“I would like our country to be led by men who court criticism, rather than by men who use intimidation to attempt to silence criticism. Glasnost. We seriously need a more transparent, less paranoid administration of our government…Evil is real.”

I’m with you on that, John. Heart and soul.

“I. Lewis Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that President George W. Bush authorized him to leak information from a classified intelligence report to a New York Times reporter.”

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/graphics/pdf/libbyplame.pdf

We are already lost in legalisms. By his first pronouncement, that anyone involved in the leak would be fired, the president should have fired himself. His father would have, without a doubt, fired everyone involved in this had it happened on his watch. But it never would have. His father said that people who revealed the identity of intelligence agents were the lowest form of traitors. The president then changed the standard to anyone who committed a crime would be fired.

Q Scott, the President seemed to raise the bar and add a qualifier today when discussing whether or not anybody would be dismissed for — in the leak of a CIA officer’s name, in which he said that he would — if someone is found to have committed a crime, they would no longer work in this administration. That’s never been part of the standard before, why is that added now?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I disagree, Terry. I think that the President was stating what is obvious when it comes to people who work in the administration: that if someone commits a crime, they’re not going to be working any longer in this administration. Now the President talked about how it’s important for us to learn all the facts. We don’t know all the facts, and it’s important that we not prejudge the outcome of the investigation. We need to let the investigation continue. And the investigators are the ones who are in the best position to gather all the facts and draw the conclusions. And at that point, we will be more than happy to talk about it, as I indicated last week.

The President directed the White House to cooperate fully, and that’s what we’ve been doing. We want to know what the facts are, we want to see this come to a successful conclusion. And that’s the way we’ve been working for quite some time now. Ever since the beginning of this investigation, we have been following the President’s direction to cooperate fully with it, so that we can get to the — so that the investigators can get to the bottom of it.

Q But you have said, though, that anyone involved in this would no longer be in this administration, you didn’t say anybody who committed a crime. You had said, in September 2003, anyone involved in this would no longer be in the administration.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/07/20050718-2.html

Scott McClellan has admitted that the top five officials in the administration, starting with the president, told him to lie.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aoeVzcoWZAqc&refer=home

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001739

This is the only opinion I have about this, the lesson that I think can be learned from this- I would like our country to be led by men who court criticism, rather than by men who use intimidation to attempt to silence criticism. Glasnost. We seriously need a more transparent, less paranoid administration of our government.

Evil is real.

More to the point—because unlike Barack I don’t want to digress and distract (or I’d tear into Joe Wilson as the Bush apologists do)—who should have been fired, by an honest President keeping his word, and when and for what?
Armitage? When?

I’ve already given my own game away, you guys, with my—and this time I’ll encode it slightly—location of political cience, in the academic taxonomy, as a subdivision of that branch of theology which is theodicy. So I can’t see that much worse could be said of this entire cast of characters (among whom, apropos nothing, I would cast Mike Huckabee as a kind of jester had he not already done so himself). If you’d have me say much worse, John, I suppose I could give it a try, but I never tell tales out of school.

And I’m sure NOT saying, “Bush is yesterday, so leave him to historians”; but I do think that right now there are four urgent targets that deserve to be hit with every legal and legit piece of ordnance we’ve got: Hillary Clinton; John McCain; Barack Obama; and this infallibly fallible, moribund Fourth Estate, the House of Usher, MSM.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/070529_Unclassified_Plame_employement.pdf

“After working for the CIA for twenty years, she retired in December 2005, as a result of the publication and compromising of her classified cover identity by an American journalist in the summer of 2003.

On 14 July 2003, Robert Novak identified “Wilson’s wife” publicly as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” named “Valerie Plame” in his syndicated column in The Washington Post.[7] In that column Novak was responding to an op-ed entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” written by Wilson and published in the New York Times the previous week, on July 6, 2003. In his op-ed, Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to support the administration’s arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.[8]

Novak’s public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s then-still-classified covert CIA identity as “Valerie Plame” precipitated what is known as the Plame affair, leading to the CIA leak grand jury investigation, which resulted in the indictment , conviction and commuted sentence (prior to the anticipated full pardon by President Bush) of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in United States v. Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. A civil lawsuit filed by the Wilsons, Plame v. Cheney, against current and former government officials, followed, but was dismissed on July 19, 2007, in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The Wilsons appealed the decision the next day.”

After working for the CIA for twenty years, she retired in December 2005, as a result of the publication and compromising of her classified cover identity by an American journalist in the summer of 2003.

On 14 July 2003, Robert Novak identified “Wilson’s wife” publicly as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” named “Valerie Plame” in his syndicated column in The Washington Post.[7] In that column Novak was responding to an op-ed entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” written by Wilson and published in the New York Times the previous week, on July 6, 2003. In his op-ed, Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to support the administration’s arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.[8]

Novak’s public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s then-still-classified covert CIA identity as “Valerie Plame” precipitated what is known as the Plame affair, leading to the CIA leak grand jury investigation, which resulted in the indictment , conviction and commuted sentence (prior to the anticipated full pardon by President Bush) of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in United States v. Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. A civil lawsuit filed by the Wilsons, Plame v. Cheney, against current and former government officials, followed, but was dismissed on July 19, 2007, in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The Wilsons appealed the decision the next day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame

—

This always makes me mad. If your wife was a serious real covert operative in service to the Bush Admin, would you be writing “What I didn’t find in Africa?”

I believe that, given this, the perfervid self-aggrandizement of Ms. Plame and her rather silly husband was reprehensible. I venture to guess that the courts thought so too.

I am the veriest tyro at all of this WWW type blog deal. It is very helpful that you have alerted me to the hierarchy of the parts of speech in these debates, if I may call them that. And so now here I have gone and used a noun, treason, and you have attempted to shoot it down with an adjective, junk. I see why you don’t like that. I am not an historian. I haven’t, to this point, applied the rigors of an historian to the stuff I have written though I understand it is not good manners at the very least to indulge in self assertion. At the same time, I am not a consumer of junk media, or any media at all, for that matter, though that is not to say that I might not have been infected by some piece of dis or misinformation that is floating around out there. I would appreciate, if it’s not too much trouble, your pointing me in the direction of those court records that will clarify what I have gotten wrong. One of the last things I want to do is bear any false witness. I am curious whether I have missed the spirit of what went down, or whether I have gotten on the wrong side of a big fancy legal decision. I am also curious as to what disinformation I have fallen victim.

One thing that is irrefutable is the fact that the president said he would fire anyone involved in the leak of a CIA agent, and he not only did not, but, by the sin of omission at the very least (the sin he considers the worst of sins) covered that leak up. That is in the White House press records, if those are to be trusted.

This is from the horse’s mouth (Don’t forget The Horse’s Mouth):

http://www.wilsonsupport.org/

From Ms. Plame:

“I am outraged to learn that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan confirms that he was sent out to lie to the press corps and the American public about two senior White House officials, Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby who deliberately and recklessly revealed my identity as a covert CIA operations officer.

Even more shocking, McClellan confirms that not only Karl Rove and Scooter Libby told him to lie but Vice President Cheney, Presidential Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and President Bush also ordered McClellan to issue his misleading statement. Unfortunately, President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s felony sentence has short-circuited justice.”

I want to believe you are not being pedantic with your last post. I want very much to trust you. As an historian, can you tell me of another administration in which the president, the vice president, and their top several aids have participated in the outing of a covert CIA operative to silence criticism of one of their policies?

While I agree with much of your desciption of the Administration, I fail to see how it differs, in other than its particulars, from previous administrations. And as to particulars, your account of the Plame case is not accurate in its legal particulars, which are matters of court record. Yours is the account the junk media would wish us to give, after the propaganda war is through.

I do hope that Ms. Alba was everything I think her to be, and more. And more and more.

Are there mobs? Yes.

Do people overlook truth, or have a lower standrd of evidence, when they want to go fight? Yes.

Are these group dynamics made up of individuals? Yes.

Are the individuals each rational actors unto themselves, making demands of their leaders and their media? Yes.

Jon, I’ll say it again, if you were a rational actor leading up to the war, so was everyone else.