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Oct. 26, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:41
October 26, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Would you get Cookie in here?
I just missed a phone call, and I got to have her return for me.
Greetings.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome back to the award-winning, thrill-packed, ever-exciting, increasingly popular, growing by leaps and bounds, Rush Limbaugh program featuring, come on in, come in, featuring America's anchorman, me, Rush Limbaugh.
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And the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
So I'm minding my own business last night, as I usually do, bothering no one.
And all of a sudden, what time was this?
Seems like this was, it was, I think it was before the World Series games.
By the way, do you know that the Houston Astros don't have any black players?
They ought to be losing.
They don't have any black players on the, well, I'm not saying this.
Joe Morgan's saying this and some others.
This is becoming a big issue here.
Well, it is.
I saw a TV show about this two weeks ago, but we'll get to that sometime today.
It had to be before the game started.
All of a sudden, the internet starts blowing up.
The internet starts blowing up.
The first story was that ABC had called the White House, and they said, and they had two sources confirming that indictments were coming.
One to five indictments on the high end, and it, you know, Rove Libby, it could have been even higher.
And the White House said, don't know anything about it.
And then it turns out ABC did not run with that story on their evening news last night.
The White House said it's a bluff.
They called here bluffing us.
They don't know anything.
And then there were more rumors last night, and the rumors were identical.
One to five indictments in a CIA leak case, one to five indictments.
And it could go really high in the White House.
And then nothing.
There was absolutely nothing to it.
It was just more of, it's just the media out of control.
And then today, the special prosecutor's office, and the media got up today with the same theme going, saying, yes, this could be the day.
The day we're all, it's going to be Christmas morning.
Last night could have been our Christmas Eve.
And then the Special Prosecutor's Office.
Oh, and Fitzgerald's walking into the courthouse.
And he's got an entourage of FBI and counterinsurgent guys around him protecting him, whoever they are.
And the media, they got a throng of cameras following him in there.
This could be it.
He's going in to tell a grand jury who he wants to send up.
This could be it.
We can't even keep our pants up.
We're so excited.
And then the spokesman announced no indictments today.
And you could just, you could see the tears.
You could see the tears forming.
Some of the media look like they're sucking on the lemons the way Katrina Van den Hoovel looked last night on the on Hardball.
You see that?
She looked like she's sucking lemons the whole time she was on the program.
Had no way to connect the dots about Saddam Hussein, but boy, she can connect the dots to Dick Janey.
At any rate, folks, after all this hullabaloo last night, and by the way, ABC later denied that they had ever said the White House to the White House they double sourced anything about indictments.
So we have that disparity.
Why would a White House make this up?
At any rate, so Fitzgerald announces no indictments today, and it just made me wonder.
So what was all this last night?
Well, what all this was last night was just more of the same.
What we've had for the previous two weeks or three weeks with all these rumors, 22 indictments are coming next week.
We know indictments.
Every day, the story has been indictments could come tomorrow.
We're certainly hoping so.
We want to see Cheney and Jean in Club Gitmo Orange.
We want to see Scooter Libby being perp walked out of the White House, all this stuff.
And they keep changing the theme.
They keep changing what the indictments are going to be about, and nobody knows.
And yet, look at the reporting that we have got.
Anyway, while this is happening last night, and I'm paying attention to what the leaks say and what the media is reporting, I decided, oh, it's time to do some research here.
So I started in with a long bit of research on just how this all got started and who it was that really first notified anybody that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA.
And it turns out that Joe Wilson did one month before Novak's column.
Novak's column was in, I think, July of 2004.
And Joe Wilson was speaking at some left-wing think tank on how Iraq was such a boondoggle and what's next for the leftist movement.
And they got a little biographical blurb next to Wilson's picture.
And it mentions that he is the wife of Valerie Plame.
And then I went back and I found a Washington Times story from this past summer in which, oh, because one, oh, oh, forgot this.
One of the elements that was being leaked last night was that the FBI was roaming through the Wilsons neighborhood yesterday, knocking on doors.
Hello, anybody home?
Asking if they knew that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.
So I'm sitting, I'm scratching my head.
Wait a minute.
That's what this was all about two years ago, and they're just now getting around to it now?
I mean, you would think they would have had this wrapped up within the first three months.
You go door to door, you ask anybody in the neighborhood, hey, do you know that your neighbor here over here worked for the CIA?
But they were just doing it yesterday, according to the news.
They were just doing it yesterday.
And the FBI agent's name was mentioned as well.
Awfully suspicious, awfully odd for that to happen.
And they quote some neighbor, I didn't know.
Well, what would you say if the FBI, FBI comes knocking on your, did you know, with all this going on in Washington, this is where this darling couple, the Wilsons, reside, what would you say if some FBI agent knocks on the doors, did you know that the woman lives down the street or cross street, whatever, right next door to you?
Former secret operative at the CIA?
I didn't know.
Or would you say, hell yes, I knew it.
Everybody here, how did you, we want to subpoena you.
We're going to bring you down to the grand jury.
What are you going to say?
But this Washington Times story from this past summer mentions that everybody in their neighborhood knew.
So I'm going to present all this to you in a chronological order here after the break.
We're not going to spend nearly as much time on it today as we did yesterday because we've pretty much made our point here.
But I do want to deal with the latest.
This is more than a media conniption, folks.
This is childish.
This is amateurish.
This is the way four and five-year-olds behave on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
And it's going to be that if they don't get what they want, parents are going to have hell to pay here.
Santa Claus, whoever will have hell to pay.
But get this.
This is CNN reported this is CNN USA Today Gallup Poll.
This had to just destroy Bill Schneider over at CNN when he saw this.
And this had to destroy him everywhere over there in the media.
Only one in 10 Americans said that they believe Bush administration officials did anything wrong.
Only one in 10 Americans said they believe Bush administrations did nothing illegal.
Wait, a second.
What is that?
This is horrible.
Only one in 10 said they believe Bush administration did nothing illegal.
Yeah, wait, a minute now.
Why don't they, what is this?
Nine in ten say they believe the Bush administration did something illegal.
Is that what that means?
Or unethical in connection with the leaking of the CIA operatives' identity.
39% said some administration officials acted illegally in the matter, in which the identity of Valerie Playham, a CIA operative, was revealed.
Same percentage said that the administration officials acted unethically but did nothing illegal, 39%.
So, with all this media coverage and with all this slam-dunk assuredness that there will be indictments, and it's Roe and Libby, and it may go up as high as Cheney, and it may go to Bush, and we may be able to go back and indict Nixon all over again, even for this, because his former ties to the CIA, but who knows how far they want to go with.
You would think, you would think that far more than 39% were convinced or would be convinced of the guilt of people in the White House.
This has to be just a depressing poll, given that it's CNN USA Today Gallup.
John Dean wrote a column for Find Law.
John Dean basically said it's difficult to envision Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuting anybody, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed they were acting for reasons of national security.
While hindsight may find their judgment was wrong, and there's no question their tactics were very heavy-handed and dangerous.
I'm not certain that they were acting from other than what they believed to be reasons of national security.
They were selling a war they felt needed to be undertaken.
In short, I can't imagine any of them being indicted unless they were acting for reasons other than national security, such as perjury and this sort of thing.
Because national security is such a gray area of the law.
Come next week, I can see this entire investigation coming to a remarkable anti-climax as Fitzgerald closes down his Washington office and returns to Chicago.
In short, I think the frenzy is about to end and it'll not go any further.
That's John Dean.
Now, he'd have to be right for the first time in his life for this to have any weight, but we can hope.
But really, if what's happening here is if the special prosecutor is in fact pursuing Dick Cheney and Libby because they targeted Joe Wilson, that essentially is just a policy dispute that they're trying to criminalize.
Wilson thinks one thing about Iraq, and Cheney and Scooter Libby think another.
And because Cheney and Scooter Libby think one thing and Wilson doesn't, and they start trying to discredit Wilson, they're going to turn that into a crime.
That's what Dean's essentially saying.
He cannot imagine any prosecutor doing that.
Let's take a quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue right after this.
I know that many of you people scoff when you hear me say that I am America's anchorman.
Well, let's go to the audio tape.
Last night, or was it?
No, it was this morning on PMS NBC.
They were reading headlines from the newspapers of record.
The Washington Post, the New York Times, and my website, rushlimbaugh.com.
The Washington Post says, Bush aides brace for charges.
They report lawyers in the case and some White House officials braced for at least one indictment when the grand jury meets today.
The New York Times headline is: Leak counsel is said to press on Rove's role.
The paper reports the flurry of last-minute activity.
Had White House officials anticipating an announcement as soon as Wednesday about whether the prosecutor would seek indictments.
And then there's radio host Rush Limbaugh with a much different take.
The headline on his website this morning is Christmas Eve for Media, waiting for indictments.
Limbaugh told his radio audience yesterday, quote, I'm telling you, the mainstream press already has their story written.
And if there are no indictments, there will be no change in the way the press reports this.
Cheney is still a bad guy, still leaked all this information, outed this poor woman.
America's anchorman.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
Here's this Washington Times story.
From July 15th of this year.
And I remember reporting this to you at the time it came out.
The partisan fight over Karl Rove exploded onto the Senate floor yesterday with Democrats trying to strip him of his security clearance and Republicans retaliating by trying to strip the chamber's two top Democrats of theirs.
Anyway, you go down to the later part of the story.
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame earlier in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an undercover agent, saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
Fred Rustman, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told the Washington Times she made no bones about the fact she was an agency employee and that her husband was a diplomat.
Her neighbors knew it.
Her friends knew it.
His friends knew it.
A lot of blame could be put onto the central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here.
The agency never changed her cover status.
Mr. Rustman, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under non-official cover, also known as an NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson, also said she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, she hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997 when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson, and had twins.
That was in USA Today on July the 14th.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignments within the last five years.
She wasn't.
It's moot.
There cannot be the original purpose for this investigation cannot be what's still going on.
If all of this is true, there really can be no crime in terms of outing this woman and her status.
Mr. Rustman said she was home for such a long time.
She went to work every day at Langley.
She was in an analytical type job.
She was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids.
Most people knew who Valerie and her husband, I think, who knew Valerie and her husband would have thought she was an overt CIA employee.
Asked whether his wife had been compromised before the press leak, Wilson said, I have no idea.
Though he said he thought her work has had to change since the leaks.
My wife's status is that she's back at work, obviously in a different capacity.
She no longer has the cover that she once had, said Wilson.
And if you will recall, ladies and gentlemen, we also uncovered at that time, last July, that Mrs. Wilson had been active politically, making donations to Al Gore's presidential campaign and also to America Coming Together.
And she did so under the name of Valerie Plame.
It says here, and I've got campaign contribution search: Valerie Flame, Plame, 42, Lister Bio, CIA operative.
She gave $1,000 to Al Gore in October or April of 1999, $372 to a special interest group, Americans coming together on October 11th of 04.
And when working for Gore back in, or when contributing to Gore back in 1999, her employment is listed as Brewster Jennings and Associates.
If you recall, that's a CIA front group.
So here you have this agent who's supposedly working under deep cover.
And to release her identity would be to threaten her life and put it at risk.
And everybody who knew her.
Here she is contributing as Valerie Wilson, Brewster Jennings and Associates, publicly making these donations to the Al Gore campaign.
All this news we had for you last summer, but the reason I bring this up is because the press is still on this.
They're still acting.
We're back to the same thing we were yesterday.
The press is ignoring its own body of work.
History begins today, as far as the press is concerned.
New York Times, Washington Post, ignoring what they wrote about this back in 1998 in terms of the weapons of mass destruction, and now ignoring what has been published and known about Valerie Plame Valerie Wilson since at least last summer, especially with this notion that everybody in her neighborhood knew who she was and that she and her husband were not keeping quiet about it.
And I mentioned this only because it's a big deal last night.
Some leak, some leak from somewhere said the FBI is in the neighborhood interviewing people.
And you got to figure, okay, now what's this about?
This is something that you would do two weeks ago or two years ago.
You would do this in the first two weeks of your investigation.
If this is what you're investing, if they're just now sending an FBI agent in there, what could be going on?
So FBI agents, as recently as Monday night, interviewed at least two people in her neighborhood to determine whether they knew she worked for the CIA before she was unmasked with the help of senior Bush administration officials.
This is from press accounts last night.
Two neighbors told the FBI they were shocked to learn that she was a CIA operative.
The FBI interview.
Now, listen to this.
The FBI interviews suggested the prosecutor wanted to show that Playm's status was covert and that there was damage from the revelation that she worked CIA.
Now, that's a press report, and that is total guesswork.
That is nothing more than an assumption.
There's no official word from the prosecutor's office that that's what they're doing.
That whole sentence is nothing more than an assumption.
The FBI interviews suggested that the prosecutor wanted to show that Plain's status was covert.
Everybody in the world knows that it wasn't.
Even by virtue of the statute, it wasn't.
Now, how does this prove anything anyway?
The statute doesn't say anything about neighbors knowing.
This is just media hopefulness.
They could also be trying to determine if Plame failed to keep her supposed status secret herself.
That's what they could be trying to do.
Who knows where they're going here?
But to make these assumptions based on what is desired as an outcome is precisely what's going on.
It's why I continue to say that we are dealing here specifically with a near scandalous media, ladies and gentlemen.
And we got this contribution to Gore in 2000, noted in a public report, mentions her under her maiden name, identified her CIA front company.
We have a public website in which Wilson himself mentioned her by the name Plame in June of 2004, which is one month before the Novak piece.
The idea that she or he were concerned about revealing her seems ridiculous.
And keep in mind, this forum that Wilson attended was substantial, had all kinds of representatives from foreign governments.
Details on that when we're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
All right, we are back.
We'll be getting your phone calls in just a sec.
Here is the information that Wilson himself put out on his wife, the 2003 Iraq Forum, June 14th, 2003, Washington, D.C., and it lists three pages of speakers here, and they're from all over the world.
And on the last page, you get to Joe Wilson under the section Evening Public Lecture, a State of the Movement Address.
And it lists the keynote speaker, Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst, and then Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Now, listen to the bio that accompanies Wilson's picture on the website promoting the 2003 Iraqi Forum.
Again, this is one full month before Novak's column came out identifying her.
Joseph C. Wilson IV, blah, blah, blah, Ambassador Wilson graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 72.
He's been decorated as a commander in the order of the equatorial star by the government of Gabon and has an admiral as an admiral in the El Paso Navy by the El Paso County Commissioners.
He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has four children.
So he outs his wife's name, Valerie Plame.
Now, I'm telling you that the concern over all this is, well, if she's running around using the name Valerie Plame and is known as that as an agent at the CIA, anybody who knows her from her CIA work will then know that she's Joe Wilson's wife.
So he puts her name out there.
He also allows Vanity Fair to cover them, photograph them on the cover of the magazine.
So the point here is that Patrick Fitzgerald will not have an easy time if he goes for revelation of her identity.
She will have to take the stand, as will Wilson, and all their public appearances and various social contacts will become relevant.
So if they're still pursuing this notion that the real crime here, and the reason he asked this and speculated, because they're sending FBI agents into the neighborhood and asking neighbors if they knew that she worked at the CIA.
So, I mean, I just, I find this amazing.
I can't believe they're still working on that aspect of this.
And it could be for any reason whatsoever.
The fact is that nobody knows anything whatsoever.
Let's move on to audio.
Let me give you a C.
I told you so first.
Let me give you, go to cut three.
This is from Wolf Blitzer's show, The Situation Room yesterday.
He's talking about this whole investigation with Jeff Greenfield.
And Wolf says, you remember who originally started this whole investigation, this special counsel investigation?
It was the CIA asking the Justice Department to look into this leaked to Bob Novak.
And that's fueling all sorts of conspiratorial theories, shall we say?
I pointed this out to you on Monday.
What got this going was a CIA referral.
The CIA monitors the media.
When they see things in the media that they think are secret, private, and covert, then they can go to the Justice Department and ask for a referral to start an investigation.
And that's what happened here.
And that is why there are many people who believe that what this actually is, and I'm close to being one of them, by the way, that what this actually is, is the CIA at war with George W. Bush over a whole bunch of things.
9-11, the war in Iraq, the CIA populated with a bunch of political enemies as far as Bush would be concerned.
Same thing with the State Department.
Here is how Greenfield answered Wolf's question.
This goes back to the 80s.
It goes back to the first Bush administration when Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had his differences with the CIA.
And there's a long-standing dispute between different elements of the government about the CIA versus the more hawkish folks in the Defense Department and now in the White House Iraq group.
Clearly, this is the underlying story behind a lot of this.
Uh-huh.
See, I told you.
And if that's what's being looked at here, then what's happening here is the CIA trying to do Bush in by sending Wilson over there.
And I'm telling you, I told you from the get-go that it was Wilson and his wife that I think came up with this whole scheme to undermine the war in Iraq and undermine the presidency with the knowledge of the CIA itself, because it was in their best interest for this to be undermined too, because they were trying to survive.
And you've got an administration that they're not favorable towards.
So there's a lot going on.
But all this is policy dispute stuff.
When you get right down to it, it's inside Washington political policy.
And if they're going to make criminal activity out of this, if that's what these indictments, if there are any, lead to, it'll be an absolute shame.
Now, to show you how absurd it's getting, last night, Chris Matthews on his show, oh, take it back.
Well, he did play Cheney last night on his show from an interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, in which Cheney said he didn't know Joe Wilson.
He had no idea who he was, which is true.
When Cheney found out what was going on, Wilson comes back, starts saying, well, he called George Tennis and said, what's this?
Who's this guy?
And Tennant said, eh, well, but it's apparent Cheney didn't know.
But Matthews refers in this bite here from this morning on MSNBC to Cheney's appearance with Russert as essentially false testimony before the American people.
So Randy Myers, the host, says, much has been said about what Vice President Cheney knew and when he knew it.
Talking about Joe Wilson on Meet the Press touched off a whole thing about the criticism of the war in Iraq.
Chris, I want you to listen to this.
He plays the video of Cheney on Meet the Press 9-14, 2003.
Cheney says, Joe Wilson, I don't know who sent Joe Wilson.
He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.
I don't know Mr. Wilson.
I probably shouldn't judge him.
I have no idea who hired him.
And Russert says the CIA did.
Cheney responds, yeah, but who in the CIA?
I don't know.
Then Meyer says, at the end there, the vice president acknowledges, yeah, it's a CIA, but I don't know who in the CIA would have sent him.
Does that give the vice president some wiggle room in this whole issue?
He's certainly not being helpful to Timothy Russert, who's interviewing him at the time.
I mean, if he had been informed by Tennant, the head of the FBI, that it was Mrs. Wilson who sent her, who had a big role in sending her husband on the trip, he could have said that.
He chose not to say that.
And I have to tell you, I don't think he was being cooperative as a witness on national television if you know two things.
He told his chief of staff and his staff wrote chief of staff scooter Libby wrote it down.
He said it was Mrs. Wilson who sent her husband on that trip.
And then three months later, he said, I don't have any idea who sent him on the trip.
Well, that's not the whole truth.
Well, but it's appearing on Meet the Press.
Russert's not a special prosecutor.
You don't take an oath when you go in there.
What is this?
An uncooperative witness to the American people on national television.
Unbelievable.
I mean, that's where we've gotten.
Now you've got to hear this.
This is Katrina Vandenhoe.
And she was on Matthew's show last night, Hardball.
She's the editor of The Nation magazine.
And I'm telling you, folks, she looked like she was sucking a lemon on this whole show.
Yeah, just puckered up.
You know what you look like when you're sucking on a lemon if you would do it.
So Matthew says, Katrina, do you buy the argument that the vice president knowingly kept under the carpet the knowledge he gained from a trip to Africa by Joe Wilson, disproving the case that there was a deal by Sodom to buy nuclear weapons from Najera?
And that was not disproven, by the way.
That's another myth here that survives in the mainstream press.
But here's Vandenhoevel's reply.
This is a day when we have learned the grim and tragic news that 2,000 soldiers, American soldiers, have been killed in a war of choice.
I think we need to connect the dots to that video of Dick Cheney, the lead cheerleader for this war, who manufactured, who is out there with manufactured evidence to basically frighten, one might say terrorize the American people into a war, which even Brent Scowcroft, George Bush once, national security advisor, is very clear has undermined our security.
I think we need to connect the dots and keep connecting with the children.
I said fascinating she can connect the dots to Cheney and all this, so you can't connect the dots to Saddam Hussein.
Can't connect the dots to Al-Qaeda, can't connect the dots to anything.
So Matthew says, well, did you believe that Bill Clinton, you think Bill Clinton should have been kicked out of office for perjury and obstruction?
No, I don't.
I think I didn't like a lot of his policies.
However, I don't.
I think the key thing is no one lies to a special prosecutor, but if it's about national security, that's far more important than sexual relationships.
So you see where they're going with their defense.
Well, Clinton doing is about sex.
In fact, he's doing virtuously, protecting his wife, his daughter from embarrassing circumstances.
It was honorable for Bill Clinton to lie and commit perjury and take the heat rather than admit the truth.
Now, it's getting ridiculous now because another guest on the show last night was John Podesta, who spent his entire time in the White House defending the indefensible and spinning lies.
Podesta's job was to lie for a liar.
Podesta's chief of staff to Bill Clinton.
So Matthew says, no, we've heard half a dozen dozen cases where they're out pushing a story that Joe Wilson's no damn good wife put him on this junket.
Why did they take that risk if they weren't protecting the vice president against something really serious?
I don't get it.
Why they got so worked up, I think, goes back to the fact that they really were pushing this intelligence in a way that was unsubstantiated by the facts, probably as they knew them in February when the State of the Union was given.
And I think they just freaked out.
The one thing we know for certain is that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove told Scott McClellan to go out and tell the American people they had nothing to do with this.
They did that in September, October vote.
No, that was a lie.
Okay, so the drumbeat continues.
The hopes, dreams, and prayers of the mainstream press continue to be worn on their sleeves.
And it's gotten to the point now you go out and get the chief of staff for the Clinton administration to comment on the honesty and veracity of this administration.
We'll be back after this brief timeout.
Don't go away.
As usual, my friends, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Rush Limbaugh sharp and focused here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, Jonathan in Chicago.
You're up first today, and it's nice to have you with us.
Oh, no, you're more than welcome, Mr. Limbaugh.
I agree with you somewhat, but personally, I think that you're doing yourself a disservice by defending some of the, if you will, undesirables in this administration.
By undesirables, I mean those who have, to a certain extent, shamed themselves by not giving a damn about any form of conflict of interest.
I think that Bush should somewhat follow the Reagan line and get a little fresh blood in there, such as Reagan did with Baker and others.
I think that it would only be for the good.
Well, would you identify yourself, Jonathan, as a liberal, a moderate, or a conservative?
Well, I'm a conservative.
However, I found myself not always voted conservative.
There are some conservative Democrats that I have voted for.
Well, okay, I'm glad you called here because I, to tell you the truth, I'm glad to have the opportunity here to define my role here.
I'm not defending anybody.
I'm not defending Rove or Libby.
I don't know what anybody did.
What I'm suggesting to you is that there is an out-of-control, near scandalous media here, and I am attempting to focus people on that.
We have no clue what's going to happen here, and neither do they.
And this irresponsible behavior trying to trick the White House and everybody else into admitting that there were indictments because they don't know and they desperately want to know by the media last night is clear evidence that they're still throwing stuff up against the wall and hoping it sticks.
What does concern me about this is that if these indictments do come down on the area of a policy disagreement, that we're going to be criminalizing policy disputes, we're going to be criminalizing politics, and that is going to frost me.
That's not, you know, Joe Wilson's not an angel here.
His wife is not an angel, and to act like whatever has happened here.
What if the truth is that these people are the ones that are ultimately responsible for causing all this by hatching a plan to undo the Bush presidency in the war on Iraq?
Why not go criminalize that?
Nobody's talking about doing that, but somehow we want to criminalize the administration for trying to defend itself against what might be an attempt here by the CIA and these two agents, well, this one agent and her husband, to pull this off.
And that's my focus here.
The press is focusing on Rove and Libby, and they're trying to get up to Cheney.
And as far as defending them, my defense of them goes only so far as I would defend anybody in this circumstance.
They haven't even been charged with anything yet, and we've already convicted them.
And I'm not going to stand for it.
This is outrageous what is happening here.
So the idea of this program is to simply be a counterweight and a counterbalance to this out-of-control media, which is behaving in an irresponsible fashion, as I have documented yesterday, as I have documented today.
All you have to do is take a look at the New York Times and the way they're savaging Judy Miller.
This is unprecedented.
And there's one reason they're savaging Judy Miller.
They're savaging Judy Miller because she helped the Bush administration, they think, in promote this cause of case for war based on weapons of mass destruction.
There's no real difference today between the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, particularly that in Washington and New York.
And my efforts here are simply to offer evidence and proof of that.
Back to Chicago to Bob.
You're next, sir, and welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello.
I'd just like to say you were making a big deal about Valerie Plain using her company name when she contributed political funds, but isn't that the idea of a cover operation?
Is that what you use when anyone asks where you work?
She's supposed to say that and everybody else that works there.
Well, when I mentioned this last summer, this was the predictable response I got, and it's a predictable response I'm getting today.
Well, isn't this part of carrying out a covert operation here by acting like you're public?
Fine and dandy.
But it's not an isolated thing.
You got Wilson mentioning her name in a bio that he wrote and put on a website one month before Novak comes out with his column.
My point is, they weren't doing anything to keep her name secret.
We've got a guy, Rustman, who was her boss, worked in the CIA for 20 years, 24 years, said the whole neighborhood knew.
It's a body of evidence, Bob, that you take in context and you add one bit to the next and you get a sum total.
And so, you know, one little bit of evidence like you cite, you might be able to be right about that.
But if you put it all and combine it, put it all together and combine it, you clearly have a picture of Wilson and his wife not doing a whole lot to keep her identity secret themselves, which makes this even more laughable.
I'm going to take a quick timeout here in just a second, but there's one other little story here.
And this is Chicago sometime since we're all Chicago all day here.
First two calls from Chicago may focus on a, may as well focus on a Chicago news story.
Headline, Fitzgerald too clean for GOP criticism to stick.
It's by Lynn Sweet.
Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel leading the White House leak probe, is no Kenneth Starr.
That's why if Republicans are contemplating attacking him, if he seeks indictments and some grenades have already been lobbied against him, they may want to reconsider.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the White House will attempt to demonize Fitzgerald.
It's just not going to work in this case.
They can't do that.
The guy just seems too clean.
Okay, so this is the kind of hack journalism that I think infuriates Americans.
They tagged Starr as partisan and corrupt from the get-go simply because his target was their boy, Bill Clinton.
Now they are tagging Fitzgerald as brilliant and always right and unassailable and clean and pure as the wind-driven snow simply because he's going after their enemy.
Fitzgerald may be all of this.
I don't know the man.
But I will tell you this, Ken Starr was not a pervert.
Ken Starr was not zealous.
Ken Starr was not partisan.
Ken Starr wasn't any of these things that they tagged him.
You could have said the same things about Starr that they're trying to say about Fitzgerald.
What they're saying here, you try to demonize this guy and we, the media, are not going to let you.
Folks, did you hear the latest great news?
ConocoPhillips oil company profits are up 89%.
I'll tell you what, when we're having economic slowdowns and threats to economic slowdowns, I just love it when American corporations and businesses pave the way and show the way to success and prove that economic growth is possible.
I love capitalism.
Congratulations to ConocoPhillips.
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