Honest!

From the newly-leaked Palestine Papers, here's Tzipi Livni, then Israel's foreign minster, speaking during a meeting with members of the Palestinian Authority in 2007:

LIVNI: I was the Minister of Justice. I am a lawyer…But I am against law -- international law in particular. Law in general.

Okay then.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Thanks, Dad

Back in 1961, Ronald Reagan recorded a record for the AMA explaining how national health insurance in general, and Medicare specifically, would destroy America:

REAGAN: One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.

What can we do about this? Well, you and I can do a great deal. We can write to our congressmen and to our senators. We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms. And at the moment, the key issue is, we do not want socialized medicine...

[I]f you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Later as president, Reagan of course stopped any progress toward national health insurance in its tracks.

Here in 2011, Ronald Reagan's son Ron is 52 years old. And soon he and his sick wife won't have health insurance:

He wends his way to a University of Washington hospital, where Doria, a psychologist, is undergoing treatments for a mysterious degenerative ailment that first hit several years ago. Ron emerges from the hospital holding Doria's left arm while she leans heavily against a crutch in her right hand. They inch forward slowly...

They argue their worries are not unlike the average American's. Although Doria is working, Ron isn't employed these days. He worked as a television political commentator and radio host, but his show on Air America, on which he tended toward liberal flame-throwing, ended a year ago amid the talk radio network's bankruptcy. The couple were relying on his union health insurance. But now that he's got no gig, the insurance expires in a few months. He's not sure what they'll do then.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Joe "Sweetheart" Lieberman's Long History of Lying About Iraq and WMD

Just as the sun always rises in the east, so too does Joe Lieberman always lie about Iraq and WMD.

This morning Lieberman told Morning Joe that:

LIEBERMAN: ...the evidence is very clear that [Saddam] was developing weapons of mass destruction...Charles Duelfer conducted the most comprehensive report on behalf of our government...he found, and proved I think, that Saddam...was developing chemical and biological weapons.

Lieberman followed up this embarrassing performance with snide condescension toward Arianna Huffington, who was also on the program:

HUFFINGTON: Well, based on this completely unfounded assumption, I sincerely hope for the sake of the country that you do not become Secretary of Defense.

LIEBERMAN: Now Arianna, these are not unfounded. Go read the Duelfer Report.

HUFFINGTON: There is nothing in the report that proves anything that you have said.

LIEBERMAN: I don't think you've read it, sweetheart.

Obviously this is false. The report that Lieberman was referring to was produced by the Iraq Survey Group, headed by Charles Duelfer. The report certainly isn't impartial, given that it was written by U.S. government officials who—as is obvious from the report—felt considerable pressure to spin things in the most favorable possible way for war supporters like Lieberman. So it's even more notable that it says nothing like what Lieberman claims.

Here's the report's conclusion (available on the CIA website) about Iraq's non-existent chemical weapons program:

Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter...

And here's the report's conclusion about Iraq's non-existent biological weapons program:

...in 1991, Iraqi leaders decided to destroy Iraq’s undeclared weapons stockpile in secret...in late 1995, ISG judges that Baghdad abandoned its existing BW program...ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program...

Of course, as noted, this is far from the first time Joe Lieberman has lied about what was found in Iraq. In fact, he usually lies with even more gay abandon than he did today. Here's Lieberman on the Hugh Hewitt Show back in 2007:

HEWITT: Do you think Saddam had WMD in 2002?

LIEBERMAN: Well, look, he surely, even the Duelfer report, which was the most authoritative report, said he had some, and he had a network of chemical and biological experts working on it, and a kind of fallback network on nukes, which is what he really wanted. Here’s the point. In 2002, Saddam himself said he had weapons of mass destruction, and we gave him every chance, pursuant to the UN resolutions, which the U.S. asked for, to come clean and show us that he had destroyed the inventory of WMD that he filed with the UN as a condition of the end of the Gulf War in ’91, and he wouldn’t do it. So you know, I know people look back and say this was some classic colossal act of deceit by our government. I think everybody in the world, and the best intelligence services, frankly, including most people around Saddam Hussein who’ve been interviewed since, thought that he had WMD.

Let's go through these lies one at a time:

1. "The Dueler report...said he had some." False; see above.

2. "...he had a network of chemical and biological experts working on it." False; see above.

3. "...a kind of fallback network on nukes." God only knows what Lieberman's weaselly words are supposed to mean, but here's what the Duelfer report said on this subject:

Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program. Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years.

4. "In 2002, Saddam himself said he had weapons of mass destruction." Completely false. On the contrary, Iraq and Saddam Hussein said over and over again from 1991 onwards, and especially in the run up to war in 2002 and 2003, that Iraq had no WMD.

5. "...we gave him every chance, pursuant to the UN resolutions, which the U.S. asked for, to come clean...and he wouldn’t do it." Completely false. Iraq explained over and over again to the UN what had happened to its WMD programs after 1991. The reports Iraq filed with the UN say almost exactly the same thing as the CIA's 2004 Duelfer report.

6. "...everybody in the world, and the best intelligence services...thought that he had WMD." Completely false. Here's what Alan Foley, who ran the CIA's efforts to investigate Iraq's WMD programs, thought (according to the book The Italian Letter):

There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush's State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. "Not much, if anything," Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book.

On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge Lieberman has never claimed that Saddam Hussein was 2000 feet tall and could shot nuclear laser beams out of his eyes. So I guess we should be grateful for small blessings.

P.S. I would bet $1 million that Joe Lieberman has never read the Iraq Survey Group report.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Five Dollar Friday

I'm giving $5 today and every Friday the rest of this month to Glenn Greenwald, who's having a fundraiser for his work at Salon. I assume I don't have to explain why Greenwald is such a valuable member of the bluggosphere. The only place where he could improve is his work ethic—if only he were willing to put in the hours, he could really have an impact.

Ha ha! But seriously, I think the model Greenwald is helping to create—where people are part of an established institution but also bring in money in an entrepreneurial way on their own—is a valuable one that lots of us should aim for.

—Jonathan Schwarz