UPDATE JULY 13, 2005:
While it’s unclear whether this means another vacancy will occur in the Supreme Court, it’s evident that Rehnquist’s days are numbered, at least with regards to his service. This comes as a frightening, while not unexpected blow to liberals around the country.
For obvious reasons, a concurrent vacancy with O’Connor’s is filled with concern and ‘what if’s with regards to the appointments that are to take place. News has been released that late last night Rehnquist was rushed to the hospital for a spiked fever, likely relating to the thyroid cancer.
July 13 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who is fighting thyroid cancer, was admitted to the hospital last night with a fever, the Supreme Court said.
Rehnquist, 80, was taken by ambulance for observation and tests to Arlington Hospital in Virginia and remains there today, court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.
In another blog article earlier this month I created a liberal ‘cheat sheet’ for the potential nominee’s. This news has come along with more SCOTUS nominee gossip that First Lady Laura Bush has been urging the president to consider another female nominee since they are confident of their hispanic base. The name bandied about is Judge Edith Brown Clement of the 5th Circuit Court. This particular bit of SCOTUS gossip also implies that Alberto Gonzales is not in the running.
It is unclear how seriously the president ever regarded Gonzales as a potential court choice or if he was steered away from Gonzales at the urging of conservatives who want Bush to move the court to the right in its judicial philosophy.
How do you argue with the venerable WSJ’s Opinion Journal? – you can’t, can you?
[First, you may want to check out http://www.jeffgannon.com who said it too, almost as surprisingly well. Whether he got in the WH the right way or not, (no male-gay hooker jokes, please!) yes, he was there, right in the gaggle as I recall, asking questions, and he yes, he certainly did interview Joe Wilson. You could say that he was an “expert witness” as is Rove, et al. To see Karl Rove as a whistleblower is a far cry from the calls to dismiss him and lambaste the man as a traitor — but I still would like answers…]
REVIEW & OUTLOOK – Karl Rove, Whistleblower He told the truth about Joe Wilson. http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006955
Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove’s head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we’d say the White House political guru deserves a prize–perhaps the next iteration of the “Truth-Telling” award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.
For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real “whistleblower” in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He’s the one who warned Time’s Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson’s credibility. He’s the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn’t a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
Media chants aside, there’s no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband’s selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger. To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he’d obtained in an official capacity. But it appears Mr. Rove didn’t even know Ms. Plame’s name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.
On the “no underlying crime” point, moreover, no less than the New York Times and Washington Post now agree. So do the 36 major news organizations that filed a legal brief in March aimed at keeping Mr. Cooper and the New York Times’s Judith Miller out of jail.
“While an investigation of the leak was justified, it is far from clear–at least on the public record–that a crime took place,” the Post noted the other day. Granted the media have come a bit late to this understanding, and then only to protect their own, but the logic of their argument is that Mr. Rove did nothing wrong either.
The same can’t be said for Mr. Wilson, who first “outed” himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous “16 words” on the subject in that year’s State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.
But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. “Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip,” said the report.
The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn’t even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.
About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain’s Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: “We conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that ‘The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa’ was well-founded.”
In short, Joe Wilson hadn’t told the truth about what he’d discovered in Africa, how he’d discovered it, what he’d told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission. The media and the Kerry campaign promptly abandoned him, though the former never did give as much prominence to his debunking as they did to his original accusations. But if anyone can remember another public figure so entirely and thoroughly discredited, let us know.
If there’s any scandal at all here, it is that this entire episode has been allowed to waste so much government time and media attention, not to mention inspire a “special counsel” probe. The Bush Administration is also guilty on this count, since it went along with the appointment of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in an election year in order to punt the issue down the road. But now Mr. Fitzgerald has become an unguided missile, holding reporters in contempt for not disclosing their sources even as it becomes clearer all the time that no underlying crime was at issue.
As for the press corps, rather than calling for Mr. Rove to be fired, they ought to be grateful to him for telling the truth.
[So, how do I argue with that? Is Mr. Wilson merely a publicity hound? Should Rove just press on, see if this media firestorm #277 in a series will simply blow over? Should Miss Miller just be let out of jail and subsequently be able to sue the pants off of Mr. Fitzgerald?
…TO BE CONTINUED, OF COURSE!]
Wow, a woman that works in D.C. and explains that her job is in the spin-fields comes and copy -n- paste posts an off-topic editorial about how much of a hero Karl Rove is, and how much of a loser Wilson is.
Suddenly I feel so enlightened and ready to become a republican conservative. Not.
I just realized that I need to take back what I said on another thread about never getting any comment spam. I’ve never had commercial comment spam, but for a while I was the victim of an anti-immigrant (and also racist) commenter who left numerous comments on one of my posts (at least it was a post that actually did talk about immigration). Some searching revealed, of course, that he was leaving identical comments on several other blogs, so I started deleting him and he went away.
The most galling part to me was that the guy did not have a blog of his own! He wanted to use my bandwidth on my pro-immigrant liberal blog to preach his message.
I do see that our current thread hijacker does have a blog. But we would be much too polite to go over there to her Karl Rove post and start commenting about the environment or the wage gap or something.
Rehnquist’s possible retirement “comes as a frightening, while not unexpected blow to liberals around the country.”
Huh?!? Were you unaware that Rehnquist is a staunch conservative? Since when have liberals been so fond of Rehnquist’s jurisprudence that they would see his retirement as a “blow”?
Rehnquist’s potential retirement comes as a blow, not because he himself is such a defender of liberals, but because it gives the current son of a Bush in office two chances to stick his own nominees in the SC.
A Rehnquist replacement might be more centrist than Rehnquist, or at least no more conservative – but I’m not holding my breath.
“Rehnquist’s possible retirement “comes as a frightening, while not unexpected blow to liberals around the country.””
Say it with me: “Chief Justice Scalia”
So what? Scalia is already on the Supreme Court, and Chiefs don’t get an extra vote or anything. Plus, Scalia is (1) more pro-free-speech than Rehnquist, and (2) more liberal than Rehnquist on issues of crime and due process (e.g., the Kyllo decision or Apprendi).
It’s kind of a ‘devil that you do know’ versus the devil that you don’t scenario in my mind.
The idea that some of these younger, more spry candidates that are nothing if not rabid theocrats being added into the mix for who knows how many years frightens me a lot. From the discussions I’ve had, many share my opinions.
Yeah, the downside is that whoever replaces Rehnquist will undoubtedly be much younger and we’ll have to deal with them for a long time.
If Bush is going to insist on using the pro-life litmus test, I made a short list (just in fun) of people that I wouldn’t mind seeing on the bench. I know that pro-choicers wouldn’t pick any of these people, but it’s a sure bet that you would prefer these folks to whoever we really end up with.
The most galling part to me was that the guy did not have a blog of his own! He wanted to use my bandwidth on my pro-immigrant liberal blog to preach his message.