Down On Your Knees With Newt

Shorter Charles Krauthammer

"If my boss was maniacally obsessed about a subject I'd never heard of before, I couldn't possibly be expected to remember where I'd heard about it, but, man, if anyone ever gave me head...."

And who could ever believe that Ari Fleischer would lie?

Smokin' Dick

From The Smoking Gun:

MARCH 7 -- Federal prosecutors want to gag an indicted former Washington, D.C. madam who has recently threatened to go public with details about her former customers. In a motion filed Monday in U.S. District Court, investigators are seeking a protective order covering discovery material to be provided to Deborah Palfrey and her lawyers. Palfrey, 50, was indicted last week on racketeering and money laundering charges stemming from her operation of the Pamela Martin & Associates escort service, which closed last summer after 13 years in business. In their motion, a copy of which you'll find below, government lawyers claim that some discovery documents contain "personal information" about Palfrey's former johns and prostitutes that is "sensitive." The prosecution filing does not detail the nature of this confidential information, though the identity of Palfrey's D.C. customers would surely be cloaked if the protective order was signed by Judge Gladys Kessler. According to the prosecution motion, while Palfrey and her lawyers would be able to use the discovery material to help prepare a defense, they would not be allowed to disclose the documents to anyone else (nor use the material for any other purposes). Palfrey, whose assets were frozen late last year, has recently floated the idea of selling her escort business's phone records. She has also "made statements that could be considered veiled threats to cause embarrassment to former customers and employees," according to the motion. In connection with an asset forfeiture action, Palfrey has sought to depose political consultant Dick Morris, who she has identified as a former escort service client.

It Makes Me Smile

Tiffany Midgeson has created a new standard for the application of criminal sanction:

I'm not a lawyer, so I have no idea what the odds are of any appeal by Libby being successful. But here's what I do know for a fact.

I know that nothing Scooter Libby did led to the publication of the name of CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson in Robert Novak's column - the event that began this legal fiasco.

I know that Scooter Libby, who is an old friend of mine, is suffering today. I know his wife, Harriet, is suffering. I know his children are in torment. And it breaks my heart.

Because if a criminal suffers when he's convicted of a crime, the crime didn't happen. And the immediate family deserve a veto on conviction, or at least the right to make a criminal impact statement, as it were.

These sentiments make sense coming from a man like Poddy, whose first and only accomplishment occurred that night, many years ago, when Norm and Midge got plastered, cried like babies and then did their duty for posterity. (And they weren't even psychic!) If you can't use your family to carry your worthless ass throughout your life, then what good are they?

Meanwhile:

While the rest of the Scooter Libby Fan Club is getting all the ink they want to spin their fables, Marty Peretz, who is a Founding Father of the Libby Legal Defense Trust, has remained silent as the grave. And it's not because his dictaphone is broken. Perhaps Marty is a shrewd investor after all.

Beltway Blarney

In a touching bit of media incest, former NBC content provider and MSNBC regular Lawrence O'Donnell tells us that "Russert Convicted Libby."

Not in this reality.

Russert didn't convict Libby. Libby convicted Libby by telling a series of deliberate lies, under oath, in which Tim Russert made a guest appearance.

Patrick Fitzgerald presented the facts to the jury, with remarkable skill. But Libby convicted himself.

Russert wasn't even a credible witness in general, as Libby's attorneys were able to show. Perhaps that's why Libby chose Russert for a starring role in his perjured testimony. But the defense couldn't show that Russert lied about Libby, because there was no evidence he did.

Pumpkinhead's testimony was simply consistent with the other testimony and documentary evidence, so Libby convicted himself whether or not Pumpkinhead was believed by the jury. The uncontradicted evidence showed that Libby knew everything he claimed he learned from Russert before calling Russert, so whether Scooter and Fat Tim talked Plame was irrelevant.

I generally like O'Donnell, so I'll chalk this up to an early and ongoing St. Patrick's Day celebration between Larry and Chris Matthews.

Grand Old Police Blotter: Soft-Headed On Crime Edition

The criminal apologists at National Review Online are working themselves into a frenzy, each trying to out-stupid the last. It's a thing of beauty.

While the lemon-puss cry-babyism of hairless troll doll Mark Levin is the most heartwarming, I'm giving best in show to historian Cliff May, for this gem:

Over the weekend, I talked with a former federal prosecutor. I said to him: "If Libby were going to lie, surely it would not be about a conversation with Tim Russert. Tim Russert is too famous and too credible. People would believe him, rather than Libby. Libby is smart enough to know that. So if Libby were going to invent a conversation, surely it would be a conversation with someone else -- almost anyone else. It makes no sense that Libby would lie about a conversation with Tim Russert and think he'd be believed and Russert would be disbelieved."

The former prosecutor replied: "Libby's lawyers would have better off making that argument than the arguments they did make."

Bolstering the credibility of the man whose testimony proves the prosecution's case -- it's an ingenious strategy alright. I bet Cliff also mused to his (mostly likely pretend) prosecutor pal that he couldn't understand why Libby didn't call Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a character witness.

You really owe it to yourself to visit The Corner, to witness the 500-Year Dumbassery.

More Lie of Heartbreak

There's only one thing missing from this little puffer on the deep personal toll the Libby verdict might conceivably take on Dicky-Ticker Dick:

On a personal level, friends of the vice president say the trial has been deeply painful for him. Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were all but inseparable -- Ms. Matalin has called the former aide "Cheney's Cheney" -- and often started their days by riding to work together. Mr. Libby accompanied the vice president almost everywhere he went, and Mr. Cheney made clear his high professional and personal regard for his aide, even playing host to a book party for him in 2002 at his official residence. Alan K. Simpson, a Republican former senator from Mr. Cheney's home state, Wyoming, said he saw Mr. Cheney over Christmas and asked how he was doing. He took the answer as a kind of oblique reference to the Libby case.

"He said, 'I'm fine, I'm O.K., I have people I trust around me — it's the same old stuff, Al,' " Mr. Simpson recalled.

Another friend of Mr. Cheney's, Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman, said the verdict had "got to be heartbreaking for the vice president." But Mr. Weber said he wished Mr. Cheney would explain himself.

"I don't think he has to do a long apologia," Mr. Weber said, "but I think he should say something, just to pierce the boil a little bit."

Missing is the fact that Simpson and Matalin are thick as thieves with the Scooter Libby Defense Fund. Knowing that little fact might put their fables in a whole new light.

Justice Tuesday

...And a Happy New Year.

I can't think of a lovelier holiday present for Victoria Toensing.

In Defense of Bigotry

Male-patterned male escort Mickey Kaus leaps to the defense of his fellow hater, Ann Coulter:

What do I think of Coulter's comment? I think a) she obviously wasn't saying John Edwards is gay; b) she equally obviously doesn't think Edwards is gay; c) she picked the word "f-----" because she wanted to make a joke about what that Grey's Anatomy star said that resulted in him going into rehab; d) hard as it is to believe, it seems as if she doesn't realize how offensive that word is to people -- she thinks it's a very strong, non-boring word that basically means someone with the effeminate traits stereotypically associated with homosexuals; e) it's worse than that, a toxic word that shouldn't have been used even in a joke--or anyway in that joke; f) she's not, in fact, a homophobe. She's not even really what Mike Kinsley would call a "closet tolerant" because I don't think she's in the closet about it. It's worth noting what she did not say in response to Nagourney, which is any suggestion that gays are sinners going to hell, etc.--i.e. what the stereotypical liberal would expect the stereotypical Christian conservative to say ...

Of course, this is all bullshit and Kaus knows it.

Whether Coulter thinks Senator Edwards is a "faggot" is irrelevant. She thinks gay men are legitimate targets for hate and ridicule, and chose the word because she knows exactly how much her audience of haters -- Kaus included -- despise gay men. It doesn't matter if Coulter thinks gay men are sinners, or lesser human beings, or simply an easy target for verbal abuse in front of a crowd that believes the first two. It's bigotry all the same.

And Kaus, whose archives are littered with his weasel-worded opinions about how it's entirely reasonable to be repulsed by homos, whole-heartedly endorses it.

Synergy

Years ago, I read a book by Erving Goffman called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. As intriguing as its title, the book actually did a microsociological analysis of the deployment of different personalities and affects for different circumstances and needs. Well, Hillary Clinton is a case in extremis of the phenomenon. Hillary is the greatest makeover artist of the era. Her hair, her face, her names, her beliefs. And now, courtesy of Powerline, you can hear how she's made here [sic] voice over... or voice-over.

And Bob Somerby highlights another meeting.

Motel Hell

Things are getting tough on the wingnut welfare rolls. Listen to Mister Ed's tale of woe, camping out CPAC in a rent-by-the-hour fleabag:

I got back this afternoon from my CPAC adventure, tired out and glad to be home, but happy with the weekend's work. I'll be grateful for my own bed after the rather unpleasant stay I had at the Washington Plaza Hotel in DC.

The place looks like a million bucks from the outside on Thomas Circle, but it looks like $1.50 on the inside. It has unique balconies that are shared for the entire floor, which means anyone can wander by your room. The balcony door only has a normal doorknob (the main room entrance is from the interior hallway), and mine fell off in my hand the first night I arrived. I asked twice the next morning for them to fix it, but when I got back to my room the next night, it was still broken. After listening to a bunch of foul-mouthed, loud lunatics on the balcony until 1 am, I got about four hours of sleep. I went down to the desk the next morning, this time with the doorknob in hand, and told them I expected to get a phone call when it got fixed.

After making several calls myself back to the hotel, they finally fixed it around 6 pm or so. They jammed it back onto the latch just tight enough so it wouldn't fall off again, rather than replacing the entire assembly, as they should have done. I won't stay there again, and neither should you.

It's tough out there for a welfare queen cum call-center manager.

Actually, I have no idea whether Mister Ed got free room and board for his banal blogging, but no one but a prize-winning chump would put up with such inferior accomodations on his own dime.