Same lame Plame blame game
By Beldar on Politics
A lawyer friend who also reads and comments here with some frequency suggested that I stay away from this topic until my blood pressure has really stabilized. But having finally caught up on my reading — there's no wifi at The Methodist yet, and I had to spend almost a week disconnected from the net, drat! — I can now comment pithily and pungently, without popping any pressurized pathways.
Any blogger, pundit, cable-TV talking head, national print or electronic media columnist, major- or minor-party chairman, or flack from any part of the socio-political spectrum, or anyone else who claims to know all about — or even to have deeply penetrating and almost-certainly-valid insights into — the entire Plame/Wilson/Niger/Novak stuff ... is farting through his/her hat and trying to convince you that it's gospel singing.
I'm tired of reading and listening to it, I'm tired of pretending that it's well modulated or that any of it smells sweet, and I'm still not going to play the gossip-and-speculation game about "how it's all going to turn out." In fact, the one thing we can be abso-positively-freakin'-lutely certain about is that not even any of the principals — whether Amb. & Mrs. Wilson, Messrs. Novak, Rove, Lewis, Cooper, and Fitzgerald et al., Mlle. Miller, His Honor Hogan, Dubya, and/or the D.C. Dogcatcher — know how this is likely to turn out either.
So just respect the process, people!
The process is designed to figure out whether there's enough reason to believe that a crime has been committed in order to charge someone with that, and then to figure out whether he/she is guilty, and if so, of what.The process doesn't always work perfectly, and it rarely works quickly. But it works far better than anything else anyone's come up with yet. We've been polishing it up for hundreds of years. And in this particular set of matters, it's way far from being finished yet.
The only people it's worth getting worked up about at all yet are those who've been trying to subvert or short-circuit the process. It's hard to imagine a circumstance in which Judy Miller will ever be more than a supporting actress in this drama/comedy/melodrama, but right now she's seized the stage and won't let any of the other actors speak their lines, play their parts, or demonstrate whether the pistol brandished in Act 1 must indeed be fired in Act 3. Judy Miller is demonstrating why there's a reason that Nature rots tomatoes and shapes them so as to minimize their air resistance and fit comfortably to hand. But right now, except for her, we don't know who deserves the tomatoes or the roses, the yawn, the golf-clap, or the wild applause.
There's a reason they call the process "due." Until the process has proceeded, the proceedings aren't properly probative. Hence my plea to the blogosphere: Please let the prosecutor and the grand jury — and depending on their results, then possibly a trial court and a petit jury, and then maybe some appellate courts — just "due" it. |
