RW-(the original) Dancing Madly Backwards Through A Liberal Minefield

Click the title for more from the Radio and TV Correspondents Association Dinner last night in Washington.

Or at least she likes to comment on them. Is that what keeps up her "young" Democrat image?

In one of the more unusual proposals to emerge in the Senate debate on Iraq withdrawal, Sen. Mark Pryor wants to keep any plans for bringing troops home a secret.

The Arkansas Democrat is a key holdout on his party's proposal to approve $122 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while setting a goal of March 31, 2008, for winding up military operations in Iraq. Unlike the plan's Republican opponents, Pryor wants a withdrawal deadline of some kind. He just doesn't want anyone outside the White House, Congress and the Iraqi government to know what it is.

"My strong preference would be to have a classified plan and a classified timetable that should be shared with Congress," Pryor said yesterday. A public deadline would tip off the enemy, "who might just bide their time and wait for us to leave," he said. "Then you'd have chaos and mayhem and instability."

Pryor said a classified plan would be provided by the president, shepherded by Senate committees and ultimately shared with Congress and Iraqi leaders. He is confident that the plan would remain secret, because Congress is entrusted with secrets "all the time."

What if the president's withdrawal plan didn't include a deadline? Or what if it leaked, through leaders in Iraq, to insurgents?

All worth considering, Pryor said. But in the meantime, "at least you'd have a plan."

The only halfway redeeming quality for this otherwise moronic idea is that so many dates would leak out the minute this bill was signed it would at least cause confusion. The most telling part of this to me is that when you constantly hear Democrats saying the President doesn't have a plan, Pryor gives up what that really means. So in the minds of Democrats a plan is simply a date certain to leave, it has nothing to do with success.

Once in a while a bill goes through that's so egregious it even gets a major league beatdown from some very unlikely sources. Friday the House passed just such a bill and the Washington Post smacked it down in advance.

TODAY THE House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.

Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill -- for whatever reason -- will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next 17 months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.

The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget. The legislation pays more heed to a handful of peanut farmers than to the 24 million Iraqis who are living through a maelstrom initiated by the United States, the outcome of which could shape the future of the Middle East for decades.

They didn't stop there, check out the knockout punch.

As it is, House Democrats are pressing a bill that has the endorsement of MoveOn.org but excludes the judgment of the U.S. commanders who would have to execute the retreat the bill mandates. It would heap money on unneedy dairy farmers while provoking a constitutional fight with the White House that could block the funding to equip troops in the field. Democrats who want to force a withdrawal should vote against war appropriations. They should not seek to use pork to buy a majority for an unconditional retreat that the majority does not support.

It's a little difficult to take them seriously when they won't allow answers. Isn't it the height of absurdity to call a witness and then tell them flat out they can't answer you because you aren't willing to yield your time to them?

As Bryan at Hot Air points out, Victoria Toensing wrote the law that covers outing a covert agent.

This occured earlier today yesterday, during Rep. Waxman’s Valerie Plame show trial. Keep in mind that Victoria Toensing wrote the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the law that was at the center of the Plame-Wilson fracas. Keep in mind that she knows what the law is for and whom it covers, since she wrote it. Keep also in mind that Toensing was called to Waxman’s kangaroo court as a witness. Witnesses generally answer questions asked of them in such settings. That’s why they’re there.
Now, watch Nostrildamus not allow said witness, an expert’s expert since she wrote the law in question, to answer questions.

Bonus Video!

OK he's wrong about almost all of his views and he's misreading the nutroots that are pressuring everyone to censor the Fox News Channel, but he's dead on accurate with this comment.

“I’m prepared to discuss the war, health care, trade, or any other issue anytime, anywhere, with any audience, answering any question from any media. And any candidate who won’t shouldn’t be President of the United States.”

Click the post title to watch this incredible segment with UPI reporter Pamela Hess. This is one of the few times I feel like I can type reporter without scare quotes.

Or Click here to keep from opening a new window to watch the video.

Hot Air has links to the entire program here.

Is this beginning to have the feel of a bunch of second graders telling their friends they'll get cooties if they talk to so and so?

It's hard to argue with much of this article. It's one thing to prosecute some process crimes along the way, but when the only prosecution is a process crime that didn't even involve the party that did the leaking and it was determined that the leaking wasn't even a crime it's time for President Bush to step up and say we won't have this foolishness going on in his justice department. Scooter Libby should have been pardoned before I typed this.

For that, in essence, is what this case is really all about. We learned long ago--and Mr. Fitzgerald knew from the start of his probe in 2003--that Mr. Libby was not the source of the leak to columnist Robert Novak that started all this. Mr. Libby thus had no real motive to cover up this non-crime. What he did have strong cause to do was rebut the lies that Mr. Wilson was telling about the Administration and Mr. Cheney--lies confirmed as lies by a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004.

Mr. Libby did talk to some reporters about the Administration's case for war in 2003, and he did mention Ms. Plame in some cases. So the jury apparently decided that, when asked about those conversations by the FBI and grand jury, he had lied about his own sources of information about Joe Wilson and his wife. In other words, he has not been convicted of lying to anyone about the case for war in Iraq, or about Mr. Wilson or his wife.

Rather, he has been convicted of telling the truth about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame to some reporters but then not owning up to it. One tragic irony is that if Mr. Libby had only taken the Harold Ickes grand-jury strategy and said "I don't recall," he probably never would have been indicted. But our guess is that he tried to cooperate with the grand jury because he never really believed he had anything to hide. This may also explain why Mr. Libby never retained an experienced Beltway attorney until he was indicted.

Guess who else thinks Libby should be pardoned? Did you guess that it was one of the jurors? Oh and just for fun too! We now have a juror that is BBQ buds with half the witnesses against Libby and another that thinks it would be cool to convict someone leaving them in financial ruin and then pardon them for sport. Unbelievable!