What We Need In A President, A Few Libby Thoughts

Richard Dalton wrote this, but he and I are pretty much of one mind about what we need:

I apologize for this being so long-winded. I guess my disgust with our current national priorities fueled a diatribe that's been burbling around inside me, probably since George McGovern's candidacy. It is ironic that McGovern was soundly defeated by a man who represented so much of what is wrong with the morality of this country.

We have about 150,000 armed forces in Iraq carrying the latest weaponry and body armor, backed by helicopter gunships, fighter planes, tanks, armed personnel carriers, heavy artillery, and smart bombs; all backed with intensive logistical support so the forces eat regularly, talk by phone with loved ones, and have the finest battlefield medical care ever provided. This has cost us something north of $400 billion.

Arrayed against this might are a few thousand militants with limited support and improvised weaponry (that's why they call them improvised explosive devices). If they were playing chess, the militants would have started the game without a queen, both rooks, a bishop and a couple of pawns and would still have forced a stalemate. Anyone want to guess how many orders of magnitude less the insurgency has spent, compared to US outlays?

Now follow this logic: We can't even effectively contain the Iraqi militant forces, much less defeat them--and we've been trying for FOUR YEARS! Since the likelihood is that future wars will be waged using similar guerilla tactics, the obvious answer, according to our new Defense Secretary, is to plan a 92,000 person increase in the size of our conventional forces for a piddling $100 billion plus another &15 billion per year to maintain them.

Even before you add the cost up super-sizing the US military, we are expecting a $400 billion deficit in 2007, which will be added to the $8.5 trillion we (our kids, our grandkids, etc.) already owe. This figure is about six times the amount of US currency in circulation. On an individual basis, each head of household owes a share of about $60,000.

In the 2008 elections, I'm looking for a candidate who has a radical economic platform. One that will take our world-leading medical expenditures and pour that money instead into a single-payer medical system that won't leave 44 million Americans without any medical coverage. This candidate will also heavily tax petroleum companies and public utilities and plow the additional revenue back into development and implementation of effective alternative power resources.

He or she will radically curtail military spending, starting with an immediate and rapid wind-down of the Iraq war. Research will be undertaken with the savings to develop effective anti-guerilla tactics and diplomatic skills. A major University of Muslim Studies will be built and it will become renowned for its ability to train Arabic-speaking envoys.

The rest of the military savings can be used for the public good in areas like education, infrastructure reduilding, cooperative public housing ventures and at least as much support for the fight against disease in developing countries as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett currently provide.

If that candidate appears, I will pour every bit of energy and other resources I have into his or her election.

***

I stayed away from day-to-day coverage of the Libby trial, but I do have some thoughts that were raised by his trial, the conviction, and the aftermath:

Questions least likely to be asked of Tony Snow at a press briefing:

• Why does Karl Rove still have a security clearance?
• Why does Dick Cheney still have a security clearance?
• What restrictions, if any, has George W. Bush proposed for the type of classified information being provided to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove?
• If no such restrictions have been proposed, why not?
• Other than causing grave and exceptional damage to the national security of the United States and increasing the physical risk to every American by destroying Valerie Plame’s intelligence network, what other actions has George W. Bush taken to give aid and comfort to America’s enemies at what George views, erroneously, as a time of war?
• What personal threat did George W. Bush perceive that caused him to risk the life, safety, and welfare of every American (and urbanites everywhere) by instructing Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby to publicize Valerie Plame’s covert connection with the CIA and thereby destroy her efforts to control the spread of WMD? Was George worried about the 2004 election? Was George worried that his (his father’s or the Carlyle Group’s) financial dealings with WMD traffickers (or Osama Bin Laden and his family) would be revealed? Was George worried that his connection to documentary forgeries he authorized purporting to establish a sale of unenriched raw uranium ore from Niger to Iraq would be uncovered? Did George actually suggest in about July 2003 a partial declassification of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate for the purpose of leaking a misleading part of the NIE to Judith Miller, then allegedly a reporter for The New York Times?

What Scooter Libby did was a George W. Bush/Karl Rove operation all the way. George and Karl were merely acting as Richard Nixon, Charlie Colson, and Donald Segretti taught them. The difference is that Nixon at least had some vestigial, minimal, and wholly insufficient notion and understanding of national security. As previously reported and established by PSACOT, Bush, Dick Cheney, Rove, and Libby have close to no such understanding. What a jury found Libby did, what Libby admitted he did in his grand jury testimony, and what the trial evidence indicates is that there was active participation by George, Dick, and Karl in the Plame affair. They caused grave and exceptional damage to the national security of the United States and to the life, health, safety, welfare, and physical security of all Americans and urban dwellers everywhere.

A picture may be worth a thousand words but the pictures of Mrs. Libby on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post on Wednesday, March 7, 2007, spoke volumes. It was one thing for George H. W. Bush to save himself a long prison term by pardoning Caspar Weinberger and others after the November, 1992, election. His son George W. Bush, will be placed in a far more difficult position (with his approval rating already at 29% and dropping in one respected national poll) if, in early June, 2007. At that time, United States District Judge Reggie Walton may sentence Scooter Libby to several years of a possible 25 years and then refuses to allow Scooter to remain on bail while appeals proceed until well into 2009. The pictures along with a report from the courtroom by the best source of news and analysis of the Libby trial (the blog Firedoglake.com) indicate Scooter may talk. That is, he may start to atone for the grave and exceptional damage he has done to the national security by having an honest discussion with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. About? About the actual involvement of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove in said damage. Whether Scooter actually will talk remains to be seen.

And, for the record, no one has ever explained to me what grave and exceptional damage to the national security of the United States resulted from Clinton's lies about sex. It was not the same thing, folks, no matter how you stretch and twist. Don't tell me Valerie Plame wasn't a clandestine agent; she was. Her cover was blown, her network was endangered, so that George, Dick and Karl could smear Wilson. That's an impeachable offense in my book. That's treason, Ann. Treason is not a belief in healthy debate and political disagreement about the means towards our common goal of a free democracy at home and a safe world abroad. Treason is not even lying about a sexual favor from a White House intern. When the full power of the government can be used covertly to attempt the destruction of an individual citizen's right to tell the truth, using classified information, that's treason and the terrorists have won.

In other Rove news, White House in retreat on flap over US attorneys.