"Have you noticed how special prosecutors who are investigating conservatives are brilliant legal minds, while special prosecutors investigating liberals are hacks?" --- Rush Limbaugh

October 24, 2005 -- This Valerie Plame business could be one of the triggers for a coming implosion that does not happen at the White House.  That and Able Danger are just sitting there in the path, waiting for some major leftwing journalist to step on them. Ask Dan Rather if there are typeface experts hanging out on the internet.

I watched the big media sumo corpus twitching on Sunday.  Tim Russert, by all reports a fine fellow on the personal level, made a fool of himself with a single assumption.  Wide-eyed and cherubic, he talked to people from the New York Times and the New Yorker Magazine, and discussed stories in the Washington Post about how the special prosecutor, Fitzgerald of Chicago, is becoming dangerous to the White House, and how presidential political advisor Mr. Rove (and VP advisor Libby) is standing on shaky ground, if not as a result of the commission of a crime at least as a result of an attempt to cover up the fact that he didn't commit one.

National Review Online: A coverup without a crime?

Yes, you read that correctly.  The danger that is looming over the White House is the possibility that no crime was committed, and the president's associates may have lied about it under oath.  The beltway can, indeed, harbor Swiftian lunacies.  Colorful but dead-brained reporters float in that pool, like autumn leaves in some tannic backwater, waiting for the November rains to wash them away.

A little about what it's about

Shocked by the Bush defeat of Gore, shocked by the Bush mid-term defeat of Tom Daschle, shocked by the Bush defeat of Kerry, the OLD LINE REALLY BIG MEDIA (giganticus bovinae excrementa propagandium) is squinching up its face, cocking an eyebrow and peering this way and that, looking for some way to get even.  

Joe Wilson's wife was just the ticket.

The pieces of the puzzle seem not connected, but they are.  A New York Times reporterette in jail for refusing to name a source to a grand jury.  (Her source was apparently Cheney aide, Scooter Libby, who was talking off the record. Gossip has it that he warned said reporterette to be careful of information received from Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.) 

Somewhere at some time somebody publicly "outed" Joe Wilson's wife.  (Stated that she had been a undercover operative for the CIA.)  All hell was about to break loose.

A self-admitted former Sixties druggie who inhaled, Joe Wilson, a Bush-hater, was nominated by Valerie -- at the time operating behind a desk at the Langley, Virginia CIA facility -- for an investigative trip to Africa. Off he went to find out if Iraq had, as British Intelligence held, tried to buy nuclear bomb fuel in Niger.  Testimony and NYT opeds littered with misinformation by said husband following his return from two weeks of drinking green tea on the shores of the dark continent produced conflicting results. There is the strange lack of an official written report by the man. There are the secret documents stuffed into the sox and underwear of Clinton-era  security chief, Sandy Burglar, during the 911 hearings. There are oddly-timed Saudi donations to the Clinton Library.  There are leaps of liberal faith as reporters packing visceral hatred for President Bush grab at the brass ring and trumpet "Foul outing of an undercover CIA operative (name of Plame) by Chief Presidential and Vice Presidential Political Advisor(s)."

I've heard it said that Joe Wilson outed his wife.  Whether that was in one of his New York Times opeds or while talking to members of the 911 Commission, I don't know. Maybe he even beat Robert Novak's column.   Maybe it was the magazine cover photo of Joe and Valerie riding in their convertible.  

In any event, no outing law was violated, folks.  There are such a laws, but even if somebody in the White House was the original source of the outing, none were violated.  Joe Wilson's wife's undercover work was more than five years in the past when this all popped up.  The situation is similar to the recent Delay indictment.  In that case the law wasn't violated because it wasn't a law until after Delay's actions -- which, by the way, happened in the full light of day, with the knowledge of public bodies and under the advice of a wide range of lawyers who had studied the legal aspects of the situation. 

This isn't about laws.  It's about political enemies.

Here is the truth

Saddam Hussein did try to buy weapons of mass destruction yellowcake (uranium) ore in Africa. He would not have done so because he liked to roll around naked in bins of it, so he was, just as Bush said, working on weapons of mass destruction. Although I don't know where, the word is that something Joe Wilson wrote confirms the president's position on this.  If such writing exists, it compromises Wilson's widely published proclamations to the contrary.  The 911 Commission representatives, when recently confronted with this, said they decided not to include this information in their final report. I don't know why they did that.

The question now is what will happen to Rove and Libby?  Rush thinks this is all just a step on the road to presidential impeachment demands by the Democrats.  Certainly, Howard Dean, the lunatic in charge of the Democrat Party, has openly called for that.  But, my guess is that Rove and (White House VP chief Scooter) Libby will be cleared of  (CIA agent outing) leak charges.  And, Tom Delay, I believe, will be cleared of Travis County grand jury campaign money laundering charges.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Rush Limbaugh is cleared of all Florida drug charges, too.  God, how the big media hates them all.  But, these attempts by the Left to bring down with the courts that which they cannot defeat in the marketplace of ideas, or at the polls, will miserably flop like a dying sea bass on a cold and clammy dock plank. 

The New York Times will once again end up trying to explain the unprofessional behavior of one of its reporters, pity poor Pinchy.  The 911 Commission will be exposed as a fraud, because it will be shown to have  refused to acknowledge the Wilson yellowcake information -- and, more importantly, the Able Danger scandal.  Google those two words, just for fun.  The big press is really sitting on this one.  It's the blue dress, dangerous stuff.  If it is true, then somebody did connect the dots prior to 911, prior to the USS Cole and perhaps even prior to the first trade tower bombings.  Able Danger, a top secret investigative group, it seems, tried to to tell the Clinton Administration  about most or all of these impending terrorist attacks, and was ignored. 

The current attempts to silence, even punish, the Able Danger whistleblowers will probably not succeed.  In the old days, with the old media protecting the Left, it would have succeeded, but not now -- as little Danny Rather learned to his eternal displeasure just before the last presidential election.

There is a coverup going on, my friends.  Not a conspiratorial but rather an instinctive one.  It is an old-line media coverup of every truth presently floating free, with a blanket of rumor-based accusations at Bush.  The national media is at the heart of it, but the stink of this deception reaches all the way down to your local Oregon newspaper, radio station news break and television anchor desk.

2006 is just around the corner.  Forget Bush's poll numbers.  He can't run, again.  But, see if you can locate the Democrat poll numbers.  You won't see them in the papers, because they are lower than snake bellies on the Chicago  commodities exchange. The Democrat drive to regain power is, as a result, becoming frantic.  They know that the monopoly of the liberal media has been broken.  They know that for the first time in decades their dirty laundry is flapping in the breeze.  Their media, the old media, can't protect them any more. 

Their old media, not Bush, are the ones walking through a minefield.  Can the lib journalists avoid stepping on the bombs?  Only facing the truth about their own bias, and cleaning up their act, will save them.  But, can you imagine Marvin Kalb on CBS or Terence Smith on PBS with a panel of famous reporters seriously investigating such personal bias charges?  That would be like a group of blind men trying to investigate a rainbow.  

(LL)

© 2005 Oregon Magazine