|
The answer is "It was Armitage!" Hmmm, that's the answer? Think about this. The answer we are being told again and again is "It was Armitage!" See, there's your answer. Now aren't you ashamed. Except that "It was Armitage!" is not an answer to any of the central questions. By presenting it as "the" answer, suddenly the question itself has been framed to get the media and the public into believing that Armitage is the guy at the center of the outing. See, for Armitage, a post-administration critic of the Iraq War's handling, to be the outer, then the whole thing is just the product of desperate, conspiracy-crazy Democrats.
Let's go back a second, though. The question was not "who was Novak's other source?" That's just one of a thousand questions surrounding the actions of the White House during this period. The question is and always has been, did the White House conspire to out a covert CIA agent working for this country's defense against the proliferation of WMD's in order to punish her husband for contradicting administration lies? The answer "It was Armitage!" is not an answer to the question. In fact, as a disclosure, it simply reveals the breadth of the conspiracy. It consumed the entire administration. When Karl Rove called reporters to tell them Valerie Plame was "fair game," it was obviously preceded by an internal administration strategy to take just that approach. That Armitage got the memo is only evidence of a wider complicity. The answer to the question "did the White House conspire to out a covert CIA officer?" is, therefore, an emphatic yes.
Why, then, is the Armitage issue coming out now and being presented as an answer to the leaker question? It's nothing but pure framing. Strategy leading into the mid-term elections, and as a way to blunt Bush's coming pardon of Libby after the elections. It's a card they have been holding to deflate the Democrats from using the issue, and it has Rove's fingerprints all over it. I'll give him credit. It's a very smart angle, the Armitage card, but that's all it is, a way to frame the outing using the clueless media. It must also be remembered that despite Armitage's later statements, he and his boss Colin Powell were at the time true believers in the necessity of the Iraq War, having been so convinced of the doctored evidence that they presented it with urgent conviction before the U.N.
Can we expect the media to realize they are being played again? Of course not. They'd rather get cool shots of reporters standing in hurricanes and speculate endlessly over Jon Benet's fake killer. Dumb sells, and the dumber the country gets, the more it sells.
I also would like to ask the Right Wing treason apologists, though, what they would be saying if this had occurred under a Democratic president? What actions do they think a Republican congress would have taken against a Democratic administration that had purposely disclosed the identity of a CIA agent in order to bitch-slap her husband? If the treason apologists answer anything other than
impeachment, we all know it's BS. Because in the end, this case speaks beyond this administration to the broader ideology of Republicans themselves. Republicans have abandoned accountability for winning and keeping political power, and ironically that is exactly what is taking them down even as Plamegate is being framed by one its principle propagators. But until they lose the political game, they'll never learn.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(327 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
