Speaking of Cement

So it turns out it was Karl Rove who outed Valerie Plame. I wonder if anyone will care. This is sort of like the old TV serials, where at the end of each episode a voice would ask the burning questions the audience was supposed to be pondering at that point. Will Sweet Sue escape from Dastardly Dan? Will Hero Harry find her in time? Will it bother Americans that this arrogant ass revealed sensitive information having to do with our national security to a reporter whom he knew was sure to make that information public? Will enough Americans understand the significance of what happened that there will be a strong enough public outcry to force an investigation, Senate hearings, any response? Will they be outraged that the White House put the life of a covert CIA agent and those of her contacts in jeopardy to get back at her husband for telling the world that the reasons Bush was giving for attacking Iraq weren’t true? Will the Democrats finally find their voices and actually accuse the White House of misdeeds?

For the past few years Bush and his cohorts haven’t missed a chance to remind us that we are under threat from “terrorists” and so must submit to whatever indignity they prescribe in the name of “national security.” These reminders are meant to keep us in a state of constant low-level fear. That fear hangs over the collective soul of Americans as we wait for the other shoe to drop from the sky. The fear is doing its job of making us compliant, willing, if not eager, to hand over our civil rights in exchange for an illusion of safety. Even though we know the illusion isn’t real, it’s all we have right now, so we cling to it like a national teddy bear, but we pay a dear price for it.

Supposedly, the threat is so great that the only way we can stave off another attack is to agree to open our private lives to state scrutiny, to throw our children and grandchildren into generations of crushing debt to pay for an ill-conceived “war on terror,” (while still managing to provide enormous tax breaks for the very rich, of course), to keep silent while the most corrupt and secretive White House in history bankrupts our nation, dismantles our Constitution and installs its own religious Taliban in its place. If the threat is so great that this is the price we must pay in return for safety, then is this not a particularly dangerous time for anyone to be compromising our safety by revealing secret information?

It’s not like this administration doesn’t know how to keep a secret, when they want to. One of the first executive orders issued by Bush after his first appointment as president was the sealing of the documents of prior presidencies as well as his own so that the American people will never know what happened behind closed doors in his father’s administration or his. We still don’t know who attended the secret energy talks with Dick Cheney, or what was discussed there. They found it appropriate to keep secret the source codes for the paperless Diebold voting machines that sucked so many votes into a black hole to be spit out as votes for Bush, no matter what they said going in. Yes, they are really good about keeping secrets in what is supposed to be an open government. But this, they tell us, is a peculiarly dangerous time, and so secrecy must be imposed in the name of “national security.” Does not the threat of attack that they keep telling us is so great lend a particular urgency to the task of keeping state secrets, well, secret? And doesn’t anyone who, at this dangerous time, makes such secrets public in retaliation for criticizing the president come perilously close to treason?

When he thought it unlikely that anyone would find out that his sidekick, Karl Rove, was the source of the leak, Bush told reporters, told the American people, that if there was a leak in the White House he wanted to find out who it was and that person would be “taken care of.” Uh-huh. Well, okay Mister “president,” it was your buddy, Karl; so what are you going to do about it? Will George fire Karl? Will Karl face indictment? And what about Robert Novak? …