Hurricane Fitzgerald approaches D.C.

By the end of day Friday, Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is likely to bring charges against an array of Bush Administration officials on charges of perjury, lying to federal investigators, and violations of the Official Secrets Act for disclosing the name of a CIA agent to the press in retaliation for her husband not toeing the Party line. So how is the Bush Administration planning to deal with Hurricane Fitzgerald?

From reading the Party press and perusing some of the wingnut sites, it becomes clear: they are going to use the Goebbels Big Lie strategy. To quote the OSS summary of this strategy:

... never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

The goal is, first of all, to paint Fitzgerald as an out-of-control prosecutor on a partisan witch-hunt (tuning up the strategy that Tom Delay is using) who is prosecuting these poor innocents for things that are at worst minor technicalities. Perjury, obstruction of justice, etc., apparently are crimes when committed by Democrats, but only minor technicalities for Republicans. But that doesn't matter. By making their lies so big that people say "it must be true, nobody could surely tell such a big lie with a straight face!", and by repeating the lies over and over again, they hope to discredit Fitzgerald with the American people.

This will not, of course, stop the prosecution from going forward -- prosecutors don't care what the American people think, their job is to enforce the law, period -- but then comes the next stage: The Saturday Night Massacre, where Fitzgerald is removed from the prosecution and sent back to Chicago, and replaced with a compliant incompetent who will drag out the prosecution for years until finally, on Bush's last day as President, he pardons the whole batch of them and the whole thing becomes moot.

Watch and wait. Time will prove whether I am right or wrong... but I'll just note that I've been right more than I've been wrong. After all, I correctly predicted that Iraq had no nuclear weapons or biological weapons programs, I correctly predicted that Iraq's army would collapse rapidly, and I correctly predicted that the resulting occupation of Iraq would be a fiasco. And my current prediction that Iraq will become Iran West is swiftly becoming true -- SCIRI, an Iranian-based Shiite group, is now in control of the Iraqi government, and if we pull out, the Iranians will provide them with all the military force needed to take our place.

So while we wait for Fitzgeraldmas (Christmas in October!), let us not forget that he is, in the end, an employee of the same Bush Administration that he is investigating -- and that, with sufficient political cover, he can be removed from the prosecution with nothing more than an executive order. When you are dealing with an administration that uses the Big Lie strategy almost exclusively as its method of dealing with the American public, no lie, no slander, no depravity is too evil for them to consider...

- Badtux the Political Penguin