Razor Scooter

Since the Scooter Libby "revelations" earlier this week, I have been a bit skeptical of the notion that Libby, thinking that he's no longer up for an eventual pardon from a hobbled preznit, is trying for leverage by bringing Rove and Cheney into this. There's no specific reason for this, other than the understanding that Libby is the company man's company man, and these people don't roll easy. Libby's had plenty of time to get his case together, and this is what they come with? It smells like some sort of obfuscatory dodge, a way to cloud things, pass the buck a little further down the field. It's a stalling tactic, even if a factually correct one. Maybe they're counting on a lack of political will to expand investigations into Rove and Cheney. There are worse presumptions to be had.

Seems someone else might have a similar hunch:

David Johnston and Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times take a look at the arguments coming from Scooter Libby's lawyers (that Libby was hung out to dry to protect Karl Rove), and, well, color them unconvinced.

First, despite the fact that reporters (and Patrick Fitzgerald) have been swarming all over Plamegate for almost four years, this supposed White House cabal against Libby escaped detection. And they still can't find anyone to support that idea. In fact, Libby and Rove seemed to have worked pretty closely together. “They didn’t show any ankle — it was always a team effort,” as Lawrence Wilkerson, a former State Department official, puts it.

Second, it's not clear that Libby was really hung out to dry. The only evidence seems to be that it took White House spokesman Scott McClellan a week longer in September of 2003 to lie to the press about whether Libby had been involved in the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity than it did for him to deny Rove's involvement.

And third, "[e]ven if the assertion is shown to be true, it is not clear how it would help refute the charges that Mr. Libby had perjured himself."

We'll see how this develops, and I could be entirely off-base, but it just seems too pat (bad pun intended) for an opening gambit. It's a cornered-animal move, and the only people who open with a cornered-animal move are desperate people and cheap-shot artists. Libby, like his dark overlords, is a whole lotta both.

And the real crux of this case cannot be overstated -- these people conspired to lie, to defame and delegitimize a critic of their war policy, which has consistently proven to be the construct of ideologues and fabulists. They did it sotto voce through their reliable conduits in the lapdog media, tainting that already debauched profession. They were and are unrepentant about any of this, about misleading people, about bullying people, about causing all the death and destruction that's already taken place, and will continue to take place.

This is not an inside-baseball story; this is the heart of it all, of creepy warmongerers and their useful propaganda tools, of secrecy and corruption and lies. This is going to bring some people down, if done right, if reported right. We'll see.

In the meantime, if "Scooter"'s ethical underpinnings can be divined from his fictive discursions, festooned with episodes of pedophilia and bestiality driving the narrative, perhaps we gain a better understanding as to whether or not he will do whatever it takes to save his own ass, and those of his masters. These are treacherous people, and they have already shown that they can play the willing dupes of the media to their own hidden advantage. Stay tuned.

[Update: Josh Marshall has probably the most succinct explanation of the wide-ranging implications of Scooter's treachery, and that of the White House itself, how it has poisoned the ability of senators from both parties to work on equal footing in matters of national security, how Italian intel's involvement in cooking the Niger documents has strained intelligence-gathering ability and cooperation in that part of the world, and on and on.

It is crucial to find a compelling narrative to communicate the true measure of duplicity and corruption at work here; the web has been so deliberately and completely tangled that only the most diligent and patient can unravel it all, and the media and the general public are too engaged in their endless pas de deux of post-ironic cynicism to dig that deep. But if a handle can be gotten on all the intricacies of this, enough so that the public will care, and enough so that the media will believe the public will care, which in turn legitimizes their effort (in their mindset), there are doubtless many much darker truths to be found in the nooks and recesses of this utterly corrupt and unaccountable administration. Not only do we not know what we do not know, we may actually not even want to know the full measure of official mendacity, of abuse of office, and contempt for policy, principle, and people.

So far it has been portrayed as a self-referential scenario of silly nicknames and beltway clubbiness, of a grandstanding diva journamalist who helped pimp an unnecessary war and had a reputation for fucking her sources. But Scootergate is much deeper and darker than that; it comes very close to objectively, conclusively demonstrating what most of us take for granted now -- that they knew their intel was bunk, that facts were suspect and stovepiped, that only cherry-picked anecdotes and sharp elbows were going to get them the war they craved. And now that Ari Fleischer is on the short list to drop a dime, we may get more than we bargained for.]