Scooter Libby -- Variations on a Theme

In my lifetime I’ve gotten to see Lyndon Johnson’s brilliant handling of the war in Southeast Asia. Then I went to sleep one night and woke up to the Watergate hearings and Nixon waving goodbye as he climbed into the helicopter. Carter seemed like a nice enough guy, but not much of a leader. Then Uncle Ronny and Aunt Nance came to live in the White House and, just as things were looking up, the whole Iran-Contra mess came up and then, reminiscent of the Watergate hearings, no one could seem to remember anything except that Ollie North did it. Bush I seemed to handle things pretty well, but having the ex-director of the CIA in the White House always made me a little itchy. Bill Clinton was cool for a while, but then he said that something depended on what the definition of “is” was, and I went to take another nap.

G.W. showed up promising to restore dignity to the U.S. Presidency and he decided that the best way to do that was to tell the world that Saddam had WMD, and then prove himself wrong. Now we have Scooter Libby, who plays The Boy Wonder to Rove’s Batman, being indicted for lying to a Federal Grand Jury and obstructing justice, among other things.

Now, after thirty-some years of watching the U.S. Presidency make a mess of itself at least once a decade, I’m now being asked to believe that, even if it’s true that Scooter did it, it stops right there. Rove, Chaney, Bush… they had no idea this sort of thing was happening and did nothing wrong. Well, I have but one thing to say to the White House on this point: Do you think we're stupid?

Let’s look at what happened here in simple terms. The CIA sent a guy named Joe Wilson, to go over to Africa to find out if a story about Saddam trying to buy yellow cake uranium was in fact true. He came back and said it wasn’t, but the administration didn’t want to hear it. OK, so far so good. They don’t have to listen to everything they hear, no problem.

Wilson decided, however, that the people of the United States should know about what he didn’t find in Africa, so he exercised his patriotic duty and wrote an article in the newspaper. We still have freedom of speech, right? You can disagree with the President, if you like. I certainly have for most of my lifetime.

This time, however, the White House got mad. They didn’t like Mr. Wilson’s article and so Scooter and Rove got on the phone and started calling reporters to engage in conversations about Mr. Wilson and his lovely wife Valerie Plame. Those reporters did what reporters do after being handed a story by Mr. Rove… they reported it, in one way or another.

The problem, of course, was that we weren’t all supposed to know about Valerie’s chosen career in the CIA. She was, as they say, under cover. No one knew she was working for the CIA; she had fake business cards and was running a fake company. But when the two guys from the White House told reporters that it was Wilson’s wife that was behind his trip to Africa, I suppose in an attempt to attack the credibility of Mr. Wilson and his trip, they essentially blew Valerie’s cover.

Now, I realize that there’s a whole lot of extraneous crap related to this story that I am not bothering to bring up. But let’s just pause there for a moment so that we can understand what’s really happening here…

Some of the top guys in the White House got pissed off at what an American citizen had to say and decided to strike back at him by telling the press things intended to harm his credibility and his wife’s career. Here it is again: Our top guys in the White House picked up the phone and called reporters in an effort to discredit an American citizen and punish him for his exercising his right to free speech. From reading the newspapers, it seems like Rove or Scooter had to be on that phone call for at least ten, maybe fifteen minutes.

Now, as is always the case, the left and right each have their own interpretation of this still emerging and intriguing tale. On the right they’re questioning whether Valerie’s position at CIA makes giving away her identity a crime. At one point I heard one of the two White House storm troopers defend himself by saying something about only referring to “Wilson’s wife” as opposed to Valerie Plame. I suppose the implication is that he didn’t do it because he didn’t actually use her name. I think it would have to depend on what the definition of “is” is.

OK, I have a couple of things to say about all this.

Item #1: Will somebody please give these people something to do. Am I to understand that two of the top guys in our government – guys on the White House staff – have nothing better to do than vindictively pursue one guy because of an article he wrote that made the administration look bad? Are you kidding me? I run a small business with six employees and I don’t have time to get back at someone who pissed me off. And, there were two of them on it. Two. Two of them. I can only surmise that it’s because one senior advisor to the President of the United States would not have been sufficient firepower to get the job done right.

Item #2: I don’t know… Maybe the two of them could fill in their dead time by trying to do something to find Usama Bin Laden, what do you think? They obviously have way too much time on their hands. Was Joe Wilson’s article in the New York Times really going to be all that powerful? First of all, it was in the New York Times and because Fox News and conservative talk radio have long since convinced roughly half the country that the Times is a liberal, leftist rag of a paper, we don’t have to concern ourselves about the article’s potential effect on them.

Secondly, it was in the New York Times and most of the country, the part that elected Bush to a second term by the way, has never even seen a New York Times, much less read one. Hell, I got stoned once in the last seventies and didn’t see a Times again until ’84 or ’85.

Item #3: It’s important that you understand that I don’t give a damn about any of the other convoluted facts on either side. I’ve tried to read the detailed accounts of those facts in several newspapers and by the time you’re done, you’ll either have Excedrin Headache Number 622, or you’ll find yourself daydreaming about where you might go next year on vacation.

I don’t even care whether Scooter is found guilty, or Rove gets indicted. I don’t care if Cheney was sitting on Rove’s lap, giggling as he prompted Rove to make a whole series of phony phone calls. I don’t care whether Valerie Plame’s “outing” was a “crime” or not. I don’t care what Rove knew and when. I don’t even care about Joe Wilson’s wife’s career. None of it matters.

The whole thing is just so high school. Let’s see… “These two senior guys, after being shot in the ego by a couple of sophomore girls, come to school on Monday spreading the rumor that the two girls are sluts. Since the two guys know the editor of the school paper, they get pictures of the girls printed in some demeaning or discrediting way.” If you pitch it right, it’s got all the makings of good solid episode of Boy Meets World, or Saved By The Bell.

What in the world were Scooter, Rove, and whoever else turns out to be involved, thinking? Just the fact that they would spend any time at all chasing around a guy because of an op-ed he wrote in the newspaper… ASTOUNDS ME. That’s why I say the extraneous details don’t matter. Neither one of them should ever have picked up the phone.

And that, by the way, is how we know that these two monkeys in suits meant to do what they did to the Wilson family – it was no accident. Following Wilson’s op-ed in The New York Times, they both picked up telephones and talked to reporters about Joe Wilson, his wife and his trip to Africa in an effort to discredit the article and its author. One guy… ok, maybe. But two guys… well, that’s pretty close to hatching a plot.

Forget about whether what they did rises to the level of a criminal act, or whether any given charge can be proven in a court of law. What does the whole thing tell you about who these two guys are? Can you imagine all the other shit these two jokers have pulled on other people while climbing the ladder to the top? And Scooter’s a nice Jewish boy named “Scooter” for God’s sake. How can these things happen?

What Scooter and Rove did was seriously wrong. There may be other factors that, at the end of the day, somehow mitigate the outcome, but regardless, what they did certainly didn't help to restore any dignity to the White House. Simple as that.