[Mb-civic] Bob Herbert

[Mike Blaxill]

Smoke Gets in Our Eyes
    By Bob Herbert
    The New York Times

    Monday 31 October 2005

    There's a reason so many top officials of the
Bush administration treat the truth as if it were
kryptonite.

    More than anything else, the simple truth has
the potential to destroy the Bush gang.

    Scooter Libby was one of the most powerful
figures in the administration, Dick Cheney's most
highly trusted aide and a champion of the
wholesale flim-flammery that led us into the
crucible of Iraq. I haven't heard anyone express
surprise that he would lie in the service of the
administration.

    But if the federal indictment returned last
week in Washington is to be believed, Mr. Libby
lied with the kind of reckless disregard for his
own interests that would suggest he had become
unhinged. It was as if he'd waved red flags in
front of the grand jury and cried, "Come get me!"

    You will hardly ever hear of someone who is
skilled in the art of government, and a lawyer to
boot, telling the kind of transparent lies that
Mr. Libby is accused of telling the F.B.I. and a
federal grand jury.

    The indictment says, for example, that he
told the feds he'd had a discussion with N.B.C.'s
Tim Russert in which Mr. Russert asserted that
"all the reporters" knew that Valerie Wilson, the
wife of the former diplomat Joseph Wilson, worked
for the C.I.A. In fact, according to the
indictment and Mr. Russert, no such discussion
occurred.

    Mr. Libby himself was spreading the word
about Ms. Wilson and, as Patrick Fitzgerald, the
special counsel investigating the case, asserted,
"he lied about it afterwards, under oath and
repeatedly."

    Who knows why Mr. Libby did what he did.
Misplaced loyalty? An irrepressible need to be
punished for his sins? Maybe he's just a dope. Of
greater consequence for the republic is the fact
that Mr. Libby is no hapless functionary who
somehow lost his way. He's a symptom, the hacking
cough that should alert us to a dangerous
national disease, and that's the Bush
administration's culture of deceit.

    Scooter Libby was the main man of the most
powerful vice president in the history of the
United States. The most important aspect of the
prosecution of Mr. Libby for perjury and
obstruction of justice is the tremendous
spotlight it is likely to shine on the way this
administration does its business - its
relentless, almost pathological, undermining of
the truth, and its ruthless treatment of
individuals who cling to the old-fashioned notion
that the truth matters.

    Condoleezza Rice, for example, gave us
nightmare fantasies of mushroom clouds and
declared on television that aluminum tubes seized
en route to Iraq "were only really suited for
nuclear weapons programs." Perhaps she forgot
that a year earlier her own staff had been
advised that experts had serious doubts about
that. In any event, she would be promoted to
secretary of state.

    Gen. Eric Shinseki met a different fate when,
as chief of staff of the Army, he dared to speak
an uncomfortable truth to a Senate committee:
that it would take several hundred thousand
soldiers to pacify postwar Iraq. There was no
promotion for him. His long and honorable career
evaporated.

    That's the game plan of this administration,
to fool the people as much as possible (not just
on the war, but on taxes, Social Security, energy
policy and so on) and punish, if not destroy,
anyone who tries to counter the madness with the
truth.

    Most members of the administration are more
artful than Scooter Libby when they send out the
smoke that is designed to hide the truth on
important matters. They dissemble and give
themselves wiggle room, like Dick Cheney when he
said, truthfully but deceptively on "Meet the
Press," that he didn't know Joseph Wilson. The
vice president didn't know him personally, but he
sure knew what was going on.

    The art of Bush-speak is to achieve the
effect of a lie without actually getting caught
in a lie. That's what administration officials
did when they deliberately fostered the
impression that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al
Qaeda and thus was involved in the Sept. 11
attacks. This is an insidious way of governing,
and the opposite of what the United States should
be about.

    It should tell you something that the
administration's resident sleazemeister, Karl
Rove, who is up to his ears in this mess but has
managed so far to escape indictment, continues to
be viewed not as an embarrassment, but as
President Bush's most important and absolutely
indispensable asset.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/103105N.shtml