[Mb-civic] RE: PLAME CASE - Throw Another Plot on to Boil - Michael Kinsley - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Throw Another Plot on to Boil

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, October 28, 2005; Page A23

Confused? Sure. Who isn't? One entertaining aspect of the story that is 
expected to reach some sort of climax today is the struggle of the media 
to summarize or label it. Once upon a time someone went to Niger, which 
is not Nigeria, and off we go in time and space. Even Fox News has been 
driven to compound sentences.

All the glam elements are there: a secret agent, international intrigue, 
sex if you know where to look, blogs, moral dilemmas, movie-of-the-week 
dialogue at the White House. (Aide: "Mr. President, somebody has 
inserted a lie into your State of the Union address!" The President: 
"This is clearly the work of al Qaeda. We must invade Iraq immediately. 
Or is it Iran?") But somehow all these elements don't cohere. Alfred 
Hitchcock coined the term "McGuffin" to describe the gimmick that keeps 
the plot moving. He said you need one. The trouble here is not the lack 
of a McGuffin but a surplus of them.
   
You can't knock the names, though. Above all, there is the wonderfully 
Pynchonesque Valerie Plame. And yet the eponymous heroine of the affair 
has actually been offstage the entire time. Except for a brief 
appearance in Vanity Fair, posed rakishly with her husband in a sports 
car, it's been "Hamlet" without the Prince of Denmark.

The husband's name is forgettably bland. Joe Wilson? Then there is the 
aide to the vice president who answers to the call of "Snooker." Or is 
it Smoky? Or maybe Sunshine? In the typical movie about Washington, a 
character labeled as an aide to the vice president might just as well 
carry a sign saying, "I get killed off in the first five minutes." And 
yet Skipper, or Snappy, starts out as an obscure minor character and 
floats up steadily to the point where he is the central figure of the 
entire drama.

Anyway, let's recap. Two and a half years ago, Robert D. Novak published 
the name of an undercover CIA agent in his column. He then joined Plame 
offstage, where he has mysteriously remained ever since. Since he has 
known the answer all along, he may have been murdered to ensure his 
silence. Although there is no evidence for this, it makes as much sense 
as any other explanation for his disappearance from the story line.

Enter the liberal media establishment, led by the New York Times. First 
seen charging up a hill, demanding the appointment of a special 
prosecutor to get to the bottom of this outrage, it soon was charging 
back down, complaining that the special prosecutor was asking 
journalists to finger the leaker. Who else would you ask?

Judith Miller of the Times was the only reporter who declined any deal, 
at least at first, and went to jail rather than testify. An expert on 
germ warfare (the subject of her most recent book), she said that 
revealing her source would inevitably lead to a pandemic that would wipe 
out all of humankind. Or something like that. My notes are a bit hard to 
interpret.

Everyone assumed that Miller's source was Snapper. Him and/or Karl Rove 
(another great name, especially for the official bad guy). He said he 
didn't mind if she testified. She apparently didn't hear this, so a 
couple months later he said it louder and she said okay. Then she 
testified that she couldn't remember who told her that Valerie Plame was 
an undercover CIA agent, but it wasn't Skippy. And she conceded that 
much of what she reported in the run-up to the Iraq war, relying on 
administration leaks, was wrong. So she went to jail to protect a 
"source" who didn't give her the crucial fact at issue for a story she 
didn't write, but did give her inaccurate information for other stories. 
Huh?

The New York Times has started nervously backing away from Miller, like 
hikers trying to escape a rattlesnake. The rest of the media are fleeing 
without restraint. She's not a good poster child for the cause. But the 
cause itself remains somewhat bewildering. Why should you go to jail to 
protect the identity of a source who has used anonymity systematically 
and successfully to deceive you and your readers? Why should Scooter 
Libby go to jail -- involuntarily -- for having a conversation with you 
that you think the Constitution should protect and even encourage? 
Either this whole prosecution is nuts or the mainstream media view of 
reporters' rights is nuts. Which is it?

The Republicans have their own plotline they'd like to impose on this 
confusing blur of events. It's actually a dusted-off plotline from the 
Reagan Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s: all about an "overzealous 
prosecutor" and "bitter partisans" on the other side who want to 
"politicize policy differences." But two intervening developments have 
overroasted these chestnuts: Bill Clinton and Yahoo. When Sen. Kay 
Bailey Hutchison preemptively mocked perjury as what prosecutors charge 
you with if they can't find a real crime, it was the work of minutes for 
bloggers to find and post her comments from the Clinton impeachment 
about the transcendent seriousness of a perjury rap.

But despair not. Many of these contradictions and ambiguities will 
surely be resolved in Act Two. Please take your seats. The performance 
is about to begin.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701857.html
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