The slow-motion trap | Salon.com: "The White House's initial response was for an anonymous 'senior administration official' to leak to the New York Times that Bush had played 'only a peripheral role in the release of the classified material and was uninformed about the specifics,' as the Times reported. The White House source, trying to remove the president from the glare, fingered Cheney as the instigator.No wonder people are starting to make comparisons between the "fictional President Logan" and our current fictitious President (I even made a comment, but it got lost in the Bush thread).
On Monday, Bush appeared at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where a graduate student asked him about his role in the leak of classified information. The president, who had once perplexedly said, 'I want to know the truth,' replied, 'I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth.' Was blind but now he sees? Grace (or Patrick Fitzgerald) had led him home.
Bush acted in the beginning as an innocent injured party. He pretended to be utterly baffled by events. His feigned unawareness was intended to deflect attention from himself. His call to find those responsible was to ensure that the facts would never be known. When he was exposed, he donned a new guise. Instead of the seeker of truth, he became the truth teller.
But the classified information he authorized to be selectively leaked -- that Saddam Hussein was seeking to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger for use in nuclear weapons -- was not the truth, and its release was intended to buttress a falsehood. Indeed, last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told journalist Robert Scheer that the notorious 16 words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address concerning Iraq's supposed efforts to buy uranium -- the claim that former ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate -- were bogus. 'That was a big mistake,' Powell said. 'It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it." Thus, three years after the event, Powell finally admitted publicly that the president spoke falsely about the reason for war, that there were interested parties inside the administration determined to put false words in his mouth, and that the secretary of state, knowing this, lacked the power to stop it.
Bush as the man of truth offered a convoluted explanation of the declassification process. He retreated into technical legalisms that as the man of action he had disdained. "You're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document," he said at Johns Hopkins. "I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches."
Once again, he offered a misleading statement. The completely irregular process of Bush's declassification, so unprecedented that Scooter Libby was unsure it was legal, was a badge of guilt. The declassification reflected a vengeful impulse against a critic and was an inadvertent confession of the fragility and tenuousness of Bush's case for war. "
Day by day, minute by minute this country is changing, and not for the better. I never thought I would live in a third world country and now I don't even have to move, it came to me. Unless we have 2006 elections that are untainted this nation will cease to exist. It will be more like a Stalinist society without the death camps (so far).
Can you tell I feel a little better this morning? Nausea level is still about a 6, but I can't tell if it is because of the news or because I'm still sick.
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