Recently, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, resigned as Chief of Staff for Vice-President Dick Cheney after being indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. The indictment stems from an investigation surrounding the leaking of Valerie Plames identity as a CIA employee. Valerie Plame is the wife of Joseph Wilson, critic of the Bush Administration. Joseph Wilson asserts that the revelation of his wifes employment was retaliation for his debunking of the claim in the Presidents State of the Union address that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
There are a couple of critical problems with Wilsons argument. The first is that the Presidents words are absolutely true and to this day, the British government stands by the intelligence assessment the President cited. Second, Wilsons oral brief to the CIA upon returning from his short trip to Niger reported that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger, though Niger declined Iraqs overtures. The CIA believed Wilsons report substantiated suspicions about Iraqi intentions. Third, Wilson self-aggrandizingly told the press that his report had debunked forgeries about Niger uranium sales. These papers had turned up in Italy. The timing for this claim of Wilson does not tally. The US did not come into possession of those forgeries until months after Wilsons trip and report. This timeline can be found in the 9/11 Commission Report.
In 2003, Wilson was polluting political waters with inaccurate information and the Administration was clearly trying to deal with Wilsons charges. Wilson claimed that he was sent to Niger on behalf of the Vice-President. The natural question was why Wilson. He was a critic of the Administration and a Gore supporter. He was not qualified in proliferation matters. Why would the Vice-President send him? He didnt. In the course of refuting Wilson, presumably Scooter Libby and perhaps others said the Wilsons wife, an employee of the CIA, was responsible for the trip. This was repeatedly denied by Wilson, whose pride as a former ambassador may have been wounded by the need for nepotism. The 9/11 Commission unequivocally concluded that Ms. Plame recommended Wilson for the trip.
There was concern in 2003 that perhaps the identity of a CIA employee at been illegally compromised, but that particular charge seems not to have borne scrutiny. Libby, if he is found guilty, committed the crime obstructing an investigation premised on crime for which there is no prosecution.
If Libby did perjure himself or obstruct justice, then he should be appropriately punished. Conservatives and Republicans should not be lured into the Clinton defense that perjury and obstruction of justice do not count if the underlying crime seems incommensurate with the penalties for perjury or obstruction of justice. For the answer as to Libbys guilt we will have to await the results of a trial or plea bargain.
It should also be remembered that at this point, there only seems to be the prosecution of a person with regard to an issue orthogonal to lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Left continues to push the narrative that Bush lied about WMD to get the US into Iraq. For that to be true, President Clinton, Senator Hillary Clinton, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the French, and the Germans would have to abetted in the lie, an unlikely alliance. The 9/11 Commission Report concluded as much, yet the Left still persists in its mendacity.
The Left had hoped that the Libby scandal would allow one more opportunity to peddle their deliberately misleading narrative about the origins of the war. Now it seems that the investigation has narrowed. The prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has said as much:
“This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.”
The Left does not really care about Scooter Libby or Valerie Plame. It only cares about undermining Bush. Who knows? The may succeed one day. But it hasnt happened yet and the frustration will likely to increase the vitriol around the Libby case.
Ten Years and Counting
Sunday, October 30th, 2005Too often, when people have nothing to write about they revert to writing about writing. This week marks ten years of publishing a weekly web-based essay. I, therefore, request the indulgence of those who happen upon these words as I briefly reflect on the ten years of writing that produced over 400,000 words of text in over 500 essays.
When this enterprise began in 1995, not that many people had Internet access at home and those that did mostly relied on a dialup connection operating at a now painfully slow, 28 Kbits per second. Now the Internet has become ubiquitous and my cable modem regularly achieves download rates of 4 Mbits per second, nearly 150 times faster. Even if the connections are faster, but there is still an open question whether the amount of useful information transferred has increased proportionately.
This enterprise began when few used the Internet for politics. Indeed, one of the first essays I wrote compared the Republican and Democratic Party websites and suggested that the comparative mean spiritedness of the Democratic pages were a metaphor for their approach to politics. The comparative nature of these web sites has not changed very much, but at least the visual presentations have become more professional.
Now the number of political sites is enormous. I have a day job and writing once a week exhausts the time I am willing to devote to this enterprise. There are many other sites with political commentary produced several times a day with which I can not compete in terms of volume. I thus indulge myself in the agreeable fiction that quality compensates for any lack of quantity. One down side associated with the growth of the Internet is that the threshold to publishing is now so low that the signal-to-noise ratio in political discourse has decreased. My hope is that I have always contributed to the signal portion of that ratio.
A computer examination of my published text reveals that, not surprisingly, other than very common words, “political” is the most frequent word I have used over the years, appearing 984 times. The word “Bush” turns up 590 times and “Clinton” follows with 537 mentions, though both terms apply to more than one politician. There is no quick way to count the ratio of positive mentions to negative ones that Bush and Clinton have received. However, you can be confident that Bush received far more positive references than Clinton. Despite the fact that baseball is a metaphor for life, the term “baseball” appears a relatively few 139 times.
I have always self-published the pages and have even secured the “Monaldo.net” domain. In June of 1997, Suite101.com asked that I publish there as well and since that time my essays have appeared at both sites. Perhaps the most exciting times occurred when Steve Kangas was the corresponding Liberal voice at Suite101 and we debated frequently in dueling columns. Unfortunately, Steve apparently committed suicide soon after leaving Suite101. This lapse of judgment has cost him and us his commentary over the last six years.
Suite101 has since changed hands, but in its infancy granted stock options to its contributing editors. During the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, I was actually able to make several thousand dollars from the sale of these assets. Some at Suite101 made even more. However, this writing has never been about money. If it had I would be foolishly working at far below the minimum wage rate.
Sometimes the articles write themselves. Sometimes I struggle. The easiest articles to write are the ones composed in passion. I have even managed to generate a little poetry about Clinton and Gore. It was embarrassingly easy to write during the Clinton years when finding hypocrisy and disingenuousness was an uncomplicated sport. In the days and weeks after the attacks of 9/11, words flooded from my keyboard serving as an emotional release for the indignation and distress at the loss of 3,000 fellow Americans.
Perhaps the most liberating feature of this enterprise is that I write for myself. Though feedback is rewarding, I have no one to satisfy, but myself. These essays provide a discipline for me. Ideas that would have otherwise have floated indistinct and amorphous through my head are now moored to tangible words.
Perhaps most importantly the words written here provide a modest immortality and serve as an intellectual and literary legacy for my children and their children. Of course, I would like for them to understand what I thought of the events of our time. Perhaps, it will help them understand their times in a fuller context. More importantly, I have a private fantasy. I hope that one day a child or grandchild will spot some clever turn of phrase, some little bit of humor, or a twist of wit I produced and a smile would sprout across their face as they share across the years an intimate moment of joy with me. At such a fleeting moment my mind would be part of their mind.
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