| We don't often quote conservatives like Andrew Sullivan around here, but he has a very interesting discussion in his blog last week, and I think it's interesting precisely because he's a conservative. If you're like me, you don't have any trouble with the fact that Libby and Cheney arranged to do whatever they had to do to destroy Valerie Wilson and her husband, and you really don't have any trouble believing that the stories they used to mislead the United States into invading Iraq were just lies. Sullivan doesn't want to believe it, especially the part about lying, so he spends more time that we might trying to psychoanalyze Cheney and Libby's motives. What he comes up with is really pretty clear: I can still just about believe that Bush thought the WMD case was sound. I can't believe, given all that we now know, that Cheney did. He's too smart. The data he read, we now know, was far more equivocal than the data the public was provided with. He's not new at this. He probably never wanted to make the WMD argument anyway, put it in to appease the UN crowd, and certainly wasn't going to query its validity. We may never know, of course, because Cheney will have destroyed the evidence, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's obvious Cheney knew all along that the WMD line was a cover, not a real threat, but realized by the summer of 2003 that any hint of this leaking (even from a two-bit blowhard like Wilson) needed swift and brutal rebuttal. They were embarrassed enough by the WMD bust, but if it was revealed that they had ignored all the caveats beforehand, it could get really dicey. One has to assume that Libby and Cheney are indistinguishable in their knowledge and involvement. Miller was also trying to cover her tracks that, in retrospect, had begun to look shady. Hence the weird Cheney-coordinated hit on Wilson and Plame. Hence Libby's clumsy perjury. Has Libby ever done something as clumsy in his entire life? Sometimes, even the smoothest cannot escape their own lies. This sounds like a reasonable explanation of what happened, but get what he says next: That's not just worth 30 months in jail. It's worth impeachment. Isn't that what we've been saying? |
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