After the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of
Staff I. Lewis Libby on perjury charges, there was a lot of
satisfaction among administration critics that once again the
lessons of history, in particular of Watergate, had gone
unlearned.
After the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby on perjury charges, there was a lot of satisfaction among administration critics that once again the lessons of history, in particular of Watergate, had gone unlearned. It’s the cover-up that gets you, people said smugly, not the original crime, and this White House was no different than any other.
But we still don’t know who spoke the magic words to columnist Robert Novak that outed Valerie Plame. And prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s failure to bring more substantive charges in what looks, walks, and quacks like a cover-up, is frustrating to anyone wanting to get to the bottom of the web of lies that led us into war.
So if Libby’s case marks the end of the road for Fitzgerald, there will to be justifiable satisfaction in the White House that they’ve gotten the hang of this cover-up thing. All Libby has to do is wait for his January, 2009 pardon from the outgoing George Bush and ride off to his private sector reward. Maybe while in prison Libby will write his second novel, the working title of which might be “How We Got Away With It.”
His basic story line is now almost as familiar as the Watergate story was to an earlier generation: Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, was sent to Africa by the her employer, the CIA, to check out a report (advanced by Cheney) that Saddam Hussein had bought uranium from Niger.
Wilson found no such evidence, but the White House repeated the allegation anyway in Bush’s 2003 state of the union address. Wilson objected, finally publishing an account of his trip in the New York Times on July 6.
His conclusions were a direct challenge to what was known as the White House Iraq Group, led by Cheney, who needed the word “uranium” in its lexicon to buttress Condoleezza Rice’s “mushroom cloud” imagery.
One can imagine Cheney’s reaction at finding that a mission he’d unwittingly set in motion had blown up in his face. This was, after all, the man who dropped the F-bomb last year on Sen. Patrick Leahy simply for questioning the no-bid contracts in Iraq by Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton.
Eight days after Wilson’s piece appeared, Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent appeared in Novak’s column.
Was ruining her career a deliberate act of revenge? That’s also part of the story line, and it fits a Nixonian White House obsessed with enemies and without scruples about engaging in the politics of personal destruction. Just ask former insiders Richard Clarke, the administration’s one-time terrorism czar, or Paul O’Neill, Bush’s first Treasury Secretary. Ask Sen. John McCain.
But there’s an alternative explanation that is, in its own way, just as pernicious.
Desperate to get Wilson, Libby and presidential advisor Karl Rove spread the story that the only reason Wilson got the Niger assignment was because of his wife’s CIA connections – his many years as an African diplomat notwithstanding.
In Schwarzenegger/Rove parlance, Wilson was a girly-man, and in this “bring-it-on” White House, that is the kiss of credibility death. In this scenario, outing Valerie Plame was an afterthought. Rove and Libby treated her like political road kill, or like a hostage-taker’s human shield, acting in a manner that suggested they didn’t care one way or the other about Valerie Plame.
But the ruin of her career may, in the end, provide our best hope for a positive outcome, even if Patrick’s investigation peters out. If the timing of a recent Washington Post poll is any indication, it appears to have played a role in the public’s growing understanding of this White House’s disregard for the human toll of its realpolitik.
Only 34 percent of Americans now give the Bush administration a positive rating for its handling of ethics in government. As compared to Clinton – and this is a number that should make Republicans sit up and take notice – 40 percent said Bush fared poorly. Only 8 percent gave Bush an excellent rating in that comparison.
And that means George Bush is beginning to look to the public even more like his fellow, if fictional, Texan, J.R. Ewing. Once you get rid of integrity, said Ewing, it’s a piece of cake.
