Talking Corruption: Valerie Plame

Dear President Bush:

I’d be surprised if there were, in United States history, a more corrupt administration than yours. If a Democratic president had committed half of the crimes that you have, he or she would have been impeached a good dozen times. The GOP impeached Bill Clinton for lying about something he should never have been asked in the first place.

The Valerie Plame affair, while just one example, serves as a perfect illustration of your administration’s corruption, so it's a good starting point in a long list of your administration's scandals. It started when her husband, Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, entitled, “What I didn’t Find in Africa.” In it, Wilson detailed your exaggerated, cherry-picked, unreliable bullshit (ok, I suppose “unreliable bullshit” may be a redundant use of adjectives– I don’t think there’s another kind of bullshit) claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. This was your way of “proving” the more direct unreliable bullshit claim that Saddam intended to develop nuclear (nukular) weapons, and thus justify your “pre-emptive” attack.

Y’all on the right were stunned! This whole democracy and freedom of speech and press and the right to dissent clearly went too far this time! What the hell did this jackass think that Democracy means, that we get to criticize our Glorious Fuehrer? Maybe you all should have put him in “re-education camp,” or something. Or maybe you could kill his wife, an undercover CIA agent. Wait, that’s it, I’ve got it! You could compromise his wife’s security by publicly releasing her classified identity! What an original idea I have!

Shit, you already thought of that.

So, Robert Novak (herein referred to as soulless bastard) responds to Wilson’s op-ed in his syndicated column for the Washington Post. And he identified Wilson’s wife as a CIA agent named Valerie Plame, who was an operative on weapons of mass destruction.

So who was the source of information for soulless bastard? Well, for one, it was Soulless Bastard. Ok, there may be some confusion here, since you may think soulless bastard and Soulless Bastard are the same person. They’re not: the former (lowercase letters) was the name I just gave to Robert Novak; the latter (capitalized) is, of course, Karl Rove. So, Rove told Novak about Plame, according to Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press, who wrote an article on the forthcoming book from Scott McClellan. That’s right, Scott McClellan, your former press secretary, states in his new book that both Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were directly involved in leaking Plame’s covert identity. Wow. Are you going to argue your own press secretary is a closet Democrat? And what’s more? He also said that when he denied involvement by anyone in the white house, he was knowingly passing along the false information at the behest of Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney and the President himself.

(Apuzzo, 2007)

What?

And nothing came of this. You consistently said that you would get rid of anyone who “leaked her identity,” which soon thereafter turned into, “anyone who committed a crime,” because amazingly no one actually took the heat for committing treason. (Again, I ask anyone to imagine what would have happened to a Democratic administration who did the same thing.) Scooter Libby is the only one who gets prosecuted for anything at all – not for the leak itself, but for lying about it – and you commuted his sentence. You, at the very least, knew about the leaks in your administration and did nothing, and instructed McClellan to lie about it. This by itself is grounds for impeachment; indeed, if it had been a Democrat, the GOP would have had his head on a pitchfork. But you’re a Republican, so you’re above the law.

Only because you’re a Republican and because we have a complicit media did this not cause far more outrage in the country.

Source
Apuzzo, M. (2007, November 21). Former aide blames Bush for leak deceit. The Associated Press.