The President as Traitor

Boy, these days one can almost feel sorry for Scott McClellan and some of the other underlings carrying water for the Rove administration. Almost, but not quite, since the members of this cabal have all known one another forever, making it the consummate “Old Boy Network” – No, they all knew they were making a Devil’s Bargain way back when Bush was just wrecking Texas, not the entire country, with Dionysian designs on the entire fucking globe.

So no, I’m not quite mustering the sympathy for ‘ole Scotty-Boy. I watch the press briefings and see the flop-sweat in high-def. The Washington press corps seems to have gone in for a collective MRI and rediscovered that they are indeed vertebrates, in possession of a spine, and they have been showing it lately. There has been an absence of softball questions like “Can you tell us, what has been the President’s favorite parade?” in the past few weeks.

Nope. It seems that the mainstream (corporate) media is finally catching up to the blogosphere in regard to the outing of CIA asset Valerie Plame Wilson as an act of treason committed for political revenge against her husband, who dared speak truth to power. They are only a couple years late, but well, better late than never, I always say. What the hell, welcome aboard fellas. Get the notes from someone who was here for the entire class.

It was painful – in a schadenfreude sort of way – to watch Scotty-Boy under the bright lights, tap-dancing out on that skinny limb, trying to play down the act of treason committed by the president himself. He didn’t leak, he “declassified information” in the interest of “the public good.”

Excuse me, but I gotta say this: WHAT THE FUCK? And by the way, that spine the press corps finally located needs calcium, because nobody shot back “Excuse me, but how can outing an intelligence asset EVER be in the interest of the public good?” Maybe on the Bizzaro world, but not here in the reality based community.

My tax dollars recruited Ms. Plame, trained her, and paid her salary. There is no indication that her cover was ever compromised and there is no indication that her work as an undercover operative and a weapons analyst was ever anything but exemplary. She was unmasked and revealed to the world for the basest political reasons. Her husband told the truth and pissed of some people in power whose interest was protected as long as the lie was protected. So to punish him, one of my best employees got shafted. How the hell can that ever be played up as “in the interest of the public good?” This member of the public wishes she was still on the job.

Ms. Plame and her family were not the only people compromised. Real human beings, intelligence assets recruited by Ms. Plame, foreign nationals who risked life and limb to provide American officials with intelligence information, were compromised. That no deaths occurred in the fallout is, quite frankly, amazing.


I have sat in an Officers Club as recently as last week and discussed this topic with current and retired Intelligence Officers (full disclosure – my husband was an intel officer after the Titan mission was complete.) When this topic comes up, jaws set firmly, muscles twitch, faces cloud over…I haven’t seen expressions like this on the faces of military men since my father and his fellows were criticizing U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. (I first heard the expression “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining” about a month before my dad retired. One of his shipmates used that expression during a back-yard beer-and-BBQ Sunday afternoon in the back yard of our last base housing unit. I never forgot it. Twenty years later when it entered the lexicon, I smiled and reminded myself that the Navy comes up with all the most colorful expressions.)

Nobody laughed when the TV above the bar flickered the image of Bush looking under his desk in the Oval for the WMD’s. “Nope. Not under there.” The officers drinking in the O Club that day were not amused. Many of them had attended funerals for troops that fell in battle who had served under them, who died looking for those fucking WMD’s that never existed and are now a big fucking joke to their supposed commander-in-chief. He is as AWOL from reality as he was from the Texas Air National Guard. (Of course, the country was a lot better off when the impotent little prick was drunk in a titty-bar doing blow off the ass of a stripper than we are with him in the oval office. His commanders might have been onto something. Maybe he didn’t slide as an act of political favoritism after all.)

The bartender picked up the remote and turned off the set, and someone else played the jukebox. It stayed quiet for quite a while.

“If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it and we’ll take the appropriate action.” said the President in 2003. “If anyone in this administration was involved in it (the CIA leak), they will no longer be in this administration.” Mr. McClellan reiterated soon after. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for Bush to resign. You’ll turn blue, pass out, and possibly hurt yourself in the fall.) Now we find out that the president himself was the source of the leak, and it was for the most crass and craven of reasons…to save his political hide. Turns out that the leaker he was so distressed about was none other than: Himself! (BWA HA HA HA HA HA!)

That we Democrats fail to get the finer points between committing treason and declassifying information is “engaging in crass politics” says McClellan. The audacity of that statement simply boggles the mind. Nope. Sorry. But hey, Scotty, thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you on the way out. For starters, these lovely silver bracelets…

This simply cannot be spun. The outing of intelligence assets is an act of treason. How the hell can that ever be “declassified information in the interest of the public good?”

How about my descriptive instead? “Sinking a dagger in the back of an ally in an effort to save your own sorry lying ass (however temporarily) from the swinging end of a rope?”

I have said it before and I will say it again. If it was 1776, instead of 2006, you just know these smarmy bastards would every last one of them be Tories who would have sold out Washington and the Continental Army for thirty pieces of silver.

Traitors and Judases, to a man.