Bearings Confirmation

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After all the noise from the past couple weeks, I wanted to check to see if Conservatives were really that much different from Liberals. Fortunately, a quick look at an article from E.J. Dionne provides proof that the Liberal mind is very, very alien from the Conservative one.

Dionne’s latest offering is titled “The Cover-Up Worked”,
and once one begins to read, the reader discovers Mr. Dionne is discussing the Plame Affair and Patrick Fitzgerald. Anyone familiar with the facts would nod in appreciation that since Joe Wilson has not made any recent appearances in handcuffs before a judge, a cover-up does indeed seem to have happened. But it turns out Mr. Dionne does not believe in the cover-up suggested by the facts, but instead the cover-up drawn up in the paranoid minds of the farthest Left.

Dionne begins in disbelief that the subpeonae issued in October 2005 were not issued in 2004. Only the most naïve or conspiracy-prone would believe that an investigation in its early stages, as this was last year, should be allowed to influence a national election, especially as none of the candidates was believed to have any involvement in the matter. In actual fact, there still is no evidence of personal involvement by anyone running for the White House in 2004, which is effectively an admission of bitterness that Dionne wanted to bring up such an irrelevant attack.

Dionne, never one to worry much about getting facts straight, tries to fling mud at the Administration:

“the White House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.”

I love that statement, actually. Besides the plain fact that nineteen months after Joe Wilson tried his smear job, nothing at all has been produced to either support Wilson’s vitriolic charges or to suggest that President Bush or Vice-President Cheney has bothered to regard Wilson as anything more than the arrogant fraud he is. I find it amusing as well, that by tagging Wilson the “arch-critic on Iraq”, Dionne as much as admits the Left has nothing stronger than Wilson’s fables with which to press their case.

Dionne also has fallen in love with the legend of Valerie Plame, secret agent:

“As long as he was claiming that journalists were responsible for spreading around the name and past CIA employment of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, Libby knew that at least some news organizations would resist having reporters testify. The journalistic ``shield'' was converted into a shield for the Bush administration's cover-up.”

You know, a reasonable person might wonder why, if Plame was really a secret agent and the Wilsons loved their privacy, as Joe has claimed, they did a photo shoot with Vanity Fair. One might wonder, if the Wilsons were so careful to follow the rules and maintain security, why Valerie Plame was the principal in persuading the CIA to send Joe Wilson on a mission, without so much as the standard secrecy agreement. One might wonder why Wilson’s press conferences to discuss intelligence information were not investigated for the damage they did to the process and the lives of agents in place in the Middle East, or the chutzpah of writing a book and going on a press tour to claim a violation of privacy. One might wonder why Fitzgerald never asked about the laws Wilson may have broken, or whether secrecy laws are even applicable to an employee with no undercover field status at the time of the alleged incidents. But Mr. Dionne does not trouble himself to consider such inconvenient elements.

Dionne, crafting a new fairy tale to press the attack, says of the President:

“You can tell the president worries this won't work because on Monday, he did what he usually does when he's in trouble: He sought to divide the country and set up a bruising ideological fight. He did so by nominating a staunchly conservative judge to the Supreme Court.”

Yep, that’s right. Bush, it seems, did not nominate Alito because he thought Alito was qualified, or because he knows the man, or because there happens to be an opening in the United States Supreme Court that needs to be filled before some very important cases arrive there. Nope, Bush just wants to distract the nation. Yeah, sure, just keep telling yourself that, E.J., and pay no mind to the overwhelming likelihood that Alito will be on the SCOTUS bench before you write a cogent article.

Dionne then tries to excoriate Alito. Here is the best he could manage:

“Judge Samuel Alito is a red flag for liberals and red meat for Bush's socially conservative base. Alito has a long paper trail as a 15-year veteran of the Court of Appeals and a right-wing reputation so strong that he has been nicknamed ``Scalito," after Justice Antonin Scalia who is presumed to be Alito's philosophical soul mate. All this guarantees a huge battle that will serve the president even if Alito's nomination fails: Anything that ‘unites the base’ and distracts attention from the Fitzgerald investigation is good news for Bush.”

Heh. A nominee with a long record on paper, whom Conservatives almost unanimously love, and which heals a lot of the rancor from the Miers feuding. And Dionne considers this ‘divisive’. Actually, he’s partly right. It will separate Liberals from their former portion of power on the High Court, but beyond that, only the most fanatical screed-writer could consider this only a feint. But then, I am writing about E.J. Dionne.

Apparently aware of how badly he has failed to make his case, Dionne turns to outright lies:

“The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and in talking about Plame.”

Not in the least, Mr. Dionne. A prosecutor often wants indictments to show something for his work, and more than a few legal experts have said that at least three of the charges against Libby are extremely weak. At the very worst, there is still no evidence of any kind that the conspiracy alleged by Joe Wilson and repeated by the less sane on the Left, has any merit or substance. For all the digging and slander, there’s nothing to the charges, where the Administration is concerned.

The case against Libby is a sad, cautionary tale about letting Special Prosecutors run around with blank checks. It remains to be seen whether Libby did in fact, make statements in poor judgment, but there is no question at all that the initial purpose of the investigation, to determine whether an undercover CIA officer was endangered by a press leak, was abandoned because there was no danger to the individual, the leak (if indeed it happened) was not published (note that Novak’s column was never pursued), and the CIA employee involved was not in fact a field officer or undercover at the time of the alleged incident. The four sure things which come from review of Dionne’s column are these:

1. E.J. Dionne has still refused to return to reality, apparently so discomfited by Bush’s reelection that he prefers to dwell in a world of illusion instead of the one in fact;
2. The Joe Wilson attacks on the Bush Administration have failed utterly, even as their demonstrated falsity is hidden by their advocates;
3. That the Left would continue to attack and lie about Bush and Cheney is no surprise. That this is the best they can manage, shows how utterly bereft of strength and evidence they have become; and
4. The Conservative Movement may become fractious at times, and may hold heated debates. But there is no simply comparison between the Left and Right in terms of cogency or substance, and for the foreseeable future the Average American will come to understand that only one party has presence of mind; the other major party has simply lost theirs.