I Can Hear Music, Sweet, Sweet Music!

It is possible to get so wrapped up in news-chasing as to neglect posting, there is no doubt. And with the hour late, thanks to that chase, I will have to limit personal content here to merest fringe around links to a useful list-post and one that reminds us just how vital the stakes are in the Plame case. I would never have guessed when that case inspired me what seems an awfully dark lifetime ago to set up my first news-alert ever that it might morph into the critical arcane spell that might re-open the door on the possibility of democracy in the States.

For those who like lists (I'm with you), this one has bonus feature of mug-shots and short bios (tending more and more to delightfully resemble rap-sheets - check it out):

Administration "characters" with known connections to the outing of an undercover CIA agent:

Karl Rove
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby
Condoleezza Rice
Stephen Hadley
Andrew Card
Alberto Gonzales
Mary Matalin
Ari Fleischer
Susan Ralston
Israel Hernandez
John Hannah
Scott McClellan
Dan Bartlett
Claire Buchan
Catherine Martin
Jennifer Millerwise
Jim Wilkinson
Colin Powell
Karen Hughes
Adam Levine
Bob Joseph
Vice President Dick Cheney
President George W. Bush

And this article by James Moore may help provide a bit of scale as to the overall significance of what not long ago seemed just one of countless instances of criminal, odious behavior by the crooks who came to dinner and changed the locks:

The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.

We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.

We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic.

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There you have it, Mr. Prosecutor. To quote an unreconstructed former Republican presidential candidate, “You know it. I know it. And the American people know it.”

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Prove to us we still live in a democracy and a nation of laws.