The editorial fails to distinguish the charge itself and the policy behind the decision to bring the charge. It won’t surprise you that people commit perjury every day in virtually every type of judicial and quasi-judicial proceeding. Perjury is practically never charged. In Fitzgerald’s press conference he explained why he had chosen to bring the charge, i.e. because “the case involved compromising national security information”.

However, the policy reasons do not affect the evidence which may be admissible (and, accordingly, discoverable). The substance of the case is that Libby lied about who told him that Plame was a CIA agent. There are two possible defences:
• The statement was true;
• Alternatively, although the statement was untrue, Libby was innocently mistaken.

Whether the rationale for going to war was true or not is not relevant to those issues and therefore not admissible. How important the surrounding facts were to Libby is relevant. Therefore it is completely appropriate for Fitzgerald to put in issue whether “Defendant undertook vigorous efforts to rebut this attack during the week following July 7, 2003”, and completely disingenuous for the New York Sun to assert that Fitzgerald is criminalizing policy differences.

Here is an interesting article at: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/authoritarianism_and_fascism_alerts/index.html

Below is a list of things some Muslim fundamentalists hate about our culture:

* They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the single rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.

* They hate liberated women, and all that symbolizes them. They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will become breeders, when they show the independence of getting abortions, and changing laws that previously gave men more power over them.

* They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They hate homosexuality, can’t confront the homosexual tendencies that exist in them, so project them outward and punish them in others.

Not much about these revelations is really new. We saw all this before, when Khomeini’s Muslim fundamentalists wreaked such havoc in Iran in the years following 1979. We have long known that Muslim fundamentalism is a mortal enemy of freedom and democracy.

But a real surprise came just a few days after September 11th, in that remarkably unguarded interview on “The 700 Club” between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It was remarkable partly because these men are so media-savvy it’s amazing they would say such things on the air. But it’s also remarkable because as they listed the “causes” of the September 11th attacks, we heard exactly the same hate list the Afghan Taliban had outlined:

* They hate liberated women who don’t follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten, or laugh at, their arrogant pretensions to rule them.

* They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies. They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children - even when that describes fewer than one-sixth of current American families.

* They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Pat Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn’t a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians of his kind.

WARNING - fascism is on the rise in our nation. Educate yourself to the signs.

In contrast, The Roman Catholic Church, with a wholly different teaching on justification (and eschatology, which also factors in here) tried to convert Indians but also (quite consequently) respected them as equal souls and would inter-marry with Indians and generally co-habitate with them 365 days of the year, not just one day in November.

In addition, it matters little when the first Thanksgiving took place. Whenever it was, don’t overrate the bestowing of a Turkey leg when the bestower believes he is either feeding a cat or that his dining partner will soon be swimming in a lake of fire as in insouciant about it.