It's The War, Stupid... And Our Lives

by DemFromCT

Sometimes even the media gets it. This AM, Howard Kurtz has a nice summary of Miller reaction around the blogs, but more importantly lays out why all the fuss (for those who don't read blogs):

I've been trying to figure out why the Judy Miller saga has become so all-consuming for so many people (ed. note: next time, just post the Q on TNH. It's only a nickel).
...

Then it hit me. It's the war, of course. We're re-fighting the war through this case.

After all, Mr. Valerie Flame, Joe Wilson, was accusing the White House of exaggerating the evidence for Iraq having WMDs--based on his CIA-approved fact-finding mission to Niger--when those "senior administration officials" went after his wife.

The people who are mad at Miller are mad because they feel she was a conduit for the administration's erroneous WMD claims, and is still protecting Libby. The people who are mad at Libby, and Rove, are mad because they are seen as among the architects in designing, and selling, an unnecessary war to the American people, not to mention the press.

The people who are mad at Wilson believe he is a publicity hound who has his own credibility problems and has milked the controversy for a book and television exposure, not to mention a Vanity Fair photo shoot with his now-less-than-covert wife. They feel the press is antiwar and was all too happy to attack Bush over the famous 16 words in the State of the Union on Iraq seeking uranium from Africa, and is still beating the WMD drums as a way of discrediting the war. And they don't believe a crime was necessarily committed in the leaking of Plame's name.

So all this amounts to a proxy war. And there will be more collateral damage before it's over.

Maybe not just the war. Maybe we're refighting two Presidential elections and the dirty rotten scoundrels who have done more to harm the political process, divide the country and legitimize propaganda than anyone since Richard Nixon, another president who (despite his apologists) had to resign in disgrace for a similar mindset. Maybe we've written on more than just Judy and foresee issues with competence coming up elsewhere.

Remember that time – when was it? – oh, a few weeks ago – that a hurricane wiped out New Orleans? And remember how the feds – uhh – made a disaster out of the disaster?

And remember how the guy in charge of FEMA – Crony Brown – wasn't qualified?

Remember how Bush gave him the job because he was a pal of a pal – or maybe they met at a church pot-luck supper one time? So Bush figured that a guy who used to run horse races would be real good at running disasters?

It's the war, but not just the war. It's about things that matter more than whether or not a reporter gets to tag along to Iraq for turkee, or whether Bush's plane serves better food than Gore's or Kerry's. It's about our lives. Fancy that. And judging by the polls, Americans who aren't reflexive Republicans have figured that out ages ago.

Comments

[o]

right. on.

[DemFromCT]

from First Read:

Lastly, the latest Gallup survey shows nothing but "lowests" and "worsts" for Bush and the GOP-run Congress: a 39% Bush job approval rating, his lowest in that survey; a 29% job approval for Congress, "its lowest level since 1994, the year Democrats lost control of the Senate and House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years;" and 68% saying "they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country. That is the most negative assessment in nearly a decade," says USA Today. The good news for Bush: his "approval among his Republican base continues to hold firm."

I wonder if any honest republicans will comment on how it feels to be alienated from the rest of the country.

[dj moonbat]

Maybe we're refighting two Presidential elections and the dirty rotten scoundrels who have done more to harm the political process, divide the country and legitimize propaganda than anyone since Richard Nixon, another president who (despite his apologists) had to resign in disgrace for a similar mindset.

Hey, these guys make Nixon look like a freaking angel. Nixon just wanted to get elected; these assclowns committed several different frauds for the express purpose of getting lots of people--including 2000 Americans--killed.

[Mimikatz]

Well, duh, Howie--how brilliant of you. Of course it is about the war and how the American people were sold a bill of goods by a bunch of blinkered ideologues with the assistance of a press who was too dazzled by the Bushies' supposed "strength" and "determination" to notice that it was based more on wishful thinking and hidden agendas than on solid information and analysis.

And of course Judy Miller has become a symbol of the symbiotic relationship between a scoop-minded celebrity press corps and an unscrupulous adminstration, because she epitomizes it so clearly.

And of course there is more than a certain amount of bitterness toward a gang who couldn't win on a level playing field, but had to bend the rules, go the Supreme Court and bully their way into power, and then broke all records for sheer venality and incompetence. Maybe Dems are just a little miffed at the double standard that was applied to the Clinton vs Bush Administrations? Could it be?

[Crab Nebula]

A "regular voter reminder": (NOTE: quotes are imaginary sayings)

I'd say well over 90% of regular voters aren't particularly perturbed about Plamegate and Iraq, although they think the former is "not right" and the latter been botched. And a similar percentage aren't pissed at Bush except mildly at best.."oh, yeah, that guy's kinda incompentent. I don't like what he's been doing."

The foaming at the mouth of the blogosphere is.....well....not an emotion that is shared much out there. As usual. I really think activists on our side need to not copy the Right, but to learn speak out less from anger and more from the perspective of message. Because anger does not persuade. I've posted variations on this dozens of times. It's probably the closest thing to originality that I contribute to the blogosphere, but it is too often forgotten.

[DemFromCT]

Was I foaming, Crab? This is as close as I get, I suppose. or was that a generic reminder (and well taken, btw)? Because indictments might just change that, and disgust, not anger is what voters do and will feel.

[DemFromCT]

EJ Dionne's article on IOKIYAR, a follow-up on Kagro's.

[park]

It's easy to avoid copying the right: Don't deliberately spread misinformation. That shouldn't be too tough.

[Mimikatz]

Crab Nebula is right that anger gets in the way of clear thinking and certainly persuasive communication. At the same time, acknowledging that there is a basis to the sense of injustice that EJ Dionne comments on is important. And recalling the pious tones the GOP used on Clinton is instructive, because what got the public was not the fact that Clinton was attacked, but how over-the-top the attack was. Starr and the impeachment zealots violated the hidden law about how society deals with adultery by splashing the details all over the daily news and the internet, when custom dictates that not be done. That's what turned the public against them. But the rules are certainly otherwise when the crime is fiddling with intelligence to push the public into fighting an unnecessary war that has turned into a massive strategic blunder, or exposing a CIA agent, or gross incompetence in handling core governmental functions.

But Crab is right about the tone of much of the lefty blogoshpere and above all about the tone that needs to be taken when attempting to persuade the great middle.

[Volvo Liberal]

Lest we forget why this all matters:

3 more soliders killed in Iraq...Total now is 1979.

http://icasualties.org/oif/

---

[DemFromCT]

our friends at the Beeb say:

The prosecutor in this case will issue his report any day now. Mr Bush's presidency is already in a mess, and criminal indictments could all but finish it off.

We don't know what happens next. We are interested to see what happens, though. very interested. ;-)

Bill kristol expects indictments. we'll see.

[DemFromCT]

from AP's Tom Raum:

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's CIA-leak inquiry is focusing attention on what long has been a Bush White House tactic: slash-and-burn assaults on its critics, particularly those opposed to the president's Iraq war policies.

If top officials are indicted, it could seriously erode the administration's credibility and prove yet another embarrassment to President Bush on the larger issue of how he and his national security team marshaled information much of it later shown to be inaccurate to support their case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Ah, yup. Dionne:

This case goes to the heart of how Republicans recaptured power after the Clinton presidency and how they have held on to it since. The strategy involved attacking their adversaries without pity.

Yes to that, too. reprters think this is just politics as usal? That it shouldn't be criminalized? Fine. Then report on it, thoroughly and completely, or turn in your reporters' notebook and go home.

[Crab Nebula]

DemCT, no, my post was not at all intended as an indictment of your tone.

But indictments of the admin people will definitely be even more persuasive to regular folks....but it won't make them shake their fists. I'm guessing you agree, as I recall from discussions past. My post was more of a general one. Yeah, and the blogosphere should listen to me and Mimikatz. (insert smiley thingy)

[DemFromCT]

from Froomkin:

Could the CIA leak investigation turn into an accountability moment for the Bush administration and the way it handled intelligence before and after taking the country to war?

Let's hope so (see Kurtz).

[Meteor Blades]

I agree about tone, Crab Nebula. And I've agreed since I wrote my first editorial decades before blogs were a gleam in anybody's eye. Shrieking rants are for the choir, and as deeply satisfying as they can be to write or read, they are rarely persuasive.

I do very occasionally, however, find it impossible to refrain from raining a rant onto my left compatriots because - sometimes - nothing else seems to penetrate. I've learned in this process that just about nothing one writes will draw flames than suggesting in a loud voice that maybe the conventional (left) wisdom is wrong. (And I say this as an unrepentant leftist.)

Something else that is nudging me toward the Foaming Rant button these days are expressions like Mr. Kurtz's "...an unnecessary war..."

I am never a fan of euphemisms. And while this - like calling the war a "mistake" - may be considered an improvement over what various muckety-muck idiocrats have previously called the war in Iraq, it still conceals the truth. America was force-marched into this war at the end of a bayonet labeled 9/11. "Unnecessary"? That makes what's been going on for the past three years sound like an unfortunate mishap. How about "depraved atrocity"? Or, if the tone of that is too ranty, how about "unfuckingforgivable"?

[Melanie]

Meteor Blades,

Amen, brother.

[Berlin]

Must be contagious. In the paragraph quoted in the post, Kurtz refers to Valerie Plame, but he actually uses the name "Flame." The column is correctly quoted. On the Washington Post site, the column's first reference is to "Flame" and all the other references are to "Plame."

[TCinLA]

I don't care what the halfwits think, since "think" is "a fact not in evidence" with the 95 percent of our fellow citizens who slept through high school government class, their only exposure to "political science."

I just want to see Rove turned into a "good Republican" as defined by my great-grand-uncle, Harry Truman's enforcer: "the only good Republicans are pushing up daisies."

Actually, I just want to see that scumball piece of dog excrement face down, bleeding out from a large-caliber exit wound.

Call me extreme, but having gone through that sonofabitch Nixon and watching the same shit be pulled by even-dumber morons - who learned their crap from him - on an even more dumbed-down public just pisses me off. You shouldn't have to go through this twice in one lifetime (even if you are a "double-1 "2" in numerology - as I am - defined as an idiot stupid enough to try and do a shortcut to get rid of two lifetimes of karma in one)

[janinsanfran]

Way to go TCinLA -- I tried to write something the other day describing how living with all the excellent work that is being done, here and elsewhere, to dredge the crimes of this bunch out of the sewer feels like living through Watergate. Here.Though of course this may fizzle, like Iran-Contra. In each case, we are dealing with crimes, murders, committed not really to advance semi-rational policies, but to hold power.