Sarbanes is right - it's "an administration of bullies." That part about Rove saying "Plame is fair game" is troubling too.
Haroki, It is sad that Plame's "secret life" was so blatantly exposed. There may be a technicality here, but the fact is that before bob novak ran his column, very few people knew that she was a spook. That perhaps protected that Alibaba and his runners. Now that she is exposed, the whole network is in mortal danger. It is sad.
I think if you look at exactly what Libby said, you will find that he was pretty equivocal. His mistake was to refuse to leave it at "I don't recall." He said he wasn't sure then volunteered stuff. At the end of the day, it came down to him and a few reporters disagreeing about the details of phone conversations. I have to disagree with you about Fitzgerald. He may be hot stuff in Chicago, but he sounded like a moron every time he opened his mouth here. He was in way over his head, which probably wouldn't take much. He found out who leaked Plame's name the first day of the investigation. A prosecutor with any judgment should have ended matters right there. But he knew that wouldn't get him the national exposure and media adulation he evidently lusted for, so he kept it going for months, spending millions in a vain effort to entrap White House officials. Finally he had to give up and rather than slink back to Chicago empty-handed, he pulled in Libby and ruined him over a few phone calls. About the level of professionalism I'd expect from a guy who blew a terrorism investigation when someone on his staff(since no one was ever fired over it , who do you think it was?) leaked details to Judith Miller of the NYT.
from opinionjournal.com "Valerie Plame testified she did not know whether she was a "covert" CIA agent as defined under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 2003, when her supposedly secret identity surfaced. Reader Jim Lucas makes a crucial point that we missed: The Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a federal crime to intentionally reveal the identity of an agent whom one knows to be covert. So how can anyone be accused of knowingly revealing Valerie Plame's identity as a covert agent if Valerie Plame herself didn't know if she was covert according to the law? That pretty much settles the question, doesn't it? If Plame's status was secret even from herself, how could "leaker" Richard Armitage or "perjurer" Scooter Libby possibly have known?"
Maybe you shouldn't expose your stupidity by acting like you understand American politics. The neocons HERE are righties. That's why they are in the Republican Party. Your little delusional conspiracy that a bunch of radical "lefties" highjacked the conservative party HERE IN AMERICA without anybody else but YOU noticing, borders on the psychotic, to put it mildly. If you knew anything about American neocons, you would know that they are as far from socialists as can be. They are in fact CORPORATISTS aka fascists. Why the fuck else would they be trying to PRIVATIZE everything? Idiots should know when to stop talking out of their asses.
Screw that. Street brawl. Why is it that pussies always make these conditions? How about a badminton game? This ain't Burr vs. Hamilton.
You need to do a little research yourself, and you would see that he is basically correct. The original neo-cons were liberal jews who joined the republican party because of the democrats' appeasement of the Soviet Union and their failure to address the Soviets' perseution of jews. Traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan have been their arch enemies in the Republican Party for decades. You can look up Pat's opinion pieces and find dozens of attacks on them. The neocons primary policy interest has been Israel, and many conservatives have accused them of subordinating the US' interests to those of Israel. The failure of the Iraq war has severely discredited the neocon wing of the republican party, but they remain quite powerful in the media.