Puppeteering a Kiss-Ass Press

For a time it looked as if the dominating non-event of the day was going to be the U.S. Senate’s impending vote on an alleged “compromise” that would put “millions” of Mexicans on the path to American citizenship (an assumption half-pregnant with arrogance: why do these lawmakers think Mexicans’ priority is citizenship, as opposed to livelihood?). I call it a non-event because whatever the Senate decides will either die in an eventual absence of agreement with the House of Representatives, or, should it become law, will result in an administrative nightmare that will have every migrant crossing the border carrying a copy of Kafka’s Castle with him, as a primer on the Department of Homeland Security’s morbid ways and means. Then the other non-event of the day broke: the allegation, by the Vice of Darkness’ former chief of staff “Scooter” Libby, that Bush authorized the leak of classified Iraq war intelligence in order to rebut a CIA analyst’s debunking of Iraqi nuclear threats. This, too, is a non-story that will garner all the headlines in the morning because the White House spin dervishes, along with a compliant press, will do to it what they did with the story about Bush being told, twenty-four hours before Katrina hit, of the potential disaster should the levees be overrun: Semantics silenced the smoking gun. Bush didn’t react about Katrina, you see, because his pals only warned about levees being topped, not breached. Big, huge difference (regardless of the disaster that did actually happen while Bush was gallivanting around Arizona and California, chatting up Medicare and one more military memorial, while his Vice of Darkness might as well have been on the dark side of the Moon and his Secretary of State was shoe-shopping in Manhattan). In this “breaking” CIA case, the dervishes will swarm around the convenient distinction, so well spelled out by the Washington Post, that although Libby “gave a reporter sensitive information from a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in a July 2003 conversation with the president’s approval, he did not disclose the CIA employment of Valerie Plame.” Missed, of course, will be the Lord and Savior president’s role as deceiver-in-chief. Read the rest...