So, um… did everybody here go out and buy Dick Cheney’s autobiography (In My Time, which came out earlier this week) yet?

In any case, given the way the government responds to FOIAs, we’ll probably learn more about this in 5 years or so.

I’m most interested in all the assumptions here, that a bunch of Chinese hackers know precisely how the White House email system works. If that’s true, why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over the emails OVP deleted from the first days of the Plame leak investigation? And why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over all those emails hidden on the RNC’s server? Maybe they can also help us find all of John Yoo’s torture emails?

The way secrecy in this country works is insidious not just because the government prevents citizens from learning the things we as citizens need to know to exercise democracy, but also because the President and other classification authorities can wield secrecy as an instrument of power, choosing to release information they otherwise claim is top secret when it serves their political purpose.

Back in 2007, NYU professor Jay Rosen held up FDL’s coverage of the Scooter Libby trial as an example of great journalism, and he warned traditional media folks to “make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise.”

Four years later, it sure looks like the good professor knew what he was talking about, doesn’t it?

A couple of days ago, I managed to stumble across Judith Miller’s review of Fair Game, the movie based on the Plame leak scandal (via Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson’s books on the subject).

Given the source — and especially that she wrote the review for the Wall Street Journal editorial page — I figured the review would be a masterpiece of unintentional comedy, and I wasn’t disappointed.

A chief executive whose mental gears were engaged might have thought to himself, “Hmm, wait a second. Why would Scooter lie, to the point of obstructing justice, if he wasn’t involved in the leak to Novak?” He might have been even more suspicious when his vice president compared Libby to “a soldier on the battlefield” — implying that Libby’s crimes were committed on behalf of the administration.

I am very very grateful that Ryan Grim exposed Bush as a plagiarist on Thursday.

Today’s news will be dominated with Bush’s admission that Cheney was mad at him for not pardoning Libby. As the press is distracted with a rehashing of the successful cover-up of one of Bush’s crimes, we ought to remember that today marks the successful cover-up of a more horrible crime.

Now, Scooter seems uninterested in relitigating his conviction for lying to protect his boss, Dick Cheney. Interestingly, though, a key point of his appearance — given its focus on Iran’s purported nukes — was to suggest that back in 2003 more could have been done to prevent Iran from getting nukes. You know. 2003. The year he outed a CIA spy trying to prevent Iran from getting nukes?