My newspaper column for this week: Watergate/Plamegate

[flowomo]

Also available online at:
www.cumberlink.com/articles/2005/10/20/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis01.txt


Where Plame case meets Watergate
By Rich Lewis, October 20, 2005

In one of those little coincidences that make life interesting, it just so happens I will be showing "All the President's Men" to my journalism class on Tuesday.

When I put the syllabus together back in August, I had no idea we would be watching the story about Watergate and Richard Nixon's downfall at almost exactly the same time that indictments are expected in the Valerie Plame affair.

Of course, the two cases don't match up in every detail, but they come close in some key respects.

"Watergate" became the umbrella term for a huge array of illegal activities being conducted by the White House, but the scandal began with a relatively "minor" crime — the burglary at the Watergate complex.

"Plamegate" also emerged as a relatively smallish allegation — that someone in the Bush administration sought revenge on whistleblower Joseph Wilson by leaking that his wife (Plame) worked for the CIA, which ended her career as an undercover agent.

But now the talk is that Plame might have been just a detail in a larger scheme to engineer public support for the war in Iraq. As rawstory.com reporters Larisa Alexandrovna and Jason Leopold put it, federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "may be looking at a broader conspiracy case of pre-war machinations by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and by the Pentagon's ultra-secret Office of Net Assessment, the former operating out of Dick Cheney's office and tasked with ‘selling' the war in Iraq, and the latter operating out of Defense Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith's office and tasked with creating a war to ‘sell,' as some describe."

U.S. News & World Report suggests that Cheney might resign over this, becoming the first vice president to resign since Spiro Agnew, Nixon's vice president, though Agnew was chased out by criminal charges of tax evasion, not for any involvement in Watergate.

The press is playing a huge role in Plamegate, as it did in Watergate, but in quite a different way.

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein won a Pulitzer Prize for their dogged work in cracking the Watergate case. They are widely regarded as journalistic heroes — and even got that movie made about them.

In Plamegate, the central press figure is New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed for not revealing the source who leaked Plame's name to her.

But Miller is widely regarded as a villain in the case — and, some say, was actively recruited by the WHIG to write stories hyping the claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In fact, the New York Times later apologized, saying it had found "a number" of its pre-war stories included information that "seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."

The Times' embarrassing confession did not mention Miller by name, but she wrote most of the discredited stories — all in support of the administration's line that Saddam was ready and able to blow us away, which turned out to be false.

The big political question is whether Watergate and Plamegate will converge at two critical points — will Plamegate bring down a president now, and cost the Republicans the White House later, as Watergate did?

Rumor suggests — and that's really all we have — that anywhere between two and 22 White House officials could be indicted soon, but nothing suggests Bush will be among them. Cheney seems to be as high as this goes, for the moment anyway.

Of course, Nixon was never indicted, though he was an "unindicted co-conspirator." And White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused yesterday to deny the accuracy of a New York Daily News story alleging that Bush has known for two years that Karl Rove was involved in the Plame leak. What you know and when you knew it matters, as we learned in Watergate.

The second question concerns whether indictments of any officials would lead to a Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Public disgust with the Nixon White House led to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. His promise of "a government as good as its people" was a direct assault on the perceived ethical bankruptcy of the Republican party then. It worked, even though his opponent was Gerald Ford and not Nixon.

That could happen this time, assuming crimes are found and indictments issued.

But blogger Bill Scher of LiberalOasis.com proposes that we look to another case for guidance here: the Iran-Contra scandal.

After that scandal, people went to jail, Ronald Reagan's popularity fell, his agenda stalled but "there wasn't any permanent damage to the GOP. The party retained the presidency in 1988. Beyond that, it never lost its rep for defending our national security. Why? Because the Reagan Administration's illegal actions could still be seen as part of its commitment to defeating Communism."

Very interesting parallel there. Even if Fitzgerald proves that some of WHIG's activities were illegal, voters might still view those tactics as earnestly patriotic efforts to protect national security — and still favor the GOP candidate in 2008.

And that is especially true if Democrats continue to be the clueless opposition — too fearful to oppose Republican ideas and too confused to propose new ones.

Rich Lewis' e-mail address is [e-mail]

[dbeach]

1. oh how history repeats BUT the villains canot learn

what we ALL learned as kids

Crime does not Pay..

The ole timers would say the DC pols are OK but a bunch of crooks.

NOW they are no longer OK.

[Demeter]

2. Iran-Contra Was Corrupted By the Reagan Glory Story

The press aided and abetted the GOP in trivializing, poo-pooing and otherwise neglecting to educate and inform the public about the corruption that riddled the White House and Congress, as manifested by IranContra, although by no means limited to it.

But then, they also would have had to come clean about Reagan's mental incapacity, which they were also concealing. It was a national disgrace, that law and precedent was so twisted and defiled to spare the feelings of a gaga old man and his dotty wife and their hordes of koolaid drinking idol worshippers.

This cannot be allowed to happen again. There must be criminal prosecutions, at home and in the world courts; there must be irrevocable jail time and confiscation of ill-gotten gains, and careers must be stopped for all time, not just for 18 months and a pardon. The message must be: Do this and die; so don't do it!