It would be poetic justice if Rove got to share a cell with Jim Guckhert. I can hear it now: “Come on Karl, squeal like a liberal!”

Posted by: lonesomeG | Oct 10 2005 21:02 utc | 4

lonesomeG,
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
EEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Posted by: KarlR | Oct 10 2005 21:10 utc | 6

This snip from antiaristo over at Rigorousintuition discussion board.
>>Chapter 37 turns out to include our old friend 18 U.S.C. 793, the Espionage Act.
The media focus (until now) on the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, was deliberately written to be hard to violate, made the members of the White House Iraq Group seem much safer, in legal terms, than they were in fact. That, in turn, put Fitzgerald in a position where any indictment on a substantive charge (as opposed to perjury, false statements, or obstruction of justice) could be made to seem far-fetched, thus opening him to the treatment Ronnie Earle has been getting.>>
It is reference to a prediction by Citizen Spook a couple months ago that Fitz has the case locked up against the WH reptiles, a prediction studiously avoided by MSM until Johnson of the NYT (just yesterday?) broke down and hinted that indeed the bosses/lackeys could very possibly face serious felony charges. Treason with penalties up to and including death, perhaps?
Read it and make your own conclusions, or just wait til Fitz drops the bombs.

Posted by: rapt | Oct 10 2005 22:09 utc | 8

The Rovians are getting their “Swift Boat” sunk. That the dirtiest campaigners in history are crying foul is beyond belief.
lonesomeG, that is funny. If Jimmy?Jeff? are together I can see that Deliverance moment. I fact, doesn’t Rove really look the part for a modern Deliverance movie. The rethugs like those Red Staters, a little trip into the backwoods might be in line.

Posted by: jdp | Oct 10 2005 22:32 utc | 10

People are sure pinning a lot of hopes and dreams on Fitzgerald. I’d like to believe that something significant will come of this, but I beyond cynical.

Posted by: steve expat | Oct 10 2005 22:53 utc | 12

I’ve thought of that, too. These people are not tough, just dirty beyond the bounds of what people thought possible in the United States (but not in the Germany of the 1930s). One reason they got away with it so long is that it was so improbable. That one or two persons can act like shits is not improbable; that a whole administration is run by shits is highly improbable. O’Neill was surprised; I’m sure Colin Powell — though he knew the players — was surprised, too, at first; and Whitman was surprised. The outsiders — Republicans and Democrats alike, couldn’t believe what was happening, and I think were in denial.
Rough stuff gets you a long way when people aren’t expecting it. But it doesn’t get you the whole way. These guys aren’t smart, just ruthless. Fitzgerald is smart AND ruthless. What impresses me most is that we haven’t heard a peep out of him or the GJ since his investigation began. All we have is a few subpoenas and the statements and off-the-record observations by the lawyers of the targets.
An important point in all this is that unlike Watergate, where the principals were all lawyers, the villains in the Bush administration come out of policy think tanks. They probably didn’t have the instinctive understanding of how vulnerable they were when they started lying to a professional prosecutor. Because of that they were blind-sided. At least Dean knew there had to be a fall guy, and bailed out when he still could. I think Rove, Libby, Hadley, Bolton, Feith, Wolfowitz (marginally) and Condi (possibly) are in for a ride so rough they won’t remember where they got on. As to Ms Miller, may she rot in some godforsaken prison with a bunch of junkies in a place where the Aspens turn golden together about this time every year.

Posted by: Knut Wicksell | Oct 11 2005 1:12 utc | 14

Hey, didn’t the goosesteppers actually pick this guy to investigate? I do seem to recall…perhaps they should’ve picked someone more, well, , you think?

Posted by: Stfish7 | Oct 11 2005 1:23 utc | 16

Reminds me of this oldie from The Nation
Richard Perle: Whose Fault Is He?
Calvin Trillin
Consider kids who bullied Richard Perle–
Those kids who said Perle threw just like a girl,
Those kids who poked poor Perle to show how soft
A mamma’s boy could be, those kids who oft-
Times pushed poor Richard down and could be heard
Addressing him as Sissy, Wimp or Nerd.
Those kids have got a lot to answer for,
‘Cause Richard Perle now wants to start a war.
The message his demeanor gets across:
He’ll show those playground bullies who’s the boss.
He still looks soft, but when he writes or talks
There is no tougher dude among the hawks.
And he’s got planes and ships and tanks and guns–
All manned, of course, by other people’s sons.

Posted by: SimoneDB | Oct 11 2005 3:19 utc | 18

Other peoples’ sons? That’s cause he’s an Israeli, or he’s an American. It all depends on who’s getting the call up and who’s getting the pay day.
He’ll have time to get reflective when the world reaches the right state of security and the bank account is flush. Some day he can sit in his southern French country home and he write the book that explains it all.

Posted by: christofay | Oct 11 2005 3:45 utc | 20

I’m with steve expat, above, on this thing.
After the 11th or 12th time I thought, “This one will bring the Bush Junta down,” or “The media will have to cover this one,” or “The American people are not going to put up with this one,” I stopped counting and stopped believing that anything short of an apocalyptic disaster, on the order of Katrina times ten, will change the direction of this nation of heartless dullards.
Of course, it would be great. But I’m just saying . . .

Posted by: James E. Powell | Oct 11 2005 4:11 utc | 22

@James E. Powell and others…
One of the issues raised in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is the issue of collective responsibility. Responsibility, only comes with awareness. Awareness of a fear driven life where you fuck anyone in your way just to keep food on your family; Arendt maintains that he was an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in furthering his career, which seems like a game one can not, not play in our current system. As Robert Anton Wilson wrote:
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed “anomie” or “alienation” or “existential anguish” about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call “money”.
Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn’t look for biosurvival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. “You can’t live without money,” as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.
Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or even ostracism, were sufficient punishments to enforce tribal conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as Shakespeare’s day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal(“Banished!” cries Romeo, “the damned use that word in Hell!”)
In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security; exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio-security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror.
Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool.
Conservatives who claim that no form of Welfare is tolerable to them are asking that people live with total bio-survival anxiety and anomie combined with terror. The conservatives, of course, vaguely recognize this and ask for “local charity” to replace State Welfare – i.e., they ask for the gene-pool to be restored by magic, among people (denizens of a typical city) who are not
genetically related at all.
On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or a tribe, and cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying that they are going to get cut off (“exiled”) for some minor
infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new mysticism, the paranoia becomes total. Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or affinity-groups (Reich’s “Consciousness III”). Recall the hippie crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communes. Back in the real world, the tickets called “money” are the biosurvival bond for most people. Anti-Semitism is a complex aberration, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the “Jewish Bankers’ Conspiracy”) it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin. Thus, as anti-Semitism has declined in America, the “Bankers’ Conspiracy” lives on in a new form. Now the villains are old New England WASP families, the “Yankee Establishment.” Some Leftists will even show
you charts of the genealogies of these WASP bankers, the way anti-Semites used to show Rothschild genealogies.
C.H. Douglas, the engineer and economist, once made up a chart, which he showed to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 when they were discussing money and credit regulation. The chart graphed the rise and fall of interest rates from the defeat of Napoleon in 1812 to the date the Commission met in 1932, and on the same scale, the rise and fall of the suicide rate in that one
twenty-year period. The two curves were virtually identical. Every time the interest rate went up, so did the suicide rate; when interest went down, so did suicide. This can hardly be “coincidence.” When interest rises, a certain number of businessmen go bankrupt, a certain number of workers are thrown out of their jobs, and everybody’s bio-survival anxiety generally increases. Marxists and other radicals are urgently aware of such factors in “mental health” and hence scornful of all types of academic psychology which ignore these bio-survival issues. Unfortunately, the Marxist remedy-making everybody dependent for bio-survival on the whims of a State bureaucracy-is a cure worse than the disease.
Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets.
Until then we will have joe sixpack and susie soccer mom, as little eichmanns.
…the peculiar nature of the game…makes it impossible for [participants] to stop the game once it is under way. Such situations
we label games without end.
– Watzlawick, Beavin, Jackson,
Pragmatics of Human Communication

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 11 2005 5:20 utc | 24

@Unca
Yes, but Hannah Arendt also described the dilution of culpability when blame is spread too broadly and thinly. When the average American is tarred with the brush of being a “little Eichmann”, those who bear the primary responsibility for the failed policies and monstrously inhumane consequences of this administration become just another component in this dysfunctional culture; Cheney et al are merely symptoms of our collective misdeeds and are, therefore, no more responsible than AOA on the corner whose voice has been silenced by Diebold.
I’m not saying that there is no collective guilt, but focusing too broadly on it will only provide a degree of absolution to the truly wicked. Is there any other reason that Enron is viewed by the average American as Evil,Incorporated and yet we are still working out how “guilty” Kenneth Lay is? Is every American citizen to share a prison cell with David Lesar for the crimes of Halliburton ? If you insist on all or nothing, you are certain to get the latter. Our collective guilt must be dealt with collectively and individually, but for now, let’s not cast such a wide net that even a behemoth like Karl Rove will be able to wriggle free from it.

Posted by: Monolycus | Oct 11 2005 5:54 utc | 26

@Monolycus
Yes, I agree, there are variables to everything. I have said many times, until we address the Diebold issue, all the wonderful prose, banter, rants, comments and white papers will get us exactly zilch. However, the masses are imprinted to a simulacrum of itself. The unpleasant truth about the situation is that the US public wants to pretend that everything is okay as much as its leaders do. The public is not so much being misled as demanding that its leaders in government, business, and the news media continue a game of make-believe. How can such a large percentage of the US population remain blinded by denial in the face of so much evidence which flatly contradicts their view of reality (and isn’t such delusion a feature of psychosis)? When the rest of the world clearly sees and deplores what is happening, how is it that a majority of the US population-which prides itself on freedom of information and informed democracy-has not clue what is really happening?

Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 11 2005 6:25 utc | 28

Thank, that’s super, Uncle. I presume that’s the source of yr. earlier quote.
I beg to differ w/yr. formulation of the “Diebold issue”. The problem is not Diebold per se, but the piratization of the Electoral Commons. Until we reclaim that we still have a hijacked process.
The great majority of every nation is clueless, but as Maragaret Mead has reminded us, it’s the organized enlightened minority that drives everything anyway.

Posted by: jj | Oct 11 2005 6:42 utc | 30

@jj
hahaha… you are correct sir:
I put things in probabilities, not absolutes…
as a “Model Agnostic” which “consists of never regarding any model or map with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. The moment you become attached to an opinion or theory, no matter how good or true or beautiful it might
seem, you’re no longer fully open to change, Your perceptiveness wanes and your understanding shrinks. A solipsist seductionist’s dream.
I don’t believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of, brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity the (B.S.) atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System .
-Robert Anton Wilson
@ christofay
Your comment /question is a relevant one, and needs to be considered, because I suspect that so much hope has been is laid at the feet of the democrat’s savior; meaning, if Pat Fitzgerald doesn’t bring down the ‘House of Busch’ look for massive retaliation on all fronts. One would be wise to prepare.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 11 2005 7:15 utc | 32

“ “I have opinions but no Belief System.””
Without doing the whole angels on a pinhead thing one could argue that the above statement in fact signifies a belief. That the belief is a paradox, that is the belief is that I have no beliefs, doesn’t nullify its existence because many other’s beliefs are equally paradoxical.
However Uncle does us the favour of indicating the difficulty anybody who claims to be a ‘free thinker’ has genuinely opening their consciousness to all options since if we allow ourselves acceptance of a concept that means we have rejected all concepts that don’t agree with it. There is nothing ‘free thinking’ about that.
All of this is minor stuff however when you compare that little contradiction to the major divergence between what most people say and what they in fact do.
We have all met selfish socialists and generous capitalists, both conditions are far more common that most people feel comfortable with so generally we all seem to have an unspoken agreement that it is ‘unsporting’ to point out the gap between ‘walking the talk and talking the walk’.
This notion can segue across to Monolycus’s point that too much emphasis on collective guilt may dilute the concentrated guilt of those who participate in evil by acts of commission rather than more neutral acts of ommission.
Surely someone whose guilt is just confined to talking (ie voting for BushCo but never actually killing an Iraqi and stealing their oil) shouldn’t be considered as bad as someone who actually made sure that Iraqis did get shot and not only participated in the theft of Iraqi oil but also benefited directly from that theft?
Well I guess that depends on what you believe the purpose of seeking justice should be. If justice is an end in itself ie it’s purpose is to punish those according to the amount of direct harm they have caused others, then the BushCo actors should ‘feel more pain’ than those that ‘merely’ voted for them.
If you think the justice system should strive to prevent this harm from being committed again then then perhaps it makes more sense to ensure that the talkers cop a punishment as heavy as the actors.
Bill Burroughs (inventor of the Burroughs adding machine scam) once observed that it was pointless to go around locking up drug pushers. He reckoned that as long as there was a big pool of addicts prepared to pay good money for junk, there were sufficient greedy people in the world to replace incarcerated pushers as quickly as the state locked em up.
If one truly wanted to stop smack from being sold on the streets of your nation then the addicts had to be eliminated because it was only when the demand for heroin had been destroyed that pushers would stop trying to push it.
Extrapolating that notion one could argue that as long as people are selfish and greedy enough to rate their desire for cheap energy higher than an Iraqi’ freedom, there would always be a mainchancer prepared to give them what they wanted in return for a vote.
So if one really wanted to get rid of corrupt and greedy politicians the only way to do that 100% wouid be to eliminate voters prepared to trade their vote for personal gain.
However it doesn’t have to be an either/or thing. The guilty committers of evil should be punished to serve as an example to those who do consider the consequences of their actions.
If many of the voters ‘knew’ there was a good chance that they would be held accountable for their sefishness, their ability to think consequentally would greatly reduce the number of voters prepared to support the greedheads.
You see I’d be certain that the vast majority of these actual actors are arrogant in their certainty that they will ‘get away with it.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 11 2005 11:30 utc | 34

I’m not so sure about your certain pardons thing rapier. Of course Fitz and his little gang know all about what happened with watergate, and I hear that they have some means by which they can prevent a pardon party this time around. Give em credit – it looks to me like they are tying up all the loose ends here.
We shall see quite soon.

Posted by: rapt | Oct 11 2005 17:19 utc | 36

On message
From Lewis Lapham in this month’s Harper’s:
It does no good to ask the weakling’s pointless question, “Is America a fascist state?” We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, “Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen,” an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of the international capital markets, worthy of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”? I wish to be the first to say we can. We’re Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 11 2005 22:47 utc | 38

Latham’s is a great essay – eerily similar to Swift’s writings which, unfortunately, appear to be timeless.
I’ve been musing lately on the similarity between corporate hegemony and Kurzweil’s singularity forecast by geekdom. The singularity meme posits that on present form it will only be some decades now before we are (willingly) ruled by machines which we are unable to control, understand or exist without. I think the singularity has already come and gone, and we are already (willingly) ruled by corporations (in whom humans fill the role that individual cells do in our bodies) in return for some modicum of bread and circuses (oxygen & sugar). The only remaining evolutionary detail is the completion of the migration of corporations to machine intelligence – which will not be “our” choice, but theirs as they strive for competitive advantage amongst themselves.
In all speculation about the singularity the central issue for us is whether machine (corporate) entities will be benevolent, for either utilitarian or sentimental reasons, or hostile to humans.
Given how we’ve treated those life-forms that we’ve gained power over I’d say the prognosis is not good.

Posted by: PeeDee | Oct 12 2005 20:55 utc | 40