Reading notes

Frank Rich wows me again with his take on the Treasongate scandal, reading between the lines that it’s even bigger than it appears:

This scandal is not about [Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or … Robert Novak] in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players. …

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit — the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes — is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

For many days now I’ve had this odd feeling I can’t decide whether is foreboding or the inchoate precognition that a tidal wave is comin’.

[via Armando]

Further: Fascinating backstory on the special prosecutor, subtitled “whether probing a leak or trying terrorists, Patrick Fitzgerald is relentless.” Against those who would wage war based on lies, slaughter 10,000s of innocents, and bankrupt the U.S. for personal gain, we need relentless.

Still further: Josh summarizes Frank’s piece as

This is about a president who knowingly took his country to war on the basis of lies and the war on the homefront against anyone and everyone who’s tried to peel back the lies and expose the truth.

I think it’s the second situation in particular (my boldface) for which history will accord this presidency the blackest marks. In its wake all forward motion in the U.S. has stopped. Our humanity has been anaesthetized.

The theological depiction of the situation is as Jesus describes to Nicodemus:

“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.

“For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

“But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”

Are enough of us struggling in the harness to begin moving again, to shake off the numbness, to finally come back into the light of truth-telling, honesty, transparency, understanding, and the unfettered discourse necessary to actually solve problems?