Wilson Lies, People Dies

Turns out the conspiracy to discredit Joe Wilson and mortally imperil our CIA activities abroad by disclosing the CIA identity of a woman with extremely poor taste in men, rather than reaching up to the highest levels of the White House, stops with a guy in the State Department named Richard Armitage who is no fan of the neo-conservative cabal, and at best a reluctant supporter of the Iraqi war. Of course, Joe Wilson, in addition to his lawsuit which names Cheney, Rove, and Libby for efforts to defame him, should own up to his own role as a co-conspirator in his own defamation – if he wasn’t such a well documented liar and bombast, he wouldn’t have been so easily discredited and defamed. If the rest are guitly as charged, then Wilson has to be guilty of entrapment.

If Wilson thinks he was defamed by these guys, he should credibly accuse Bill Clinton of sexual assault - then he'll really see the gloves come off. The difference, as I am tired of hearing, is that such accusations had nothing to do with the public behavior of the President, whereas Wilson's pertained to porpurted motivations for war. That is a big difference, indeed. But there is another difference to keep in mind - Wilson is a documented liar, and should have been subject to much broader discrediting on the basis of the importance of his lies to our public policy, whereas Kathleen Willey, for example, was in all probability telling the truth.

Even the Washington Post, that bastion of hatemongering yellow journalism so characteristic of the political Right, had this to say:

“It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago.”

“Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.”

But not the Hatcher! I’ve always known and professed that the guy is an ass, and if you didn’t agree with me, you only have yourself to blame. But I’d go beyond the statement that the Washington Post makes, saying that it is unfortunate so many people took him seriously. It is also unfortunate that anyone takes those who took him seriously seriously, if that makes any sense. Which implicates nearly every major Democratic politician, with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman, who now is persona non grata at all Democratic functions.

And to the extent that Wilson’s lies became the banner of much of the far Left with respect to Bush lying to lead us into an unjust war, doesn’t this go a little bit beyond unfortunate? This is precisely the type of propaganda that aids our enemies, and for years now a not unsubstantial portion of the American population has treated allegations that have been known to be false from the get-go as truth, knowing full-well that their lies damage our efforts.

I recently read an article accusing the Right of having to boil the world down to good versus evil, making it easy for us to cast everything in moral absolutes with no sense of nuance. (Fair enough, although clearly I am in a set that agrees such sharp distinctions are often times more accurate.) I’ve read things like this probably one thousand times before, and there never seems to be any self-awareness on the part of the author that many on the left, and often the author himself within his own article, fall into the same mindset, only with good versus evil defined differently, but with the out group - in their minds the political Right - treated as a monolithic whole. This is why the left cannot simply shout that they disagree with a Bush policy, or even content themselves with saying that he is a moron – they have to turn it into a moral issue, where there is clear intent on the part of Bush to be evil. Or, for those who hue to the straight “moron” hymnal aware that there is a potential paradox in saying a guy who is so successful in his quest to do evil is at the same time a moron, he has to be surrounded by a group of conspiratorial puppet masters bent on world domination.

Memo to the left: be content to just disagree with his policies as a matter of preference; if you have to make it personal, flatter yourself that he is not nearly as smart as you are. But please stop being so offended when someone questions your patriotism when your operating assumption, supported only by your unique omniscience, is that the President of the United States is the new Hitler. Such comparisons make you no friend of this country, and their shear ignorance and the evident lack of psychological balance they reveal are such that you cannot even claim intellectual superiority over the guy. Having said that, I note that many, perhaps most on the left, are not in that set (at least to the same extent), but the problem is that that set seems to be wielding disproportionate influence in the Democratic party these days.