Bill Kristol sez: Legalize It!

by Kagro X

I had a law professor -- though like Judy Miller, I can't recall who it was -- who once opened a class with a variant of a classic joke. "A conservative is a liberal who's just been mugged," he began, reciting the line in its customary and shopworn form. Then came the twist. "A liberal, however, is a conservative whose friend has just been indicted."

William Kristol has finally jumped in with both feet. And as so often happens when one intervenes too quickly on behalf of friends accused of bad acts, he's gone in over his head.

Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove have all, Kristol says, been unfairly targeted by overzealous prosecutors, the practice of (conservative) politics itself having been criminalized as part of a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy to get tough on crime undermine their efforts to govern as conservatives.

I'm sorry. Could you repeat that? Did you say, "govern?" As "conservatives?"

Step out of the car please, sir. Hey officer, I detect the strong odor of... bullshit.

The first and most glaring omission from Kristol's trial balloon: Jack Abramoff. I suppose he could always argue that Jack wasn't trying to "govern," although as you know, I don't accept that assumption as being valid with respect to any of the named targets, either.

But ask whether Jack Abramoff and/or Tom DeLay paid for the Republican dirty tricks in New Hampshire on Election Day 2002, as Democratic State Party Chairwoman Kathy Sullivan has in this AP article, which I found via Elwood Dowd's Daily Kos diary on the subject.

Then, in the spirit of my "big lie" question, ask yourself what exactly is the crime here? Not in the Richard Cohen sense, but rather in one which asks how big the crime is. That is, what is its true scope?

On October 28, 2002, two of Jack Abramoff's client Indian tribes -- the Agua Caliente tribe, based in California, and the Mississippi Choctaws -- sent $5,000 each to the New Hampshire State Republican Party. Four days later, DeLay's ARMPAC sent $5,000, for a total of $15,000. Four days after that, the State GOP paid Virginia-based Republican consultantcy GOP Marketplace $15,6000 to jam the phone lines of the New Hampshire Democratic Party headquarters on Election Day, disrupting the Party's critical Get-Out-the-Vote efforts. By day's end, Republican John Sununu had won a narrow victory over Democratic candidate and former Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

Think about that next time someone spooks you with nuclear option talk.

What went on in New Hampshire, possibly at DeLay's behest, is not "just politics." It's the very opposite of it. "Just politics" is what the New Hampshire Democratic Party wanted to get done that day. "Just politics" is what would have resulted from a hard fought and clean election. "Criminality" is what the Republicans engaged in to stop it, and two of the GOP's three hitmen from this job sit in the clink right now to prove it.

The notion that the Plame outing is "just politics" is equally galling, for reasons previously stated:

Ordinarily, there would be a strong presumtion against seeing in bureaucratic or political infighting between political appointees and career professionals a serious effort to "impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States." It is, after all, something that happens all the time. Something that's easily dismissed as "just politics." The question, though, is whether it's ever risen to the level of "dismantling" the established intelligence vetting process,  whether any other administration would have characterized the intelligence community's bureaucratic intransigence as an effort to "deliberately and maliciously" keep information from them, and whether an active program of "flooding the zone" with challenges to good information in order to keep intelligence operatives too busy to combat bad information might not be just what we're looking for [in order to prove criminality]: impairment and impeding of the foreign intelligence activities of the United States.

So, again, what is the big lie? Frank Rich joins us on the other side of the looking glass today:

Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

And here we are, asking the same question as before:

Is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to prevent the exposure of its mistaken reliance on bad intelligence? Or is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to promote intelligence developed by its own, parallel intelligence structure, a plan which required the simultaneous undermining and the destruction of the credibility of the country's established (read: authorized and legitimate) intelligence structure, which refused to give them what they wanted?

The answer to that question is the difference between "just politics," and "we're not kidding when we whisper the word 'treason.'"

Rich poses the same problem in his own way:

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

What worries me is that the bigger joke of history is likely to be the one that goes, "Did you hear about the guys who disassembled the United States' functional intelligence community in the name of 'security,' and the ones who laundered extorted casino money to pay for election rigging and nobody could come up with an indictible crime for them?" Ba-dum, ching!

Well, what do you call it when someone sets out to subvert the Constitution? And if you think I'm limiting the question to Bush, Cheney and the White House Iraq Group, think again. Because I'm talking about the 17th Amendment, too.

And I think I've had just about enough of the "everybody does it" excuse, too. Because you just know what that leads to:

I've gotta believe that they believe that this will all end up on the scrap heap of history, alongside Iran-Contra, as one of those nasty imbroglios about which the bulk of the American people retain darkish, vague memories, but no real resentment, because after all, nobody really did anything wrong or they'd be in jail. Nevermind that they were all pardoned by the president who oversaw and orchestrated their subversive activities.

Just as Abramoff's antics came into sharper focus once we changed perspectives on what he was doing, so a similar shift  must take place in order to understand why we need to punish the Bush cabal for their transgressions (and please, let us not forget how fully bound up Abramoff's are with their own). I once again indulge in the venal crime of quoting myself, by way of tying my own disparate thoughts together:

I don't think they were prepared for Fitzgerald, because his greatest achievement has not been investigative, but imaginative. They thought they were involved in "politics as usual." Hardball, to be sure, but just politics as usual. A paradigm in which the "administration" is given a wide berth to redirect policy and reorient intelligence programs. So what if they took a few shortcuts? Surely people would understand their "decisiveness" in fighting the "global war on terror." And enemies are enemies, whether foreign or domestic.

I don't think they thought they had done anything wrong. I think they thought they were entitled to do these things. I think they thought that the level at which they were pulling these stunts entitled them to protection -- that their policy decisions (and that's how I think they regarded the Plame outing) were beyond the reach of the courts and the law. Not because they "owned" them, but because what they were doing was "political" and not justiciable.

You can be sure that like DeLay, the Bush "administration" will be complaining that the prosecutor is trying to "criminalize politics."

Well, here it is. Bill Kristol wants to legalize it. And he'll be trying to sell it to you over your Cheerios this Sunday.

Comments

[ahem]

Why are conservative Republicans, who control the executive and legislative branches of government for the first time in living memory, so vulnerable to the phenomenon of criminalization? Is it simple payback for the impeachment of Bill Clinton? Or is it a reflection of some deep malady at the heart of American politics? If criminalization is seen to loom ahead for every conservative who begins successfully to act out his or her beliefs in government or politics, is the project of conservative reform sustainable?

Shorter Kristol:

"Every time a man passes me on the street, I'm afraid he's going to grab me and drag me off to some bathroom to suck my cock. I've even started to visualize these repulsive cock-sucking episodes during the healthy, heterosexual marital relations I enjoy with my wife–even some that haven't actually happened, like the sweaty, post-game locker-room tryst with Vancouver Canucks forward Mark Messier that I can't seem to stop thinking about."

-- courtesy of The Onion, 'Why Do These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?'

[Chuck Dupree]

Kagro X, you're dead on. The current batch of Republicans has surpassed the previous record for dishonesty and destructiveness. Nixon was more cunning than Bush, and as nasty as Cheney. But he didn't lie to start a war; that was LBJ, who might have been a great President, given his commitment to civil rights, if he hadn't shot his wad in Vietnam.

And, like the Nixonistas, this crop of criminals will claim — indeed, is claiming — that everyone does it, that lying to start a war in which over a hundred thousand people have been killed to increase Halliburton's profits is equivalent to extramarital sex. In their book, it's true: sex is worse than murder. Unfortunately for them, the law doesn't agree. If only they could read, they would know…

[Kagro X]

Here are two paragraphs I was missing from the Rich article that hammer home the point with some additional force:

"Bush's Brain" is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in "Bush's Brain," bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by "a layer of operatives" from any ill behavior that might implicate him. "There is no crime, just a victim," Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

What it means: Rove, on Bush's behalf, accumulates and holds power not by "building a mandate," but by being better and more ruthless at undermining the competition. (This, ironically, is precisely the shortcoming Republicans try to pin on Democrats in the media: that they rely solely on tearing down their opponents and have no ideas of their own.) When the prize at issue is an election, people expect it -- although Rove frequently goes further than the law allows. When the prize at issue is the governance of the United States, people don't -- and when people like Rove avail themselves of the new toys at their disposal as the nominal heads of government to do their dirty work, they cross into criminality by definition.

[DemFromCT]

kagro, the signature of mehlman (protege) and Rove (master) is to accuse Dems of what they are doing. Sometimes it's the easiest way of figuring out what they're up to.

[DemFromCT]

Mike Allen has a Miers story that shows the mindset:

Bush's friends contend that it is the conservative elite, not the President, who miscalculated and that self-righteous right-wingers stand to lose their seats at the table of power for the next three years. "They're crazy to take him on this frontally," said a former West Wing official. "Not many people have done that with George Bush and lived to tell about it." If a Justice Miers eventually takes her seat on the court, vocal critics can only hope the Bush Administration handles the punishment of the treasonous as poorly as it is currently promoting one of its most loyal subjects.

What bullshit. This weak little man is going down as the worst president in modern history, and within a week his consigliere will (politically speaking) sleep with the fishes. What kool-aid are they drinking in the West Wing?

[RonK, Seattle]

Hmmm ... about those "seats at the table of power for the next three years" ...

Miers may be confirmed, or Miers may be rejected, and it weakens W's position at the grown-up's table either way.

If Bush can hold his place at the table, it'll be a rough ride. If not, rougher. Either way, his skybox backers have to start thinking about how to turn the franchise around.

[YK]

kagro, the signature of mehlman (protege) and Rove (master) is to accuse Dems of what they are doing. Sometimes it's the easiest way of figuring out what they're up to.

Accusing the Dems of playing dirty also helps justify the Republicans' own actions. It's the same reasoning that says that it's not wrong to kill people when you're fighting a war.

But even in war, some things are prohibited -- targeting civilians, for example. Jack Abramoff, and the manipulation of intelligence on Iraq, should fall into this category.

[Mimikatz]

This is really a good summing up, Kagro. As I said before I read it, the conduct of Abramoff-DeLay-Rove etc shows that they didn;t believe that the GOP could win in a fair fight. They thpught they had to corrupt the whole enterprise to be surte of winning. What unconfident guys! And they strut around as if they are so tough. No wonder that the whole enterprise is starting to come unglued. They never really cared about governing and had no idea how to do it. I really do think that the people are starting to turn on them,, enough that is, because theri incompetence has led to so many deaths, high gas proces and so many potential disasters left unattended. The GOP was right to intuit that what people really want from gov't is to be protected, but it isn't just about terror, it is about hurricanes, flu and all the rest, things they can't even begin to think about how to deal with.

[Peter (Pete) cochran]

Whose is sucking Bill Clinton's cock now?