April 7, 2006
It's Official: We Have a Liar-in-Chief
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
BuzzFlash does have a right to do some boasting about exposing the Plamegate affair. It's a testament that proves that the Internet is often the only source for detecting what is in plain sight, as the White House press corps continues in its dazed stupor.
David Corn, who writes for the Nation, first picked up on the significance of the sentence in a Robert Novak column that outed Valerie Plame. No other reporter in the entire multi-billion dollar mainstream news machine could see what was printed in front of their eyes, but David did.
As soon as we read David's first column on the possible significance the Novak piece, we called him and interviewed him twice and began a tandem beating of the drums on the significance of Novak's piece -- and it's inevitable connection to a coordinated White House effort to debunk Joseph Wilson for proving a key Bush Administration lie regarding a reason for invading Iraq.
What's more, the dramatic irony was that the Bush White House exposed a CIA operative who specialized in the tracking of the illicit transfer of Weapons of Mass Destruction. In short, in order to save itself, it betrayed the nation. Tragically and ironically, it endangered our national security by rendering Valerie Plame and her contacts useless on the very issue it claimed that it needed to invade Iraq to prevent.
During the period when John Ashcroft still asserted that he was in charge of the investigation, Corn and BuzzFlash continued to bring the issue to the forefront. Bush lied from the beginning, claiming that he wouldn't tolerate leaking, but did nothing to find out who the leakers were. Now we know why; he was the leaker-in-chief.
Over time, with the still sudden and unexplained recusal of Ashcroft
from overseeing and burying the case, other Internet sites and even the
national press began to follow the story.
The mainstream media, whatever its bewitched state of Bushevism, has
a standard convention of taking federal cases seriously. When Patrick
Fitzgerald, an Elliot Ness sort of guy, took over the case with apparent
autonomy, suddenly reporters started paying attention -- and when Libby
was indicted, it now became a story officially in legal play.
Now, we have the revelation that Bush authorized a leak of a classified document -- that he personally declassified -- to be given, in essence, to the infamous Judith Miller by Scooter Libby. (Although this first piece of information he is tied to leaking is not the actual outing of Plame per se, but part of the overall campaign to "dirty up" Wilson. There's more information to come out, for sure, about Bush's role in authorizing the actual outing of Plame, which was, basically, a treasonous act.)
This puts Bush at the center of the efforts to discredit Joseph Wilson -- and explains why he never bothered to ask his staff who leaked classified material, because he was the person authorizing the leaks.
It is astonishing that he is still allowed to occupy the White House. America's national security has been compromised by Bush over and over again -- and he has lied to the nation on a chronic and unrelenting basis
America is a great nation; it doesn't deserve a self-serving crook who risks our national security as its most powerful person.
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS