Focus Pulling

I am with Billmon on this. I find it highly doubtful that Fitzgerald is going to indict on charges unrelated directly to the Plame leak and ensuing cover-up, but I do think he’s going to indict. As much as I’d like to believe that he’s spent the last 22 months getting to the bottom of the forgeries and Iraq lies and the inner workings of the propaganda campaugn that led us to war, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

First of all, I think he would have sought a specific expansion of his mandate (which he helpfully supplied here on his brand new web site yesterday.) As Billmon points out, it was almost certainly done to show that he was charged with more than investigating the potential violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act — and that the Justice Department explicitly gave him the power to investigate charges of perjury, obstruction etc in a second follow-up letter dated February 6, 2004. Fitzgerald asked for this explicit permission in order to make it very clear that he wasn’t going outside his mandate by investigating a cover-up. Posting this on his web-site was very likely done to quell the predictable GOP line of defense that he is an out of control prosecutor who strayed far outside his mandate. (I doubt that he was asleep during the Starr investigation.) For this reason I don’t think he’s gone far outside it.

This, however, doesn’t mean that these issues are not going to finally get an airing. Judy Miller’s little drama is a crucible for the Washington press corps. If any of them hope to save their journalistic souls, now’s the time to do it. They are already publishing articles about the WHIG, about Cheney’s monomaniacal insistence on the war. Critics are coming out of the woodwork (better late than never, I guess) and the lies that perpetrated this debacle in Iraq are being examined.

I realize that this is too little too late to save the blood and the treasure that has been wasted since the media turned themselves into a group of evil teen-aged girls and helped Karl Rove propel his creature into the White House. But the country must recover somehow and we need the press to try to right itself. Democracy depends upon it.

Fitzgerald’s probe may focus on the Valerie Plame leak and it may only touch upon the larger issues peripherally. But it is the hook, the opening, that allows the media to revisit the run-up to the war and correct the jingoistic cheerleading they called journalism for the first two years after 9/11. It means that there is a second chance for the American public to learn the truth of what really happened then, outside the manufactured hysteria that engulfed the culture for the last three years.

This is the most important thing. Much of the public already know a lot of this subconsciously. This case gives them a way to understand what happened without losing face. The “grown-ups” who led them into this war were liars and criminals. We need to make sure they realize that the “grown-ups” are the Republican establishment.

Many of us wrote a lot about certain memes the Republicans used to make the Dems look bad during the last few years. We are “soft” on terrorism, crime, morals — whatever. Soft. It’s a powerful primal image that they have used to great effect to put us on the defensive and turn the country to the right with coded slogans like “law and order” and “fight em there so we don’t have to fight em here.” It works because they’ve been saying it so long, and there is just enough truth in it, that people have internalized it.

But the Republicans have some baggage of their own that goes back just as far. They have long been associated with corruption and criminality in office and their poster boy is Richard Nixon, the father of the modern Republican party. “I am not a crook” has a resonance far beyond that moldy time. People know this, deep down, in their subconscious, just as surely as they know that Democrats are flip-flopping libertines. “Republicans are crooks.” It just rings true.

These primitive heuristics cut both ways. If we choose to play that game, and we should, we have a perfect opportunity to portray the Republicans the way that people already think they are.

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