1 Boring Old Man

OSP: The "administration" hangs its hat on wordplay

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That is, it is a resurrection of the infamous Nixon doctrine, revealed in Nixon’s 1977 interview with David Frost:

Frost: "So … what … you’re saying is that there are certain situations … where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal." Nixon: "Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal." Frost: " By definition." Nixon: "Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security … then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law."

The "administration’s" gambit here is that we’ll all fall back on the presumption that the government is "entitled" to this kind of deference. Either that the "Commander in Chief" can get away with certain methods of circumventing the law, and that if he "breaks" it, it’s really not breaking it, precisely because he’s the president. Or failing that, they hope at the very least that we’ll accept their view that the sort of "not illegal" activities which Feith pursued at the behest of the "administration" ought to be beyond the reach of the criminal law, because otherwise we’re "criminalizing politics." At bottom, though, this report makes clear that the "administration’s" presumption rests on the willingness of the American people to believe that the purposeful dismantling and circumvention of our legal and authorized intelligence channels — up to and including the outing of critical undercover non-proliferation agents and the insanely dishonest selling of a war that turned out to be the worst foreign policy disaster in American history — is "just politics." It’s time we all asked ourselves a question I posed early in the Plame investigation:

What I’m asking is, what’s bigger? The lies the administration used to convince the country to go to war? Or the lie that the administration only fought the intelligence community after the fact, to cover its tracks when caught? Is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to prevent the exposure of its mistaken reliance on bad intelligence? Or is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to promote intelligence developed by its own, parallel intelligence structure, a plan which required the simultaneous undermining and the destruction of the credibility of the country’s established (read: authorized and legitimate) intelligence structure, which refused to give them what they wanted? The answer to that question is the difference between "just politics," and "we’re not kidding when we whisper the word ‘treason.’"