Plamerovetreasonlibbygate Is Not Whitewater:
Comparing the current investigation of the White House's leak of CIA operative's name to the Whitewater investigation (or any investigation) of the Clinton adminstration is about as specious as saying that the war in Iraq is analogous to the American Revolution. It's not just like comparing apples and oranges; it's like comparing apples and carburetors. Other than a couple of words, like "special prosecutor," "perjury," and "obstruction of justice," there's nothing remotely similar about the two. So not only fuck you to every right winger who wants to make this point, but come back to the fold, Nicholas Kristof, who joins a number of those on the far right in poo-pooing the idea of perjury as a "technicality."

For those who don't have super-special access to the New York Times or Nexis, here's a quote from his editorial today: "I find myself repulsed by the glee that some Democrats show at the possibility of Karl Rove and Mr. Libby being dragged off in handcuffs. It was wrong for prosecutors to cook up borderline and technical indictments during the Clinton administration, and it would be just as wrong today. Absent very clear evidence of law-breaking, the White House ideologues should be ousted by voters, not by prosecutors."

Listen, children, let's go through this again: Whitewater wasn't referring to the pearl jam Bill Clinton deposited on Monica Lewinsky's dress. Because the Republican party sought to shut down the Clinton presidency in any way possible, Janet Reno appointed a special prosecutor to look into a two-decades-old land development deal that went south. The appointee, Robert Fiske, also says he's gonna look-see if Vince Foster offing himself had anything to do with the whole deal, involving a little fuckin' bank and a little fuckin' land purchase. Ken Starr gets appointed and, even after a report that exonerates Clinton from any wrongdoing, goes nutzoid with the investigatin', egged on by a right-wing machine that must be fed with the corpses of Democrats. Then, after engulfing a bunch of Clinton supporters and administration members in a huge clusterfuck that nobody understood or cared about other than said crazed rabid right-wingers, Starr, who was gonna bail on the whole thing for a post at Pepperdine until he was threatened with lynchin' by the same right-wingers, discovers the fuckin' with an intern, and, glory be, we got lyin' about fuckin', and all of a sudden, the land deal fades into somethin' fer eggheads to argue about, and the press goes nutzoid about the fuckin'. And the whole enterprise comes down to the fuckin' and whether Clinton lied about the fuckin' during a videotaped deposition over a piece of shit Arkansas opportunist who was suin' Clinton. The perjury charge on Clinton was for that - not for a goddamn thing havin' to do with the original land deal, for which Clinton was cleared of any crimes.

You wanna tell us how that is like an investigation into who outed a CIA agent's identity as a way of discrediting someone who questioned the reasoning that got us into a goddamn war? You wanna tell us how Rove and Libby lying under oath about how they disseminated that information and where they got it from is in any way similar to lyin' about who you fucked? You wanna tell us how Patrick Fitzgerald's possible opening of his investigation into the rationale for going to an ongoing war is in any way as irrelevant as veering a financial dealings investigation into a lie about blow jobs and hand jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not Bill Clinton got a little financial benefit from a shitty savings and loan bank that went under?

Is there a clamor to look into George Bush's sexual habits to see a pattern of exaggerating what's real? Is anyone asking what George Bush's dick looks like? 'Cause at this point, it oughta be shrivelled like a scared turtle, to the point where he has to dig into his body cavity to pull it out to take a piss.

So, yeah, the Rude Pundit finds himself as "repulsed" as Kristof. But his repulsion is at the manipulation of the media and the public by an administration that cravenly, cretinously desired a war; his repulsion is at the inability of the Bush administration to admit error on the path to destruction. Instead, it just sends its lackeys, attack dogs, and others to do its bidding. Sure, there's a lot of disgusting shit out there. Slamming Scooter and Karl (and maybe others) into the dirt and making them eat rocks ain't part of it.