I'm not a big fan of the whole Plame affair. It worked to continue the intimidation of the media that's been a hallmark of this administration. Mostly I've just felt that Valerie Plame got the short end of the stick and it was petty and juvenile of the administration to be involved in that kind of thing.
But I didn't really care that much. I realize that Plame was doing important work, and I know that she was at least not working in a position where she was leaving a business card around saying "CIA Secret Agent" or anything like that. Regardless of anything else, it's pretty sad that in today's job market a competent professional working for a government agency has to hope that everything they and their spouse do is okay with the administration.
But now I'm starting to get a little more interested. The new meme seems to be "nothing to see here, move along." It may just be me, but when I see people trying like hell to say "there's no story here" it kinda sets off my radar.
The newest person to jump on the "it's really not a story that our Administration acts like bullies in high school" kick is David Broder.
His article is entitled "One Leak and a Flood of Silliness." He first goes through the usual lamentation about Karl Rove being an innocent victim. Let's just get one thing straight here--Karl Rove has never been an innocent anything. I think the guy was born trying to spread vicious and mean-spirited rumors. Karl is a genuinely bad person who deserves every bit of spite he gets. He's crudely divided the American people in a time when we need unity to further an agenda that has failed. But whatever. Back to Broder's diarrhea of the pen.
He makes this claim:
Now at least one count in that indictment has been substantially weakened -- the charge that Rove masterminded a conspiracy to discredit Iraq intelligence critic Joseph Wilson by "outing" his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame.
He offers absolutely nothing to support this assertion. We're just supposed to believe that Richard Armitage I guess has a habit of discussing the identities of intelligence officers with reporters, and that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove just let their tongues slip or something. He just takes cheap shots at Joe Wilson like this one:
No one behaved well in the whole mess -- not Wilson, not Libby, not special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and not the reporters involved.
I would seriously like to know what Wilson's "bad behavior" in this matter was. As a concerned citizen with information he felt Americans had a right to know, he pointed out that Mr. Bush's claims about Niger and Iraq negotiating a sale of uranium were based on poor information. They were. Reporting facts is not "bad behavior," even if those facts are inconvenient. Similarly, I wonder why he accuses Patrick Fitzgerald of "bad behavior" considering Fitzgerald just did his job. Nor can he claim Fitzgerald is motivated by partisan objectives--Fitzgerald has also targeted Democrats in his work in Chicago. Lying to a grand jury
USED to be a big deal, but I guess now it's just a little bit of bad behavior.
He then attacks Sidney Blumenthal for saying that it was wrong for Plame's name to have been used in this way. He then offers this abusrdity:
In fact, the prosecutor concluded that there was no crime; hence, no indictment. And we now know that the original "leak," in casual conversations with reporters Novak and Bob Woodward, came not from the conspiracy theorists' target in the White House but from the deputy secretary of state at the time, Richard Armitage, an esteemed member of the Washington establishment and no pal of Rove or President Bush.
Okay, Armitage has worked in Washington for awhile. He started under Bob Dole, then worked for Ronald Reagan. He is a signatory of the Project for a New American Century letter sent to Bill Clinton urging regime change in Iraq. The same letter was signed by Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Francis Fukayama just to name a few. I don't see how advocating policy like that and hanging out with people like that qualifies you as "not a pal of President Bush." Even saying he was connected to Powell more than Bush because he resigned about the same time as Powell doesn't indemnify him of a connection to Bush. Powell also trumpeted the false claims of the administration as to Iraq's non-existent "weapons of mass destruction." You can read the letter
here
My information on Armitage is from Wikipedia. While there are likely more reliable sources, I've found that for the most part if it's not a congressperson or the correct number of elephants in Africa it's fairly accurate. Armitage's Page is
here.
Broder finishes his column by saying a bunch of people owe Karl Rove an apology. Karl Rove owes so many apologies to so many people, he ought be willing to take it. Perhaps it was not a Rove-orchestrated smear campaign. That doesn't make it right for Libby and Rove to give out Plame's name to other reporters. It doesn't make Novakula's original column any less petty and aimed at retribution.
Basically Broder's argument, as was the Post's before it is that we shouldn't look behind the curtain here. It doesn't matter that Karl Rove lied about not giving out Plame's name to the American people or that the President has not lived up to his promises to fire anyone "involved" with the leak. It was "bad behavior" for Joe Wilson to blow the whistle on the administration's jumped-up arguments about a possibly nuclear armed Iraq.
And black is white. A fine duckspeaker, that David Broder.