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Lawrence O'Donnell took his turn filling in for Keith on Countdown and Rachel Maddow called out the Cheney's for their continual lying on her show the next hour. CREW's Melanie Sloan joined Rachel later in the segment to discuss the newly released interview by the FBI which did not reveal much--other than his willingness to throw Scooter Libby under the bus. More on that from Marcy Wheeler:

Hung Out to Dry: One Former VP Chief of Staff

If I were Scooter Libby right now, I’d be seething. I’d be utterly disgusted with the way Dick Cheney hung me out to dry, over and over and over, in his interview with Fitzgerald. Cheney denies any knowledge of issues he and Libby worked on together repeatedly and he denies that his own orders and instructions had anything to do with activities that ultimately (though Cheney of course didn’t admit this) ended up outing Valerie Wilson.

There are three general categories of information about which Cheney hangs Libby out to dry.

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Transcript from Lexis Nexis below the fold.

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Who better for Bill O'Reilly to get a "fair and balanced" opinion from following President Obama's speech to Congress than serial liar Karl Rove? Media Matters has the run down on this one.

Rove advances "glaring misstatements" and "distortions" in criticizing Obama speech:

Purporting to examine President Obama's health care speech, Karl Rove claimed that while discussing "the so-called lies and misstatements about his proposal," Obama "made a series of very glaring misstatements or distortions." In fact, it was Rove who was advancing falsehoods and distortions.

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Rove distorts "what people were concerned about" regarding "panels to kill off senior citizens".

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Contradicting CBO, Rove suggests "most companies" will "dump the coverage" under House bill.

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Rove distorts Obama statement to claim he is "not shooting straight" on deficit.

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While discussing with Ed Schultz whether there is going to be a public option in the final health care bill once everything is said and done, Shultz reads off John Boehner's response from the Republicans saying that the Democrat's plan is a "government takeover" of health care. Schakowsky points out that Boehner's statement is of course complete bunk since no one is proposing single payer (sadly IMO) and they've already compromised with Republicans, so they've already got a bipartisan bill. She goes on to make one more really great point on the media's lousy coverage of this debate.

Schakowsky: Let me just say one other thing Ed about the news media. When myths are, or lies are told, it is not just he said she said. I like what you said. It is not true. It is simply a lie that this is a government takeover and I think that it really ought to be up to the media too, not to just report well this is what the Republican said then this is what the Democrat said and this is what the President said. They're telling lies! And I think they need to be called on it.

Amen sister.

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This saddens me. Anyone who has ever blogged knows that there are the occasional commenters who post things that embarrass us. If a blog in question has a commenting policy that forbids racist, abusive, violent, or otherwise inappropriate comments, we at Crooks and Liars don't make an issue of it if, on a blog we disagree with, some commenter slips through their gate with a comment that violates those policies.

We also know that some right-wing blogs, namely Michelle Malkin and her Hot Air brigade, run through our comment threads regularly looking for comments that might embarrass us. That's not the reason for our policy, we simply have standards.

When this Free Republic "spokesman" is given an opportunity to distance himself and the blog from some ridiculous comments that he and the blog were not initially responsible for, he instead uses his fifteen seconds of fame to exclaim that the left wing blogs "have no standards." Really.

And it's not like we can't prove him wrong. Crooks and Liars has a comment policy, and sitemonitors checking the threads regularly, as well as technology in place that specifically bans use of certain highly offensive words.

Daily Kos has policies in place and their readership and front-pagers take responsibility for removing comments that are offensive. I laughed when I saw that the Kos comment policy singles out certain individuals:

The exception to the normal troll rating golden rule of "rate the comment, not who makes it" is for people so disruptive to the community that they need to be quickly autobanned. This is a very difficult threshold to reach, and is reserved almost entirely for freepers or other trolls here only to disrupt.

Heck, sorry to give them a link, but even RedState has a comment policy. And Free Republic posts this disclaimer: "Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management." Okay then. Why not point that out to David Schuster, distance yourself from the racist slurs that appeared (and according to Schuster, re-appeared?) at your site, and take advantage of the free publicity to show your blog is represented by a classy, intelligent, and responsible Net Citizen?

Nevermind.

David N.: Free Republic has had this problem many times in the past, and it has generally been good about taking the most hateful material down promptly. However, according to Raw Story, these comments were kept live on the site for more than a day.

The Freeper spokesman in the video heatedly denied that the comments went back up, but it's worth noting the exchange reported by Chris Parry of the Vancouver Sun, whose reportage on this has been the subject of the ensuing side controversy/red herring about whether he acted as an agent provocateur. Whether true or not, if his reportage on Robinson's initial response is accurate, it's fairly damning:

After attention from other blogs, the thread was suppressed and placed under review, but before long it was returned to the site intact, and attracted a new series of racial slurs when the original complaint email was posted publicly to the site, with the sender's email address intact.

"The writer has a point," wrote site owner Jim Thompson sarcastically. "We should steer clear of Obama's children. They can't help it if their old man is an American-hating Marxist pig."

"I agree Jim," wrote commenter, by the nickname NoobRep. "The kids didn't pick their commie pinko pansy of a father. Nor did they choose to be put into the spotlight. But Obama/Soetoro is fair game and so is his witch of a wife."

"Poor kids. I hope they're not 'punished with a baby'," wrote another. "Hopefully they won't deal cocaine like the Kenyan."

"DIRTBAGS! All of them. Our [White House] is now a joke to the rest of the world. We have no respect and this is not going to turn out well, mark my words. We will be hit, and much worse than last time. We are now seen as weak and vulnerable. Ghetto and Chicago thugs have taken over."

Only after significant negative attention from a host of left wing political blogs did the maintainers of the Free Republic site place the thread under review for a second time, before finally pulling it.

February 12, 2009 C-SPAN

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From D.L. Hughley Breaks the News, Hughley and Cliff Kelley discussing the Blago impeachment. Whether anyone agrees with Hughley's defense of Blago here or not, he's spot on with this statement:

Hughley: Now I listened to those tapes and I'm not going to hide my affinity for this guy. I never met him before then but to me we have become such a trivial place that we will impeach a man for having sex, or lying about having sex with a woman. In California we will impeach a guy because he raises taxes on license plates because energy gets out of control. We'll impeach a guy for saying some things on tape. But a man can take us to war and lie and we won't do a damn thing about that. That makes me so mad.

I wrote on Wednesday about the Pentagon's claim that 61 Gitmo detainees had "returned to terror" and noted previous Seton Hall Law studies that said the Pentagon was...umm...lying through it's teeth.

Seton Hall now has a new report out examining the evolving claims and hyped allegations entitled Propaganda by the Numbers. The accompanying press release says:

Professor Denbeaux of the Center for Policy & Research has said that the Center has determined that “DOD has issued “recidivism” numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong—this last time the most egregiously so.”

Denbeaux stated: “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, they have been forced to retract their false ID’s and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantanamo —much less were they released from there. They have counted people as “returning to the fight” for having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. They have revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning— except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.

Fourty-three times they have given numbers—which conflict with each other—all of which are seriously undercut by the DOD statement that “they do not track” former detainees. Rather than making up numbers “willy-nilly” about post release conduct, America might be better served if our government actually kept track of them.”

The study itself notes that  the Pentagon keeps hedging it's bets:

Eighty-two percent (82%) of the publicly made claims catalogued in the Appendix of this report contain qualifying language, including terms such as: “at least”; “somewhere on the order of”; “approximately”; “around”; “just short of”; “we believe”; “estimated”; “roughly”; “more than”; “a couple”; “a few”; “some”; “several”; and “about.”

Why? Because the Department of Defense "does not keep track of released detainees nor does it follow their post release conduct". It makes these claims up from data collected which might show Gitmo detainee involvement but having previously claimed as recidivists men who were never in Gitmo in the first place and someone whose only terrorist act after release was to pen an op-ed for the new York Times it's amazing that the mainstream takes them seriously.

When you really, truly, need a statistic pulled out of someone's ass - call the Pentagon's Geoff Morrell.

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McCain booster Sen. Lindsay Graham has his talking points and he's not going to deviate from them, no matter how much logic and reality may interfere.

Even though highly visible (and amazingly, still respected) Republicans have openly criticized the choice of Sarah Palin for vice president and endorsed Obama, Graham will have you know that Palin has energized the base like no other. Pay no attention to those polls, people. Strangely, Graham asserts that even though her appeal is to the Republican base, if she was a Democrat, she'd be more popular than "sliced bread". How does that work, Huckleberry?

But incongruously, even though that base is energized by Palin, McCain is still that mavericky man unafraid to take on his party. Does Graham think that might depress the energized base? Maybe this is where those sliced bread Democrats come in. But even more incongruously, Colin Powell (that 'not-real-Republican', according to Graham) is nervous about McCain's SCOTUS picks, which would be just like Bush's selections of Roberts and Alito. How mavericky that is.

My head is spinning from this bizarre, logic-free rationalizations of a campaign without a clear narrative and imploding on itself. So I'll merely leave with the best line from Graham:

Governor Palin is what John McCain has been trying to do in Washington, she has done in Alaska. She has -- filing a complaint against a sitting attorney general of your own party with a Democrat takes a lot of guts. Taking on the oil interests, you know, cutting taxes. She is -- running against an incumbent governor. John sees in her many of the qualities he sees in himself.

And this is a good thing?

As Think Progress reported yesterday, the full blown descent into McCarthyism within the Republican Party continues. This time, it's Rep. Robin Hayes of North Carolina. At a McCain event, trying to energize the crowd, Hayes dug deep into his blackened soul and said the following:

Representative Robin Hayes, who prefaced his comments by saying it was important to “make sure we don’t say something stupid, make sure we don’t say something we don’t mean.” Republicans, he reminded the crowd, were kind people. Plus, he added, the liberal media had shown itself eager to distort such remarks. With the crowd duly chastened and put on best behavior, he accused Obama of “inciting class warfare” and said that “liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God.”

Good to know he was trying to keep from saying something stupid. Of course, when confronted, Hayes denied it.

Gosh, I guess that makes having the audio a little troublesome for such a bald-faced liar. By the way, this isn't the first time Robin Hayes has said some monumentally stupid things. He's the representative that was still insisting as late as 2005 that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and that the best thing we could do in Iraq to ensure "victory" is to convert them all Muslims to Christianity.

Blue America candidate Larry Kissell is running against Robin Hayes. You can help his campaign here. The Southern Dem at DailyKos has more...

I think I've made my feelings about Bill Kristol very clear in the past, but allow me to reiterate: He is never right. He is wrong constantly. Anything and everything he says is a pathetic mix of lies and ignorance.

Now that we're clear, I have to ask, what will it take before the New York Times realizes that they are paying for utter and complete wrongness to pollute their paper?

In less than six months since his column began, the New York Times had already issued at least three corrections for factual errors in Bill Kristol columns.

Today, he's given his editors another reason to keep their red pens close at hand.

Kristol's assertion that the 9/11 attacks "did not result in a much-feared (by intellectuals) wave of popular Islamophobia or xenophobia" in this country will surely come a surprise to the millions of Muslims and immigrants in this country.

This goes against plentiful data and the lived experience of Muslims, Arab Americans and immigrants in our country. Many Muslim Americans reported increased hostility toward them after 9/11. Shockingly, Kristol's "non-existent" Islamophobia and xenophobia have also proved deadly for a number of Americans who became victims of hate crimes after 9/11. (See Divided We Fall for a moving account of this painful reality.)

Considering the amount of xenophobia that Bill Kristol and his PNAC buddies have unleashed on this country in pursuit of their agenda, I'm surprised he thinks he can write this without bolts of lightening striking him down.

Sarah Palin's lies when it comes to what the Troopergate probe found -- i.e. her contention that the report said she did nothing unethical when, in fact, it found that she VIOLATED THE STATE'S ETHICS LAW -- are pretty brazen. At least the Bush administration tried to muddy the waters of their scandals a little bit. But not Palin; she's content with just lying about objective facts and findings. Can we really afford someone like this a heartbeat away? I'm with Cafferty: This woman scares the hell out of me.

"Sarah Palin would love nothing more than to superficially answer all of our shouted questions, but she doesn't have time."

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In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash Monday, John McCain actually said the following with a straight face:

BASH: Now, whether or not, since I know you've heard this during your rallies, since you have been talking about Ayers -- and your running mate has, also -- we've heard people in the crowd screaming things like "Terrorist!," "Traitor!," when you talked about Senator Obama -- and worse. When you hear that do you...

MCCAIN: I've heard the same thing, unfortunately, at Senator Obama's rallies being said about me. There's always a fringe element that's in politics in America. The overwhelming majority of the people that come to my rallies are good and decent and patriotic Americans. And if they're worried about this country's future, that's correct.

But to somehow -- to somehow intimate that of the thousands of people -- 17,000 people were just with us in Virginia. And to somehow intimate that the overwhelming majority of those people, with rare exception, are somehow not good Americans or are motivated by anything but the most patriotic motives, is insulting. And I won't accept that insult.

Let's be clear here: No candidate is responsible for the random things people scream out at their events. But that's not what we're dealing with here. John McCain and Sarah Palin for the past two weeks have been making the case that Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists" and "doesn't see America like they do" and is therefore mysterious, scary and un-American. In other words, they are fostering an atmosphere in which stuff like this becomes inevitable; they are "playing with fire." It is absolutely disgraceful for McCain to (a) play dumb and (b) lie about what goes on at Obama events.

Anonymous Liberal and Glenn have more.

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Senator Obama spoke about the economic crisis today in Chillicothe, Ohio, calling on all Americans to appreciate the severity of the situation and come together to solve it. While John McCain is running around accusing him of being a terrorist, Obama is talking about the issues people actually care about, and doing it in the form of a true leader. It should come as no surprise, then, that despite all the sh*t Team McCain is throwing at him, he continues to widen his national lead and consolidate his state-by-state numbers and McCain finds fewer supporters, even among those of his own party.

"I think that folks are looking for something different. It's easy to rile up a crowd by stoking anger and division. But that's not what we need right now in the United States. The times are too serious. The challenges are too great. The American people aren't looking for someone who can divide this country - they're looking for someone who will lead it. We're in a serious crisis - now, more than ever, it is time to put country ahead of politics."

Transcript of full speech below the fold

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During the recent debate with Barack Obama, John McCain stated that "I know the veterans, I know them well, and I know that they know that I'll take care of them". Obama let it slide, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Our good friend Brandon Freidman of VetVoice has done some excellent work researching and compiling the Master List of how little McCain cares for troops and veterans. It's a must-read post that's too detailled to excerpt but it comprehensively lists all the times McCain: refused to support veterans by refusing to vote for veteran benefits, healthcare and support; refused to support the troops in combat by voting against extra armor for them; refused to  support the troops by first cheerleading for and then voting for enmiring America in Bush's war of choice in Iraq; refused to support the real front in Afghanistan by continually voting against any withdrawal from Iraq. It also lists a whole slew of McCain's foreign policy gaffes, pointing to systemic ignorance and bad judgement rather than a few accidental mis-speakings. Brandon has included sources for his list and YouTube videos to back many of the items.

Seriously, you'll want to read and cite this list often. His support for veterans and troops is a big part of McCain's pitch but in reality it's simply mythology created out of whole cloth.

And so is McCain's "judgement" on Iraq.

McCain: "We're going to win this victory. Tragically, we will lose American lives. But it will be brief.  We're going to find massive evidence of weapons of mass destruction . . . It's going to send the message throughout the Middle East that democracy can take hold in the Middle East." (Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, 2/21/03)

Download | play    Download | play   (h/t Heather)

Was anyone else surprised by the prodigious number of non sequiturs that marked John McCain's debate performance...from the gratuitous Ted Kennedy reference (also out of date, as Kennedy had already left the hospital an hour before the debate began) to turning the entire 40 minute discussion on the economy into a rant about earmarks and federal spending, as if the financial crisis would in any way be alleviated by eliminating earmarks (not to mention some of the critical infrastructure improvements made via earmarks, it's not all Sarah Palin's study of halibut harvesting)?

One of the strangest non sequiturs came in the beginning when McCain brought up Eisenhower on the eve of the Normandy Invasion: 

You've mentioned President Dwight David Eisenhower. President Eisenhower, on the night before the Normandy invasion, went into his room, and he wrote out two letters. One of them was a letter congratulating the great members of the military and allies that had conducted and succeeded in the greatest invasion in history, still to this day, and forever.  And he wrote out another letter, and that was a letter of resignation from the United States Army for the failure of the landings at Normandy.

Somehow we've lost that accountability. I've been heavily criticized because I called for the resignation of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. We've got to start also holding people accountable, and we've got to reward people who succeed.

The problem is, as Will Bunch points out, McCain doesn't know his history and doesn't realize that it's easy to fact check: 

First of all, here is the second and thankfully unnecessary letter that General Eisenhower wrote on the eve of D-Day. As you can probably see, it concludes with the words, "If any blame is found attached to the attempt, it is mine alone." In other words, he never offered to resign. Where McCain got that idea from, I have no idea. Wasn't that remark prepared in advance?

Of course, the funny thing is that he didn't really call for the SEC chairman to resign either. He said that if he were the president, he would fire him -- even though it came out that the president doesn't really have the authority to fire to SEC chairman. He never called for the chairman (Christopher Cox) to resign.

I would agree with one thing, that we've got to start holding people accountable. John McCain, I hold you accountable...for not telling the truth.

Transcripts below the fold

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