Live from the Nuke Free Zone

The far right wing doesn’t want anybody to be concerned about the Wilson leak scandal, so they’ve been tossing a few lies and fallacies at the press, hoping they’ll go away. Here are some of the more obvious ones.

The “Coffee is supposed to be hot!” defense

This attempts to paint the Wilson leak as a trivial matter that the public should not care about. Through repeated exaggeration over decades, the US government has reduced the phrase “national security” to a state of meaninglessness. “National security” is cited whenever the government is doing something illegal and doesn’t want Congress or the press to find out about it. The Bush administration has been citing “national security” to hide evidence of their own incompenence.

There is a huge difference between the sorts of leaks which are threats to Bush’s political security in 2004 and the Wilson leak which actually, truly does harm the nation’s security by effectively ending the career of a veteran agent specializing in keeping nuclear weapons materials out of the hands of terrorists.

For extra points, redirect blame on the Democrats. Bush himself did this when he publicly denounced “Congress” for leaking information, “Congress” somehow still being a code word for the Democratic Party nearly nine years after the Republicans gained control of both houses.

Of course, the Bush defenders are also denying that Wilson’s wife was a secret agent, taking Novak’s changed story over the words of the CIA and Wilson who confirm her job. Which leads us to..

The “Wilson did it!” defense

In the grand Republican Party tradition of accusing the target of being what you are, this accuses Wilson himself of making the leak to discredit himself because Wilson is a n00b. Forget his exemplary 23-year career as an ambassador, George H.W. Bush’s #1 man in Iraq before the Gulf War, a member of the National Security Council specializing in African affairs, and so on. The implication is that Wilson is a house-husband who was sent to Niger by his wife, not Dick Cheney. Some reports suggest that creating this implication may have been the original intent of the leak in the first place.

This defense is largely the invention of Robert Novak, whose new story is eagerly repeated without question by the right-wing media who ignore that Novak’s journalistic integrity has been recently tarnished by a scandal involving revealing the identity of a CIA agent. It is easily rebuffed and discredited by every other recent news report which doesn’t simply echo Novak, and by earlier reports made by a reporter close to the leak, Robert Novak.

The “Bush really really cares!” defense

This is the most unbelievable of all. We’re expected to believe that Bush wants the leakers to be punished despite his ignoring the crime for the past several months and his refusal to lift a finger to clean his own house. The truth? Either Bush does not care or Bush supports the leak. The first is reason enough to impeach him, and the second is so dreadful it discourages consideration.