Tangled Web (As Usual)

Katharine Armstrong, whose family owns the property on which Dick Cheney shot someone, and whose father hired the aforementioned shooter at Halliburton, and who was the civilian charged with alerting the pubic to the shooting incident, also, as it turns out, is a registered lobbyist, who has been paid to lobby the White House.

Armstrong told NBC News in a telephone interview that she has never directly lobbied Cheney as far as she remembers.

"Never!" she said. And she says she does not remember directly lobbying the president himself either.

Something in the water in D.C. does hideous things to people’s memories, huh? Imagine being a perfectly functioning person and then suddenly not being able to definitively recollect whether you’ve ever lobbied either the president or vice president, which certainly seems as though it would be memorable. Maybe Ronald Reagan didn’t really have Alzheimer’s, but a bizarre alien memory-eating virus, which is now affecting all of those who drink from the same grand pitcher of conservative Kool-Aid from which he drank.

(Does anyone seriously think that we read “as far as I can remember” or “to the best of my recollection” or any other memory-challenged caveats serve any other purpose than an ass-covering device in case the truth gets accidentally revealed down the road?)

Armstrong was paid $160,000 in 2004 by the powerful legal firm Baker Botts to lobby the White House, according to records she filed with the U.S. Senate as required by lobbying disclosure rules. The records indicate she was paid the money after she "communicated with the White House on behalf of Baker Botts clients."

In a phone interview, she told NBC News that in return for the money in one case, she set up a meeting at the White House for a Baker Botts client, although she said she felt she could not release the client’s name.

"A meeting for doing something with one of their clients," she said, describing the event. "I’m not at liberty to say which." She says she cannot remember which White House official the meeting was with. She also said that during the inauguration proceedings, she got Karl Rove to speak at a Baker Botts function. "I got them Karl Rove," she said.

Ah. So, in other words, she did deal with the real president after all.