WikiLeaks Scoop: Bush Was Right

Those of us who were paying attention already knew this, but it’s always good to have more voices and revelations corroborating the same thing. From Larry Elder:

Wired magazine’s contributing editor Noah Shachtman — a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution — researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here’s what he found: “By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). … Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.”

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq — on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels — what even The Associated Press called “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program”: 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: “The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. … To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam … would have been too big a risk.”

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake — the WMD Bush supposedly lied about — a WMD. It was, well, old. It was degraded. It was not what we think of when we think of WMD. Really? Square that with what former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean said in April 2004: “There were no weapons of mass destruction.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow goes even further, insisting, against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that “Saddam Hussein was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction”!

Bush, hammered by the insidious “Bush Lied, People Died” mantra, endured one of the most vicious smears against any president in history. He is owed an apology.

When Hollywood makes “The Vindication of George W. Bush,” maybe Sean Penn can play the lead. 

Still doesn’t make Julian Assange any less of a cretinous wretch. Throw the book at him.

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You’ve gotta be kidding me: someone’s turning Maureen Dowd into a sexed-up action heroine in a new comic book? It’s so absurd that it would be hilarious…if not for the fact that the plot is yet another way in which entertainment outlets are injecting a false narrative of the Valerie Plame saga into the national consciousness. Historical revisionism is no laughing matter.

First Geraldo Rivera revealed how “open-minded” he was about what “really” happened on 9/11, and now losertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano has joined the Truther brigade. It’s way past time for Fox News to can both these clowns.

Comedy great Leslie Nielsen, dead at 84. I plan to take some time this weekend to watch Airplane! in his memory; I’d encourage all of you to do the same.

Donald Douglas slaps around a richly-deserving losertarian blogger.

Neil reminds us that ethanol is a dud.

And this Thanksgiving, I’m really, really thankful for a little wonder-virus called Stuxnet.

Plame….Val Plame

I guess the Democrats aren’t satisfied with the likely imprisonment of Scooter Libby. Now we apparently have to milk this invented scandal for every bit of political expediency we can.

Valerie “007” Plame, wife of liberal hatchet-man Joe Wilson, testified before Congress today that she & her husband were victims of a White House smear campaign. Over at National Review’s Corner, they’ve been keeping track of the highlights. In particular, John Podhoretz notes:

“Valerie Plame Wilson has been testifying for an hour, and while it appears on a chart, the name of Richard Armitage — the actual person who actually leaked her identity to Robert Novak (and, a month earlier, to Bob Woodward) — has yet to be spoken. Scooter Libby’s name? Ten times.”

“Valerie Plame Wilson complained that Dick Cheney — the elected vice president of the United States — made an “unprecedented number of visits” to the CIA in the run-up to the Iraq war. She’s right. It’s shocking. Evidently, Cheney actually listened to the CIA.”

“This is what Valerie Plame Wilson just said about her husband’s trip: “I did not recommend him, I did not suggest him, I did not have the authority.” An officer serving under her was upset to have received an inquiry from the vice president’s office about yellowcake from Niger and evidently, while she was comforting that junior officer, some guy walked by her office and suggested her husband should go to Niger to check it out. She said she was ambivalent about the idea because she didn’t want to have to put her 2 year-old twins to bed by herself at night. Still, she and the guy who had just happened to walk by then went to her supervisor. Supervisor: Well, when you go home this evening, would you ask your husband to come in. Then her supervisor asked her to write an e-mail about the idea. She did so. That e-mail, she said, was the basis for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence claim that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger for the CIA. In other words, she didn’t recommend him or suggest him. Rather, it was a guy who walked by.”
Cliff May notes: “My friend the ex-CIA officer reminds me that, in addition to Valerie Plame’s new and very creative assertion that sending Joe Wilson to Niger was the idea of a guy who just happened to be strolling by her desk one day, there also is the fact that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the Wilson was known to the CIA because Plame had recommended him for an earlier mission. See attached excerpt.”
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Impressive, huh?

Most importantly, take a look at this PDF file—it’s the testimony of Victoria Toensing, who, as one of the key players in drafting the final version of the law in question on “outing” “covert agents,” knows this as well as anybody.

No crime was committed. You’d never know it from the media’s ominous headlines. Or the Democrats’ hysteria. Or the White House’s cowardice.