"Fitzgerald's long work hours made him ineligible to adopt a cat"

Bush_Eats_Beef

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Mon Oct-24-05 03:44 PM
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"Fitzgerald's long work hours made him ineligible to adopt a cat"

Edited on Mon Oct-24-05 03:44 PM by Bush_Eats_Beef

Plame games

The GOP spin: Smear Wilson (again), belittle the charges. The Dems' spin: Bush and his enforcers lied us into war.

By Michael Scherer

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/24/plame/index.html

Oct. 24, 2005 | WASHINGTON -- Long ago, Washington's political attack dogs resigned themselves to the fact that they have nothing on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The man is so squeaky clean that just about the only dirt besmirching his public record concerns long work hours that made him ineligible to adopt a cat. Later this week, the most powerful men and women in the country will sit helplessly on the sidelines as Fitzgerald decides whether to indict White House officials in the case of Valerie Plame, a clandestine CIA agent whose identity was leaked to the press by the Bush administration.

But as soon as Fitzgerald announces his decision, in a press conference, a walk from the grand jury room to the magistrate's office in U.S. District Court, or a posting on his Web site, the political détente will end. The knives will come out. It will be an all-out rhetorical war.

Though still unfinished, the two narratives of attack, one for Democrats and the other for Republicans, have been in the works for weeks. "We have prepared and are preparing for multiple scenarios," said Republican National Committee spokesman Brian Jones, who recently put out a press release calling former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean the leader of the "Merlot Democrats." On Friday, Jones began distributing updated fact sheets on Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, whose criticism of President Bush's rationale for war sparked the current investigation. "Wilson calls the United States an 'imperial power,'" reads one Republican talking point.

Wilson's character is still fair game for Republicans hoping to deflect attention from the possibility that senior White House advisors, like Karl Rove or I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, may have broken the law. The RNC fact sheet claims, among other things, that Wilson admits to having used drugs in his youth, which is true. The fact sheet also claims that the CIA identity of Wilson's wife was not a secret when it was disclosed to the press, a falsehood belied by the fact that Plame's employer, the CIA, requested the current investigation. But these attacks also reveal a striking irony: Republicans plan to defend themselves by continuing the very same smear campaign that started the Fitzgerald investigation. On Sunday, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, debuted another spin designed to protect the White House. She downplayed the gravity of a perjury or obstruction of justice charge, two possible outcomes of the current investigation. "Look at Martha Stewart," Hutchison said on NBC's "Meet the Press," invoking the heavily derided perjury case against Stewart, who ended up serving a short stint in jail. "We are seeing grand juries and U.S. attorneys and district attorneys that go for technicalities, sort of a gotcha mentality in this country." A third approach under consideration is to attack Fitzgerald, whom even the president has praised for his "dignified" investigation, for being a detail-oriented stickler. Witness Monday's Wall Street Journal editorial: "The fact that the prosecutor has waited as long as he has -- until the last days of the grand jury -- suggests that he considers this a less than obvious case," the editorial board writes. "A close call deserves to be a no call."