E. J. Dionne (Surprise!) Just Doesn’t Get It
One thing about blogging – you really get to see how shallow some of the guys who get the big bucks are. Give me a Tom Maguire or a Mickey Kaus any day over an E. J. Dionne – and I’m not talking politicial preferences; I like plenty of liberal writers. I’m talking about scratching beneath the surface to get at original insights and questioning conventional wisdom.
E. J. swallows C. W. whole, though, and regurgitates it in lifeless, predictable prose that seldom challenges but often infuriates. Take the following as an example:
What’s amazing about the defenses offered for President Bush in the Valerie Plame leak investigation is that they deal with absolutely everything except the central issue: Did Bush know a lot more about this case than he let on before the 2004 elections?
But first, let’s offer full credit to the Bush spin operation for working so hard and so effectively to change the subject.
The news was the court filing by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald reporting that President Bush, through Vice President Cheney, had authorized I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to leak sensitive intelligence information in July 2003 to discredit claims made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Wilson had fired a direct shot at the White House’s rationale for the war in Iraq by saying the administration had distorted intelligence concerning Saddam Hussein’s supposed efforts to obtain nuclear materials.
What’s worse here – that snearing ‘supposed’ (see Christopher Hitchens for a devestatingly brutal slam at the willful ignorance behind that statement), or the idea that the central issue was what Bush knew before the election (does Dionne not see that the central issue was whether the Butcher of Baghdad was close to going nuclear? Does he think a presidential election trumps that)?
Dionne continues with a disingenous argument against disingenuity:
The president’s defenders want you to think that when it comes to leaking, every president does it. Why should Bush be held to a different standard? Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., told CNN on Sunday that the Bush administration was innocently asking itself “how do we get the full story out there?”
Besides, since the president can authorize the declassification of anything he chooses to declassify, he can’t be involved in anything untoward. “This was not a leak,” Joseph diGenova, a top Republican lawyer, told The New York Sun’s Josh Gerstein. “This was an authorized disclosure.” Ah, yes, it depends upon what the meaning of the word “leak” is. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
These arguments merely distract attention from why Fitzgerald’s disclosure was so important. When a fuss was kicked up in the fall of 2003 about the leaking of the name of Wilson’s wife, former CIA operative Valerie Plame, to the media earlier in the year, the president spoke and acted as if he knew nothing and was incensed that any leaking was going on in his administration.
In its issue of Oct. 13, 2003, Time magazine quoted Bush as saying: “Listen, I know of nobody — I don’t know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information.” Then the magazine’s writers made an observation that turns out to be prescient: “Bush,” they wrote, “seemed to emphasize those last two words as if hanging on to a legal life preserver in choppy seas.”
The key words here are classified information. Did Bush at the time he made that statement know perfectly well that Cheney and Libby were involved with the leak, but that it didn’t involve “classified information” because the president himself had authorized them to act? Talk about a legalistic defense. Could it be that Bush — heading into what he knew would be a difficult election — was creating the impression of wanting the full story out when he already knew what most of the story was?
What madness is this? Is Dionne criticizing the president for being truthful? The allusion to Clinton is no good – Clinton was not truthful in his ‘legalistic’ defense. Dionne knows that the President holds the trump card here, but he chooses to criticize him for being smart enough to play it.
It’s not every day that you see an accusation that a man was dishonestly truthful – I guess E. J. deserves those big bucks, after all…
The variance between Clinton’s dissembling and Bush’s dissembling is a distinction without a difference. The idea that the NIE was really unclassified because the President can use his powers of double secret declassification – and hence when Libby called reporters, told them that he was giving them classified information, which he asked to be attributed to a retired Hill staffer, it wasn’t really a leak – is ludicrous. Promising to get to the bottom of the leak, when he knew full well who was leaking and what was being leaked, is about as convincing as O. J. Simpson vowing to search for the real killers.
It is similar to Bush telling reporters in 2002 that he had no war plans on his desk, six months after Tommy Frank started developing plans to invade Iraq. Unless you think that George Bush is such a hands-off President that he was unaware that the Pentagon was developing plans for the invasion, his statement is true only in the most literal and trivial sense (i.e., the physical pieces of paper were not on his desk in the Oval Office). This is an achievement of deception which Bill Clinton could only aspire to.
The law is ludicrous, I guess. ALL classification and declassification is an executive perogative. All the pro forma steps taken by agencies beneath the White House is a delegation of same. Clinton’s actions (if we are talking the perjury impeachment article) were a violation of the law; the law against perjury. In any event we know that Clinton lied and Bush truthed. Why this is so hard for Democrats to understand would be baffling if we hadn’t already lived through Clinton. The real villain here, the person who should be the object of this investigation, is Joe Wilson. He is a liar AND a leaker. His public statements are contradicted by his own report on the Niger trip and the details of that trip were confidential. Why there is no Justice Department investigation of him can only be explained in political terms. He staked his claim on the high ground of the NYT and no one has the cojones to take on THAT behemoth of lies and treachery. Comparisons with Clinton are quite laughable also in that Clinton’s illegal lies were in defense in a purely personal matter. Bush’s non-crime was an attempt to expose a traitorous liar screaming calumnies on the public square. His weapon? Only the truth. Only the truth. Well, Clinton’s whole political career was predicated on no greater aim than to get his fat ass laid. What a disgrace to this nation, but mostly of course to the Democrats.