Carol Platt Liebau: Loose Talk in the Green Room?

Monday, November 07, 2005

Loose Talk in the Green Room?

Brit Hume reports that Major General Paul Vallely has asserted that, during at least three separate green room chats, Joe Wilson himself told Vallely of Valerie Plame's job with the CIA. This was apparently during the fall of 2002 -- long before Bob Novak's 2003 column.

Wilson is denying Vallely's account -- but we all know about Joe Wilson's tendency to "misspeak" when he wants the "facts" to match his own version of reality.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I believe he's a general.

6:55 PM  
Blogger Matt Brinkman said...

For what it is worth, anonymous is correct. Paul Vallely is a Maj. Gen (Ret.).

General Vallely is the chairman of the military committee of the neo-conservative Center for Security Policy and a paid FOX military analyst. Paul Vallely is famous for filing a false report that claimed the French government helped members of the Iraqi regime escape to Europe post-invasion.

See, we can all play the he said/he said game, Carol. This is merely rhetorical fog, however. There are known facts out there, so let us cut to the chase.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has filed an indictment which lists I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Official A (Karl Rove), and an unidentified high ranking Bush administration official as the sources of the Plame leak. Note that none of these people could be Ambassador Wilson, who is not Scooter Libby nor Karl Rove, and did not serve in the administration of Bush the Dimmer.

Keep tilting at wind mills, Ms. Liebau-Quixote.

7:23 PM  
Blogger Anonymous said...

Couldn't have said this better myself:

President Bush's Walkabout

Published: November 8, 2005
After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.

In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.

It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.

The White House is in an uproar over the future of Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, and spinning off rumors that some top cabinet members may be asked to walk the plank. Mr. Bush could certainly afford to replace some of his top advisers. But the central problem is not Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary John Snow or even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. It is President Bush himself.

Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver - in great part through his own powers of leadership - a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.

The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration's most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions.

Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now. (NYT)

7:31 AM  
Blogger SantaBarbarian said...

Carol -

You might want to do your homework on this one....

Larry Johnson sets the record straight on the "slimming" the Republicans are so set upon doing (somehow I don't think that Jesus would approve of the Bush slimming procedures)

"There they go again. Rightwing hacks making up facts. The latest comes from retired Generals and Fox News Contributors Paul Vallely and Tom McInerney who went on John Batchelor's radio show and claimed:

that Joe Wilson more than once in 2002 in the green room at Fox New Channel in Washington D.C. boasted about his wife the "CIA desk officer." McInerney has the same memory and more, since both he and Vallely were on FNC between 150 and 200 times in 2002 each...

Well boys and girls, I too was a Fox News Contributor in 2002 and spent a lot of time in the Green Room with both Vallely and McInerney. I saw them but never saw Joe Wilson. What is really curious is that I know I spent more time with Vallely and McInerney than Joe Wilson ever did and the subject of my wife (or their wives) never came up.

I first met Joe Wilson in the Spring of 2003 and he did not mention his wife.

We were at a seminar hosted by the Nixon Center. At the time I did not know that Joe had married the woman I knew as Valerie P. Although Joe knew that I worked at the CIA he did not take that opportunity to unburden himself of protecting his wife's identity. In fact, he said nothing about his wife. Not even a wink and a nod.

....What is so pathetic is that both Vallely and McInerney present themselves as military experts on special operations when neither has held any position of any importance with those forces. In fact, neither has ever held compartmented clearances required to know about those special programs. Given their track record of getting military facts wrong there is no doubt they are wrong about Joe Wilson."

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/11/trying_to_smear.html

8:43 PM  

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