Obama's warm vomit on the State of the Union

I am reminded about the biblical book of Revelation, where the church of Laodicea is promised to be vomited out of God's mouth for lukewarmness.

That's pretty much what the SOTU sounded like to me, from glimpses I was able to catch as ... ironically ... we were shorthanded at my newspaper and I wound up putting together the front page with SOTU at the top!

Anyway ....
1. Nothing on gun control. Chicken shit.
2. Allegedly revenue neutral corporate income tax reform. Can anybody say Catfood Commission II?
3. Not addressing the real jobs problem - a protectionist China with a corporate industrial policy and six times the population of Japan when we worried about it. Not to mention intellectual property theft and things that Japan didn't do, at least not so egregiously.

In other words, a mix of neoliberal mush and pure plain mush.

Add in Congressional Democrats' idiotic "date night," which I skewered two weeks ago, and it was lukewarm vomit indeed. One longed for a Joe Wilson or Samuel Alito, if nothing else.

FiredogLake has more.

Brewster Jennings outed well before Plame outing

Neocons play hardball pre-Iraq; Wilson claims perhaps more murky

In a claim that will have the Jonah Goldbergs of the world calling for Scooter Libby’s pardon, FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds claims that Brewster Jennings was exposed as a CIA front way back in 2001. It’s related to her claim we handed nuclear info to Turkey:

“One group of Turkish agents who had come to America on the pretext of researching alternative energy sources was introduced to Brewster Jennings through the Washington-based American Turkish Council (ATC), a lobby group that aids commercial ties between the countries. Edmonds says the Turks believed Brewster Jennings to be energy consultants and were planning to hire them.

But she said: “He [the State Department official] found out about the arrangement . . . and he contacted one of the foreign targets and said . . . you need to stay away from Brewster Jennings because they are a cover for the government.

“The target [Marc Grossman of the State Department] . . . immediately followed up by calling several people to warn them about Brewster Jennings.

“At least one of them was at the ATC. This person also called an ISI person to warn them.” If the ISI was made aware of the CIA front company, then this would almost certainly have damaged the investigation into the activities of Khan. Plame’s cover would also have been compromised, although Edmonds never heard her name mentioned on the intercepts. Shortly afterwards, Plame was moved to a different operation.

Are the claims real?

It sure looks like it:

Phillip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, said: “It’s pretty clear Plame was targeting the Turks. If indeed that [State Department] official was working with the Turks to violate US law on nuclear exports, it would have been in his interest to alert them to the fact that this woman’s company was affiliated to the CIA. I don’t know if that’s treason legally but many people would consider it to be.”

The FBI denied the existence of a specific case file about any outing of Brewster Jennings by the State Department official, in a response to a freedom of information request. However, last week The Sunday Times obtained a document, signed by an FBI official, showing that the file did exist in 2002.

Re Libby, err Cheney, and Plame, it’s still unclear how far knowledge of Brewster Jennings was disseminated before 2003. But, there’s loose threads, to say the least>

As Democratic Underground notes:

In Joe Wilson's book, The Politics of Truth, he says that he met his future wife, Valerie Plame, at an American Turkish Council (ATC) event at the residence of the Turkish ambassador in Washington DC in 1997. At the time, both the ATC and the Turkish diplomatic community were targets of FBI investigations.

And…

Wilson's consulting company, JC Wilson International Ventures, appears to have some Turkish clients, some of which may have come through his involvement at the ATC.

Given the interconnectedness of much of the Washington village, while I’m not offering a defense of Scooter Libby, it seems the whole Plame imbroglio has more gray areas than many Cheney-haters may want to admit.

On the other hand, the fact that Grossman is known as neocon complicates things yet further, and also shows how far they were, and still are, willing to go.

Meanwhile, the State Department still wants to be a nuclear proliferator, specifically to Turkey. Is this a CYA by neocons, who drool over Turkey precisely because of the nature and degree of its backdoor intelligence arrangements with Israel? Could well be. In that case, Grossman flagged Brewster Jennings in an effort to make it back off. And, it shows in yet another way how neocons had no regard for CIA professionals.

That, to me, is the backstory all along. The Turkey-Israel connections are well-known. I’m sure that’s why the Turks’ refusal to join the invasion in 2003 was a surprise of sorts, as well as a disappointment.

It’s a whole new Plame field

So, as people have been expecting to happen, Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson are suing Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove, along with Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby and 10 unnamed persons.over the leaking of her name while she was still a CIA operative.

The lawsuit alleged "a conspiracy among current and former high-level officials in the White House" to "discredit, punish and seek revenge" against Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publicly disputing statements made by Bush justifying the war in Iraq.

No dollar amount, but both compensatory and punitive damages are being sought.

Will their suit have synergy with Libby’s trial? Or will they and prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald get at cross purposes? As methodical as he’s been, I doubt he relishes this newcomer pair dealing themselves in at this point.

Second set of questions revolve around the pacing of this suit and how much happens before the November elections. And that’s the one that the GOP is surely sweating.

Rule No. 1 of civil suits is: There’s no Fifth Amendment.

Rule No. 2 is: Don’t ever forget about Rule No. 1.