The Ming Report

PATRIOTISM UNDER ATTACK

July 18, 2005 - Let us recap. The idea that Karl Rove had anything to do with leaking Mrs. Wilson’s identity is preposterous. We have Scott McClellan’s word on that. Scooter Libby didn’t leak either and neither did Eliot Abrams. We have Scott McClellan’s word on that too. The President has wanted to get to the bottom of this affair for the last two years. That is something else for which Mr. McClellan has pledged his word. Since the President has not gotten to the “bottom” of this in the last two years he must not talk to Karl Rove or Scooter Libby very often. And, on those few occasions on which he spoke with either gentleman the subject of Joe Wilson and his CIA Agent wife must not have come up.

Of course because the White House is quite scrupulous about refraining from comment during an ongoing investigation Scott McClellan just can’t talk about the Plame affair. He would like to, you understand, but he just cannot. It wouldn’t be proper for the Executive to interfere in the judicial function in that way. Thus Scott must hold his tongue and refrain from answering questions because of the ongoing investigation.

They don’t have that constraint across town at the Republican National Committee. Neither, apparently, does that nicety apply to the Republican Representatives and Senators who populate the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. From those venues comments on the subject of the ongoing criminal investigation has been continuous, contentious, and loud. In echoes of the party line of two years ago the strident voices have launched a vicious campaign of smear and character assassination that Ambassador Wilson and his wife should be discredited. At the same time the RNC has engaged in a superlative exercise in the cynical Clintonian parsing of the statute and public statements in an effort to excuse the leak and diminish its seriousness.

All of this activity in the face of White House silence serves to divert public attention from the fact that the closest advisors to the two most powerful men in the world were and are willing to sacrifice a covert agent, her company cutout, and all of the contacts that she had built up over more than a decade of service. We expect covert agents to be sacrificed from time to time to serve the national interest. We call such men and women heroes and patriots and we honor their sacrifice. But Victoria Plame’s usefulness to the Agency and the Nation was not sacrificed for any patriotic interest. The intelligence network carefully constructed by Ms. Plame was discarded in the name of political expediency and revenge.

In such an atmosphere, where the most powerful men condone the scandalous behavior of their lackeys and claim disingenuously ignorance of their activities patriotism itself is under attack.