TOBY PETZOLD

A few days back, one of my commenters told me:

You know damn well that Gore knew that there was an Al-Qaeda threat out there and was going to make stopping it his number one foreign policy priority.

Does anybody know if this is true? One would think that such a premonitory sense would have become part of the Gorebot’s legend —and, yet, I’ve never heard of such. One might also think that Gore would have been far more aggressive in pushing for retaliatory strikes against al-Qaeda in response to the East African embassy bombings and the Cole —but this is not a part of his narrative as I know it.

Who does know, though? Hmm. Maybe we can call up Sandy Bergler and ask him.

UPDATE: The commenter refers me to a three year-old blog post for my answer to the question of whether Gore was going to make “stopping” al-Qaeda his “number one foreign policy priority.” Besides the fact that the post itself doesn’t even refer to Gore with any particularity whatsoever, it also makes this apology:

After the bombing of the USS Cole the Clinton Administration had drawn up a comprehensive plan for fighting Al-Qaeda. But they didn’t want to execute it with a new President taking office in a few months, so they briefed Bush’s team at the highest levels and told them how important it was that they carry it out. And then Bush did nothing.

If that was the Clinton Administration’s rationale for not acting, then we should be all the more grateful that its Vice President didn’t achieve the legacy of the “third term.”

The Cole was attacked in October 2000. Clinton knew who did it from very early on, but did nothing. Why not? He could order up some half-assed retaliation for the embassy bombings the same day Monica Lewinsky was testifying against him before a grand jury, but he couldn’t bring himself to retaliate for an attack on the Cole? That’s crap. And so’s this idea that Gore was all keen to “stop” al-Qaeda.

Where’s the evidence?

Lyndon Johnson made adjustments in Viet Nam prior to the Election of 1968 that were intended to help Hubert Humphrey. Is it really believable that a man who had ordered a military strike to deflect media attention away from his girlfriend’s testimony would not also have found a way to burnish his and his Vice President’s anti-terrorist credentials by taking a real hard line against al-Qaeda during the Election of 2000?

You know: because of the conviction?

In the January 2004 issue of Vanity Fair:

In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him.

That’s because Wilson was putting a down payment on a piece of real estate in the same neighborhood of the paper where Kristof himself opines.

And it was one mullet of a deal: business up front and a party in the back.

Were Plame’s disclosures to Kristof on that morning in May 2003 authorized by her employer? If it was left to George Tenet —who’s a miserable bastard— then, yeah, probably.

On 6 May 2003, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof, in whch this piece of intelligence is shared:

I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

Keep in mind that these words were printed in the most influential newspaper in the United States two months before Joe Wilson’s own, notorious op-ed piece was run in that same paper.

There’s no question that the “person” and the “someone” mentioned by Kristof were none other than Wilson and Plame —feeding Kristof and other reporters intelligence details in a bid for the A-list on the Leftist celebrity cocktail circuit. How did they divulge to Kristof the circumstances of their knowledge? How much leg did they have to show to land an op-ed piece in the Times? Why hasn’t Wilson been made to answer for his lies?

Why is that damned dog so interested in selling the secret family recipe? How is that supposed to benefit him? Has the dumb bastard thought any of this through? 

The anti-Bush Left are trying to keep their hysteria in full flower over the already-epochal Libby Commutation —and here’s what Steve Soto’s doing to water it:

Bush’s intent was to obstruct justice by preventing Democrats from getting around a Libby Fifth Amendment dodge and compelling testimony under oath from a defendant whose pardon negated that Fifth Amendment claim.

I don’t understand this. The Fifth Amendment is a hugely important civil liberty —you know, the kind that we’ve been losing with every new martyr sent to the concentration camps all over Amerikkka since Bu$hitler took over— but it’s not so important when a conservative invokes it. Then it’s a dodge.

But, beyond the hypocrisy, one must note the rather glaring error in Soto’s assertion: Libby didn’t get a pardon! The conviction stands. Instead, he had a ridiculously punitive prison sentence lifted. (Goddamned Sandy Bergler repeatedly stole and destroyed eyes only documents from the National Archives and got a $50,000 fine and the back pages. You’re telling me that Libby’s so-called lies, by comparison, merit years in prison? Get serious.)

In any event —convicted, acquitted, pardoned, or imprisoned— how is Libby’s Fifth Amendment right “negated”? It may technically be true that double jeopardy wouldn’t attach where Congress might compel Libby to testify, but that is essentially what one would have in making the Congress into the mere setter of a perjury trap —a notion that strikes me as a partisan insult to the Bill of Rights. Is Libby no longer entitled to his civil liberties because his prison sentence was commuted? Anyhow, Conyers and Schumer are wall-eyed craphounds if they think they’re taking this somewhere.

To the extent that the American People know about this case or could even pick Scooter Libby out of a line-up, it is important to note now that the narrative has already hardened into “Libby was convicted for outing Plame.” It becomes one of those shorthand bumper stickers of a thought that rattle around your average Democrat’s head —like “No War for Oil” and “When Clinton Lied, No One Died.” Never mind that it’s false and that Joe Wilson is a far more plausible violator of the IIPA than Libby ever was. Never mind that this story is only useful as anti-Bush/anti-Cheney propaganda. If it’s something for Keith Olbermann’s audience to mutter and splutter about, then that’s what it will be.

Fuck a litmoid existence. It must be hell.

Setting: Me and another semi-country boy. Earlier this evening. In the parking lot at Target. Stopping in my tracks to look up into a beautiful Texas sky and behold a fantastic storm migrating to the northwest. The whole, sobering grey and blue palette.

Pardner, passing by: Don’t look good.

Me: Purdy, though.

I fully endorse the President’s commutation today of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. It was a just response to an absurd and nakedly political hit on a powerful member of this Administration —and I commend George W. Bush on his exercised sense of right.

Of course, this travesty will not be fully ended until Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame are convicted of their own actual crimes —both literally and in the eyes of History.