July 9, 2007

In Liberal Fantasyland, Evil Criminal Scooter Libby Walks Free

Left-wing reaction to the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence is revealing something about the pretend world that has come to substitute for reality in much of America.

One of the leading liberal theories is that President Bush committed Libby’s sentence because Libby has the goods on the involvement of administration higher-ups. Bush, you see, needed to placate Libby so he wouldn’t spill the beans about the complicity of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rove and, of course, Bush himself, in the plot to blow Valerie Plame’s cover. And this was all revenge against the sainted Joseph Wilson for daring to tell the truth.

We have two versions of reality in play here. One is reality itself. The other is a liberal fantasy world.

Let’s get the real thing out of the way. It’s much less interesting. In this version, columnist Robert Novak asks Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage who this Wilson guy is, and Armitage says, search me, but I guess his wife works for the CIA. Novak calls the CIA and asks if this is true. CIA tells Novak they would really rather not see him write that, but when he says he’s going to write it anyway, CIA shrugs collective shoulders and that’s that.

Now you may be asking, “Who is this Armitage guy?” Ah. Never heard of him, have you? His name is rarely mentioned in stories about the Valerie Plame Identity Leak Scandal. That’s because Armitage didn’t play a very interesting role in the Scandal. He’s only the guy who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity. He doesn’t matter, especially because he’s not a neo-conservative, Iraq-liberating, democracy-spreading idealist. He’s a State Department paper pusher. Who cares about him?

Let’s get to the liberal fantasy-world storyline – the one most often referenced by the media and thus most thought to be true by many Americans. It goes like this:

Brave truth-teller Joseph Wilson goes to Niger to see if it’s true that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium there. Honest Joe says no no no. No yellowcake-seeking here. Joe comes back to America and does what all good government fact-finders do – he writes an op-ed in the New York Times calling the president a liar for 16 words in the State of the Union address – even though the president merely cited a report from British intelligence that the Brits stand by to this day.

Wait. That’s reality. We’re not dealing with that right now.

So . . . once Joe reveals the awful truth about the president’s deceptions, Dick Cheney gathers his cadre of malefactors – Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and, through a special channeling ritual, Richard Nixon on videoconference.

“This Wilson,” Cheney says. “He’s making us look bad. We’ve got to ruin him. Any ideas?”

“Abu Ghraib,” says Rumsfeld.

“Send him to Guantanamo,” Rove intones.

“My girlfriend has a friend,” Wolfowitz suggests. “Sort of an emo type. I could introduce them . . .”

“Excellent, excellent,” says Cheney. “This is a brainstorm. There are no bad ideas.”

Nixon clears his throat:

“In my day, we would make an enemies list. Send the CIA to spy on him. Too bad his wife is a super-secret covert CIA agent. How ironic is that? We’d probably end up blowing her cover . . .”

Lightbulbs appear over heads. That’s it. That’s it!

Cheney’s pacemaker is going crazy. He reaches for his buckshot rifle and exclaims, “Someone get Robert Novak on the phone – right now!”

Now that’s a story. It has about as much to do with reality as a Police Academy movie, but it’s great copy.

But clearly, there is a segment of America’s population that thinks this is an approximation of the truth. And it’s not just people posting on wacko left-wing Internet forums. It’s a significant number of reporters, pundits and public officials. They either think this is the truth, or they’re rolling with the storyline because it’s so juicy.

These are the people who think Scooter Libby is getting away with some sort of serious crime. They haven’t the slightest idea that no crime was committed, and that Libby was convicted of losing a game of Twenty Questions at the behest of a special prosecutor “investigating” a “crime” he had known all along had never happened.

Do actual facts matter at all anymore? They don’t in this case. All that matters is the idea people have, fed by suggestions and implications that go uncorrected by a news media that either don’t know the facts, or know and don’t care.

I’m not sure which is worse. I guess we should just be glad they still know a good story when they see one, even if it is a fantasy.