We've Been Here Before

Anna Quindlen gets it... this is not about just one leak, it is about a perversion of our form of governance by using character assassination, cultivation of fear and deliberate intimidation to make a mockery of constitutional guarantees of democratic governance. What good is a a right to free speech if everyone is afraid to exercise if for fear of being labeled unpatriotic. It should be treason to lie a country into war, and if Prosecuter Fitzpatrick is as able as he is reputed, those guilty will soon be sweating it out under indictment.

During each election cycle, we ponder the question of whether character matters. Of course it does. Does anyone doubt that the continued prosecution of this war has to do with the personality of the commander in chief, a man who is stubborn and calls it strength, who wears blinders and calls it vision? When he vowed to invade Iraq, the advisers he heeded were those who, like him, had never seen combat. The one who had was marginalized and is now gone. The investigation of who leaked what to whom, of what the reporter knew and how she knew it, may be about national security and journalistic ethics, but at its base it is about something more important: the Nixonian lengths to which these people will go to shore up a bankrupt policy and destroy those who cross them on it.

The most unattractive trait of the American empire is American arrogance, which the president embodies and which this war elevated.