2007-07-04
complex
When I was young and wild and had just started blogging this blog, I did so mainly because it seemed like a reliable forum to 1) talk nearly incessantly about myself and 2)attack others for their mistakes. And although I was right in theory, in practice the whole operation has been more difficult than I expected. The mistakes of other people have turned out to be far more complex than I could possibly foreseen-- too complicated, in fact, to blindly ridicule without "background research" or "looking up the facts."
I don't know how you define journalistic integrity, and to be honest I don't really care. I personally find facts burdensome and avoid their use. But today I have little choice, since everything is all "blah blah Scooter Libby blah" and apparently there's a long story behind that. Until corruption comes with Cliff's notes, is it too much to ask for a proper scandal with a proper a blowjob?
Oh, true, the Plame scandal is simple enough to be summarized in one sentence ("White House staffers leaked a covert CIA agent's name to the press in an attempt to discredit a critic of the flawed intelligence used to support the Iraq War.") but the devil is in the details. Details I have forgot and don't want to look up. There are names and people and places - names like "Niger," which sounds very much like Nigeria and yet is not Nigeria - and people like "Scooter," which is the name of the Vice President's former chief of staff and yet is also the name of a muppet. Can a muppet be sentenced to jail time? If so, will the muppet serve the sentence alone, or are the puppeteers who operate his mouth and limbs also liable? Was he voiced by Jim Henson, and if so, how will the Justice Department punish the dead? Finding answers to these intricate questions of sentencing would require some sort of codified legal process, and the United States doesn't seem to have one of those.
Do you see what I mean, with the "complicated" and the "boring"? It is taking a long time to get to the punch line, which is going to be anticlimatic because its just going to be a stupid joke about Bush abusing his power anyway.
Really. You might as well stop reading right now.
So anyway, the President (surprise!) contested the appropriateness of the sentence given to Scooter. His skepticism of the judge's sentencing is understandable--it may well be excessive, given the hazy nature of his crime. I mean, should reporter-source privelege be an implied contract in which a journalist protects her source's identity in exchange for reliable information, or should it be an absolutist right wantonly abused by state officials to disinform the populace, crush their critics, and commit crimes from beyond the veil of a shield law? It's a difficult question for all of us, and easy to see where Libby may have been confused.
Did I promise you a punch line a few paragraphs back? I probably shouldn't have done that. I spent so much energy explaining and reviewing and backgrounding that I'm too exhausted to pull it together now. It's like collapsing in the twenty-sixth mile of the marathon.
Sure, by the celestial power vested in me as a blogger, I could wrack my brain for hours and come up with some clever witticism that would undoubtedly be hilarious. But that isn't the point. The point is that I shouldn't have to. Scandals should be accessible and easy to mock for all of us. America is meant to have a government of the people - and its scandals should be scandals of the people, too. Outing CIA agents, silencing war critics, covering for the false pretext of a false war, favoritism, sentencing, pardoning criminals - it's all too cerebral to have the kind of mass entertainment value that is the raison d'etre of the American criminal justice system. Where's the heart, the soul, the semen-stained dress?
Damn you, George Walker Bush! I could forgive you for mismanaging the economy and education system and the environment and disaster relief and the war. But I'll never forgive you mismanaging the age-old American tradition of simple, filthy scandal.
Never.
zebrasaur at 12:51 a.m.
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