Fitzgerald Didn’t Match Media Alternative Reality

RUSH: Let’s move on to the Libby indictment. I’ve got some audio sound bites here, and some comments to make about them. Yeah. Let’s go to the sound bites first, and we’ll do the comments after the break. This, to me, is the key question and answer of the Fitzgerald press conference last Friday. The ABC reporter, Terry Moran, said, “Many Americans are opposed to war. Critics of your administration have looked to your investigation and hoped they might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises. Does this indictment do that?”
FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war, and people who believe furthering the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are — have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel. The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction and I think anyone who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this process for any answers or resolution of that.
RUSH: Now, let me tell you what that means. That means that everything the press — led by Chris Matthews, my old buddy — has been trying to “connect the dots” on for the past three weeks, intently and the last five years (well, I guess three years generally), has just been nuked. Whatever this indictment is about, it has nothing to do with the war. So little means that every person in the media who said that that’s exactly what this is about, has just been blown to smithereens, has just been nuked. They created an alternative reality. That reality was that this indictment was going to lead to a trial on this administration’s lying to the public to get us into war. Where does that idea come from? The idea comes from the fringe left, and has been picked up by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party, and it goes back to what I’ve been saying all along. They are unhinged because they had their government taken away from them, starting in ’94. They failed to get it back since. They thought they were going to win it with Gore in 2000. Bush won. They think the election was stolen. They think 2004 the election was rigged. They do not look to themselves to find out why they might be losing. They come up with conspiracy theories or crackpot ideas that blame the voters for being too stupid to see how brilliant Democrats and liberals are, but they don’t look at themselves, and as a result of their being unhinged they’ve concocted all these conspiracy theories, and they have created such an alternative universe, such an alternative reality that the news today is not what really happened!

The news that you see on television every day including today is what the Democrats hope to happen, and what the press hopes to happen, and this business of trying to take out Sam Alito today is what they hope the news will be at the conclusion of the hearings, and that’s what they’re trying to do, try to take him out — and I welcome it. Bring it on. As I say, “We want the debate,” but the media has — there’s really no difference between the Democratic Party and the media today. Last time I was in Washington I was driven by a couple buildings. My driver there always sees the need to give me a tour. “Hey, I know what this place is, Ralph. You don’t need to show me around.” So he drove me by the NEA and he said, “Branch office of the Democratic Party.” Then we drove by ABC. I said, “There’s the branch office of the Democratic Party, and if we went way out of the way we’d get to NBC and see a real branch office of the Democratic Party.” He didn’t bother showing me CBS, but they’re all branch offices of the Democratic Party — and the point is that really it’s almost pathological. Chris Matthews was making a bet on his TV show Wednesday or Thursday night last week that this indictment was going to be about the prosecution of the war and how Bush had lied to get us into it, and that’s been his theme for the last two weeks on that show of his, Hardboiled — and it’s gotten to the point he believes it! Even now, after the fact, he still thinks that’s where this is going to lead. They all do. Fitzgerald just said: Don’t go there. This indictment has nothing to do with that, zilch, near, nada. We have Joe Wilson to play for you, after the break, but an interesting editorial today in the New York Sun making the case, advocating a presidential pardon for Lewis Libby.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want you to listen to Pat Fitzgerald again, same bite, last Friday at his press conference. Terry Moran from ABC basically said: Does this indictment touch at all on the administration lying to take the country into war?
FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe furthering the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are — have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel. The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate and this is focused on a narrow transaction, and I think anyone who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this process for any answers or resolution of that.
RUSH: So on the Today Show today the estimable and cleaner-and-purer-than-the-wind-driven snow, Joseph Wilson, appeared with Katie Couric, and she said to Mr. Wilson, “Mr. Fitzgerald says this is not about the propriety of the war, but you disagree. You think this is about the buildup to war and the Bush administration’s rationale to invade Iraq?”
WILSON: Mr. Fitzgerald was — was investigating a possible crime. He has made some determinations as to what crimes may have been committed. Uh, my view of this is that the whole rationale for having attacked me as viciously as they did and compromising Valerie’s identity was, one, to scare other people, keep them from stepping forward about other bits of disinformation this administration might have put in the debate to justify the war, and, two, an act of pure revenge.

RUSH: Well, he couldn’t find the evidence of it, Joe. This is so, frankly, odd. I don’t remember them ‘viciously attacking’ this guy. This guy really was under the radar until he went and wrote his op-ed in the New York Times and talked to Walter Pincus at the Washington Post, and then it was quite obvious to the administration that this guy is out there lying about what went on in Niger. ‘Who is this guy?’ This is a policy dispute. The administration is trying to sell the war with Iraq. This guy is trying to undo it. But what, this vicious attack on him and compromising his wife’s identity? That did not happen and not even — and Fitzgerald didn’t even allege that. Now, this is another thing that troubled me, because all during that press conference Fitzgerald did refer to the outing of a CIA agent but he never charged anybody with that crime. He never made it a point that nobody was being charged with that crime, yet he goes on and on and on about how we’re trying to recruit CIA people, and their security is a must, and we gotta keep them private and so forth. But nobody was ever indicted on that.

I guess you could say that the independent counsel found out pretty soon there was no crime committed, and he didn’t close up shop. Then he started looking at the… But this was a perjury case. I mean, it started out as trying to find out if somebody illegally leaked her name, but nobody did. They couldn’t find any evidence of it, despite all these journalists. So basically what you’ve got here, I’ve got Scooter Libby indicted for lying to journalists — and the journalists are going to have to be the witnesses at any trial, and all this talk about ‘outing’ his wife and his wife’s identity being compromised and so forth? If you’re so worried about that, why pose for that picture — for which you are paid, by the way — on the cover of Vanity Fair, even though she is wearing sunglasses? If you’re that scared about this, and if you’re saying there are threats being made, why do that? I think Mr. Wilson is a media whore, a publicity whore, as I said last week. So Katie Couric says, ‘Well, you referred to your 27 months of hell. Why was it so hellacious? How damaging do you think this has been at you and your wife?’

WILSON: In Valerie’s case it also — they also compromised the identity of the front company that she was working for. If there were other agents working for that company, all their operations would have been compromised. I think Mr. Fitzgerald said it quite accurately. This was a crime against the national security of the country.

COURIC: Did you get death threats or have you gotten death threats at any time?

WILSON: We’ve received — we’ve received threats. We’ve changed our phone number.

RUSH: Well, they changed their phone number! How many times have I changed my phone number during my life? Whoop-de-do! ‘Fitzgerald said this was a crime against the national security of the country’? Well, where’s the crime, because he didn’t charge it! I’ll tell you, I think the wrong person has been charged. I think the wrong person was investigated. I think if we’re going to investigate policy differences, it just seems to me the wrong guy was looked at. The wrong operation was looked at in toto, but we’ll all see if it comes out in the trial. Now, as I said the New York Sun</a> today has an editorial that advocates a presidential pardon for Lewis Libby. Here’s the relevant paragraph: ‘If Ms. Plame didn’t want her identity out, she shouldn’t have gotten her husband to secret mission to Niger and then allowed him to wage a public campaign against the president’s foreign policy,’ and let’s be straight about it. She did engineer his trip; she did play a role in that, and then he went out and made his role public, and then that… Well, who is this guy? Who is this guy? Nobody in the White House sent this guy over there! The CIA is, and everybody says, ‘Who is this guy?’ Well, naturally when you start to find out who Joe Wilson is, you find out who he’s married to and all that. That’s their point.

‘The leading prevaricator in this case is Mr. Wilson himself. He has accused Mr. Bush of falsely leading America to war. Mr. Bush had claimed, ‘The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of ‘uranium from Africa,’ [quote, unquote]. Mr. Wilson drank tea in Niger for a week and said that Bush’s claim wasn’t true, that even after Mr. Wilson’s objection, the July 2004 report by the British government’s Butler commission found that Mr. Bush’s comment was well founded. In a July 2004 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Roberts, Hatch and Bond said of Mr. Wilson, ‘The former ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world, a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated and misleading.”

‘Is there a serious journalist in the mainstream media who thinks that the story in the Libby case might be the CIA’s efforts to defeat the president?’

It’s a question raised by the people at PowerLineBlog — and now, they’re not interested in that, Power Line, because they’ve created an alternative reality. They’ve been living it for years — and to this day, despite what Fitzgerald said, they believe this indictment is about lying to the American people to take us into war because Joe Wilson is their god.

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