joe Wilson's book. The CIA basically said that she wasn't really covert but they hadn't bothered to change her classification, but she was never planning to go back into the field. The law that was supposedly broken was co-authored by Victoria Toensing, who said that the law didn't apply to Plame. That's why Fitzgerald indicted no one on the charge of outing a covert agent. It was not a very merry Fitzmas for liberal Democrats.
As for the whole Niger incident, Wilson's report alleged that he was sent to Niger by the Vice President to see if there was any truth to the reports that Saddam was looking to buy yellow cake uranium. When this report came back in the negative, Cheney was informed about it and started some inquiries about who this Joe Wilson was and why he was saying he spoke for the Vice President when in fact nobody in the VP's office had ever heard of him. Even worse, Joe Wilson was a major critic of the administration and was no supporter of the Iraq policy, so people wondered why this person, of all people, was given that job. Paul, Valerie did not go to Niger. Joe did.
That's when the VP's office discovered that Joe Wilson was sent by his wife. When confronted with it, Wilson lied, denying his wife had anything to do with it. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence then uncovered emails from Valerie Plame to her boss recommending her husband for the boondoggle. All Wilson did was have two lunches with a Niger official and took his word that Saddam wasn't looking for yellow cake. Considering Niger has only one major export, uranium, just what else would Saddam's agents be looking to buy?
Wilson's report was immediately round-filed by the CIA as much evidence came about that he was dead wrong. The Butler Commission in the UK and the Senate Select Committee both determined that the 16 words about Niger spoken by President Bush in his State of the Union address were "well founded."
That his wife didn't send him was only one of Joe Wilson's lies. He also claimed that he debunked some forged letters alleging that Saddam was looking for yellow cake and that was one of the reasons why he concluded that Saddam was not trying to obtain uranium. The problem for Wilson was that those forged letters were not in American possession until ten months AFTER his report was filed. He could not possibly have seen them.
Once his lies were exposed, John Kerry's campaign dropped him like a hot potato. Once an advisor of the Kerry campaign and prominently featured on Kerry's website, his name quickly disappeared from the website and he was publicly disavowed by Kerry, himself. So much for Wilson's veracity.
Bob Novak started nosing around, trying to figure out who was whom and who told whom. Novak's main source was NOT Karl Rove, but Richard Armitage, Colin's Powell's deputy at the State Department and a harsh critic of the administration's Iraq policy. Armitage was no friend of Bush.
Novak asked Rove in a wide-ranging interview about many topics about Plame. Rove's response was that he'd heard that too. So he was basically acknowledging that he'd heard what Novak had already known. Rove didn't even know her name. Rove's legal problems were due to his testimony that he claimed that it was Tim Russert of NBC who had told him about Plame. Russert denied it. As it turned out, Rove just had a bad memory. Bob Woodward of the famed Woodward and Bernstein was the source who had told Rove, not Russert. Since guys like Rove do dozens of interviews a week, it shouldn't be so surprising he couldn't remember precisely who told him. In any case, Rove was told by a reporter, not the other way around. So Rove was completely innocent and was not indicted for perjury since Fitzgerald essentially took Woodward's word that he was Rove's source and that Rove simply didn't remember correctly. So if Rove was such a bad guy, why is it he had to find out about Plame from the press?
So no, the administration was not out to destroy a covert agent. They were trying to figure out who was trying to sabotage their Iraq policy by claiming the Vice President was responsible for Joe Wilson's trip. it was Wilson's own big mouth and his huge desire for publicity that made this even a story. As I said, covert agents don't do photo layouts for Vanity Fair.
Huh? Oh. You mean that it's the Republicans' job to complain about government spending, slash income, and then spend billions of dollars that they don't have bloating the military so that they can buy thousand-dollar toilet seats and several-hundred-dollar intra-ship phones that can't even do the job of a $20 walkie-talkie.
Wasn't I the one complaining about how bad the government was at spending? And wasn't I the one who used that as an example of why government shouldn't be trusted to run health care? Wars are expensive. First you complain about no body armor because it was too expensive, now you complain about them spending too much on the war. Which one is it?
Also when it comes to fighting wars, do you really want bean counters making war decisions? No, wars are not fought on the cheap. It costs billions.
You know, there was a thing in Newsweek (not the greatest source, but not too bad) about where the candidates would spend the most money. How much it'd cost to put into effect their top 3 most expensive plans. The dems (both of them) want something like $300 billion for health care, and then 50 or so for education and the environment. Comes to about $400 billion. Sounds like a lot? McCain's number one alone tops that. They estimate that his plan for Iraq would cost $550 billion over the next four years.
I am not a McCain fan and never said I was. This is the guy who tried to beat Bush in 2000 by relying on Democrats and Independents in the open primary states like Michigan.
You mentioned No Child Left Behind, so you know. Many things are set at the state level, but Bush put national regulations into place in the form of NCLB. He was pushing hard for them. He was very proud of them. It's a program which he instituted in Texas, and which he and his wife made into major talking points at the elections. But, well... Maybe I should let the National Education Association explain what\'s wrong with it . We agree. Anytime a liberal like Ted Kennedy gets his hands on education, like with his principal authoring of the NCLB Act, education is bound to suffer. That's why so many Republicans voted against it. Unfortunately, the Texas portions of the bill that would have made a difference were stripped out by Kennedy. The federal government has no business being in education. It's best left to the states and localities.
As for democracy... It works for us, but that doesn't mean it's the one true path, right for all people and all cultures. People don't like it when you take over their countries and tell them how to run them. (In fact, wasn't that the reason for the first Gulf War?) And democracy doesn't automatically mean freedom and rainbows and the end of terrorism. And the idea that you can impose freedom is just inherently contradictory.
We could give it back to Saddam's family if you think democracy's a bad idea for them. Seriously, though, we didn't tell them how to run their government. It was their decision to go for a Parliamentary system where we urged a strong executive like ours, mostly because a strong executive to them meant Saddam and they wanted nothing to do with Saddam. We made many recommendations that they simply ignored. The government of Iraq is their own. We didn't fashion it for them They were the ones who wrote the constitution and voted on it and risked death threats from al Qaeda. The people voted overwhelmingly to ratify it. The people spoke, and without a gun held to their heads, unlike when Saddam always received 100% of the votes when he held an election.
