Monday, October 24, 2005
On Fitzmas Eve…
Today’s post comes from Common Dreams; the topic? The sword of Damocles that hangs over the entire White House at the moment. I think we can expect to see something come down the pipe this week, as Friday is deadline for indictments. I’m trying to keep my head sensible about this thing, though it’s hard not get excited as a progressive blogger. The truth is that this is a solemn event, and should be treated as such. Not only did we have one or several traitors (in the purest sense of the word, rather than the version bandied about by pseudo-patriots) in the White House, they have been allowed to stay there by an Administration seemingly complicit in the act that they committed, a grievous act committed only for pure politics, the ultimate triumph of party over nation.On Friday, Common Dreams posted a great article written by James Moore (he of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential) that detailed the importance of this trial and just what it means for the country as a whole. I think this is the most powerful of passages, though the whole article is worth reading:
Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.
We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic. Because far too many of us know and are aware of the crimes committed by our government in our name, we are unlikely to settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats. The last thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our government or the people we have elected but our constitution is still very much alive and we choose to believe that destiny has placed Patrick Fitzgerald at this time and this place in our history to save us from the people we elected. If the law cannot get to the truth of what has happened to the American people under the Bush administration, then we all may begin to hear the early death rattles of history’s greatest democracy.
A highly-recommended read.
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WOW!!
Great read indeed!
I just hope the Repub's will have the same response to any perjury charges that they did with Clinton.
If not, they should be called out as hypocrites.