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Refusing to see the obvious
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by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
Oct. 29, 2005
It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lai of the Lord of the Underground.
But this Irish priest of the law, Patrick Fitzgerald, neither Democrat nor Republican, was very strict, very precise. He wasn't totally gratifying in clearing up the murkiness of the case, yet strangely comforting in his quaint black-and-white notions of truth and honor (except when his wacky baseball metaphor seemed to veer toward a "Who's on first?" tangle).
"This indictment's not about the propriety of the war," he told reporters yesterday in his big Eliot Ness moment at the Justice Department. The indictment was simply about whether the son of an investment banker perjured himself before a grand jury and the F.B.I.
Scooter does seem like a big fat liar in the indictment. And not a clever one, since his deception hinged on, of all people, the popular monsignor of the trusted Sunday Church of Russert. Does Scooter hope to persuade a jury to believe him instead of Little Russ?
Good luck.
There is something grotesque about Scooter's hiding behind the press with his little conspiracy, given that he's part of an administration that despises the press and tried to make its work almost impossible.
Mr. Fitzgerald claims that Mr. Libby hurt national security by revealing the classified name of a CIA officer. "Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life," he said.
He was not buying the arguments on the right that Mrs. Wilson was not really undercover or was under "light" cover, or that blowing her cover did not hurt the CIA
"I can say that for the people who work at the CIA and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected," he said, adding: "They run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees."
To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty. Unfortunately for them, this time they Swift-boated an American whose job gave her legal protection from the business-as-usual smear campaign.
The back story of this indictment is about the ongoing Tong wars of the CIA, the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon: the fight over who lied us into war. The CIA, after all, is the agency that asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate how one of its own was outed by the White House.
The question Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to answer yesterday -- Dick Cheney's poker face has finally met its match -- was whether this stops at Scooter.
No one expects him to "flip," unless he finally gets the sort of fancy white-collar criminal lawyer that The Washington Post said he is searching for -- like the ones who succeeded in getting Karl Rove off the hook, at least for now -- and the lawyer tells Scooter to nail his boss to save himself.
But what we really want to know, now that we have the bare bones of who said what to whom in the indictment, is what they were all thinking there in that bunker and how that hothouse bred the idea that the way out of their Iraq problems was to slime their critics instead of addressing the criticism. What we really want to know, if Scooter testifies in the trial, and especially if he doesn't, is what Vice did to create the spidery atmosphere that led Scooter, who seemed like an interesting and decent guy, to let his zeal get the better of him.
Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson's name from the CIA and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the CIA to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on the altar of faith-based intelligence.
Vice spent so much time lurking over at the CIA, trying to intimidate the analysts at Langley into twisting the intelligence about weapons, that he should have had one of his undisclosed locations there.
This administration's grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they're promoting national security when they're hurting it; they say they're squelching terrorists when they're breeding them; they say they're bringing stability to Iraq when the country's imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)
And the most dangerous opposite of all: W. was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn't have been listening to, and not listening to his real father, who deserved to be listened to.
As originally published
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Commentary, by Herb Ruhs, MD:
Dowdy Maureen Dowd is seemingly on a roll with her recent columns. How odd. I don't really like gift horses of any sex or color. On the other hand, in today's political climate, any barking dog seems a good dog.
In this column, she makes an important observation -- without drawing the obvious conclusion. Maybe that is the point?
She states, "This administration's grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they're promoting national security when they're hurting it; they say they're squelching terrorists when they're breeding them; they say they're bringing stability to Iraq when the country's imploding."
By their fruits ye shall know them. Why does Maureen, and the whole host of pundits and commentators, who are having fun giving raspberries to our so called leaders, not consider that the actual agenda of who ever is pulling the strings is exactly as she outlines?
I continue to be amazed at the credulity of so many people who seem to be allergic to the conclusion that our governmental policies, and those of governments and international bodies across the globe for that matter, are directed at exactly the ends that are being served.
A world mired in violence and hate, starvation and debt, chaos and confusion is what is recognized in financial houses as a world full of opportunity for vast profit. No matter what "mistakes" are made, they always work to the advantage of those with the most wealth and power.
Security in the Middle East takes a nose dive, and the price of oil shoots up creating the greatest windfall "profits" (it is wrong to call illegitimate gain a profit) ever are recorded by the oil industry.
Violence increases, and the weapons manufacturers also rake in obscene "profits," while security evaporates for the rest of us the richest and most powerful indulge in a feeding frenzy of crime and isolate themselves with private armies and fortified estates.
Policies that lead to social breakdown consistently favor those wealthy people who have positioned themselves to benefit.
Peace, stability, and security are the friends of the rest of us. Currently the rest of us are eating shit and dying.
No, Maureen. The fruits of this tyranny are being enjoyed by your employers, and they count on you to help us look the other way while they steal us blind and condemn countless generations to immense suffering to further the end of their perpetual dominance.
In the wonderful history book The Perspective of the World: Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century, by Fernand Braudel, there is a discussion of the policies of the Dutch commercial empire.
That empire, like ours, was a plutocracy with ambitions to dominate the world. At one point the Dutch plutocrats provoked a war with France so that they could sell France the arms and gun powder that the French needed to attack Holland. When confronted about this seemingly nonsensical policy, the only defense offered by the plutocrats for their apparently suicidal activities was that "We had no choice. The profits were too good."
There is very little entirely new in the world, and we are fools to think otherwise. These sorts of "policies" are inevitable where commercial empires are involved. Just as the Dutch plutocrats saw no choice but to incite war against their own country, neither do our plutocrats see any choice but to incite war between nations and creeds in our time.
It is in the nature of commercial empires to do this as it is the source of the greatest possible "profits." This can be seen as true of the War in Iraq, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs and all the other wars past, present and future.
The only thing that has changed is that, through the advance education and the concept of universal human rights, the populace has demanded "democracy," which, from the point of view of the plutocrats merely means that they must invest money to control mass communication so as to foster an illusion of democratic control where none actually exists. It also follows that money will be well spent undermining education and human rights.
Maureen, in all her sympathetic complaining, remains a part of this. So enjoy, if you will, the spectacle of the servants of power being roasted on a spit. But please do not be suckered into believing that this ritual slaying of their servants signals any reversal of fortune for the plutocrats.
Servants are easy to come by. Roasting a few to quell the unrest of the hoi polloi is just a routine cost of business.
Actual justice will not be served until the paymasters themselves are brought to account. Hopefully, that day is coming.
=Herb Ruhs, MD=
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