So all the Republican mouthpieces are out there parsing, forgive me, just exactly what the meaning of "is" is. The only response to such legalistic cant is derisive laughter. There is also the fact, as one of Josh Marshall's TPM readers pointed out, that Novak initially said of his sources "they gave me her name and I used it." That is, before this became a problem for the Republicans, Novak told the truth, however accidentally.

But what really give the game away psychologically, if not legally, is that the original smear was framed in sexist terms. "Little wifey did it," as Republican hack John Gibson said yesterday. That has been the central theme of the smear from the beginning & now the good ole boys are retuning to it. Wilson is a weakling, Rove is a man -- that is the narrative the White House has been pushing from the start. They are not about to change now.

There is an aspect to the story that has gotten lost over the last few days what with all the Rove / Cooper business. That is: Who is Judith Miller protecting. Clearly, it is not Rove. (Unless Rove told Miller Plame's name? How come the names Chalabi & Bolton keep bubbling to the surface of my speculations?) I suspect that Ms. Miller is protecting her own sorry ass, but, hey, that's just me, right? 

I opposed the Iraq Adventure from the start & I am frankly mystified by Democrats who supported the administration's vendetta against Saddam, especially as it involved largely abandoning Afghanistan, where we might have actually been able to do a bit of legitimate nation building. I've been tentatively making a historical analogy between our current situations -- leaving Afghanistan to focus on Iraq -- & the moment in 1961 when the Kennedy administration shifted from thinking about Lao to thinking about Vietnam. I also opposed that other elective war, the one in Southeast Asia.

I need to go back & look again at that little piece of history. Historical analogy is most useful when it is most specific.

I am also filled with rage at the way American liberals have been caricatured as sympathizers to terror. The American right has been successful in ascribing liberals' desire to find the root causes of terrorism as "therapy." The right, intrinsically anti-intellectual, is not interested in causation & mocks those who are. Unfortunately, however intellectually & morally bankrupt the strategy, it is effective politics. I'm not sure that liberal can do much about being painted as sissies by the right except to point out that the rage & revenge of the right is not very effective at actually preventing terrorist attacks.

Specifically, the Iraq Adventure has made the citizens of Western democracies less safe than they were prior to the war. Are you listening Mr. Bush? Are you listening Mr. Blair? Your citizens are less safe than we were before this entirely elective adventure rationalized with elaborate, deliberate & systematic mendacity. Less safe. Instead of rushing off to Iraq, had the Bush administration created a real anti-terror coalition that could engage in the sophisticated police work & secutiry enhancements necessary to actually protect people from terror attacks, Americans & Britons would be safer today. Instead we are less safe.

And that is indeed cause for rage & loathing. At the perpetrators of terror & at those who have created the conditions in which terror now flourishes. 

 

 

 

As a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on about the Green Mountain Boys, Valley Forge, the Battle of Lexington & any other scrap of history I could find. Today, that legacy has been betrayed by a half century of elective wars & imperial ambition. I escaped the bloody insanity of the Vietnam War by the luck of the draw, literally: I got a high draft number in 1970. I hated that war & I hate the current war. Belatedly, I was able to go to Vietnam in peace & try to repair some of the damage – since the mid-90s I have been traveling to Vietnam & meeting with writers, learning the language, doing translations. It is little enough, but it is something.

There was a clarity about the moral claims of the American revolutionaries that I found bracing in 1960, already the beginning of the end of liberal democracy in the US, despite Kennedy defeating Nixon. (Had Nixon won, we might have gotten rid of him sooner.) Four years later, Goldwater's defeat by LBJ in a landslide would launch the right-wing reaction in the very neighborhoods where my family lived in Southern California. The fact that LBJ ran as the "peace candidate" must surely mark the beginning of the postmodern era in American politics. I don't know, maybe we've always been a postmodern nation: Ethan Allen & his bands of fighters were early real estate speculators & property rights radicals -- hardly the sort of folks I'd be joining up with now, though I retain certain libertarian sympathies.

As I said, I loved the founders of the nation when I was a little boy. I remember distinctly, though, the first time I ran across that poem with the line "My country right or wrong, but still my country!"*  I couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old, but the sentiment expressed in the poem ran counter to everything I was being taught at school, not to mention Sunday school. Later, when I was in college, my father was outraged when I came home with the flag sticker on the rear window of the Datsun he had given me turned upside down to indicate distress. This was during the height of the Vietnam War & he made me remove the sticker or lose the car. To my shame, I scraped it off.

Even as a child, the American Revolution made sense to me & it remains the basis of my love of country. The only thing I ask of those who govern the nation is that they: 1) Put national interest above personal or party interest, & 2) remember that their vast authority derives from the consent of the governed. "Current events would suggest that those who govern have forgotten both of these ideas. Ideas, one might think, at the heart of our democracy. Never in my life has that democracy been so imperiled. In a small gesture, today I contacted the president of my university & the dean of my school regarding efforts to rebuild the universities of Iraq. I opposed this war, but now I see no option but to support those Iraqis who want to establish something resembling liberal democracy. To do otherwise is to give in to nihilism.

 ______

 * I've been trying to track down the source of this quote, but all I have come up with so far is "a 19th century American admiral, "Stephen Decatur":http://www.bartleby.com/66/46/15946.html. Maybe I am remembering a transcript of the speech by Carl Schurz, but I in any case it was a piece of rhetoric that stuck in my craw. In scurrying around the internets just now in search of the source, I see that some have read the line as emphasizing loyalty to country even when one disagrees with one policy or another, but when I was presented with the line it was intended to convey a sentiment that would become explicit a few years later: America: Love it or Leave it.

That said, it could be enjoyable to sit back & watch the big business right wingers duke it out with the religious nuts. This is a fight the Republicans have been postponing for at least a decade, but it seems likely the fight over the highly symbolic Supreme Court might bring it out into the open. My guess is that Bush will toss some red meat to the religious right on this one.

As denizens of TPM Cafe know, we Democrats often get exercised about the divisions within our ranks, taking sides & then advising unity. I wonder if the Republicans, though, can continue to hold together what really ought to be an unstable coalition of interest groups, especially given the religious right's absolutist view of politics. 

Doubtless, some of this attitude is colored by my belief that Judith Miller was a willing participant in the spreading of disinformation in the run-up to the Iraq War. I also suspect that Ms. Miller herself sees this contempt citation as a chance to be "washed in the blood of the lamb," as we used to sing in the Baptist Church. That is, she sees a little jail time as a way to retrieve her reputation as a journalist. Be that as it may, I think her legal claim is weak, a rare point of view among liberals, with the notable exception of Mark A.R. Kleiman [See also here & here]. I don't know much about Cooper's politics or his integrity as a journalist, but I'll assume he is acting in good faith, something I cannot easily assume about Miller. Nevertheless, his case seems even weaker than hers, since he not only spoke to sources but wrote about the Plame affair in Time.

 Kleiman argues that once a claim of privilege has been fully adjudicated, a reporter is obligated, in a society of laws, to obey a lawful court order. There is the ancillary benefit to society in reducing the use of anonymous sources by journalists. I would also reserve the right of civil disobedience for exceptional cases. I do not think the Plame affair is an exceptional case, or if it is exceptional it is because of the seriousness of the alleged crime. Journalists have a responsibility as citizens that at least in certain cases ought to override their responsibilities as journalists.

Besides, I'm looking forward to Rove being frog-marched out of the White House & into federal custody.