Angry about Novak, Rove, Libby, Bush, Stonewall of Sheehan, Soldiers Dying in Iraq?

I get angry when the boss takes a vacation when there's work to be done. In this case, GWB needs to deal with some political fallout from his political advisor, Karl Rove, orchestrating a smear campaign of Joseph Wilson that resulted in revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative.

Also, there's the unjust war that is killing more and more each day.

Also, there is the economy that is based, in a large part, on once red-hot housing market that is starting to cool fast.

And then there's a mother of a dead soldier who just wants GWB to tell her why this war is noble.

Worst of all is the feeling that I can't do anything.

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Positive spin: the bloggers are taking care. The blog roll I have listed here -- esp. The Note, Crooks and Liars, the Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post -- keep on top of it. Yeah, there's a bit of a blog echo, but that's just people talking to each other and analyzing stuff.

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After tomorrow, I may have to stop posting for a couple of weeks when I hit the road with family and spend the remainder of August in the Pacific Northwest.


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Unlike Andrew Sullivan, I cannot have Dan Savage sit in for me while I'm gone. Both of these guys are smart and courageous bloggers. Sullivan for being a pioneer and a very hard worker (even though I disagree with about 95 percent of his positions) and for asking Dan to sub; Dan for editing an excellent newspaper, The Stranger in Seattle, and for writing an amazing sex advice column, and for writing a superb book, The Kid, about his process of adopting his son through open adoption.

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So starting Saturday, I won't post for awhile. If I get an excellent substitute, well, I got lucky.

In Case You Missed Kurt Vonnegut

My sister forwarded the editorial below from Kurt Vonnegut. Since Vonnegut's a good writer -- and has a very bloggable style -- I'm going to risk showing you something that you saw last year, and I'm going to run the whole piece (BTW, Snopes says it really is from Vonnegut). This was published May 10, 2002 on In These Times.

Cold Turkey
By Kurt Vonnegut
May 10, 2004
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
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When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.
But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:
Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?
How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …
And so on.
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!
I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.
Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?
No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.
During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.
Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
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And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”
The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.
Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.
But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.
Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:
I often think it’s comicalHow nature always does contriveThat every boy and every galThat’s born into the world aliveIs either a little LiberalOr else a little Conservative.
Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.
If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.
If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.
What could be simpler?
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My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.
One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants.
And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”
How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.
So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.
That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.
Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.
About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.
I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.
But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.
And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.
When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.
Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?
Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

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One or two readers have commented that I don't summarize my references enough.

I agree.

I have a habit of avoiding a gloss or summary of the links I put into my posts. Not glossing links is fine if somebody is reading your political blog along with a bunch of other political blogs. But only one person reads this blog regularly, and I think his name is Adam (just like the original first person), so I better start providing more context for what I put here.

Either that, or don't post at all.

In the spirit of giving more context, I have been posting more material that I find elsewhere.

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Nuff said. Chew the fat.

Dear Mr. Bush: They're Pissed and Proud at Crawford

A friend sent this dispatch along. It comes from Peacefile, a good site for keeping up with the warriors staked outside the western White House in Crawford, Texas, protestors who are calling on Bush to connect with the people -- you know, those people he had to take a 5 week vacation for, so he could go and see what's real. Apparently, it is still difficult for him to see anyone other than the servants at his big house in Crawford.

A Day in the Bar Ditch of Democracy USA
August 6th, 2005
By Greg Moses

IndyMedia North Texas / Bella Ciao / TodaysAlternativeNews / truthout! / UrukNet / PortSide

“I’m back here where I met you, in the tent!” says 53-year-old Vietnam Veteran Michael Young, speaking by cell phone Saturday evening, with lots of commotion in the background to back him up. Yes, he went to Crawford like he said, and here’s what he reports:

“Well, I got up around 7:30. Was already running a little late, because I didn’t get home until midnight. I put on a pot of coffee and then got in such a hurry that I forgot it. Didn’t take any of it with me. And I got here (at the tent) just as people were organizing to go to Crawford.”

There was a little preliminary controversy before the caravan left, says Young, as Veterans for Peace negotiated some turf issues with Cindy Sheehan, the mother of Iraq war casualty Casey Sheehan and moral leader of the trip to confront the President about his war in Iraq. In the end, it was decided that the Crawford trip would be a mutual action, since VFP had already planned a trip to the Western White House as part of its annual convention being held under and near the big tent.

With preliminary issues settled, 70 people hit the southbound highway out of Dallas, some riding in the Veterans for Peace Impeachment Bus, the rest in about 15 cars following behind. Young caught a ride in a Prius driven by VietNam Veteran Ken Ashe of North Carolina.

“No, we hadn’t met before the trip, this was the first time, but we’re brothers now,” Young assures me. Ashe made two tours to the VietNam war as a medic. “He’s got my information, I’ve got his information, and we plan on meeting up again.”

When they finally pulled off the highway into Crawford, the caravan stopped at the Crawford Peace House to freshen up with water and watermelon. They did a little protesting near the street there.

“One old hillibilly with two goats in the back of his truck told us to go home,” says Young with a chuckle, “but that was the only negative thing.” So the posse remounted and took off on the five-to-six-mile journey to Crawford Ranch, where the President of the USA–in an eerie replay of 2001– is on extended summer vacation.

“The cops made us stop the vehicles about a half mile or quarter mile from the gate. It was about 100 degrees out there. But they made us walk the rest of the way. And they wouldn’t let us walk on the road.”

“You have to see that road,” says Young. “There is no traffic on that road at all, yet they made us walk in the bar ditch beside the road, which was full of weeds. Real hard ground.” After a while the cops stopped them. “They were looking for an excuse to stop us,” says Young. “They said we were walking in the road against orders.”

“We protested loud and proud,” recalls Young. “And we meant everything we said. That went on for about 30-45 minutes. We even told the police to get out their history books and read about Hitler so they could understand their role in history, standing here protecting a war criminal. We were being brutally honest from our point of view. And there was lots of press there at the time.”

“Cindy got right in their face, too,” says Young. “She said look, this is a public roadway. How can you prevent me from walking on a public roadway?”

“At that point I got right behind her,” says Young. “If she was going to jail, I was going to jail. If they wanted confrontation, I was going to back her up. I had made my mind up about that.” But there was no confrontation, no arrest.

“Far as you could see there were armed Secret Service, armed Sheriff’s deputies, armed cops up and down the road eyeing us,” says Young. “We didn’t carry any backpacks or anything so they could see we were unarmed. They made us stand there, off the pavement in that heat. All the time we were there, I think I saw one car pass.” Then the press left the scene.

“Once the press left, there was not much point standing there,” says Young, so the protesters peeled away. I tell Young about internet information that Sheehan plans to return until she sees the President, and caravans are reported to be coming from San Diego and Louisiana. “A lot of people just showed up out of nowhere,” says Young. “I yelled ’til I was hoarse.”

“I gave Cindy a big hug and told her I loved her. Even if Cindy had found the President, she wouldn’t have found what she wants,” says Young. “Cindy wants her son back. That’s just the plain truth. I feel for her. And I was there to back her up.”

“Here we were on this little road that nobody was using but we couldn’t walk on it,” says Young. It’s like you can hear him shaking his head. Send a man off to war to defend his country’s freedoms, and 35 years later this is what he sees.

“But I’ll tell you we did ourselves proud out there. We didn’t take no guff and we talked to the cops. They said they were just acting professionally, just doing their job. And we told them that’s what Hitler’s people said.”

“Once you’ve been to war and you’re a vet,” says Young, “and if you’re sworn to uphold the Constitution and protect it from enemies BOTH foreign and domestic–that never leaves. I fought in an illegal war. These young guys in Iraq are fighting in an illegal war. If I can save one life I’ll do whatever it takes.” In the bar ditch outside the President’s Crawford Ranch, Young is fighting a better war than he fought in VietNam.

“This is a war for our country,” says Young. “They are taking our country away from us and turning it into a fascist state. What has Bush done for the people? Everything he’s done has been for the corporations.” He talks about news reports of record earnings at Halliburton and jobs going overseas.

“Here’s what they need,” says Young. “They need a state of constant war. They need an ignorant population to fight it. They need people to provide the services and materials for war. And they need an ignorant population to do that work. But it will definitely be a country of rich and poor if this is not stopped.”

“I don’t know if I can stop it,” says Young. “But I’ll be doing it until the day I die. And the VietNam vets? I’ll tell you for sure, we’re not going to back down. They can’t do anymore to us.”

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Cindy Sheehan is really showing her courage out there in Texas. She's from a town not too far from here called Vacaville. Her son Casey died doing his duty, and now she's doing a good job explaining that a soldier doing his duty does not necessarily believe in a wrong-headed President's policy. The right thing is to do your duty and support your fellow soldiers.

It seems like Americans know the difference, even though the Prez keeps trying to intimidate us into thinking otherwise.

Peter Jennings

Rest in peace.

Scooter and Judy Sittin' in a Tree: the Rove Gate Plame Game Continues

The emotional life of Robert Novak is one thing, but what about the secret relationship between Scooter Libby and Judith Miller? Why is it secret? Well, because Miller apparently has gone to jail to avoid talking about it.

As we all know, Scooter Libby is Dick Cheney's chief of staff who has refused to talk with reporters, but who has been a very popular witness before the special prosecutor's grand jury in the Plame-leak case. Judith Miller is the not-so-popular (with other journalists) NYT reporter who is now in jail for refusing to reveal her sources to the special prosecutor after she obtained classified information from senior White House officials.

According to Murray Waas at the American Prospect, Libby and Miller met on July 8, 2003. This was six days before Robert Novak published the infamous column that revealed Valerie Plame's work with the CIA. It could be that Libby is among the sources who Miller is protecting. Waas writes:

The meeting between Libby and Miller also occurred during a week of intense activity by Libby and White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove aimed at discrediting Plame's husband, Wilson, who on July 6, 2003, had gone public in a New York Times opinion piece with allegations that the Bush administration was misrepresenting intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq.

Miller was jailed in July -- two years to the day after Wilson's Times op-ed appeared -- for civil contempt of court after she refused to answer questions posed to her by Fitzgerald's grand jury regarding her contacts discussing Plame with Libby and other Bush administration officials. Ironically, even though she never wrote a story about Plame, she has so far been the only person jailed in the case.

The new disclosure that Miller and Libby met on July 8, 2003, raises questions regarding claims by President Bush that he and everyone in his administration have done everything possible to assist Fitzgerald's grand-jury probe. Sources close to the investigation, and private attorneys representing clients embroiled in the federal probe, said that Libby's failure to produce a personal waiver may have played a significant role in Miller's decision not to testify about her conversations with Libby, including the one on July 8, 2003.

The article questions why Bush does not suggest to Libby that he waive his right to confidentiality, as Rove had -- which is why Matt Cooper, of Time, was able to reveal Rove as his source (and thus not go to jail, when Miller did). If Libby was exposed as Miller's source, she may have a chance to be released from jail.

Arianna Huffington and others continue to ask why Miller is so bent on protecting sources that, in effect, put a CIA operative's life in danger. The pattern that is emerging is a well-orchestrated strategy by the White House between July 6, 2003 and July 14, 2003 to discredit Joseph Wilson by revealing that his wife had something to do with his mission to Niger. Miller is one reporter who continues to protect the sources that were part of that strategy. Miller, who has been accused of aiding White House efforts to justify going to war with Iraq based on flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction, is now in jail and unable to talk to the press about what she knows.

Sound confusing? It is, a little. One simplified version is that because Miller refuses to reveal her sources, and thus to talk about what those sources said to her, she cannot contradict information that others have given to the special prosecutor. Therefore, the special prosecutor is leaving the case open until he can find out more about what the White House senior officials actually said -- and actually knew. Remember, it is currently Rove's claim that he found out about Plame's identity from journalists. If Miller found out about Plame's identity from Libby (at the very same time that Rove claims to have learned it from reporters), that may discredit Rove.

Pressue from the blogosphere to get Libby to waive his confidentiality -- and thus leave Miller with no reason to protect him -- may help the special prosecutor to bring the case to the next step.

It would be a very interesting month -- it is August after all -- if the special prosecutor were able to charge someone from the White House while Bush was still in Crawford, Texas, taking his month off.

In a time of war, it just doesn't seem right to have the commander-in-hief clearing brush and riding bikes at his vacation house.

If dying soldiers in a mixed-up war aren't enough to get his attention, maybe a couple of indictments of his close and personal friends will be.

UPDATE: Perhaps Libby did give Miller permission to identify him as a source. Others who have talked to Libby -- including Tim Russert -- have identified him as a source.

I Really Care if Novak Cares

Yesterday, I wept in my beer about poor Robert Novak's emotional outburst -- "This is bullshit" -- on live TV.

I said (and I quote) "My heart goes out" to Mr. Novak.

Well, today, I really, really, really care about dear Robert. His long and close personal relationship with Karl Rove is very emotional and important to me and, I assume, the nation.

Apparently, like my tears, Mr. Rove has been leaking for years (intentional rhyme: tears, years). The NYT reports that Karl Rove was fired from George H.W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign after suspicions arose that he had smeared the campaign's manager, Robert Mosbacher Jr., via a leak to poor Robert Novak.

The NYT offers some background on what was happening in Texas in 1992, when Daddy Bush was trying to gather support for his re-election:

In those years, Mr. Rove regularly had dinner with Mr. Novak when the columnist went to Austin. Mr. Rove, in his mid-30's, was a rising political operator who in 1981 founded his direct-mail consulting firm, Karl Rove & Company. Gov. William P. Clements, a Republican, was one of his first clients.

Mr. Novak, in his mid-50's, was big political game for Mr. Rove. He was the other half, with Rowland Evans Jr., of a much read and increasingly conservative column that was syndicated by The Chicago Sun-Times and published weekly in The Washington Post. Evans and Novak, as it was called - Mr. Evans retired in 1993 -closely chronicled the Reagan era, and it would have been a sign of Mr. Rove's arrival on the national scene for Mr. Novak to mention him in print.

Still, a computer search of Mr. Novak's columns shows that Mr. Rove's name did not appear under his byline until 1992, when Mr. Novak wrote the words that got Mr. Rove into such trouble.

"A secret meeting of worried Republican power brokers in Dallas last Sunday reflected the reality that George Bush is in serious trouble in trying to carry his adopted state," the column began.

The column said that the campaign run by Mr. Mosbacher was a "bust" and that he had been stripped of his authority at the "secret meeting" by Senator Phil Gramm, the top Republican in the state.

Also at the meeting, Mr. Novak reported, was "political consultant Karl Rove, who had been shoved aside by Mosbacher."

Specifically, Mr. Mosbacher told The Houston Chronicle in 2003 that he had given a competitor of Mr. Rove the bulk of a $1 million contract for direct mail work in the campaign.

"I thought another firm was better," Mr. Mosbacher told The Chronicle. "I had $1 million for direct mail. I gave Rove a contract for $250,000 and $750,000 to the other firm."

The other firm belonged to Mr. Rove's chief competitor, John Weaver, and Mr. Rove was so angry, Texas Republicans say, that he retaliated by leaking the information about Mr. Mosbacher to Mr. Novak.

I think it was a serious mistake for Bush Sr. to have fired Karl Rove after the Novak column claimed "George Bush is in serious trouble in trying to carry his adopted state." How did Bush Sr. know that Karl was the one who gave Mr. Novak that information? Karl is much better at covering his tracks than that.

So these two longtime friends, Karl Rove and Robert Novak, have been at this leak game for over ten years. As I say, my heart goes out to them. They work so hard at their jobs.

I do hope that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knows what he's doing. Mr. Novak's incredible reporting may turn up some information on Fitzgerald that tells it like it really is.

Watch your back, Mr. Fitzgerald.

Does Novak Actually Care?

I know I'm grasping at the elusive needle-in-a-haystack of humanity here, but I think Robert Novak's performance on CNN yesterday -- when on live TV he became upset with James Carville, said "This is bullshit," then walked off the set -- is a signal that the man is not your standard bulletproof Republican operative. Today he even apologized, a gesture that surely separates him from other Republicans who have made mistakes far more severe.

When he blew CIA agent Valerie Plame's cover in his widely-read newspaper column, Novak was not playing nice. But now that a special prosecutor is circling in on the actors involved in this dangerous disclosure of identity, Novak is the one person who seems to be suffering inside. Bush leaves for a record-breaking extended vacation, Rove continues to wear his bemused grin, and Scooter Libby stays hidden under the holster of his boss Dick "Call me Dick" Cheney.

I have a soft spot for writers of any ilk, particularly ones like Novak who has written hundreds of thousands of words and been around for decades. Based on what Arianna Huffington is saying on HuffPost, I find myself being persuaded that Judy Miller is just kind of creepy and sad. Perhaps Novak is too. But my heart still goes out to the both of them. And Novak's emotional reaction yesterday to Carville's ribbing --"The Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you. Show 'em that you're tough" -- is a slight indication that he's letting this whole RoveGate Plame-Game scandal get to him.

Amen. It should be getting to the whole slimy crew of them.

UPDATE: Of course, the only reason we can witness Novak's emotions is that he is a journalist whose job is to display his ideas and information in public. We have not seen others crack because others stay well hidden.

Novak Proves to His Right Wing that He's Tough

Robert Novak indeed seems to be losing it.

As has been widely reported, the man who outed Valerie Plame in the national press freaked out on a television news show (CNN's "Inside Politics") when James Carville suggested that Novak had to prove to his people on the right that he was tough.

Novak shouted, "This is bullshit," and shortly thereafter yanked off his mic and stormed off the set.

I must say, this level of theater really feels good. Here in the early part of August, we're already turning up the heat. And everybody isn't just sitting around and acting like lazy cowboys either.

Let's chew the fat about this one. Speak to Fatspeak.

George W. Bush: Poet

Of course, it is old news that Mr. Bush has a flair for metaphor. He is a risk taker, using language in unpredictable ways, but still sending his message to his intended audience. I celebrate his gifts.

Today in the Austin-American Statesman, Bush expressed his confidence in Karl Rove and in NASA, both of which appear to be crumbling at the seams. He did not comment on Abu Ghraib or the legislation proposed by John McCain (and which Bush blocked) that would outlaw torture of prisoners. Bush made his comments as he was leaving for his annual vacation in Crawford, Texas.

So when things are falling apart at the office and you confidentally leave for vacation, who is your audience? Probably other bosses who can leave when things are not going well.

In the Statesman article, his poetic summary of his carefree departure reads as follows:

"I'm looking forward to getting back down there," he said, "I just checked in with the house. It's about 100 degrees. But no matter how hot it gets, I enjoy spending time in Texas."

His rich layering of language here is remarkable. When he refers to "the house," he appears to be talking about Crawford. But he is also referring to the White House, as Crawford is unofficially the summer White House. So, at "the house" it is "about 100 degrees." So Bush does indeed know his house is hot. Therefore, he is off to Texas.

When the next crisis emerges -- the Shuttle mission takes another turn for the worse, the Rovegate indictments are announced, the much more atrocious material from Abu Ghraib is published -- what will Mr. Bush do? Will he stay in Texas and manage things from there (Note: that's what he did when he received a memo on August 6, 2001 entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US"), or will he get back to the other "house" in Washington D.C.?

Fatspeak will add it up, if you like. If one of the following occurs while he is in Texas, what will Bush do?

More Shuttle Woes: stay in Texas? fly to D.C.?

Rovegate Announcements: stay in Texas? fly to D.C.?

More Abu Ghraib material released: stay in Texas? fly to D.C.?

Register your guess: chew the Fatspeak.

Sophisticated Bush Strategy: Appoint Bolton and Bolt

I know why I am such a failure.

I want things to be fair, so I pitch in and try to pursue fairness when I have the chance. George Bush, on the other hand, seems bullet-proof because fairness does not matter to him. Therefore, Bush is President, and I'm, well -- I'm Fatspeak.

So Mr. Bush appoints John Bolton during the Senate summer recess. And now Mr. Bush will leave for his air-conditioned ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he will go on about his life doing whatever bullet-proof people do.

It would all seem simple and acceptable if we weren't in the middle of a pre-emptive war that was started with bad intelligence. Bolton, it is charged by some, used his position in the State Department to manipulate intelligence and to intimidate underlings who would not help him in his manipulations. He is the epitome of one who dances-with-bad-intelligence.

Now, that's not fair.

But, as I have already made clear, fairness is for failures.

So John Bolton is now the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. This would have to be one of the coolest jobs with the government. First of all, you get to live in New York and park your car wherever you want to. You get to wear beautiful clothes and go to parties with beautiful people. It's way better than watching TV. You are actually on TV.

And it's not like he'll have to do much work. Since he has been charged by the Dems with being a bully and since Bush doesn't need any more controversy, Bolton's first job will be to sit back and enjoy the program. He must not cause any waves. It's a little like going into early retirement.

Apparently he's already off for NY. A sure sign that he intends to score a babe-trapping penthouse near the U.N.


I mean, look at him. The man is a walking love pump. He lends a whole new meaning to the words "French Tickler." I presume that he already has his eye on someone in the French diplomatic corps.

His is a class act. He wouldn't be caught dead with his pants down at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. He's Bolton, our man in the U.N.

Aren't we proud?(Photo: Chip East/Reuters)

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Chew, chew, chew the fat, wake them from their dream: chew Fatspeak.