The Dish

I’ll be on CNN’s "Anderson Cooper 360" tonight after the State of the Union.

Smackdown in the court room, according to Byron York:

[Libby lawyer Ted] Wells told the jury that the White House went all out to defend Rove against accusations he revealed Mrs. Wilson’s identity, but did not protect Libby in the same way, leading Libby to suspect that he was being singled out for blame in the matter. "[Mr. Libby] was concerned about being the scapegoat," Wells said. "Mr. Libby said to the vice president, ‘People in the White House are trying to set me up, people in the White House are trying to make me a scapegoat.’  People in the White House are trying to protect a man named Karl Rove, the president’s right-hand man," Wells said.

Wells said he will present a note written by Dick Cheney himself about a conversation with Libby. In part, the note says, "not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." Wells continued: "The person to be protected was Karl Rove‚ĶKarl Rove was President Bush’s right-hand person. His fate was important to the Republican party if they were going to stay in office. He had to be protected‚Ķthe person to be sacrificed was Scooter Libby."

Ouch.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

Paris, France, from a clock window, 12.03 pm.

He told Leahy that he’d soon have new information on the case. The new information is that the U.S. government is keeping Maher Arar on its watch list and won’t say why. That information is contained in a letter dated last Tuesday – before the hearing. So Gonzales knew full well the government’s latest position on Arar when he testified but decided to withhold that information from the Senate. That’s the contempt he feels for the legislative branch on a matter as grave as torture. Time for another hearing, Senator.

Movies in 2006 weren’t as bad as the Academy Awards make them seem, argues Dave Weigel. You just never got to see most of them.

Was Jimmy an under-estimated hawk?

Abbé Pierre died yesterday. Here is the obituary from the Times of London. Here is a tribute from Le Figaro. I love the expression that France is "endeuillée." Money quote from the Times:

On a visit to Assisi at 14 he discovered St Francis and decided to become a monk. At 19 he told the young woman who was his dance partner one evening: "This is my last dance for I am joining the Capuchins tomorrow."

In 1931 he gave away his worldly goods and spent eight years with the Capuchins, being ordained on August 14, 1938. An assistant priest at Grenoble Cathedral at the time of the 1940 armistice, he started to help Jews to cross the Alps to Switzerland. On another occasion he carried Jacques de Gaulle, the paralysed brother of Charles de Gaulle who was being hunted by the Gestapo, across the barbed wire of the Swiss border and to safety in Geneva.

Then this:

Mitterrand, a longtime friend from the Abb√©’s days in the National Assembly, dropped in at Esteville by presidential helicopter in 1992 to ask him whether he entertained "doubts". The Abb√© replied: "Only when I was 16. There have been many questions since then, but no doubts."

Maybe that’s a more eloquent formulation than my defense of faith-in-doubt. Maybe I mean faith-with-questions. I’ll wait for Sam’s next sally and try to explain again.

We have evidence of one plot against the U.S. from Jihadists in Iraq. Peter Bergen (TNR firewall) argues that the situation is worse than many believe:

Several studies have shown that the suicide attackers in Iraq are largely foreigners, while only a small proportion are Iraqi. In June 2005, the site Institute of Washington found, by tracking both jihadist websites and news reports, that, of the 199 Sunni extremists who had died in Iraq either in suicide attacks or in action against coalition or Iraqi forces, 104 were from Saudi Arabia and only 17 were from Iraq. And the University of Missouri’s Mohammed Hafez, in a study of the 101 known suicide bombers in Iraq from March 2003 to February 2006, found that, while 44 were Saudi (and eight were from Italy!), only seven were from Iraq. Most of these foreign suicide attackers are affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq, which the DIA judges to be "the largest and most active of the Iraq-based terrorist groups." Meanwhile, a classified U.S. Marine assessment of the situation in Anbar province–obtained by The Washington Post in November 2006–states that Al Qaeda surpasses all other groups "in its ability to control the day-to-day life of the average Sunni" and is an "integral part of the social fabric of western Iraq." No wonder the organization felt emboldened to recently declare an Islamist emirate in Anbar province.

Hey, we sent, er, 4,000 more troops there. Stuff happens.

The Arizona senator finally tells the truth:

"The president listened too much to the Vice President … Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the Vice President and, most of all, the Secretary of Defense … Rumsfeld will go down in history, along with McNamara, as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history."

This will now become the official Republican defense of Bush (someone tell Hewitt): that he was done in by Cheney and Rumsfeld, despite the fact that he chose Cheney and Rumsfeld and could have removed either at various points in his presidency. That’s the best defense they’ve got now. Just in time for the SOTU.

"I find the misuse of statistics described above appalling. If this were an isolated incident, it might be excusable. But, having been a watcher of evangelicalism for many years, I know that this is not an aberrant case. Evangelical leaders and organizations routinely use descriptive statistics in sloppy, unwarranted, misrepresenting, and sometimes absolutely preposterous ways, usually to get attention and sound alarms, at least some of which are false alarms," – Christian Smith, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, in Christianity Today.