michael weisskopf loses hand in Iraq......

[buycitgo]

conscience in DC?

for those who don't know about this intrepid reporter who first became known to me as coauthor of "Tell Newt to Shut Up," detailing what a frigging liar, scoundrel, demagogue that creep is, he was victim of a grenade attack in attack in Iraq the other day, getting his hand blown off in the act of tossing it back out the Hummer into which it was thrown.

if this sounds callous, well, my father got his ass blown off in WWII on a bridge near Bastogne just before youknowwhat, and spent the next year in hospital, fighting for his life. according to doctors, he came within a millimeter of not being my father at all, and spending the rest of his life dead on a bridge in Belgium.

anyway, I know that isn't me (so perhaps I haven't the right to comment on Mr. Weisskopf's injuries in such a cavalier manner), but I've been wearing my dad's dog tag (gave other to my brother) since the run up to the Iraq invasion, seeing as how my father gave his ass, literally, fighting fascism.......and lost to the kleptocrats currently holding our nation hostage. (Gee, today's the the 3d very black anniversary of that awful occurrence).

and to refresh anyone's memory on why I said MW lost his conscience in DC, recall he wrote with Steno Sue the most egregiously, laughably ironic screed, "Truth at Any Cost." Filled to the brim with illegal leaks, innuendo, out and out falsehoods, TAAC is right up their among the reasons the media can be considered in the pocket of the FAR FAR FAR right wing, and the most important factor in the junta's Grand Theft Nation exactly three years ago, to this day.

this bit from the NY Observer captures quite nicely the Schmidt/Weisskopf duo's utter disdain for those "stupid things" to get in the way of a good story:

On page 10, they refer obliquely to a Starr witness who “met with the Clintons’ Washington lawyer, David Kendall, who was offering legal assistance and informal advice to witnesses interested in resisting Starr’s probe.” The explanatory footnote goes on to identify this witness as Mr. Watt, who, despite this supposed intervention by the President’s attorney, “ultimately pled guilty and cooperated with Starr’s investigation.”

That sentence is inexcusably inaccurate. As Mr. Watt himself says, it is “a complete and total falsehood. That is a lie. I didn’t plead guilty to anything because I wasn’t charged with anything.” Although the former Little Rock judge was a target of Mr. Starr’s investigation, he was never indicted by the independent counsel or anyone else.

Moreover, neither he nor his attorney ever colluded in any way with Mr. Kendall, since they have had not the slightest contact with him. “That too is inaccurate,” said Mr. Watt. “I’ve never met David Kendall. Mark Hampton, my lawyer, has never met David Kendall.” The Clintons’ counsel agreed. “That’s simply false. I never met or spoke with William Watt or his lawyer.”

The real story of Mr. Watt’s harsh encounter with the Office of the Independent Counsel is complicated and revealing. When Mr. Starr’s deputies found him unwilling to bolster the testimony of David Hale, their chief Whitewater witness against the President, they threatened indictment. “They tried to intimidate me, bankrupt me,” he recalled. As the Starr prosecutors knew, however, he was innocent of wrongdoing despite his dealings with Mr. Hale. Indeed, he had tried to expose Mr. Hale’s $2 million fraud against the federal government several years before the crooked businessman was finally indicted in 1993. Unable to indict Mr. Watt, the O.I.C. eventually immunized him.

so they just make stuff UP!!!!

but wait, it gets better.......S&W write a letter to the Observer, whining about Conason's conflict of interest in commenting on their "competing book," while avoiding the issue of their gross malfeasance in the Watt fiasco.

it's all in the same link, and shows the depths to which the "liberal media" sank during those benighted years of "get the Clintons 'at any cost'"

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/9634/pimps.html

just the tip of the iceberg with them

[HPLeft]

1. I saw the report on the news tonight

I didn't know him at all, but I hate this war, and I hate what it's doing to people's lives - both now, and in the future.

[buycitgo]

2. same here, in spades, and.......

it's high end media figurehead handmaidens like MW that made this hellWHOLE possible by trashing whatever standards of media obligation to telling both sides of the story for WJC's entire presidency that made the subsequent smearjob of Gore by the likes of Rove/Comstock, slavishly copied/printed/broadcast by the RW media that enabled the BFEE to get just close enough to steal the election three years ago.

and for those who've forgotten, E. Jean Lewis, one of the earliest LIARS, who helped get the Whitewater inquistion rolling, has been appointed to a FEDERAL job (I forgot, under the endless onslaught of mindboggling assaults on democracy this junta perpetrates every single day).

the estimable David Neiwert comments, while also bringing back one of the most OBvious cases of perjury one could ever hope to witness.

one which, of course, went completely unpunished, then uncommented upon by the major media, then, unbelievably, scandalously reWARDED!!!!

L. Jean Lewis has been named chief of staff of the Defense Department's inspector-general office; this is one of the most amazing news reports of the year.

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_09_14_dneiwert_archive.html#106356174989755233

for details of the most egregious, insanely Clintonphobic Lewis' journey from low level RTC investigator, to perjuror, to $100K+ IG administrator, you simply must take the time to read this page, and a few links provided there.

the perjury:

http://www.netmagic.net/~franklin/MZ2.html

[buycitgo]

3. refreshment on Lewis

Some of the more colorful instances of her lying before Congress were her claims that the tape recorder "turned itself on" and that her use of the word "BITCH" on the T-shirts she sold (with the subscript, "Bubba, I'm Taking Charge, Hillary") were "in no way intended to denigrate the First Lady". But the most serious instances of unmistakable perjury were her assertions that she had not made any pre-election attempts to pressure the FBI and U.S. Attorney about her shabby criminal referrals for the Clintons in the Whitewater matter, which were directly contradicted by testimony from the FBI (who had documented the contacts, of course) and several other law-enforcement officials.

It should be clear that any normative candidates for top staffing positions at any Inspector General's office should be persons with spotless records and unquestionable reputations for professionalism, ethical behavior and personal integrity. That someone like L. Jean Lewis even made it past the door raises serious questions about just what standards were used. This goes well beyond mere cronyism.

as for her senate testimony......just a minute.

I talked to SS and MW on the Jim Bohannon show about that, and Schmidt LIED her big fat ass off about that.

details follow, including what I said to her

[Jim Sagle]

4. Isn't she the turkey who fainted during a congressional hearing.

AND THE PRESS REFUSED TO REPORT IT?

[buycitgo]

6. hey! what're you some kind of snake oil peddler audience shill???

thought you'd never axe

heh

was just getting to that

several years ago, when "'Truth' at Any Cost" reared its ugly head, and the two media whores turned into pimps for their own lump of hardbound toilet paper, they were on the Jim Bohannon show.

I called in.....still have the audio tape somewhere......and asked Schmidt SPEDIFICally about Lewis' testimony, and WHY she, as the lead WPost reporter at the time, FAILED to report her suspicious testimony, her fainting spell, and subsequent failure to return to complete it.

she said that she LEFT for LUNCH, didn't come back, but was sure that some other reporter for the Post covered it.

well, according to all accounts I've read (hard to prove that negative), NOBODY from either the Post or the Grey Lady bothered to report that incident at all.

At all.

Lyons and Conason have both commented on that, as well as Neiwert, and the Daily Howler, so I'll leave that there, unless someone wants a link to their specific references to that.

[buycitgo]

7. what about this, Jim?

what was that thread you started the other day.....something to do with a Palast article that has gone unnoticed, pretty much......about Baker in Russia/Europe.....what?

did you bookmark it? bring it back, cause Baker should be in the FOREfront of the news, given today's ignominy

[buycitgo]

5. from Salon, on Lewis' interesting role

I know this is a rehash, but Lewis was a fundament of what the wingnuts parlayed into the Gore theft.

remember that, on this anniversary of, perhaps, the blackest day in US history.....

. Jean Lewis. Lewis was supposed to be Whitewater's Joan of Arc. A low-level investigator for the Resolution Trust Corporation in Kansas City, Mo., Lewis took it upon herself during the 1992 election campaign to file "criminal referrals" with the FBI and the U.S. attorney in Little Rock listing both Bill and Hillary Clinton as potential suspects in the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Thanks to reporter Mollie Dickinson's recent story in Salon, we now know that sworn depositions from the Senate Whitewater committee prove that the Bush White House was actively involved in attempts to force the Justice Department to take action on those referrals in time to affect the November election.

So was Lewis herself. FBI agents and federal prosecutors who testified before Sen. Alfonse D'Amato's committee said that Lewis had made dramatic pronouncements to them about altering the course of history, prompting them to suspect her motives. The form and content of Lewis' criminal referrals, moreover, struck every Justice Department official who examined them as factually deficient and legally incompetent. Then-Attorney General William Barr got nowhere in his attempts to push them through the federal bureaucracy. Little Rock U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks, a Reagan appointee, wrote a blunt letter refusing to be a party to what he viewed as a politically inspired smear.

In sworn testimony before both House and Senate Whitewater committees, Lewis denied making any pre-election attempts to pressure the FBI and U.S. attorney, claiming she'd had no conversations with anybody about her criminal referrals until December 1992. But FBI agents testified otherwise, and had contemporaneous records to support them. In fact, the records show, Lewis had hounded them repeatedly. Within a week of her initial September 1992 referral, for example, Lewis left a taunting message for FBI Special Agent Steve Irons at his Little Rock office. "Have I turned into a local pariah," Lewis asked, "just because I wrote one referral with high-profile names, or do you intend on calling me back before Christmas, Steven?" A few days later, she showed up in Irons' office in person to urge him onward. The agent testified that her partisanship had the opposite effect.

Lewis had also made a secret, and potentially illegal, tape recording of a meeting with an RTC colleague named April Breslaw, then testified inaccurately as to the import of their conversations. She blamed the inadvertent recording on a worn-out cassette recorder that had spontaneously activated itself without her intervention. Confronted with inconsistencies in her testimony by Democratic counsel Richard Ben-Veniste, Lewis appeared to faint and had to be assisted from Senate chambers, never to return (a startling development not reported by either the New York Times or the Washington Post). Investigators subsequently found evidence that Lewis had, in fact, bought a spanking new tape recorder only days before her meeting with Breslaw. They passed it and a copy of her "accidental" tape recording along to Starr's office for analysis.

http://archive.salon.com/news/1998/04/cov_08newsa3.html

and don't forget she used "her government office to market a line of 'Presidential BITCH' T-Shirts and coffee mugs mocking the first lady." the above bad craziness, among other things, got her investigated by the RTC's own IG. but, guess what? Ken Starr took over for them when he was sicced on WJC, and nothing ever came of Lewis' various alleged infractions.

which brings this to my phone call, based on the highlight segment above, dealing with Lewis' fainting spell.

[grasswire]

8. Lewis is a freeper

When I was posting over there a couple of years ago, she got a little ticked off when asked about her fainting spell.

[buycitgo]

9. can you believe she got that JOB?

a hundred eighteen K, with her past?

they should do a top ten brazen appointments list:

Reich

Negroponte

Abrams

pick your several insanely RW, lunatic judicial noms

Pitt

Olson

others?

and can you remember any details of the Lewis freep exchange?

I'm going to look hard for that Bohannon tape, as Schmidt was so obviously lying about weaseling out of covering the fainting story, and it would be fun to xscribe it.

[buycitgo]

10. oh, yeah, and NO media coverage, no outrage from dems

at all. barely remember hearing about it at the time.

it just came and went. she really really really could have been so easily convicted on several counts of perjury, as well as conflict of interest/malfeasance, whatever


but what do I know?

and did you notice that TAPA is down again?

is it turning into the old TAP?