Since I started this blog in 2006, 294 of my posts have the name "Plame" in them. It was Patrick Fitzgerald’s Investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. identity that got me started writing. Today, I finally saw "Fair Game," the recent movie with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn about those days. It was a fine movie, though it’s almost unheard of – not widely distributed. It was never in a theater near us, but it finally made it onto the on demand "just in" list on our cable. While the country seems to be in denial that the whole episode actually happened, I personally think that it was the single-most important factor in exposing the Bush Administration – allowing us to escape its grip. Bush and Cheney flew out of Washington about 800 days ago, and now they’re rarely mentioned in any context.
The Invasion of Iraq stands as one of the two greatest betrayals of this country by its own government in history. The other was President Johnson’s use of the Gulf of Tonkin Non-Incident to engage in the Viet Nam War. It’s hard to choose between Iraq and Viet Nam. In Viet Nam, we lost 58,000 Americans. In Iraq, we’ve lost 4441. So on that Axis, Viet Nam was the most costly. But for me, Iraq was a much greater betrayal. The President’s Men spent a year working at finding a way to drive us to war. They outed a CIA Agent Valerie Plame as part of their cover-up. And they destroyed our place in the world in a brief few years.
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