There’s news in the longstanding Plame investigation… but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily any closer to a solution. Michael Isikoff of Time (who has been played before) and David Corn of The Nation (ditto) are revealing in their upcoming book that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (who was Colin Powell’s right-hand man and had chilly relations with the Cheney White House) may have revealed Plame’s name to Novak, in essence putting him at or very near the “scene of the crime.”
This sounds pretty juicy, of course, and John at AmericaBlog gets the sense that the spin will tell us that Armitage was the guy who got the ball rolling, thus mitigating the culpability of Cheney, Bush, Libby, et cabal. You would certainly expect to hear that based on the S.O.P. of the WHIG (that is to say, based on the way “business” gets done these days).
Christy Hardin Smith at FireDogLake is one of the premiere Plameologists, of course, and her take–along with others who have been watching closer than we have–is that something’s missing from the story. Armitage may have saved his own bacon by cooperating with the FBI pretty early in the investigation. Fitzgerald’s statement (which I remembered in hazy ways and was glad to re-read at FDL) certainly leaves room for sensitive and different investigative approaches to different players. (Which is how the job is supposed to be done, as opposed to WhiteWater, which was the “indict first, ask questions later” model.) A key question in this latest round is, Why would Libby take such a hard fall if Armitage was the guy? FDL speculates he might have done something like that in order to protect someone. (Someone snarly, probably, with a pacemaker and a shotgun.)
I bring this up primarily to show how complex a story like this can be, and how media coverage can be incredibly susceptible to spin, obfuscation and the mists of time. A brief article in Time two years after the fact doesn’t offer the kind of depth and context that the blogs (the honest ones, at least) regularly do. In fact, it couldn’t if it wanted to; it’s too deeply tied to its own bottom line and the arcane rituals of social/political D.C. It’s a bit revolutionary that we have the tools to track these things ourselves, as engaged citizens. We’re no longer completely dependent on the frames and text (both sub- and con-) of the behemoth news corporations and the political cults using them to write convenient meta-narratives.
Deep In The Weeds and Spinning
There’s news in the longstanding Plame investigation… but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily any closer to a solution. Michael Isikoff of Time (who has been played before) and David Corn of The Nation (ditto) are revealing in their upcoming book that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (who was Colin Powell’s right-hand man and had chilly relations with the Cheney White House) may have revealed Plame’s name to Novak, in essence putting him at or very near the “scene of the crime.”
This sounds pretty juicy, of course, and John at AmericaBlog gets the sense that the spin will tell us that Armitage was the guy who got the ball rolling, thus mitigating the culpability of Cheney, Bush, Libby, et cabal. You would certainly expect to hear that based on the S.O.P. of the WHIG (that is to say, based on the way “business” gets done these days).
Christy Hardin Smith at FireDogLake is one of the premiere Plameologists, of course, and her take–along with others who have been watching closer than we have–is that something’s missing from the story. Armitage may have saved his own bacon by cooperating with the FBI pretty early in the investigation. Fitzgerald’s statement (which I remembered in hazy ways and was glad to re-read at FDL) certainly leaves room for sensitive and different investigative approaches to different players. (Which is how the job is supposed to be done, as opposed to WhiteWater, which was the “indict first, ask questions later” model.) A key question in this latest round is, Why would Libby take such a hard fall if Armitage was the guy? FDL speculates he might have done something like that in order to protect someone. (Someone snarly, probably, with a pacemaker and a shotgun.)
I bring this up primarily to show how complex a story like this can be, and how media coverage can be incredibly susceptible to spin, obfuscation and the mists of time. A brief article in Time two years after the fact doesn’t offer the kind of depth and context that the blogs (the honest ones, at least) regularly do. In fact, it couldn’t if it wanted to; it’s too deeply tied to its own bottom line and the arcane rituals of social/political D.C. It’s a bit revolutionary that we have the tools to track these things ourselves, as engaged citizens. We’re no longer completely dependent on the frames and text (both sub- and con-) of the behemoth news corporations and the political cults using them to write convenient meta-narratives.
No wonder they all get so cranky about blogs.
This entry was posted on August 27, 2006 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Color Commentary, Kabuki, Misdirection, Phantom News. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.