07 14 05

The administration’s foes gets a Big Hot Scandal, and it’s in the Silly Season. O to be in Washington today; this is when the town is fun. This is the sort of thing that makes the smallest journalist feel Important and Part of Something. Of course, most people don’t care, but that just proves your point: you’re part of the Beltway herd, and we got us a stammmpede! Yee Hah!

Most of the country doesn’t care. This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the story, but these days you have to be caught bludgeoning an intern with a crystal vase you got at the Enron going-out-of-business auction to get people’s attention. And even then they’ll wonder if you got that vase legit, or had someone put it aside on your behalf. Most scandals float right over the heads of the average voter, who is either locked into a preexisting preference or inclined to vote on general concepts, e.g., candidate A is less likely to get me blown up at the mall, and the economy’s okay. Activists forget how little their core issues matter to most; I cannot tell you the number of earnest young door-knockers who show up at Jasperwood pulling long faces about arsenic in the water. It haunts their sleep, that extra .00000001 part per trillion. The very fact that we are standing there talking, not pasted to a fainting couch with our guts stabbed by invisible knives, would seem to indicate that arsenic is not the most pressing problem we face. But they are convinced the apocalypse is nigh.

It always is, for some, but it never comes. At least not in the form they predicted. And when it does show up in a different guise, it has to be explained away, put in context, folded into a shape that will fit in the box. This is what makes it possible for people who work for, say, an environmental advocacy group to go to work on Sept. 12, 2001 and write a passionate newsletter about the perils of species loss. Or Alaska oil drilling.

Anyway. The arguments over the Rove / Plame affair are best hashed out elsewhere. was nearly swayed by an interview with noted thinker and finger-painter Ted Rall today, until he said he wouldn’t believe the administration if they said the sky was blue. People say this as if it proves their bonafides as a critic, but really, that’s a rather easy thing to verify. If the sky is indeed blue and Scott McClellan makes that point, you could assume that they have painted the windows, I guess. In any case I’m amused how this Scandal seems disconnected from the issue of yellowcake in light of the post 9/11 atmosphere. Given all the tales in the 90s about the threat Saddam faced – a threat everyone accepted when Clinton was launching strikes and pulling serious faces – the idea that the whole Niger-yellowcake nexus should have gotten a big shrug in 2002, when the WTC rubble still smoked, seems to be another act of willful amnesia. If anyone in 02 could have thought we’d be parsing who said what about which agent re a politically motivated rewrite of the intel, they’d have heaved a sigh of relief: so we didn’t get hit again.

It’s all a luxury that seems vapid only after something bad happens again. You’ll note that when Blair gives a press conference nowadays the press doesn’t bring up the Downing Street Memo. Give them time, though; in due course the press will shake off that ill-fitting caot of national solidarity and start asking why the bombers weren’t detected by orbital satellites the day they were born. The role of the press is to reset the clock to yesterday morn, ferret out the slightest hint of imperfection, and splash the front page with the words that give them that priapic prang: Ongoing Investigation. Questions remain. But sources say.

The press always mistakes its own fascinations for important news, figuring that if the WaPo and the NYT and friendly radio outlets hammer the story like a sheet of tin on a blunt study anvil, and the stories appear on the front pages of the second-tier dailies, it will somehow move the needle. Sometimes, yes. But it doesn’t help that this is scandal #8732. The rightwing media spent eight years trying to convince people that Clinton had horns and a swishy forked tail, and it had little practical impact. Today Bill Clinton could run for president, and half the voters would give him a yea, even though they had reservations about his character. Which is what I mean by practical impact. It’s possible that vast swaths of moderate Bush voters will be recoiled by L’Affaire Rove, but that would mean they had to know who Rove is. In short: compared to the other recent Horrors, like the Ongoing Gulag of Gitmo, which now has added forced bra-wearing to its litany of atrocities, this smacks of the sort of inside-the-Beltway story that vulcanizes the faithful but has no impact on people who are otherwise occupied planning the summer car trip. They’re looking at gas prices. And even that isn’t a deal breaker. So they say we invaded for oil – when does that bennie kick in, then?

The only reason I mention this is because I heard an account of the daily press briefing, the usual raft of sanctimonious boilerplate. One reported went on and on and on about the effect this had on Wilson family, attempting perhaps to connect with those soccer moms who wouldn’t want to have their family business splashed all over the news. (As if Wilson had somehow been dragged screaming from obscurity.) Well: what of the families of the charter airline pilots?

You may recall the story. The xx ran big piece on a charter airline the CIA was using to transport suspects. This isn’t just outing a covert operative; it was outing a covert operation. In the case of Wilson / Plame, we had an attempt to point out how two opponents of the adminstration were trying to thwart the foreign policy of the US government via the pages of the NYT and Vanity Fair; in the case of the airline, we had an attempt to peel back the Tupperware lid of secrecy of an anti-terrorist organization in order to ruin – I’m sorry, let the people know what they needed to know about the operation. Did anyone wonder whether the families of the people in that charter airline might be harmed in anyway? Did anyone wonder whether this information might compromise attempts to interrogate suspects? Did anyone ask what the devil was served by running this story?

Imagine the war was prosecuted by a Democratic administration; imagine a GOP operative blowing the charter airline’s cover to make a point about billing irregularies. Imagine the GOP operative slipping photos of the planes on the tarmac, tailfin numbers visible, to the press.

Imagine the press running with the covert-ops story, outraged that the Democratic administration had covered up this crucial story. Can you see that happening? You can?

The air on Bizzaro World – what does it smell like, exactly? As fresh and sweet as one can only dream?


(perm llink.)