I am way too deep in the weeds of my book to offer further extended thoughts on what we can now fairly call the Rove-Plame affair.
Fortunately, other people are saying what I would, and probably better than I could.
First, Frank Rich elucidates the essential fact that the affair is not inside-Beltway baseball at all, but the tip of an iceberg, and that iceberg is how a war was sold to the American people on false pretenses. If we had a stronger opposition in Congress we’d be having a real national debate; because we can’t, the opposition is leaking out around this sideshow-style prosecution.
Then, Jay Rosen digs deeper into the Bush administration’s war on the media.
The president and his advisors have declared invalid the “fourth estate” and watchdog press model… “Executive freedom on the terrain of fact itself” is my way of describing what the Downing Street Memo said: “facts were being fixed around the policy.” … Limits on what liberties could be taken with the factual record — without triggering a political penalty — are being overcome. Joseph Wilson interfered with this project, forcing the White House to pay a penalty: the so-called sixteen words in the State of the Union speech that had to be withdrawn after his op-ed. So he had to pay. And that’s how roll back, freedom over fact, culture war, and the naming of Valerie Plame connect to one another. |
I am glad to see Jay exploring more fully and deeply the notion I wrote about back during the Eason Jordan controversy, reaching back to Ron Suskind’s observations on the Bush team’s calculated campaign to undermine the possibility of being challenged by the media on the facts. In this White House’s Wonderland, words mean anything the occupants wish them to mean, and facts can be changed as circumstances require.
Jay concludes with an Iran-Contra flashback:
A final thought: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” said Ronald Reagan on March 4, 1987. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” I wonder what caused him to say that, because whatever it was seems to be much weaker today. |
It seems to me that what caused Reagan to say that was not any particular flash of conscience, but the determined, relentless effort of a team of prosecutors and congressional investigators to dig up the truth, forcing the Republican administration into a corner from which Reagan had no choice but to make a confession in an effort to defuse a crisis that was otherwise headed down the road to impeachment. In those days, we still had an independent counsel statute, and we had two-party government, in that Democrats had a power-base in Congress. Today, there’s a prosecutor, but he’s out there pretty much on his own, and I don’t have any great confidence that his efforts will bring the Bush White House back to its factual senses. This crowd is so far out in fantasyland these days it’s impossible to dream of what might restore them to sobriety.
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