Nero Fiddled

A Fine Day for Indictments

And Dick Cheney Has Lost His Mind
And Mike Bloomberg is Right About Something

When we last left off, folks, the Bush regime was dangling for dear life over the hungry rapids of political peril. And that's pretty much where we are today, though the rapids have grown hungrier and more turbulent, and the Bush regime that much closer to a serious hissyfit.

And then we have to talk about Bloomberg and Pataki and Ground Zero.

First things first -- the hissyfit. It may be the administration's only recourse at this point. It is thought that if Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald plans to issue indictments, he'll do it today. It is also thought that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald plans to issue indictments. Late yesterday afternoon, Steve Clemons of the Washington Note reported that "an uber-insider source...since confirmed by another independent source" says that there will be one to five indictments ("The source feels that it will be towards the higher end"); that "the targets of indictment have already received their letters;" that the sealed indictments will be "filed" today; and that there will be a press conference tomorrow. "The shoe," Clemons blogs, "is dropping."

A letter of indictment has almost certainly been handed to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr., known to his friends as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr. Yesterday, in a New York Times article for the history books, we learned that Scooter "first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday."

"Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby's testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

"The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program to justify the war...

"It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government's deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration. But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry."

That was the sole right-wing rebuttal of the day, yesterday: The Vice President can discuss national secrets with his chief of staff if he wants to! Okay. But his chief of staff can't turn around and discuss them with reporters. And it has already been sufficiently demonstrated -- inside and outside of Fitzgerald's investigation -- that Cheney was at the forefront of the regime's strategy to wreak vengeance on Joseph Wilson (for discrediting Niger yellowcake claims the administration continued to make long after they were discredited in the first place). And, as the Times notes, the inconsistency in Scooter's stories suggests an effort to protect Cheney.

The Note notes the Republican response, quoting "a Republican close to the Vice President" who told ABC News' Jonathan Karl that "the issue is if somebody disclosed classified information improperly or was not truthful to a grand jury," and that nothing in the Times story suggests that Cheney did anything wrong. "That is true," the authors of the Note chime in, "but it certainly allows every television reporter standing on the North Lawn...to place Vice President Cheney squarely in the middle of Plamegate for the first time." Which is what the Times said.

Now, I know -- it doesn't seem right that Cheney didn't do anything wrong. But that's not really the case. The New York Times didn't say that Cheney did anything wrong. But if you ask his old friends, they'll tell you that Cheney has lost his mind.

Last week, I wrote about Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff. Wilkerson's career spans three administrations; he broke with the current one, much in the manner of Richard Clarke. But unlike Clarke, Wilkerson in 2001 was not a Clinton appointee nobody trusted; he had obviously been a valued player in the first Bush administration, and today he repeatedly identifies the first Bush as his idea of a great president. But in his recent address to the New America Foundation (moderated, incidentally, by Steve Clemons), Col. Wilkerson said, "What I saw [in the current administration] was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld." I told you about all of this last week, but I didn't tell you about this -- from the Q&A session after the speech:

"Q: ...How is it that Dick Cheney, who was described to me by someone who worked with him in a senior post in the Pentagon in the first Bush administration as prudent, cautious. He said to me, I don't recognize Dick Cheney anymore. How did Cheney go down this path as well?

"COL. WILKERSON: Well, there are a number of people who have asked me that question, and a number of people have offered their observations who are in a better position than I to make that judgment. I knew Secretary Cheney when he was the secretary of Defense, and he was, in my view, a good secretary of Defense. He would make a decision on a dime, and if you didn't give him the material to make a decision with he'd send you away. Good executive. 9/11 changed his entire approach to business, I think. Some people have called it paranoia, some people have called it not having enough -- sort of the ivory tower complex, not having enough contact with the real world on a daily basis to understand how things are going or how things are building or how tension is being handled. But I think -- if I had to put my finger on it and I was having to bet on it or something I would say that Dick Cheney saw 9/11, saw the potential for another 9/11, particularly one with a nuclear weapon or some other mass destruction device, and suddenly became so fixated on that problem, not without some legitimacy, that it skewed and bent some of the other approaches and decisions that he made. That's my interpretation."

Wilkerson is being a little too polite here, and in a sense he is repeating the administration line that 9/11 has changed everything and justifies anything. But this guy, until very recently, was Colin Powell's chief of staff. He's saddened that his decision to go public with what he knows about the regime has hurt his friendship with Powell. He admired Cheney and Rumsfeld in the nineties. He's not about to implicate the Project for the New American Century. But moments before answering that question about Cheney, Wilkerson had said: "I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn't mean we make a radical change in the nature of America."

I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn't mean we make a radical change in the nature of America. One of the best things ever said on this subject, I think.

"But that's what we did," Wilkerson concluded, "and we did it in private." And one of the very few guys responsible for it, Dick Cheney, is apparently unrecognizable to those who have known him throughout his career. And let's acknowledge how strange it is that the first Bush administration now looks like the very model of prudent diplomacy. Oh, if only Dick Cheney were...you know...the way he used to be!

And in this week's New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg has a fascinating article about Brent Scowcroft -- who says the same thing about Cheney. Scowcroft is another one -- invaluable to Bush I, invaluable to Clinton, ejected from the Bush II ranks early on. (In terms of the family business, Scowcroft's dismissal is worse than Wilkerson's, as Scowcroft is one of George H.W. Bush's closest friends.)

From Goldberg's profile:

"Scowcroft suggested that the White House was taking the wrong advice, and listening to a severely limited circle. He singled out the Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who was consulted by Vice-President Cheney and others after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Lewis, Scowcroft said, fed a feeling in the White Hoyse that the United States must assert itself. 'It's that idea that we've got to hit somebody hard,' Scowcroft said. 'And Bernard Lewis says, "I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power."' Cheney, in particular, Scowcroft thinks, accepted Lewis's view of Middle East politics. 'The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney,' Scowcroft said. 'I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore.'"

Now, you and I would probably say that Dick Cheney was never quite right in the head. But people who think he once had a mind now feel that he has definitely lost it. And in yesterday's Libby revelation, we got the first sniff of what may be the fall of the creature.

None of this means that Karl Rove is off the hook, or that we won't hear today that he has been indicted. He's not off the hook at all, and he probably has been issued a letter.

By the way, a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll finds that "a majority would vote for a Democrat over President Bush if an election were held this year." So at least one thing hasn't changed! A majority voted for a Democrat over Bush in 2000 and then again in 2004, so don't let anyone tell you the American people are inconsistent. A majority of those questioned in this new poll felt that "Democrats could do a better job than Republicans" in the areas of health care, Social Security, gasoline prices, the economy, and Iraq. The only area in which a majority felt Republicans could do better was "fighting terrorism." It's probably a typo.

And two thousand Americans have now died in George W. Bush's Iraq war.

Okay, Then -- Bloomberg and Pataki and Ground Zero

In deference to Sisk's excellent article yesterday about the importance of local politics, we move now from the nation's political capital to its cultural, financial, and commercial one.

This is from yesterday's New York Post:

"In a rare public spat, Gov. Pataki yesterday shot down Mayor Bloomberg's pitch to replace Ground Zero's proposed office towers with housing and hotels. Pataki said he was 'perplexed' by the mayor's about face on the plan for redeveloping downtown.

"'He has been a great partner from day one,' Pataki said of Bloomberg. 'But I'm perplexed that the city now thinks that lower Manhattan cannot support the commercial space envisioned in the site plan.'

"...The governor's aides were steamed that Bloomberg has recently made an issue of Ground Zero by suggesting [developer Larry] Silverstein should be pushed aside and questioning the need for commercial office space at the site...Earlier in the day, Bloomberg met with The Post's editorial board and continued to push his plan to convert at least some of the proposed office towers at the World Trade Center to a mix of residential and hotel space.

"Bloomberg also drew fire yesterday from Sen. Charles Schumer. Schumer said he 'strongly disagrees' with the mayor's view that 10 million square feet of office space would be to too much for lower Manhattan to absorb. 'Do New Yorkers want to resign themselves to a city that's shrinking and has fewer of the kind of jobs that fuel our economy?' Schumer asked."

(Note: In the New York Post, practically every sentence is its own paragraph. I'm omitting extraneous carriage returns when I quote from the Post, because I know my readers can handle paragraphs of more than one sentence.)

That meeting Bloomberg had with the editorial board apparently didn't go very well, because this opinion piece also appeared in the foul rag yesterday:

"Does Mayor Bloomberg think Lower Manhattan should remain the financial capital of the world? Apparently not. Yesterday, Bloomberg stopped by the Post and wondered out loud whether it makes more sense to build housing at Ground Zero -- instead of the expanse of new office space the administration agreed to, in writing, less than a year ago. It seems that redevelopment hasn't been moving swiftly enough for Mayor Mike, so it's time for a 180-degree shift in direction for Downtown -- that is, time to transform Ground Zero and environs into a condo community for yuppies. We're all for more condos -- but not where the world meets to do business.

"...Is Bloomberg seriously suggesting that Manhattan can't absorb more office space?"

Not only is he saying that; he happens to be absolutely right. I explained why in my 7/4/05 article "The Freedom Tower and the Fourth of July," but in a nutshell: Lower Manhattan does not need more office space, which is why there is still not a single tenant lined up for the impending Freedom Tower, nor for the nearly-completed new office tower at 7 World Trade Center. Moreover, Lower Manhattan didn't need more office space in 1971, when the Twin Towers were finished. There is, and there has usually been, an abundance of empty office space in the district. There is, and there has usually been, a dire need for housing there -- certainly since the mid-1960s, when acres of residential and small-business property were decimated to make way for the Twin Towers.

To anyone familiar with New York City and its history, it is absolutely laughable for the editors of the Post to suggest that the World Trade Center -- in any form -- is responsible for Lower Manhattan's status as the world's financial epicenter. Two-thirds of the gold bullion on the planet Earth is stored in a single bank on Minetta Lane. Also, though this detail seems to have escaped the Post's eye, Lower Manhattan kind of has a lot to do with the stock market. It has been the financial capital of the known universe for so long that when it first attained this status, the New York Post was a respectable newspaper.

In two weeks, it'll be time for New Yorkers to decide whether to let Bloomberg keep his job. Bloomberg, of course, is a former Democrat whose Republican candidacy for mayor was seen as a strategic grab for the coattails of Giuliani. His current race against Democrat Fernando Ferrer has actually brought him left of center, as he attempts to garner votes by narrowing the ideological gap. Those strange beings known as New York City Republicans would like Bloomberg better if he seemed more like a Republican. We New York City Democrats would like him better if he'd get off his tiptoes when talking about the administration which gave the 9/11 planes the all-clear.

Noah