Do NOT tell me that with Scooter Libby hobbling out of the White House we’re supposed to sulk home and go back to junta-as-usual.
Think for a minute about what sort of indignant, hearing-fomenting, partisan hay the Republican Party would be making out of this historic high-level scandal under a Democratic president. It has been 130 years since a sitting senior White House official was indicted. For anything.
An email I got from MoveOn urges members to fight “the battle of public opinion” to help the rest of the scandalous truth to frog-march into the light.
But I really hope we haven’t already moved from legal investigations to the battlefield of public opinion. We need our elected officials to dig deep for their inner McCarthy, their inner Dornan, and call all the cronies to account. This isn’t the time to rest on vindicated laurels that the rule of law has severed one serpent’s head.
Josh Marshall has it right when he says that Congress has “failed in its oversight responsibilities.”
If those of us who believe in real accountability allow the fight to move from the jury room to the media, we have already yielded the most precious and highest ground.
The MoveOn alert says “write a letter to the editor to remind folks that there’s no graver crime than misleading a country into war, and then covering it up.” But don’t write to editors. Keep the pressure on leaders to see that something is rotten and foul deeds need to rise, now, before spin and short attention spans let the rest of the ugly truth scurry away.