Yes sir

Senior Whitehouse officials Karl Rove and “Scooter” Libby disclosed the name of CIA secret agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband for telling the truth about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. Rather than admit that a crime was committed in an act of petty political retaliation the Whitehouse is trying to spin this on three fronts: denial/pleading ignorance, slandering her husband Joseph Wilson, and of course blaming the spiteful and vindictive democratic minority that insists on playing partisan politics.

The talking heads are all over the news programs defending Rove and Libby saying they didn’t actually disclose her name and/or they didn’t realize she was a secret agent. Yeah right. I’m sure it just came up in casual unrelated conversation eight days after her husband publicly debunked the administration’s main justification for invading Iraq – namely that Iraq was building a nuclear weapon which they surely intended to detonate in the middle of small town USA during the annual high school sock hop.

And any time you’re pleading ignorance to a crime it’s always a good idea to try and distract the American public because after all with 99% of the population suffering from an acute case of ADD all you have to do is get the American public to think about something else, anything else, for 5 minutes and it apparently has the same effect as those cool mind eraser gadgets from Men in Black. So Joseph Wilson is a liar and cheat and a crazy man that doesn’t pay his taxes – um, ok but what about the part about two Whitehouse officials committing a crime and then lying about it? Can we please get back to the point? After all nobody elected Joseph Wilson to anything, he was appointed, so let’s put the focus back on the officials elected to represent us. Liar, liar pants on fire sounds an awful lot like WMD, TERROR, WMD to me.

My personal favorite strategy, and I’m sure yours too, is the assertion that the democrats are behind this. Damn those anti-freedom-pro-gay marriage-commie-loving-soft-on-crime liberals. Actually I’d really, really like to hear Whitehouse press secretary Scott McCullen explain this logic to me. The democrats, who don’t control anything in Congress, are somehow pulling the chains of the special prosecutor appointed by the President to uncover the source of the leak. I see, now it makes perfect sense. Let’s sick the NRA on ‘em.

It occurs to me that what’s really needed here isn’t damage control but a beat down. This special prosecutor seems to be doing his job a little too well, and the administration clearly knows how to deal with people they appoint to do a job when they do it a little too well.

At least Bush is taking a leadership role in all of this pledging to fire anyone in his administration found guilty of committing a crime, which would sound pretty righteous had he not said 18 months ago that he would fire anybody in his administration involved in the leak. But in the President’s defense he made that assertion before he knew how insistent this special prosecutor was going to be at uncovering the truth.

Seriously what is actually pretty troubling about all of this is the message it sends to other people working in the intelligence field which seems to be “tell me what I want to hear”. If the CIA, FBI, and NSA are reduced to mouthpieces for the current administration don’t we lose something? Don’t we lose the truthful intelligence those agencies were created to provide to the President and instead just get more spin? Sure doesn’t make me feel much safer.