Saturday, October 29, 2005

Driving a truck through the bubble

I know this isn't very important but it's one of my favourite moments from today's Fitzgerald presser. Did I mention that I love him? :)
QUESTION: Mr. Fitzgerald, the Republicans previewed some talking points in anticipation of your indictment and they said that if you didn't indict on the underlying crimes and you indicted on things exactly like you did indict -- false statements, perjury, obstruction -- these were, quote/unquote, "technicalities," and that it really was over reaching and excessive.
[...] FITZGERALD: I'll be blunt. That talking point won't fly. If you're doing a national security investigation, if you're trying to find out who compromised the identity of a CIA officer and you go before a grand jury and if the charges are proven -- because remember there's a presumption of innocence -- but if it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on, and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.
[...] And we [charge those statutes] all the time. And if a truck driver pays a bribe or someone else does something where they go into a grand jury afterward and lie about it, they get indicted all the time. Any notion that anyone might have that there's a different standard for a high official, that this is somehow singling out obstruction of justice and perjury, is upside down. [emphasis mine]
"Truck driver" v. "high official". Hmm. This immediately conjured up a particularly endearing passage from Fitzgerald's WaPo bio (I also posted this snippet here 'cause I'm, like, totally in love with him, remember?):
He worked as a school janitor in Brooklyn to make money for college and spent summers opening doors at an upscale co-op building on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. (His father worked at a building on East 75th, just off Madison Avenue.) It is part of Fitzgerald lore that he bit his tongue when rich apartment dwellers talked down to him as "just the doorman."
Bring it, dude! What can I say? I'm a total sucker for this kind of trite "working class hero smites insular-powerelite" narrative. Suck it down like Coca Cola, I do. That said, if you're looking for more cerebral coverage of the day's indictment-events (i.e. less of the "he's dreamy" calibre), be sure to check-out ex-CIA/ex-State dept. guy, Larry Johnson's blog (he went to CIA-school with Valerie "P"). Then go-see Josh Marshall. For an excellent primer, see Tim Harper's TorStar review. Oh, and don't miss Carl Bernstein's take on the whole mess. Much less sychophantic than his erstwhile partner in Watergate reporting. Update [11:14 AM, Oct 29]: RJ Eskow dissects Woodward's toadying on Larry King, Thursday night.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice clear rundown on all the characters in Tim Harper's column--thanks.

Just so appalling that there is *so* much on the stuff that doesn't matter all that much, when the horrors of war, torture, ruination of foreign relations, mental health, life, energy, stability have to be funnelled finely into this tiny symbolic challenge. And the horrors just keep going on.

10/29/2005 3:18 PM  

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