Jonah Goldberg: Just Another Neocon Prostitute
By Jeff Koopersmith

Nov. 5, 2005 / PHILADELPHIA (apj.us) / When I write an opinion about someone, I want my readers to know a little bit about the person I am writing about.

Jonah Goldberg, who owes his career to being one of the smallest-time young gangsters who vilified Bill Clinton in partnership with his mother Lucianne - who has thankfully disappeared in disgrace after being the "senior advisor" to Linda Tripp, of all people.

Goldberg is, yes, a nationally syndicated columnist. In fact, his column appears almost exclusively in ultra-right-wing news rags, including the highly amusing Neocon fishwrap owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, The Washington Times.

Goldberg, who also used to be an underling at the now-extinct Brill's Content, is also the only boy writer who took a much-needed opportunity on the Web site (as opposed to the print version) of William Buckley's dying magazine, National Review - a monthly that is near-dead because the octogenarian Buckley has all but retired.

Goldberg's lovely wife served as a "senior policy advisor" to none other than Bush's gone-and-gladly-forgotten attorney general, John Ashcroft. You remember him, don't you? He was found praying on the men's room floor for the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas and was later better known for covering the statue of Blind Justice that stands near his office in a virtual burkha because of the statue's naked breasts.

Need I say more?

Goldberg writes in the November 3, 2005 Philadelphia Inquirer, "Plamegate doesn't look likely to unravel Bush's presidency."

Now, I might agree, inasmuch as Mr. Bush's presidency has already unraveled - and long ago as a consequence of his administration's greed, rapacity, corporate philandering, and policies degrading the poor, minorities, and homosexuals - policies that look more like hate crimes - and, of course, a pile of lies about Iraq so soaring as to rival the Himalayas.

Goldberg claims that the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has "already investigated" these lies - which he labels "prewar intelligence" in a futile attempt to raise from the dead the likes of soon-to-be-indicted-for-securities-fraud Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Pat Roberts, chairman of the committee, who has failed miserably (on purpose) to examine the heap of deception Mr. Bush and his storm troopers dumped onto the American people, calculatingly using the ghastly tragedies at New York, the Pentagon, and a lonely field in Pennsylvania that occurred on September 11th.

Goldberg, of course, lies himself, writing that the Intelligence Committee has already investigated prewar intelligence. That is fictitious. Senator Roberts has all but slipped that file into his glove compartment rather than open yet another Pandora's Box.

Goldberg, unfortunately, has become just another meaningless parrot squawking to the talking point orders of Karl Rove. This week, Goldberg did his caged avian best to dismiss Senator Harry Reid's brilliant call for a secret session of the Senate, and effort to force Senators Bill Frist and Roberts to finally - after several years of hemming and hawing - examine the lies of Bush, now infamous across the world. Naturally, Goldberg calls Democrat Senators "desperate," characterizing them as calling for a "do-over."

Desperate? Yes, Jonah - for the truth.

In fact, nothing, zip, nada has been done by Chairman Roberts to focus clearly on the lies of the Bush Administration - including those lies emanating from across the sea through the generosity of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of England who, like Mr. Bush, needed a nice little war to maintain his power.

Goldberg posits that "Plamegate" is going nowhere - but he's dead wrong, because what will happen at Scooter Libby's trial (if there is one, that is) will not be an examination of his stupidity at having lied repeatedly to the FBI and the Grand Jury, but rather a look at WHY he lied.

Ask yourself: why did Vice President Cheney's chief subordinate think it so very important to cover up his efforts to destroy Ambassador Wilson's wife - a covert CIA agent - and at the same time put dozens of agents connected with her in deadly danger?

The answer's obvious: because if the truth were revealed, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney might very well be impeached - and for treason.

Goldberg and his despicable ilk are attempting to hide the tree with a forest. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issued an indictment that clearly outlines, in detail, every lie Libby told to authorities and the Grand Jury. Goldberg labels them as "alleged." Even Libby has not yet claimed his lies are supposed, but instead may claim they were accidental - you know, the tired, old "I'm so important and busy I didn't remember what I said to Tim Russert or what he said to me" defense.

In fact, what Libby did - purposefully - was to lie to the FBI, the Grand Jury, the Special Prosecutor, the Congress, and the American people for one reason: to make certain that Fitzgerald could never find the truth about the underlying dishonesty of his boss Dick Cheney and the President of the United States in order to jump into a war they had been planning for years before Sept. 11, 2001 - planning, in fact, since the early 1990s.

What prosecutor Fitzgerald did was nothing.

Instead, even though absolutely convinced that Mr. Libby lied repeatedly, he did not as one might envision vitalize his effort to prove the crimes that must have been committed in the White House in the lead-up to the Iraq War - the very crimes that forced Mr. Libby to feel he had to lie to the Grand Jury time and time again to protect someone in addition to himself.

Mr. Fitzgerald was mysteriously un-invigorated to find the truth no matter where it lay. For some reason - yet unexplained - Mr. Fitzgerald threw in the towel and "Nerfed" the White House with the softest criminal ball ever thrown.

I would not be flabbergasted if it comes out later that Mr. Fitzgerald tangoed with Harriet Miers, Bush's attorney on his investigation and took the easy and unproblematic way out, allowing Libby to fall on his sword to protect Cheney and Bush while keeping Fitzgerald's career intact.

No wonder Miers' early Christmas present from the President was a sure-to-fail nomination to the Supreme Court.

Goldberg is absolutely wrong when he writes, "Whatever the truth may be in Libby's case, it offers no further evidence that George Bush 'lied us into war.'"

Here's the truth, Jonah: Libby's suicidal move proves the case, save one element. Did George Bush lie knowingly - or did he, as the alleged dry drunk, dimwit sucker he seems to be - rely on the fabrications of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the rest of the American Al Qaeda hiding in little rooms whispering like gleeful little girls about their trillion dollar war?

It is quite possible that the President is absolutely blameless with regard to the web of lies presented to the American people as the excuse to make war in Iraq.

However, he is guilty - guilty as sin - in not now comprehending that he was scammed and that it is time for a major housecleaning, even a total renovation at the White House and at the Republican National Committee "Neocon Dining Room" where these outrageously Big Lies are hatched and fed to the dimwitted of America.

The design of this circus smacks of Karl Rove, who trotted back and forth to the Grand Jury, changing his story four times to fit the mold that Fitzgerald and whoever else agreed to create. This quartet of Grand Jury appearances was no accident; it is, rather, a sign that Rove was playing Fitzgerald and the media like a trout on fly line - reeling him in, letting him out, and confusing the matter further each time.

The only problem for Goldberg of course is that Libby's trial - although I doubt there will ever be one - would in result in uncovering the entire filthy mess that has killed over two thousand of our boys and girls, crippled anther 16,000 of them, and nearly slaughtered twenty thousand innocent Iraqis.

One need only listen to the fifty White-House-bribed Neocon commentators on right-wing "Talk Radio" to see that Goldberg is merely one of dozens writing and broadcasting the same tripe, trying to make Wilson the liar because he dared to cross the White House and reveal that Saddam had no nuclear program.

In fact, Saddam had no hefty weapons at all!

Goldberg was absolutely right when he said that the war in Iraq "did not hinge on anything involving Wilson or Valerie Plame." And his pathetic attempt to claim that Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and the New York Times endorsed the war is almost laughable. They may have supported Bush during the run-up to the war - but this was primarily because they too were hoaxed by the White House and goaded into believing a plethora of lies so astounding as to make the old trickster Dick Nixon's crew look like Eliot Ness and the Untouchables by comparison.

The war against Iraq hinged on other matters - the Bush Administration's lust for oil, a yen for a large base in the Middle East from which to guarantee its flow, and a slap back at Saddam for daring to plot to murder of Bush the Father, who was wiser than his son in realizing that destroying Saddam in 1991 would lead to the wholesale bloodshed and the frightening instability we have now witness in the region and around the world.

Goldberg mentions Robert Novak as almost a hero, but about whom liberals laugh calling him Novakula because of his reputation as a vampiristic whore for the Neoconservative right. If anyone should be indicted, it should be Novak - who in my opinion must surely have been engaged in a conspiracy to bring down Ambassador Wilson and place his wife Valerie in danger.

I for one would like to know exactly what Valerie Plame was doing for her country when Novak "outed" her and just whose lives were put in jeopardy as a result thereof - lives of covert agents who live in daily fear of being uncovered by sloppy old men like Novak, who have a pre-World-War-II view of American righteousness.

Jonah Goldberg is, as usual, wrong. Mr. Libby will most likely attempt to plead guilty to lesser charges down the road and escape from trial. If he does not, then his trial will in fact result in the recognition that this nation is being run by some of the biggest hypocrites and liars in history.

Whichever scenario becomes the case, Pandora's Box has opened, and the truth will be revealed.

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."