1 Boring Old Man

As the dust settles and the air begins to clear, refined questions come into better focus. What we’re hearing from the Principals is "poor Scooter and his family" and "blah, blah…ongoing investigation…blah, blah." So we’re still on our own out here. As I look at my little tables from the other day, a number of things come to mind.

Leaked/Confirmed Valerie Plame’s Identity to Reporters

Leaked the National Intelligence Estimate

• Not one person on that list came forward voluntarily. Most of them fought coming forward period. Possible exceptions were Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus. Walter Pincus at least said that he’d been "leaked to" as soon as it became apparent that this was going to be an important issue, though he protected his source, Ari Fleischer, to the end. Bob Woodward finally did the same thing, finally. But everyone else had to be prodded [and prodded with the threat of punishment]. Is there something called coerced cooperation? What this says to me is that if we are ever to hear the whole story, it’s going to be because someone with some power goes after it with a pick ax!
• The people in the first column are the "first assistants" to the President of the United States,  the Vice President of the United States, and the Secretary of State for the United States. They are the "go-fors" for these important people, not independent centers of initiative. If you find out that your assistant or your executive secretary has gone off on their own and acted as an independent authority, you fire them in a heartbeat. If you’re going after Enron, you don’t prosecute and investigate Kenneth Lay’s executive secretary, or Fastow’s assistant. In a real world, it’s the bosses that get investigated – George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell [among others].
• What about those people in the second column? The reporters? As much as the blogosphere pundits attack the "Main Stream Media," there’s a fact in that table. Only two of those reporters wrote about Valerie Plame – Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine. Judith Miller was already in hot water for previous faulty reporting, shamed by her wild ride across the desert searching for dust bunnies, and in no position for a "scoop." But everyone else apparently took these leaks for what they were – tabloid smears – and went on about their business. Good on them!
• How do you get people like the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State to either tell the truth or to lie in a venue with consequences? We all know the answer – impeachment hearings. There really isn’t any other way. And we have a fine precedent for that in the attack on President Clinton last time around. I’m in the minority among liberals. I thought President Clinton behaved abysmally, and hoped he’d do the honorable thing and step aside. The attack on him was vicious to be sure, maybe even inappropriate, but he was lying to the American people – lying outright. And it took an impeachment proceeding for the truth to be known – or at least a threat of impeachment. Finally telling the truth didn’t stop things, but I thought that his finally coming clean was an attempt to abort an ongoing avalanche. Clinton’s fate is not my point. My point is that our forefathers protected the Presidency and Executive Branch on the one hand. On the other hand, we were given a mechanism that goes straight to the heart of things – impeachment by our elected Representatives. The question here is not "crime" in our very liberal sense of that word for ordinary citizens. The question is about how our leaders have acted as our agents with the power we’ve given them – still the greatest human power on our planet. There is way more than enough evidence that they have abused that power to a level unprecedented in our history. Certainly there’s enough evidence to scream for a deep and thorough investigation.