THIS MODERN WORLD

Judging from what I’ve seen and heard so far (and gosh, if Sean Hannity is good for anything, he’s good for letting you know what the current Official Republican Talking Points are), the right wing noise machine is reacting to the Libby indictment by throwing up a fog of obfuscation. I mean, there’s really no way around it–when the chief of staff of a sitting vice president is indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, that’s a big deal. So what we’re getting, and will get a lot more of, are all the lies and half-truths we’ve already been over a hundred times before, starting with the two-year-old attempts to discredit Joe Wilson himself. (Which is, of course, how we got into this mess to begin with.) Watch for lots of blather about how Wilson had no expertise, why would anyone send him on this mission, everyone knew his wife was in the CIA, she’s in Who’s Who for chrissakes, blah blah blah blah blah. And those of us in the reality-based community will continue to push the stone up the hill, pointing out things that should be self-evident, such as the fact that knowledge of Valerie Plame’s existence did not equal knowledge of her status within the CIA. Etc., etc.

And so it goes.

Atrios already linked to this, but it bears emphasizing:

Davis plays the equivalency game: for every Republican sin, he has to offer up a counterweight Democratic one. But Republicans have owned the government for five years now; there is no equivalency. There are no powerhouse Democratic lobbyists under indictment, if only because Tom DeLay has been so successful in purging Democratic lobbyists from K Street. There are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders under indictment, if only because there are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders. Democrats didn’t out a covert CIA agent; Democrats didn’t drag the nation into an illegal war based on bogus intelligence (although more than a few are complicit in the effort); Democrats didn’t institutionalize torture or strip US citizens of basic constitutional protections.

There is a national security issue here. Republicans are demonstrably more corrupt than Democrats. Hell, this isn’t even the only occasion on which the administration have blown the cover of a secret intelligence asset from purely political motives: in August of last year, the administration infuriated British and Pakistani intelligence services by leaking the name of a highly placed al Qaeda informant in order to justify an increase in the terror alert level, and in the process ruining counterterrorism operations in Britain and Pakistan.

For going on 40 years now, Democrats have gotten their asses kicked when it comes to hardball politics. Lanny Davis and Libby/Rove are emblematic of why. If Davis wants to wish a pox on both parties’ houses, he should probably wait until Democrats get a house.

From Hugh Hewitt’s piece on Harriet Miers in yesterday’s Times:

The right’s embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left – exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources – will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around.

Tactics “exclusive to the left”? This actually goes beyond the Eternal Question (“stupid or lying”?). This is more in the realm of, “Does this man live on the same planet we do?”

Considering that Libby consistently told the same false story to the grand jury and the FBI, I can’t help but think that he’s been set up to be the Administration’s sacrificial lamb. After all, according to the indictment “Official A”, Judy Miller, “the Under Secretary of State”, the “White House Press Secretary”, and “the Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs” all knew that Libby’s story about learning of Plame’s status from Tim Russert was without merit. Why would Libby be reckless enough to make his claims when any one of these people would have been able to discredit him? It defies logic to assume that Libby spoke to the FBI or the grand jury without discussing what he would say with his sources and/or fellow leakers. That being the case, did White House officials reassure Libby that they’d buttress his story only to later turn against him? If that turns out to be true, I’d expect Libby’s plea agreements to be…interesting, to say the least. There’s a damn good reason Fitzgerald says he’s “not quite done”. If Libby feels burned by the Administration, I think we can expect more fireworks.

It’s right there in the indictment.