Op-Ed

Treason, no less. A leading Democrat, Rep. Henry Waxman, howls in Congress that "The intentional disclosure of a covert CIA agent's identity would be an act of treason. If Rove was part of a conspiracy and intentionally disclosed the name -- then that jeopardizes national security."

Liberal columnists like Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times join the Waxman chorus. But suppose one of the attractive Plame's covert missions, until outed by Rove, had been to liaise with Venezuelan right-wingers planning to assassinate president Hugo Chavez, possibly masquerading as a journalist to secure an audience with the ebullient Venezuelan president. In an earlier incarnation Scheer would surely have been only too happy to jeopardize national security by exposing Plame's true employer.

Thirty-eight years ago, Scheer was one of the editors of Ramparts, and in February of 1967, that magazine ran an expose of covert CIA funding of the National Student Association, prompting furious denunciations that it had endangered national security, which, from the foreign policy establishment's point of view, it most certainly had.

AUSTIN, Texas -- As the judge in the Judith Miller-Matt Cooper case said, it just gets "curiouser and curiouser."

For starters, Judy Miller of The New York Times, who never wrote a word about Valerie Plame, is in prison, while Robert Novak, who broke the story and printed the name, may be weekending at his posh house on Fenwick Island, Del.

Meanwhile, a truly phenomenal case study in the art of spin has been launched on behalf of Karl Rove, aka Bush's brain, now that we know he was Cooper's source on the Plame affair. We have long known that Rove made the repulsive statement to a reporter that Plame, a former CIA undercover operative, was "fair game." Rove was out to smear her husband, Joseph Wilson, who told the truth about Bush's phony claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Niger. What. A. Mess.

Is Karl Rove following in the fatal arrogance of his father figure, Richard Nixon?

Like his equally twisted mentor, Rove is an amoral, mean-spirited gutter fighter. Both share the crime of treason.

With a brutally effective blitzkrieg of dirty tricks, racist manipulation, character assassination and public deceit, Karl Rove has spent a lifetime avenging Richard Nixon's lasting shame.

But Watergate was small potatoes. Nixon's truly impeachable crime was his illegal attack on Cambodia, which sent millions to the killing fields. For that he should have been imprisoned forever, forced to face a 24/7 audio-visual wall blaring the screams of his innocent victims.

Nixon's actual treason came in the 1968 election. On Hubert Humphrey's behalf, Lyndon Johnson was on the brink of signing an October peace deal with North and South Vietnam. A cessation of hostilities would have defeated Nixon.

But Nixon's covert minions intervened. In direct violation of American and international law, the Nixon campaign offered the south Vietnamese a "better deal" if they would reject LBJ's peace overtures.

As right-wing religious leaders attack Alberto Gonzales for being insufficiently doctrinaire, it's tempting to accept him as the best we can get for the Supreme Court. In a recent HuffingtonPost blog, Rob McKay suggested we mute our opposition voices precisely because a Gonzales nomination would divide the political right and fracture their coalition.

But accepting someone with the track record and values of Gonzales would be a grievous mistake. We're in our current mess in large part because our culture has been unable to confront the profoundly destructive consequences of the choices made by our leaders. To equivocate about Gonzales's role in these choices is to accept a culture of lies.

Of course, we don't completely control the outcome in this fight. It depends on the Democrats showing enough spine and the half-dozen supposedly moderate Republicans placing democracy ahead of short-term partisan advantage, and refusing to eliminate the judicial filibuster. But when someone exhibits as much contempt for due process as Gonzales does, we have to challenge him, in every way we can.

When the French government suggested a diplomatic initiative that might interfere with the White House agenda for war, the president responded by saying that the proposed scenario would “ratify terror.” The date was July 24, 1964, the president was Lyndon Johnson and the war was in Vietnam.

Four decades later, the anti-terror rationale is not just another argument for revving up the U.S. war machinery. Fighting “terror” is now the central rationale for war.

“The contrast couldn’t be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill, those who’ve got such evil in their hearts that they will take the lives of innocent folks,” President Bush said Thursday after the London bombings. “The war on terror goes on.”

The horrific terrorist bombings in London are a pale reflection of the terror erupting from George W. Bush's energy plan, which will ultimately kill far more people and wreck far more planetary havoc than four bombs and fifty deaths on a single city's streets.

Amidst Thursday's awful carnage, Bush leapt to deliver his set sermon on good versus evil. But in the same breath he bullied the G-8 nations into groveling at the feet of Big Oil, on whose behalf he is slaughtering thousands in Iraq.

Bush is the Osama bin Laden of climate change. Even conservative Republicans on the American corporate right are growing nervous about the continued emission of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere, which has reached apocalyptic proportions.

Each day the doubters further diminish as robins find their way to Alaska and tropical diseases spread toward the poles. As the weather becomes unhinged, the world's biggest insurers join oil companies such as British Petroleum in escalating desperation. Even the Saudis have joined in, warning that their gargantuan reserves, the world's largest, may not meet demand ten years out.

Judy, it’s been so many wars since we’ve talked.

Now people are hailing your dedication to the principle of journalistic independence. For many, you will always be the courageous reporter who went to jail. But I’ll always remember what happened when we met under hot lights and you showed your stuff.

Far from today’s headlines, what will endure is your approach to journalism in a time of war. (And in this era, what other time is there?) Long before your current stratospheric fame, you were upholding the media spirit that has made you emblematic of the nation’s press.

Of course there are some who still recall how you pushed stories about Saddam and WMDs onto the front page of the New York Times. And they remember that officials who helped to funnel disinformation into your articles grew fond of going on television to cite them as evidence that the Iraqi regime was a menace to the world.

But you were no overnight sensation. Your type of zeal about war was long apparent to those who cared to look.

Judy, we all know that memory can be foggy. But a transcript can help bring it back. The way we were...

AUSTIN, Texas -- The stirring tale of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, congressman and bon vivant, becomes more entertaining by the day, and it is far more instructive than another case of a missing white female.

True, Duke Cunningham is merely an obscure Republican from San Diego (Crow Eaten Here: In a recent column, I said Cunningham was in charge of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, whereas actually he is only a member thereof ... apologies. He is also on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.) On the other hand, the whole tale is so ... so prototypical, so archetypal, so (even though I keep promising not to use the word) paradigmatic.

Cunningham was a decorated pilot in Vietnam who has oft campaigned on the claim that he is the original model for Top Gun. In 2003, he sold his house in Del Mar, a very upscale town north of San Diego. The buyer was Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor, who paid $1.675 million. Wade later resold the house at a $700,000 loss.

"They died for their country," read the white granite memorial in the Concord, Massachusetts town square, honoring local men who died in the Civil War. Newer headstones mourned Concord men who gave their lives in other wars -- practically every war America has fought -- belying the recent baiting of quintessentially blue-state Massachusetts as a place whose citizens lack patriotism. I was in town, on the first anniversary of Sept 11, speaking at a local church that had lost one of its most active members on a hijacked plane, a man named Al Filipov. It was clear then -- and clearer now -- that these honored dead would not be our nation's last. I thought of Concord when George Bush urged us, this past Memorial Day, to redeem the sacrifices of our soldiers in Iraq by "completing the mission for which they gave their lives." But what if this mission (which will, of course, claim more lives) itself is questionable, and founded on a basis of lies?

Am I the only U.S. citizen who finds the annual Fourth rituals to be cloying and deceptive? Yeah -- just me and probably tens of millions of other people.

Ever since the Vietnam War, the Fourth of July has seemed to be a celebration of the past in the midst of a distinctly un-glorious present. In 2005, as in 1965, lyrical appreciation of “bombs bursting in air” is chilling in the context of current realities.

Overall, my outlook on the yearly Independence Day spectacle remains what it was a decade ago:

Patriotic holidays come and go, but one theme is fairly constant in our country’s mass media: The founding fathers were a sterling bunch of guys.

Their press notices are usually raves when the Fourth of July rolls around -- superficial accolades for leaders of the struggle for independence.

It’s true that the famed men of the American Revolution were brave, eloquent and visionary as they challenged the British despot, King George III. But present-day news media usually avoid acknowledging an uncomfortable fact: Many of those heroes didn’t seem to mind very much when they benefitted from injustice.