1 Boring Old Man

A year ago on the 4th of July weekend, Lawrence O’Donnell said that Matthew Cooper’s source in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. identity was Karl Rove. For me, that announcement was a Tsunami. I had been depressed since Bush was reelected, and had spent six months on something I called "news restriction." I just couldn’t bear to watch it. About this time last year, I had begun to watch the news again and had just discovered the political blogs – The Huffington Post, Firedoglake, the left coaster. I started reading and learning about the Plame Affair, the Bush Doctrine, the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century. And then my daughter set me up with a blog for retirement news [http://www.3oldmen.com], and later, realizing that I was way too obsessed with politics, she started another one whose name reflects her opinion of all of my political talk [http://www.1boringoldman.com].

It’s been a year now. As I think about it, it has been quite a year. We learned that all we suspected was true after all – and more. During the year, we’ve found out that corruption was rampant in the Congress. We found out that the leak story to discredit Joseph Wilson was true, all the way to Bush [see Murray Waas, Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic]. But there has been so much more – the Unwarranted Domestic N.S.A. Spying, Cheney’s deep involvement in the secret government, the invasion of private banking records, the Niger Forgeries, the Signing Statements, the Torture Policy, the ignoring of the Geneva Conventions, the New Paradigm, the Unitary Executive, the appointment of anti-U.N. John Bolton to the U.N., scandal after scandal. Wow! It’s hard to imagine it’s only been a year.

So far, all we have to show for it is Libby’s Indictment, the recent Supreme Court ruling about Presidential powers, the removal of the worst apples from Congress, and enough publicity to send Bush’s Approval Ratings to the basement.