Bushie Spin Machine and Novak

BUSINESS AS USUAL

So what’s new?

Remember when administration apologists were aghast at the mini-media explosion over just “sixteen words” in the State of the Union address? They had a point, as I believe I said back then, when they argued that the case for war did not rest on just the Niger-uranimum story. It rested on many arguments, including: the threat of WMD; the relationship between Saddam and al-Qaida; the nascent Iraqi nuclear program; the certitude that the U.S. would bring democracy, not only to Iraq but also to much of the Arab world; and the ability of Iraq to pay for its occupation—having welcomed the invasion as a “liberation” and therefore citizens would be thrilled to do so.

In other words, it wasn’t just 16 dishonest words that misled the country into war. It was closer to 160,000. The Niger story was just business as usual. Much the same is true of the Wilson affair, part deux.

Many allegedly smart people are expressing shock and outrage over the behavior of the administration honchos who were willing to compromise national security for the purposes of carrying out a political vendetta. The editors of The Washington Post expect Bush to mean it when he says he wants to get to the bottom of this because “leaks are wrong.”

Andy Sullivan, as if taking a wrong turn from the mens’s room in Rick’s American Café and discovering a gambling den in the back, writes, “If this pans out, it really is an outrageous piece of political malice. I may have misjudged this one at first, because I couldn’t quite see the motive behind it.” If this pans out? Hello? “This” is the way they do things in the Bush administration. Somebody crosses them and bang, nothing — not even the identity of CIA personnel and the laws of the United States — is going to stand in their way of trying to ruin him. Did you see what they did to the triple-amputee Max Cleland? Did you see how they used McCarthyite tactics against Tom Daschle?

I seem to recall John Ashcroft saying that anyone who even raised any questions about the administration’s conduct of the war on Terrorism was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Can anyone imagine that this same loyal Christian soldier in Bush’s holy war is going to get to the bottom of this if it leads all the way to Rove? Wanna buy a bridge?

And finally, Bob Novak, surprise surprise, thinks he’s done nothing wrong. Again, this is not exactly news. Novak has made a career of doing the bidding of extremist right-wing politicians seeking to smear those who oppose them. He has reported many things that turned out to be false during his long career but virtually nothing that does not serve his ideological agenda. When I was profiling Novak, and writing my book on the punditocracy, he was always going off the record with me to say nasty things about his friends and colleagues. You can read some of them, here.

And Novak’s most famous scoop, the one where an alleged Democratic colleague of George McGovern’s in the Senate termed his candidacy to be one of “acid, abortion and amnesty” — that pretty much sank the entire campaign — has never been confirmed. When I appeared on Crossfire with Novak once he slandered Izzy Stone as a Soviet spy when that base accusation had already been disproved, knowing that dead men can’t sue. (The Weekly Standard has invited him repeatedly to repeat this scurrilous slur, to its dishonor as well.)

That Novak, too, after wrapping himself in the flag, would allow himself to be used for so sleazy a purpose is perfectly consistent with the rest of his career. The fact that he has remained so prominent, at the Post and CNN, is itself a kind of indictment of the Washington media establishment and its willingness to bend the rule for its own kind Tweet