Obstruction of Justice, Republican/Bush Style

I needed to highlight this:

For all you Bushie defenders out there who keep averring that there was no underlying crime, try considering the facts, if you can (I know it's a challenge in BushWorld, but try.)-- VPW was covert under the IIPA. This has been corroborated by facts known about her activities that are in the public domain and by a letter to Congress from the Director of the CIA and by herself in her own sworn testimony. Fitzgerald also concluded that she was before proceeding with his investigation.

Additionally, many Bushies seem to be of the mistaken impression that no crime was committed b/c no one was prosecuted under the IIPA. However, a simple analogy puts the lie to this position: If one discovers a dead body of a woman, shall we say in the dining room at a place where there is a large gathering of people, and the body is face down with a large knife sticking out of the middle of her back. Would you say that no crime has been committed b/c you did not know who did it? Or, perhaps you do know, but cannot prove it. -- Is there no crime?

Well, of course there is, isn't there? And the lie that you keep attempting to spread, to your own detriment of credibility, is utterly obvious to anyone who has command of the facts of the situation surrounding the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson.

One more thing. While Armitage may indeed have been the one who spilled the beans to Novak, there was, as we know from the facts at the Libby trial and through other news accounts, a whispering campaign going on in the weeks before Novak's column ran where WH apparatchiks were meeting WITH REPORTERS and talking about VPW. We also know that Cheney speculated on the lie that made it into Novak's column about her sending her husband on the trip to Niger. This was false as has been testified to and reported previously. (Let alone the fact of the preposterousness of going to Niger on a "junket".) -- Armitage, a friend of Rove, incidentally, only happened to be the first, but by no means only leaker in this Case. So, these assertions that attempt to pin it all on Armitage are off-base, and untrue. Therefore the entire line of crap about "there was no underlying crime" is a bunch of tighty righty hoo-ha.

Of course most of us here already knew that, but it was time to reintroduce it b/c it still seems to keep reappearing.

No need to thank me -- I consider it a public service.


There's also a great conversation going on at Firedoglake

It is time to raise our voices!

Caveat: for those who bemoan that Joseph Wilson is the liar.