Lots and lots of people want to impeach Cheney now that Scooter has been found guilty. All the usual suspects are calling for the fall of the Bush administration, the end to the Iraq War, and a pox on things Republican now that the vast right wing conspiracy has been found to be built on lies, lies, and more lies. One can only hope that the hyper-ventilating taking place on the "progressive" side of the political spectrum doesn’t kill anybody (oops, I didn’t mean to wish ill health to anyone, especially Mr. Maher).
Since most opposition likes to refer to the national press when claiming malfeasance by the Bush partisans, let’s take a look at the Washington Post editorial today on the subject of the Libby verdict. A taste here:
The fall of this skilled and long-respected public servant is
particularly sobering because it arose from a Washington scandal
remarkable for its lack of substance. It was propelled not by actual
wrongdoing but by inflated and frequently false claims, and by the
aggressive and occasionally reckless response of senior Bush
administration officials — culminating in Mr. Libby’s perjury.Mr. Wilson was embraced by many because he was early in publicly
charging that the Bush administration had "twisted," if not invented,
facts in making the case for war against Iraq. In conversations with
journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked
evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he
had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged
that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the
administration.A bipartisan investigation by the Senate
intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these
claims were false – and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger
trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame’s
name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced
yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA
operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the
leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of
special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of
investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking
Ms. Plame’s name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak’s primary
source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an
unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing
evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking
Ms. Plame’s identity – and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert
Did Libby commit a crime? Apparently. Did he commit the crime alleged by that blowhard, publicity- seeking, junior diplomat Wilson who was dropped like a hot rock by the Kerry campaign when his prevarications were revealed? No.
It’s a sad day when the criminalization of the practice of politics becomes a consequence of the bitter struggle in Washington, DC. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Joe Wilson or his wife were wronged in this situation, unless you want to blow the whistle on the Colin Powell-Richard Armitage wing of the Republican party.
2 responses so far ↓
Daniel // March 9, 2007 at 8:27 am |
Let’s start with the things on which we can agree: In relation to the scale of the original Plame complaints from the CIA, the Libby conviction is a touch foul. It’s not even directly related to the original offennse — Novak’s outing of Plame. Niether is this a Watergate story, in which the cover-up became a bigger deal than the original act.
Now the context, on which, apparently, we disagree. You draw this line finely, viewing it as “the criminalization of politics,” and only an indictment of those State Department Republicans who fell outside the Cheney inner circle.
I wrote about this back in July 2005 (and thanks to the magic of permalinking, you can still see the good and the bad of it. The biggest problem with what I wrote then and what we learned in the trial is that in 2005 we didn’t know about Armitage — Novak’s original source. That’s significant to the case both in legal terms and in the sense of what it means to the narrative. But to say “Well, it was only Armitage” is to ignore much of what came out under oath during the trial and in the discovery phase.
You and I will also, I think, disagree on whether or not the administration deliberately misled the country into war. But I think that’s what this story was always about — with caveats that I laid out a year and a half ago:
You may, again, fairly dispute whether or not the administration knew the picture to be misleading. And we will disagree. You may also disagree with the overall pattern that I see — that this White House has consistently failed to respond appropriately, competently and ethically to criticism.
But I simply cannot agree with your narrowly drawn conclusion that there’s nothing to see here. I think you’re defending leaders who are beneath you.
Agricola // March 9, 2007 at 11:29 am |
Daniel, an old jousting partner who makes this kind of debate interesting and challenging, writes in his comment:
“You may, again, fairly dispute whether or not the administration knew the picture to be misleading. And we will disagree. You may also disagree with the overall pattern that I see — that this White House has consistently failed to respond appropriately, competently and ethically to criticism.”
Actually, You have it almost correct; I do dispute your first point, but I completely agree with your second point. I have, I believe, long maintained that the correctness of the Bush Administration’s positions has been severely hamstrung by their frustratingly inept inability to respond to criticism or attacks. The list of missteps on virtually every policy dispute is a dreary collection of fumbling efforts too long to recite. As we are losing the information war on the Jihadic front, so too is the Bush administration losing the war of ideas on the home front. AND IT’S A SHAME! Opponents have been allowed to develop their own theses about important issues, have spread their opinions far and wide, and the great American public has embraced the tenets of the opposition position as TRUTH, in the absence of a reasoned rebuttal or counter-proposal. That is not to say that there does not exist a certain, significant, portion of the electorate that will, almost reflexively and as a result of long established beliefs, oppose the goals of any Republican administration, but it is to say that in the absence of well structured reasoning and resistance to the opposition’s ideas, the middle ground of this country will go with the loudest voice. And right now, the organs of the Democratic Party and its more radical minions scream from every outlet that the Republicans, led by Bush, are liars, manipulators, and fascists. On those points, we will continue to disagree.
I will finish by saying that in every great struggle in history, viewed in hindsight, mistakes were made, lives were lost, and success came with great cost. I believe we are involved in such a struggle, and that the present administration is the only leadership willing to commit the power of our nation to that struggle. Any objective analysis will, I believe, conclude that the Europeans have lost their will to combat radical Islam, that our Islamic allies are, at best, not being completely supportive, and, lastly, that it is a trans-generational struggle in its early stages. I suspect we will continue to disagree on this point as well. This trivial game of who said what to whom and when will not change the global situation unless the electorate is persuaded that this drama symbolizes the entire structure of the argument to oppose the radical Islamic struggle to defeat our value system. If so persuaded, it will probably be the final proof of the theory that Bush failed to communicate his vision to the electorate. I think we will agree on the final point.