I Beg Your Pardon?

Bill Kristol was doing his usual Sunday morning schtick on Fox News Sunday, this time begging the President to pardon Scooter because his conviction means that Fitzgerald's charge that there "is a cloud over the VP, a cloud over the WH" will continue to have some traction in the press. Actually he goes so far as to claim that "Fitzgerald will keep repeating that there’s a cloud over the White House." This is so rich, given that Fitzgerald has bent over backwards not to make gratuitous comments to the press about the case (as far as I know he's only spoken to reporters twice – once when he announced Libby's indictment and a second time after Libby was convicted). Maybe the press will keep repeating it, but Fitzgerald won't.

The larger issue is how the Republican party maintains a sort of media fun-house of smoke and mirrors that hides all the incestual relationships between conservative magazine publications, think tanks, main stream media outlets such as Fox News, and Republican politicians and their staff such as Libby. To wit, Bill Kristol is the founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, which is funded and published by News Corporation. Of course News Corp. is the parent company of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.

Bill Kristol is also the founder and Chairman of the Project for the New American Century, to which Scooter Libby and his boss Dick Cheney are members and founding signatories. The Project for the New American Century receives funding primarily from the Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation also gives a lot of money to another bastion of Neoconservative ideology, the American Enterprise Institute which shares a building with PNAC. Rupert Murdoch sits on the Advisory Board of AEI, and also gives money to it. Many Fellows at AEI are also tied to PNAC and vice versa. Of course it was the Neoconservatives who argued the need to remove Saddam from power before 9/11 and used 9/11 as an excuse to do so, cooking the books on WMDs. And when Joe Wilson pointed out they had manipulated the intelligence on WMDs, Dick and Scooter orchestrated outting his wife, who was a CIA NOC, in revenge. As a part of the investigation into outting Plame, Scooter lied to the prosecutor about his role in this affair and got convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and now his friends go on Fox News and press for his pardon and fling baseless accusations at the prosecutor.

In essence, then Fox News Sunday is merely a store front to sell the Neoconservative movement to which Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and Rupert Murdoch belong. Furthermore, when one of their own is convicted of perjury and obstructing justice, they can then use their media empire to call for his pardon and vilify the prosecutor, all the while hiding behind the mask of "fair and balanced" journalism. If this isn't a new form of Fascism folks, it's a close as it can be without being the genuine article.