Unlike the opinion pieces in Tuesday’s New York Times written by two people who seem to miss the whole point of the Plame investigation (see below,) Bob Herbert nails it in his column today.
Excerpts:
Much of the nation is mourning the more than 2,000 American G.I.’s lost to the war in Iraq. But some of the mindless Washington weasels who sent those brave and healthy warriors to their unnecessary doom have other things on their minds. They’re scrambling about the capital, huddling frantically with lawyers, hoping that their habits of deception, which are a way of life with them, don’t finally land them in a federal penitentiary.
See them sweat. The most powerful of the powerful, the men who gave the president his talking points and his marching orders, are suddenly sending out distress signals: Don’t let them send me to prison on a technicality.
This is not, however, about technicalities. You can spin it any way you want, but Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is ultimately about the monumentally conceived and relentlessly disseminated deceit that gave us the war that never should have happened.
(Snip)
In addition to the more than 2,000 dead, an additional 15,000 Americans have been wounded. Some of these men and women have sacrificed one, two and even three limbs. Some have been permanently blinded and others permanently paralyzed - some both. Some have been horribly burned.
For the Iraqis, the toll is beyond hideous. Perhaps 30,000 dead, of which an estimated 10 percent have been children. The number of Iraqi wounded is anybody’s guess.
And to close…
Thousands upon thousands are suffering and dying in Iraq while, in Washington, incompetence continues its macabre marathon dance with incoherence.
High ranking officials in the Bush Administration went too far in their efforts to silence and discredit those who opposed their plans to invade Iraq. They exposed an undercover CIA agent, and we’ll soon know if they knew enough about Plame at the time they blew her cover to make their retalitory act an act of treason.
We now know that the Administration was not honest with the American people when this story broke. They are seldom honest about anything, and that’s the problem. In this case, their deceit was used to sell their war that has resulted in the deaths of many of thousands of people, and many thousands more will die in the future.
For those of you who brush it off as just dirty politics with statements like, “They all lie once and while. Clinton lied too…” let’s have some perspective here… Clinton wasn’t always truthful, but nobody died because he lied about a blow job.
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