Fitzmas Carols

O Aspen Tree

O Aspen tree,
O Aspen tree,
Your roots are all connected.
O Aspen tree,
O Aspen tree,
But your sources aren't protected.
How shall we sell the war to them?
Just send some lies to Judy M.
O Aspen tree,
O Aspen tree,
Your roots are all connected.

O Little Town of Washington

O Little Town of Washington,
How still we see thee lie.
The folks below
Don't seem to know
That Fitzmas day is nigh.
The grand jury is weighing
Indictments `gainst these crooks.
Hopefully, we soon will see,
Fitzgerald throw the book!

"Plame!" the White House Sources Say

"Plame!" the White House sources say,
"Wilson's wife is CIA!"
"She's the one who booked the trip"
"To debunk the Niger tip."
Slowly now the Aspens turn!
Fitz has energy to burn!
He'll flip the sources from the WHIG,
Turn this into something big!
"Plame!" the White House sources say,
"Wilson's wife is CIA!"

Walking in a Beltway Wonderland!

Pundits talk, are you listening?
On Rove's brow, sweat is glistening.
A beautiful sight,
Fitz will indict,
Walking in a beltway wonderland!

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Preznit Bush.
We'll call him an indicted co-conspirator,
And then we'll start to kick him in the tush!

Can you tell, we're excited?
Just to see, who's indicted!
Those who have clout,
Will be frog-marched out,
Walking in a beltway wonderland!

T'was the night before Fitz-mas

T'was the night before Fitz-mas
All through the White House
Not a soul was asleep
But Bush, what a louse

The shredder's a cuttin
The servers wiped bare
Wiping down fingerprints
Not even a hair

Rove's on travelocity
Libby's on codetalk.com
Big Game is a cussin'
Fuck Dubya and his 'Nam

The Christianists on one side
The neo-cons to the right
The corporatists are still kewl
Elitest want a fight

Through all of the bickerin
And all of the scare
Bush lays a sleepin
With hardly a care

When morning comes
Lawyers on the phone
The frog marches begin
And Bush wakes up alone

"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the President's rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world.

As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears a decision, perhaps as early as today, on whether to issue indictments in his two-year probe, Bush has already circled the wagons around Rove, whose departure would be a grievous blow to an already shell-shocked White House staff and a President in deep political trouble.

Asked if he believed indictments were forthcoming, a key Bush official said he did not know, then added: "I'm very concerned it could go very, very badly."

"Karl is fighting for his life," the official added, "but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that."

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.

But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.

A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.

None of these sources offered additional specifics of what Bush and Rove discussed in conversations beginning shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched into the leak of CIA agent Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.

A White House spokesman declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of Fitzgerald's investigation.

TEN TIPS FOR DEALING WITH FITZMAS

10. Put down the caffeine:  For the next 48 hours, cleanse your body of java, aspartame, splenda, and whatever other shit you've been putting in your system.  Your body will be producing more adrenaline during Fitzmas than it did when you were a hormone-crazed teenager, so don't fuel the fire.

9. "Refresh" is the AntiChrist:  Resist the urge to press "refresh" every TWO SECONDS.  Checking into Drudge every minute won't make any indictments come any faster..it'll just give him hits and make Drudge's head swell even more.  Eww.  I put "Drudge" and "swell" and "head" in the same sentence.  I just grossed myself out.

8. Gossip Folks:  Don't believe anything in the next 24-48 hours.  Guess what!! I can report on my blog that Condi will be VP when Dick resigns...and because it's on a blog, it must be true!  And my scoop will fly through the internets at twice the speed of sound and I'll be so convincing, Condi herself will hear my scoop and think "Shit. I need new shoes!" and next thing you know New York Daily News will be reporting that Condi was in NY shopping for Jimmy Choo shoes that look "Vice-Presidential" and Teresa Heinz passed her by and called her a "bitch."  Get my point?

7. Turn off the TV:  Why submit yourself to the torture of watching The Situation Room and listening to Wolf's "I'm-reading-a-script-but-I'm-trying-to-make-it-sound-live" voice in the hopes that some pundit will throw out something like "Rove will be indicted"? You all KNOW that the talking heads don't know shit, and that their dirty little secret is that they really get their info from the, gasp!, blogs, so why waste your time?  So, Kristol says Rove and Libby will be indicted.  Um...99% of the pajamajadeen have said the same thing for the last couple months.  Give your blood pressure a break and turn off the TV.

6. Don't listen to Tip #7:  Well, do turn off the TV, but turn it on for Scotty's press conferences. Nothing eases the nerves and apprehension of indictments than watching Puffy McMoonface squirm as he fends off a resuccitated press corps.  With Scotty spinning so fast, you KNOW there's some serious shit going down.

5. Don't take off of work tomorrow:  Yes, there are some of you who would actually skip work or school to stay home and catch the indictments breaking live. I've confessed to being a Plamegate junkie, but please.  Those of you who view CSPAN as political porn need to put things into perspective.  The indictments may not break tomorrow...and then what? You spent a whole day, one hand repeatedly refreshing dkos and drudge, the other hand holding a remote and flipping channels between CNN and MSNBC and, gulp, FOX, flipping and flipping and flipping and it'll all be for naught.  So treat tomorrow just like any other day, use school and work as a distraction...and, um, did you hear blogging more than once a day can make you go blind?

4. Visit Freeperville:  Watch the tension melt away as you read about how Wilson was the leaker, how Fitzgerald is really a closet Dem fucking Hillary at the Watergate hotel, and how Plame orchestrated all this just to get name recognition for 2008.  You'll laugh, you'll cry, you might even throw up in your mouth a little bit.  But it'll be a great distraction from the anticipation of Fitzmas.

3. Lower Your Expectations:  Hey, it worked for Laura Bush.  Don't expect too much from this.  We don't know what was said in that grand jury room; about all we know definitively is that Karl Rove has a "typical" garage. Fantasies of Cheney being indicted and Bush as unindicted coconspirator are just that at this point--fantasies.  Trust the Fitz to do what's right based on the evidence, and trust that the result will be as far as he was legally able to go.

2. Stockpile the Booze:  Ok, you've lowered your expectations, but sheesh, don't be downer.  No matter what comes down, these next couple of days will be explosive. So chill the Cristal (or the Guinness) and get ready.  Also, compile a list of all the emails of your most die-hard GOP friends.  Plan on sending them emails after the indictments, perferably after you've depleted your liquor reserves.

1. Enjoy the moment: Take a DEEP breath, and savor the fact that you're witnessing history being made.  The outing of Plame was a vicious act, but nothing will be as sweet as watching justice being served.

Plamegate: The John Bolton Connection

I'm now hearing that the investigation may be inching closer to never-confirmed UN Ambassador John Bolton.

According to two sources, Bolton's former chief of staff, Fred Fleitz, was at least one of the sources of the classified information about Valerie Plame that flowed through the Bush administration and eventually made its way into Bob Novak's now infamous column.

After delving into Fleitz, I can safely report that he is, at a minimum, a very interesting character.

Over the years, Fleitz earned a reputation as Bolton's chief enforcer, a swashbuckler willing to go the extra mile to make the intel fit the desired policy -- even if it meant knocking a few heads. And his dual role (serving what he called his "two bosses") put him in the position to pick up -- and deliver to Bolton -- all kinds of information… including, perhaps, the spousal standing of a certain CIA analyst named Valerie. Even though Plame was in operations and Fleitz was in WINPAC, he obviously was in a position to know.

So when Joe Wilson started making a stink about faulty intel, you can bet that those whose raison d'etre had been spreading faulty intel would move mountains to discredit him. This is a key point because, in the end, Plamegate isn't about the outing of Valerie Plame or the sliming of Joe Wilson. It's about Iraq and the White House's attempt to slam the door on questions about the corrupted intelligence that was used to lead us into a disastrous war. Intel that Fleitz and Bolton played a key role in shaping.

So what does this all mean to the ongoing Plamegate investigation? Well, another source close to Bolton recently described his management style to me as "Very hands on. Nothing goes by him. His staff does what he wants. He's not the kind of guy to have his staffers freelancing." So, if Fleitz was a key source of the Plame info and Bolton is not the kind of guy to have his staffers freelancing… does this mean Bolton was being less than forthcoming when he told people around him that the first time he ever heard Valerie Plame's name was when he read it in the newspaper? Or was he merely sharing talking points with Tim Russert?

So could Ambassador Bolton actually be a target of Pat Fitzgerald's investigation? When considering this question, it's important to keep in mind that he's never been subpoenaed or questioned by the Plamegate grand jury -- and, as a lawyer who does work for the New York Times put it: "The target of a grand jury investigation would not ordinarily be subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury."

So here is what we know: We know that Fleitz was the connection to the CIA, and that Bolton was close to Scooter Libby (and the rest of the neocons, of course) and Judy Miller (for whom he was an important source, although the last time she quoted him by name was in 1999 when he was at the American Enterprise Institute). And here is what we don't know: we don't know the pathway through which Plame's identity got into Novak's column. Did Miller learn about Plame from her old chum Bolton? Did she pass that info on to Libby? Or had Bolton already told Libby? And Rove? Or was it all just passed around and around in a cozy game of neocon phone tag? It makes one wonder more than ever before what Bolton and Miller talked about when he visited her in jail.

Courtesy Women's Wear Daily

Jason Epstein continues to find odd ways of showing support for his jailed spouse, Judith Miller. The esteemed book publisher is currently telling friends that his wife "is having the time of her life" in prison. ...

According to a Wednesday report on Salon.com, Miller, .. "is holding up well, but has had some stomach problems related to jail food, misses the Internet and outside contact, and has had to withstand a constant stream of hip-hop videos on the communal television sets."

Fifty Cents: cruel and unusual punishment for the Saks Fifth Avenue set. But what's that you say Mr. Keller:

Times executive editor Bill Keller told The Los Angeles Times recently, "Sadly, Judy is not on a fellowship at some writers' colony. She is in JAIL. She is sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor, and her communications are, shall we say, constrained."

But what's a little discomfort -- as in, say, sleeping on a FOAM MATTRESS -- in the pursuit of a good book deal:

[F]riends of the couple said earlier reports of Miller's suffering in jail are dated now that she's settled in at the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia. The hip-hop and bad food, coupled with a parade of important visitors have, they said, made the experience a novel and interesting one for her. Too, Miller is evidently enjoying all the attention she's getting in the press and is likely to have her pick of book deals if she emerges from the ordeal with her reputation intact. [LINK]