Quotes of the Morning: We Didn't Start the Fire

“After a 22-month inquiry, the special counsel in the C.I.A. leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is expected to announce this week whether he will seek indictments against White House officials, a decision that is likely to be a defining moment of President Bush's second term.
Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., who is Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, have been advised that they are in serious legal jeopardy in a case that began as a minor irritant for the president's aides but has grown into a raging conflagration for the White House.”
-New York Times, October 23, 2005

“And you know what to do with a raging conflagration.. Bring the marshmallows and hot dogs and enjoy.”
-Skippy

“On Sunday, Republicans appeared to be preparing to blunt the impact of any charges. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program ‘Meet the Press,’ compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, ‘where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime.’
Ms. Hutchison said she hoped ‘that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.’"
-New York Times, October 24, 2005

“Of course, perjury is a felony, and deliberately revealing the identity of undercover agents is commonly known as ‘treason’. They used to execute people for that. And for that ‘couldn’t find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime’ comment… I have three little words. Stained. Blue. Dress. The lies that originally started this investigation, the Nigerian yellowcake story, helped leed us into the second Gulf war. Not such a small thing.”
-Skippy

"’I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes,’ he said. ‘You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it.’
The neoconservatives -- the Republicans who argued most fervently for the second Gulf war -- believe in the export of democracy, by violence if that is required, Scowcroft said. ‘How do the neocons bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize.’ And now, Scowcroft said, America is suffering from the consequences of that brand of revolutionary utopianism. ‘This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism,’ he said.
[…]
‘There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out,’ he told me. ‘But he wasn't really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn't recovered from sanctions.’
[…]
They also argued about Iraq. ‘She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, ‘But we've had fifty years of peace.’"
-The New Yorker, interview with Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor under George H.W. Bush, October 31 edition

“Let’s not forget what this war has caused, or how we were dragged into it.”
-Skippy

“Stepped-up attacks by insurgents over the last two days have killed at least 44 Iraqis, including 12 laborers — five of them brothers — who were gunned down at a construction site, police said Monday.
In addition, the bodies of eight Iraqis who apparently were kidnapped and killed in captivity were found in the capital on Monday, police said.
Meanwhile, the toll among American service members in the Iraq war was approaching 2,000 dead. At least 1,996 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.”
-Associated Press, October 24, 2005