TOBY PETZOLD

I don’t understand why Scooter Libby has to do prison time. The whole thing is a travesty.

President Bush, you have a moral obligation to pardon him immediately. Don’t let him literally become a political prisoner.

Read this AP story —and just feel the love seep out of all the moonbats’ balloons:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff plans to take the stand at his upcoming trial to tell jurors that he never lied to investigators in the CIA leak case, defense attorneys said Friday.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is charged with perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about his conversations in 2003 with reporters regarding Valerie Plame’s CIA job.

Prosecutors say Libby is trying to torpedo the criminal case by demanding the use of classified information that is too sensitive to be released at trial. It’s a tactic known as “graymail” and the goal is to get a case dismissed.

Ha, ha. Are we supposed to believe that Father Fitzmas —the great hero of the Frog Marchers’ Brigade— is averse to compounding the folly of this prosecution by causing such a disclosure? 

It’s time to drop this nonsense and for Fitzgerald to explain why he’s such a sorry craphound.

The following is a comment made here by my constant correspondent Rider. It got tagged as spam for some reason, but I made a copy before I did something that caused it to be deleted. Hooray for small cautions.

Finally you admit she was classified. The IIPA applies. Fitzgerald could not determine whether he had an indictable IIPA case because Libby lied and obfuscated. But the IIPA applies nevertheless.

The wife-sent-him canard requires us to believe the Wilsons were not only fiends but psychic fiends. Here’s what the serial liar Mark Levin wrote in NRO in July, 2005 (”Valerie’s No Victim”):

“Why Wilson? This is the real scandal. Plame lobbied repeatedly for her husband, and she knew full well that he was hostile to the war in Iraq and the administration’s foreign policy. She had to know his politics — and there can no longer be any pretense about him being a nonpartisan diplomat who was merely doing his job. By experience and temperament, Wilson was the wrong man to send to Niger. Plame affirmatively stepped into what she knew might become a very public political controversy, given her husband’s predilections (and her own) about that “crazy” report of yellowcake uranium.

In fact, Wilson was so concerned that his wife’s aggressive and clandestine efforts in securing his assignment would become known that he lied about who sent him to Niger to cover her (and his) tracks.”

There you have it. These psychic fiends knew a full year in advance that Bush was going to lie his ass off on national TV in the State of the Union Address about African yellowcake. So this scheming, conniving bitch arranged to have her hubby sent to Niger so he could blow the whole thing wide open in a NYT op ed and embarrass and humiliate the President of the United States by catching him in his ignorance and lies. What a despicable misuse of psychic powers!

From Cheney on down, Libby, Hadley, and their army of winged monkeys in the media and blogosphere, to use your expression, lying craphounds all.

Grommet.

Tom Maguire says that the Wilsons have gone ahead and added Dick Armitage to their lawsuit against, well, everybody they can think of to drag along on their Bullshit Martyrdom Parade.

I guess that’ll be enough to throw their enemies off of the idea that the Wilsons are only in this to slime the Bush Administration.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband sued Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, on Wednesday for disclosing her identity after her husband criticized the Bush administration.

Armitage said last week that he was the first one to discuss Plame’s identity with reporters after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, criticized the Bush administration’s Iraq policy in a 2003 opinion piece in The New York Times.

Armitage, the former No. 2 State Department official expressed regrets and said the leak was inadvertent.

Armitage joins Vice President Dick Cheney, top White House aide Karl Rove and others as defendants in a lawsuit that charges them with invading the Wilsons’ privacy and destroying her career.

The Wilsons are complete clowns. And their insistence on pursuing this thing to keep Big Media’s interest up while they try to sell a few books and make a few speeches is going to become more and more of a burden on any of their fellow Democrats who try to sell themselves as legitimate on national security issues.

Have at it, losers.

Richard Armitage tells CBS News that he “screwed up” when he told Robert Novak that Joe Wilson’s wife was with the Company.

Yeah, okay. But in the online report, the subhead reads:

CBS Exclusive: Interview With Man Who ‘Outed’ CIA Agent Valerie Plame

What’s with the scare quotes around the term outed? When the whole Leftist media machine was screeching about Karl Rove and Scooter Libby betraying national security secrets, there sure as shit wasn’t any scare quotes around what they did.

Typical fucking hypocrisy.

As for Armitage, whom I now see as a world-class coward for not coming forward years ago and clearing this whole thing up, read on:

He says he was reading Novak’s newspaper column again, on Oct. 1, 2003, and “he said he was told by a non-partisan gun slinger.”

“I almost immediately called Secretary Powell and said, ‘I’m sure that was me,’” Armitage says.

Armitage immediately met with FBI agents investigating the leak.

“I told them that I was the inadvertent leak,” Armitage says. He didn’t get a lawyer, however.

“First of all, I felt so terrible about what I’d done that I felt I deserved whatever was coming to me. And secondarily, I didn’t need an attorney to tell me to tell the truth. I as already doing that,” Armitage explains. “I was not intentionally outing anybody. As I say, I have tremendous respect for Ambassador. Wilson’s African credentials. I didn’t know anything about his wife and made an offhand comment. I didn’t try to out anybody.”

That was nearly three years ago, but the political firestorm over who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity continued to burn as Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald began hauling White House officials and journalists before a grand jury.

Armitage says he didn’t come forward because “the special counsel, once he was appointed, asked me not to discuss this and I honored his request.”

“I thought every day about how I’d screwed up,” he adds.

Armitage never did tell the president, but he’s talking now because Fitzgerald told him he could.

I think what Armitage did was despicable. Same goes for Father Fitzmas. Why did either of these two dishonorable craphounds persist with —or keep quiet about— a pointless investigation when they both knew the truth all along?

I hope there’s more to this story than just a sorry-assed apology from Armitage and continued silence from Fitzgerald.

Time for both of them to explain themselves.

In case you were wondering just how much of a worthless hack Duncan Black really is, read his pitiful response to that extraordinarily harsh editorial in Friday’s Washington Post (referenced in the post prior) —and why he’s maintained radio silence on what is obviously a major condemnation of people like him. On the topic of the “stupidest trolls on the internets”:

Yes, I have them, and they seem obsessed with the fact that I haven’t commented on the information that Armitage was apparently Novak’s initial source on Plame. I haven’t commented because it isn’t especially interesting, it doesn’t change the basic narrative at all - Armitage was widely suspected of being that person - and it doesn’t magically nullify every other factual revelation about the case, including that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source on Plame.

Sadly, it seems, the stupidest trolls on the internet have taken over the Washington Post editorial board. What a bunch of hacks unworthy to even scribble their delusionary nonsense on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

The important thing to note here is that Black has confirmed that the whole troll terminology is just another way of saying “people who don’t agree with me.” That’s an evolution of the name —and makes nonsense of it.

A troll, in its original meaning, is someone who goes into online chats and comment threads and attempts to elicit responses from people for the sake of disruption. You know: like a fisherman trolling for his catch with some tasty bait. But in the circle-jerked community of groupies and yes-men that is Black’s Eschaton blog, any dissenting view is trolling.

Which means that Black’s brigades of sycophantic hippie followers are only aware enough to know that they cannot risk being ensnared in their own ignorance by any stray thoughts that don’t jibe with their programming.

What a pathetic commentary on the actual willingness to debate among the so-called ”progressives.”

So, today, the editorial writers of the Washington Post are trolls. Huh? That doesn’t even mean anything. Except that a troll is now an enemy. Something to be denied and censored and ignored —leaving the gated and insular “reality-based community” in a state of perpetual —and probably not even blissful— ignorance.

As for the non-news that Richard Armitage was Bob Novak’s source on Valerie Plame, it is best for Black and his fellow travelers to downplay that as much as possible since it does nothing to advance the shitheaded narrative fed to them by Wilson himself that Plame’s alleged exposure was the evil deed of Rove and the Neocons. In other words, the anti-Bush assholes who insisted that Plamegate was a major breach of national security have begun to be seen by more and more people as a bunch of partisan liars who will stoop to pick up any steaming load if they think they can rub this Administration’s nose in it.

Well, tough luck, comrades. You should’ve picked a more persuasive pack of liars and propagandists than Wilson, Corn, and Kristof to make your case.

The final graf of the editorial in today’s Washington Post:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

There you have it, friends. Even the Washington Post itself says Joe Wilson is a liar.

It’s unfortunate that facts like these are so difficult —and take so long— to acknowledge in today’s anti-Bush Big Media environment, but at least the consensus is growing that Joe Wilson is a liar and that he and his wife are instigators who have done much to undermine the authority of this Administration and the security of this country.

Go restore some more of that honesty, you wretched con artists.

Speaking of asses and how they get owned, check out this post at Say Anything on the disposal of Joe and Valerie’s latest crap. Quoting the Associated Press (via The Smoking Gun —and with my emphasis):

AUGUST 25–A federal judge yesterday turned down a request from former CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband that the couple’s address be kept secret in court filings in her lawsuit against Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney. In an August 11 motion, Plame and Joseph Wilson argued that their privacy would be jeopardized if their Washington, D.C. residential address was included in court pleadings. But that request was rejected by Judge John Bates, who noted in an order filed yesterday that, “in less than thirty minutes, the Court was able to ascertain plaintiffs’s residential address from multiples publicly available sources, including a database of federal government records.” Bates added that the couple’s lawyer, Christopher Wolf, has been quoted in one newspaper saying that he is Plame and Wilson’s next-door neighbor, “and the residential address of that attorney is readily ascertainable.”

The Wilsons are just pathetic. But at least Bates was able to restore some of that honesty!

But, to continue with Say Anything:

Both of these two have acting been like first class media whores for several years now. Wilson is a proven liar of epic, self-serving proportion. Valerie may have had some modest intelligence skills years ago, but over the past 5 years has shown herself to be about as capable as Inspector Clouseau. Their infamous lawsuit was filed, with great fanfare, earlier this summer, and these two are only now figuring out that they might be better off if everyone and his grandmother couldn’t look them up at the click of a mouse?

Ha, ha, ha!

In a sign of his growing madness, Joe Wilson compared himself earlier this evening to Thomas à Becket, suggesting to the comparably self-important loon Keith Olbermann that he had been targeted for character assassination by the modern-day King Henry II, Dick Cheney.

And how does St. Joe know this? Because Cheney had written a note in the margin of Wilson’s notorious NYT op-ed piece, asking whether Wilson’s wife had sent the former ambassador on a “junket” when he went to investigate the Nigerien yellowcake connection to Iraq. (A subject Plame herself had characterized as “crazy” —that is, nothing worth sending an actual intelligence officer to look into, anyway.)

This, of course, is one of the many places where Mr. Restore Honesty’s pretzel-logic breaks down: why was Cheney’s question tantamount to assassinating his character? And what does that have to do with his wife? Are we really supposed to believe that the Vice President of the United States decided the most effective way of rebutting or even punishing this miserable wanker was to deliberately expose the said wanker’s wife’s professional identity?

It doesn’t even rise to the level of convolution. It’s just a heap of crapola. 

Will no one rid us of this meddlesome prick?

Ed Morrissey says that Joe and Valerie are still on a losing streak:

Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame have run into a bit of bad luck in their lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and ten random Republicans. CQ reader Denis K took a peek at the complaint and noticed something that I had missed earlier — the judge assigned to the case. Wilson and Plame drew Judge John D. Bates — and a quick glance at his rulings will no doubt have the Left fuming.

Check out the rest of the Captain’s post. (You won’t believe what panel Bates has recently been appointed to.)