LAST SUNDAY, I WAS AT SANTA Monica’s elegant Fairmont Miramar (meaning I wasn’t wearing my flip-flops). Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were being honored by the Palisades Democratic Club for that rare commodity — political courage. As the M.C., Arianna Huffington presented the Wilsons with the 2nd annual Anne Froehlich award. Wilson and Huffington have best-selling books, while Plame is waiting for the CIA to approve hers. I might have been the only person in the room not selling a book.
As for Plamegate, so far only Scooter Libby (real name: Irving) appears to be going to jail. Obviously, Irving will get a pardon because he not only knows where the bodies are buried, but whose prints are on the shovels. (At 56, Libby should do time for still calling himself “Scooter.”) It all began during the pre-war buildup, when Dick Cheney (AKA — “Shooter” since the hunting accident) came across an Italian report suggesting Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase enriched uranium from Niger. Shooter sends a memo to the CIA, who dispatch to Niger former ambassador Joe Wilson, whom Bush Sr. once called a “national hero.” Wilson comes from a long tradition of Republican service to country. His uncle, Pete Wilson, is the former governor of California. In sending Joe Wilson they weren’t exactly sending Michael Moore.
Wilson soon discovered the Niger story was a hoax. One document was so crudely forged, the signature was 10 years old.Wilson filed his report, but kept hearing the uranium claim. He reached out to the administration but was silenced. Finally, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times: “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Now he had a target on his back and the drama moved to the second act. Rather than investigate the facts, Cheney and friends decided to “swiftboat” Wilson. Smearing those who disagree with them may be the one thing at which neo-cons are competent. In 2004, Karl Rove bragged that when he was done with John Kerry the public wouldn’t know which side of the Vietnam War he had fought on. One word: Sick.
This time, they went a step further, they went after “the wife.” They leaked to their press cronies (Bob Novak, crony numero uno) that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent.They even divulged the name of the front company, thus ending her career and putting the lives of anybody who had ever worked for Brewster- Jennings in danger. Shamelessly, they said Plame wasn’t really a spy, but more like a secretary, and that she sent her husband, so how valid could his info be? Pathetic and untrue.
It’s mind boggling! During a time of war, this administration outs a CIA operative whose specialty was monitoring nuclear materials inside Iran? Imagine the reaction if Clinton and Gore had done this. There would-n’t be enough tar and feathers or rope for a lynching. Rush Limbaugh would have a stroke screaming into his microphone. Now there’s a thought. Finally, an independent prosecutor was appointed — Patrick Fitzgerald, a Republican, who concluded that, to hide the truth, administration witnesses “threw sand in the umpire’s face.” (I think he meant “dirt.”) Fitzgerald convicted Irving on four counts of lying and obstruction of justice.
Act 3: The Wilsons sue Cheney and Rove in civil court. So many want to see those two under oath, if the trial were on pay-per-view, we could wipe out the national debt. But Cheney is already claiming immunity. I only wish we’d had immunity from him for the last six years. I’ll be so relieved when Scooter, Shooter, Turd Blossom, Commander Guy and Halliburton are either in jail or a bad memory.
Kudos to the Palisades Democratic Club and the Wilsons for their political courage. If two others had a shred of it (Tenant and Powell), Mr. Bush’s disastrous war — the worst strategic mistake in our nation’s history — might never have happened. And I include among the courage-challenged those Democrats who caved on the war funding bill and have broken my heart.
As for we the people, I suppose everyone’s too busy with day-to-day life to worry about political courage. Besides, the Ducks are in the Stanley Cup Finals. And yet Joe Wilson cautions us in his “The Politics of Truth,” when he quotes Dante:“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
Who knows? Maybe it’s a dry heat.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 25, 2007. Read the original PDF.