Via Allah comes this video, which uses video editing software to make Chris Matthews appear drunk on the air.

Good stuff.

Beldar on the Libby verdict:

There is indeed value to the republic in reassuring its public that even such crimes as perjury and obstruction of justice, during wartime or not, are taken very, very seriously, and that political connections cannot shelter any such criminals.

Andrew McCarthy:

[T]here was an investigation, and nobody, especially public officials, should lie to the grand jury or to investigating police. We can’t (or at least we shouldn’t) take the position that the obligation of truth-telling applies only to the investigations we approve of — especially when we live in a country where you are privileged to decline to answer any questions. What Libby did here was not the worst wrong in the equation, but it was still wrong.

Indeed. The impetus for the investigation of Bill Clinton was quite arguably less substantial than the impetus for this investigation. But that doesn’t matter. As I said yesterday, “no matter how silly the investigation might be, you gotta tell the truth.” Scooter Libby apparently didn’t. Too bad for him.

I regret to say that Beldar’s and McCarthy’s opinions appear to be rare among Republicans. More typical is this screed by Dean Barnett at Hewitt’s site (h/t DRJ), which careens wildly from acknowledgements that Libby is guilty to pronouncements that Fitzgerald was a wild prosecutor, out of control:

PATRICK FITZGERALD IS A PROSECUTOR. He came to the Valerie Plame affair with his typical agenda – get someone thrown in jail. It was Scooter Libby’s misfortune that he was the one without chair when the music stopped. It was his greater misfortune that there wasn’t a bigger fish nibbling on prosecutor Fitzgerald’s line. If there had been, Scooter Libby would still be a mostly anonymous public servant today.

Did Scotter Libby break the law and perjure himself before a Grand Jury? As a legal fact, yes. A jury has said so, and that’s that. Of course, juries make a lot of things legal facts that shouldn’t be.

But I’m willing to play along with the jury and agree that Scooter Libby did commit the crimes that they convicted him of yesterday. This is one of those instances where the adversarial system should indeed have produced a proper result. Fitzgerald is a great lawyer; Libby could afford equally stellar counsel for himself. There’s no reason to believe that if the facts weren’t on his side, Fitzgerald could have still so handily outfought Libby’s counsel to nevertheless win a conviction.

And yet there’s something about this case that still strikes me as unsettling and unnerving. For political reasons, the purportedly aggrieved parties of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame got their own private prosecutor whose entire job was to make sure someone went to jail because of the scandal in which the Wilsons were the featured players. Even as the main charges turned out to be unfounded or at the very least un-provable, an undeterred Fitzgerald fought on, determined to get someone, anyone, thrown in jail.

So: Libby broke the law, but for some reason (because he’s a Republican?) Barnett seems to think he should have gotten a pass on his lawbreaking. It is a slur on Fitzgerald to say he was Joe Wilson’s “own private prosecutor.” He’s a prosecutor, who investigated a case, found a lawbreaker, and prosecuted him. Good for him.

The arguments you hear from partisan conservatives sound an awful like the whining of liberals during Monicagate: the prosecutor is out of control! It’s politically motivated! Yada yada yada. Look, conservatives: a jury found, unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt, that Libby obstructed justice, committed perjury, and lied to investigators.

Deal with it and move on. Dot org.

P.S. As regular readers know, I am a prosecutor myself — albeit one who is willing to criticize prosecutors when I think they are misbehaving. I haven’t seen evidence of that in this investigation. And I will candidly state that I resent Barnett’s statement that prosecutors generally treat justice as a game, and are willing to prosecute people they aren’t convinced are guilty. That’s not me, and it’s not the prosecutors I know.

Moreover, I am puzzled why Barnett wanted to join an office that he believed was filled with such prosecutors. I sure as hell wouldn’t. Why did he?

P.P.S. Commenters think all prosecutors always stick together. That ignores the link above . . . and I’ll toss in another: Sandy Berger getting a misdemeanor slap on the wrist for walking out with, and apparently destroying, classified documents. That is ridiculous.

Glenn Greenwald and his sycophants have made it clear: hate speech (at least on the right) doesn’t just mean racist comments and threats of violence and death. According to the Greenwald crowd, it’s “hate speech” when Ann Coulter says: “Liberals want mass starvation and human devastation.” This (along with many similarly innocuous, if silly, statements) was cited as an example of hate speech by a Greenwald sycophant, in a post that Greenwald linked with approval. Thus, Greenwald has redefined hate speech to include any silly and over-the-top expression of disdain for the other side.

Sweet. The floodgates have been opened.

If Glenn Greenwald et al. think leftists aren’t guilty of this type of speech, they are dumber than they look.

We’re going to be here all year.

I’m a busy man, so I currently have time to give you only a taste. I’ll provide something more comprehensive later, but compiling an exhaustive list is going to take time. A lot of time. Because liberals have a lot of hate to go around.

Almost all of the following examples were cited in the first 50 comments to my recent post on liberal hate speech — you know, the post that restricted itself to actual threats and racism. (A couple of e-mails supplemented the list.) There’s a lot more where this came from. (I’m going to have to say that a few more times for our reading-impaired friends.)

California Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (h/t Lonewacko):

You’ve got all these crackers down in Southern Cal – ah, where is it, San Diego, taking on the governor.

NBC News military analyst and Washingtonpost.com columnist Bill Arkin (h/t EllisonEllenbergGreeny aka Dwilkers):

But it is the United States, and the recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary – oops sorry, volunteer – force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

Former Democrat presidential candidate Al Sharpton, on Jews (h/t Cassandra):

diamond merchants

Leftist talk show host Bill Maher (h/t Amphipolis):

I’m just saying if [Dick Cheney] did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.

Leftist media mogul Ted Turner (h/t Roger H.):

What are you? A bunch of Jesus freaks? You ought to be working for Fox.

Air America radio personality and Senate candidate Al Franken (h/t Eric A.):

Hey, I was glad when that Pudding homosexual got killed in Philadelphia.

Air America radio personality Randi Rhodes jokes about Bush being shot. (h/t roy.)

Radio personality Stephen Crockett (h/t roy.):

If I had my way, I would see Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell strapped down to electric chairs and lit up like Christmas trees. The better to light the way for American Democracy and American Freedom!

Again, these are just a few examples, almost exclusively from the first 50 comments on my post — which has over 250 comments. And I haven’t even tried to do independent research.

There are many more to come.

Leftists, read that again: there are many more to come.

Since you probably missed that, with the reading impairment so many of you seem to have, I’ll say it again:

There are many more to come.

Thanks, Ellison, for making this so easy. Here I was trying to provide real threats and racism. I can see I overly restricted myself.

These will eventually be added to my original post, when I get time. It’s going to be a monster post by the time I’m done.

Add your examples to the comments below. Remember: any time a Republican has been called a Nazi by a prominent lefty, it gets added to the list.

It all gets the Glenn Greenwald Seal of Approval.