The great thing about the Libby Trial is that it all centers on the lies for war...

[Postman]

They won't be able to keep it out of the press this time....

I have to laugh when I hear Chris Matthews act like this is all news to this clown...

Of course he's acting. He knew just as well as anyone else who was paying attention at the time that what happened to Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame was an orchestrated attempt to shut down anytruth tellers about the lies...and he acts like it's all new to him, what a joke the MSM is.

http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=10410

[shraby]

1. While reading this post, I momentarily closed

my eyes and saw myself trying to climb the gate in our chain link fence and realized I could just open the gate and walk through. Is this what the trial is? Figuratively opening the gate and walking through the obstacles to truth?

[emulatorloo]

2. Matthews/Hardball has had the best plamegate coverage on TV

He and David Schuster have been covering this forever.

Yes he is playing "naive viewer" in his followup questions to Schuster's current trial coverage, but that serves a purpose -- to help educate naive viewers.

I have a lot of problems with Matthews, but his coverage of plamegate has been excellent and thorough. Better than any other TV coverage, better than 90% of the newspaper coverage at grasping the seriousness of it and the issues involved.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

3. This is something of a pivotal moment for Mathews

In my opinion, he was responsible for much of the WORST of so-called-journalism during the last election when he was all Swift Boats all the time which he rotated with his other favorite wedge topic , gay marriage.

Yet, here he is now. It has been revealed that Cheney and the White House cabal were following very closely his coverage of Plame. So, does he now move forward into "real" journalism or does he fall back into his old Page Six habits?

[emulatorloo]

4. I saw him do a few solid smackdowns of the Swifties

I recall at least two hardball episodes where he directly confronted them on contradictions in their stories. This was early on, and it seem to me he was the only cable guy actually questioning their stories.

He also went after Michelle Malkin when she did the old "Some People Say John Kerry Deliberately Injured Himself" routine.

But something happened to him mid 04 -- I remember another show where he took Terry Holt (?) of the Bush campaign apart for thier use of Hardball clips in an anti-Kerry video. Basically he was furious that they snipped Kerry quotes out of context to make the "flip-flop" charge.

Apparently Rove etc came down really reallly hard on him. They cut off access to repug guests. Matthews did speak of this in interviews that he had been blackballed. In post debate shows when they would cover spin alley, he was not allowed to question directly any of the repug spinners. . .That is, he would directly ask questions of say, a Paul Begala, but when they went to a Karen Hughes type, some other MSNBC reporter would question her.

It was at the point where suddenly Matthews was all "Oh, President Bush has learned his lesson. Surely he will be more moderate in the second term if he is elected. Surely he will listen to others."

I actually started to wonder if he had been threatened in some way. It just seem bizarre to me.

But at anyrate, I am hoping he does step up to the plate on this . . .