“BLESSED ARE YE, when men shall revile you and persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.” (Matthew 5:10)

These words by Jesus, spoken some two thousand years ago, make it clear that there is nothing new about evil men seeking to destroy good men by making up lies about them.

But since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, liberal Democrats and their Big Media cronies who masquerade as journalists have taken the demonic art form to new lows. Nothing is beneath them in their determination to defame and destroy anyone who impedes their agenda.

There’s been a lot of ugliness in politics for a long, long time. But in the entire history of U.S. politics, it has never gotten any uglier than it is today.

A case in point is Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle who assembled three successive grand juries in order to get the trumped-up indictment he sought against former House Majority Leader Tom Delay on presumed campaign finance violations. Earle knew well that under the existing rules in the U.S. House of Representatives, an indictment would be enough to get Delay removed from office, so having enough evidence for a conviction was irrelevant to his purpose. He couldn't persuade the first grand jury to hand down the indictment he wanted, so he tried again, and again. Have no doubt: If Earle hadn't gotten what he wanted from the third grand jury, he'd have assembled a fourth, and a fifth if need be. This is not justice. It is politically-motivated railroading.

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New York Senator Shrillary Clinton is fond of railing against “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” I would to God there were one. We ought to conspire against evils of this sort. Regrettably, to the extent that a right-wing conspiracy does exist, it is hardly vast, and for the most part it is pretty vapid.

Let me be clear in my definitions. To conspire, according to Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, can mean either of two things: (1) to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end; (2) to act in harmony. Shrillery is, of course, implying the “unlawful or wrongful” connotation of the word; I use it in the second sense, and I would like nothing better than for all who care anything about the truth to join in harmonious outrage against the lies and the slander in which the political left now engages incessantly and with impunity.

To life’s two acknowledged certitudes, death and taxes, one might now add a third in today’s political climate: The Scandal Factory of the American Left will churn out one new scandal d’jour after another, even if they have to fabricate them out of thin air, which they usually do.

And the hypocrisy is astounding (though hardly surprising).

An excellent case in point is the supposed scandal over the firing of eight federal prosecutors by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Democrats and the liberal press (joined by a few disgustingly unprincipled or cowardly Republicans) charge that the “purge” was politically motivated and are calling for Gonzales’ head on a platter. They have not forgotten that in 1993, President Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, fired all 93 federal prosecutors in one swell fwoop, expressly for political reasons. Reno even called a press conference at the time to say as much. No, these lefty hypocrites have not forgotten that inconvenient fact. The just hope you have.

Thousands upon thousands of newspaper reports and news broadcasts (and countless liberal blogs) declared the selective purging of the Justice Department a major scandal, not because they really believe terminating political appointments for political reasons is wrong (just wait till the Shrill’s on the Hill and does the same thing, and you won’t hear a peep out of them), but because they are laser-focused on convincing (what they perceive to be) a gullible public that anything and everything the Bush administration does is wrong. In their arrogant view, whatever they choose to call a scandal is a scandal because they say it is a scandal.

To the power-ravenous socialist elites in the Democratic party and the liberal media – who believe to their core that it is their right to rule – what constitutes a scandal has nothing to do with legalities or morals or ethics. It has nothing to do with facts. It has nothing to do with truth. It has nothing to do with justice. It has nothing to do with right or wrong. It certainly has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with one thing and one thing only: seizing political power by destroying the opposition. They will use any means to do so, and they have found that manufacturing scandals is an effective weapon in that war.

It will continue to be effective until the rest of us become as passionate about promulgating truth as they are passionate about propagating lies.

The Plame Game

Perhaps no more blatant example exists of the liberal press hammering away at a manufactured scandal than the so-called “outing” of CIA employee Valerie Plame. The facts about this case are well documented and readily available to anyone who wants to know (except for the jury, to whom many relevant facts were made unavailable). And yet, those facts are ignored by the vast majority of political reporters and news broadcasters. This was true from the moment the scandal was hatched, but it reached unprecedented, abysmal depths after Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aid, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. He faces up to 25 years in prison.

Using virtually identical language (do we hear the word ‘conspiracy’?), national and local radio and TV news broadcasters across the country jubilated in the Libby conviction, calling it “just the tip of the iceberg” and talking about Libby being a fall guy in a white-house plot to leak Plame’s identity in order to  punish her husband, Joe Wilson, for being a critic of the Iraq War, as though those were established facts.

The established facts are nothing of the kind.

Here are the facts: Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew who “leaked” Plame’s name to columnist Robert Novak, and it was no one in the White House. It was Wilson’s buddy, Richard Armitage, at the State Department. Still, Fitzgerald ploughed ahead with an investigation purportedly to find out who in the White House had “outed” Plame. From the outset, the entire investigation was a fraud.

If Fitzgerald really believed that telling Novak that Plame worked for the CIA was a crime, why didn’t he go after Armitage? Instead, he doggedly pursued an investigation of Vice President Dick Cheney, Carl Rove, and others in the Bush Administration, clearly determined to find some way to charge somebody with something. In the end, the charge against Scooter Libby – and the conviction – had nothing to do with the supposed purpose of the investigation. Libby was guilty only of a faulty memory, and for this he faces jail time.

The bitter irony in the Plame case, apart from the fact that Fitzgerald knew all along who had really spilled Plame’s name to Novak, is that there exists no evidence a crime was even committed. If there had been a crime, Armitage would have been the guilty party. And yet, although Armitage told Novak that Plame worked for the CIA, he apparently did not say she was a covert operative, nor did Novak identify her as such in his column. The point of Novak’s story was to correct a false claim by Wilson that Cheney had recommended Wilson to the CIA for an intelligence-gathering mission to Niger (pronounced na-ZJEHR), whereas it was actually Plame who had made that recommendation.

Wilson, himself, was the one who “outed” his wife as a covert operative. It was no secret that she was employed by the CIA, but no one had suggested publicly (or in print) that she was covert until he, himself, did so in his tirade accusing the Bush administration of trying to punish him by endangering her. Except for his word and hers (she made the claim in a testimony before Congress on Friday, March 16), there exists no evidence that Plame actually was a covert operative or that Novak, Armitage or anyone else thought she was until Wilson said so.

In other words, there was no crime. And Fitzgerald new that. So in order to get the conviction for which he salivated, he had to manufacture an unrelated charge against somebody.

Ed Weaver, in an editorial for the Troy (NY) Record, put it well: “I can't express how much I can't stomach having to go over this yet again. Under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, written clearly in sixth-grade English, Plame was not covert and hadn't been in years because she was no longer classified and she hadn't been assigned overseas. If you are not both - classified and assigned abroad – you're NOT covert. That's the way the law reads. I didn't write it.”

Weaver added, quite appropriately, that it was  “shameless that [Chris] Matthews, Tim Russert, Brian Williams and virtually the entire Never-ending Bush Criticism network went on the air and stated that the verdict verifies criticism Bush received for manipulating the intelligence to take us to war in Iraq! This case had nothing whatsoever to do with the War.”

That Fitzgerald would have pursued an investigation of the Whitehouse to find out “who outed Plame” when he already had knowledge that the leak came from another source, and that he would persist in the investigation until he succeeded in convicting somebody, anybody, in the Administration, of something, anything, could serve no other purpose than politically motivated character assassination. Fitzgerald would put Vice President Cheney in jail if he could, even if were for spitting out his gum on the sidewalk.

The entire Fitzgerald investigation, the indictment of Libby on petty, irrelevant, trumped-up charges, the kangaroo court trial, and the conviction by a biased jury that should never have been seated, constitute a miscarriage of justice of the highest order.

One member of the jury was liberal activist anti-Bush reporter Denis Collins, who worked for the Washington Post under Bob Woodward and who is the neighbor Tim Russert – one of the prosecution’s star witnesses. After the trial, Collins told the press that it was Cheney and Rove he really wanted to convict. How could our jury selection system have failed so badly as to let a juror be picked who was so clearly predisposed to the outcome of the trial?

In the end, Fitzgerald and Collins got at least a piece of what they wanted. Sure, they would have preferred to fry a bigger fish. But getting this conviction gave them the main thing they sought: the opportunity to claim that Libby was only a scapegoat for the real criminals: Cheney, Rove and, of course, Bush, all of whom (all evidence to the contrary) they continue to assert had recklessly conspired to disclose Plame’s identity.

And so Scooter Libby is going to prison, possibly for up to 25 years, for one reason only: his politics.

Be afraid, be very afraid of this precedent. It could happen to you.

Joseph Stalin put political opponents in prison to get them out of the way. So did Hitler, Mao, and Saddam Hussein. It still happens today in China, and in a lot of other countries where political power trumps the rule of law. It’s not supposed to happen in the United States of America. It should not be allowed to happen. And if the American people permit outrages such as this to stand, be assured that America will fall.