Cue the Frog March

Image from this here MeFi thread


Saturday, July 2, 2005

• Way back when, Joseph Wilson was talking about the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA agent dealing in intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction, by someone in the White House who apparently placed more value in harassing political foes than, say, the security of the United States. Wilson said he hoped to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.

• Apparently Wilson was on to something there.
  Turns out that, according to Lawrence O'Donnell, the person in the White House that committed treason by using the media to blow Plame's cover and perjured himself in front of a grand jury investigating the leak was none other than the evil version of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man himself, Karl Rove.
  On one hand the information is gratifying, because it confirms the worst: These people in the White House aren't merely incompetent, they are malicious incompetents. It also reveals something that progressives should be repeating as a talking point ad infinitum: With these people politics comes first. The the radical nutjob right wing will put their politics, and short-term political expediency ahead of everything else, including the lives of innocent people and national security. The Iraq war had noting to do with any threat from Saddam Hussein and everything to do with short-term political gain in time for the 2002 mid-term legislative elections. The 1,700 American dead in Iraq is nothing more than the price paid for the right to gain seats in the legislature.
  The right-wing's posturing about keeping America safe is simply a political cloak they wear, ready to cast off at a moment's notice.
  The urge to finally "get" Rove isn't mere politics, even after his exceptionally stupid and divisive remarks about liberals wanting to mollycoddle the terrorists and working for the death of US troops in Iraq. Rove is, in a phrase, a shitty human being. He makes a habit of dirty tricks that exceed even Nixonian limits and demonstrates that whatever he has that passes for a moral center, it never interferes with the amoral practice of winning at any cost: According to The Guardian on the Plame affair: "Rove allegedly told the journalists that Plame was 'fair game' because her husband had gone public with his criticism.". Rove's dirty tricks, revealing about the man, often displaying either his own obsession with sexuality or his playing to people with that obsession: During the campaign for governor against Ann Richards Rove started a whisper campaign that Richards was a lesbian. John McCain, who adopted a girl from Bangladesh, was said to have fathered a black child out of wedlock. But nothing quite tops what Rove did to Mark Kennedy, an incumbent Democratic justice in a 1994 judicial race. According to Mark Green's Atlantic Monthly article Karl Rove in a Corner:
  When his term on the court ended, [Kennedy]chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove's signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.
  Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."
  What Rove did, like so much of his political maneuverings, was more than the ploy of someone playing hardball politics. It was positively sociopathic.
  On the other hand, it pays not to get your hopes up to think that this time Rove has really crossed the line. The media is lazy and compromised and, even if they weren't they would be too frightened to really go after Rove. The right wing, as usual, will be more than happy to put politics above common decency. After all, Rove may be a depraved, immoral son-of-a-bitch, but he's doing it for them, which makes it for all the right reasons in their eyes. The right has been very good at taking advantage of the "It's OK if you're a Republican" (IOKIYAR) exemption in order to ride out scandals that would have resulted in a blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy if a Democrat had done the same thing. It's likely that you can add treason to that list of crimes that Republicans are exempted. If the same standards were on place thirty years ago, Watergate would have popped up and been put down in a couple news cycles.
  Remember, this is the administration that rode out the fact that before 9/11 Bush was on vacation almost half the time and sat on his ass rather than responding to a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within the United States" and then proceeded to read The Pet Goat and zig-zag about in a panic on Air Force One when the forewarned attack came. This is the administration so favored by the press that they could hardly bring themselves to report on an uncredentialed right-wing hack and male prostitute being planted in the White House Press Corps. These are the folks who successfully buried the fact that the Commander-in-Chief opted out of serving in Vietnam and then couldn't even bother to go through the motions and eventually stopped showing up for his cushy National Guard gig.
  Treason? Perjury? These people have already gotten away with murder, so what's the big deal, right?
  I'm not being facetious about the IOKIYAR attitude. It's a legitimate phenomena that will have future historians of the 20th century decadent and corrupt fin de siècle scratching their heads wondering what it was about a bunch of wealthy, powerful cafeteria Christian right wing hypocrites that allowed them to get away with what they did. The answer: Americans shamelessly suck up to wealth, power and people who claim they talk to Jesus.
  So whether or not Karl Rove is guilty of outing a CIA agent and then lying about it isn't the point when what would get anyone else hung is treated like, at best, a parking ticket when a Republican does it.
  The only way to break through IOKIYAR is to harp on the sheer hypocrisy the Republicans practice in this regard. The problem with the scandals they have coasted through in the past is that the media smoothed the bitter pill through the collective gut by reporting the transgression without putting it in the context of how at odds it was with what the very people who committed them say about themselves. The "Jeff Gannon" scandal was barely reported, much less put in the context of the White House using gay issues as a political wedge issue, and yet giving an open-ended White House pass to a gay male prostitute. The questions about Bush's guard service was totally swallowed up in bogus questions about John Kerry's military service, which was exactly the point of inventing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the first place.
  Now we have the Chief of Staff of a White House that claims job one is keeping the American people safe compromising the effectiveness of an intelligence operative working on the weapons of mass destruction that the same White House said was the number one priority in American security. If it turns out to be solid that Rove was the source of the outing, that fact should be harped on like the next Downing Street Memo using the keywords treason, perjury and hypocrisy repeated again and again until the seriousness of this crime sinks in and the media can't pretend that it's a little mistake, a misunderstanding, and no big deal, like the deaths of thousands in a needless war.