Re: The Plame kerfuffle has made hypocrites of just about everyone; by Christopher Hitchens


"SMBalloon" <smballoon@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:031cm1h872oilpq90u01viim0jvhcip2ok@xxxxxxxxxx
> The Wall Street Journal
> What Goes Around, Comes Around
> The Plame kerfuffle has made hypocrites of just about everyone.
>
> BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
> Monday, October 31, 2005 12:01 a.m.
>
If you've violated no law, why lie to Federal Investigators and a Grand Jury
about what you actually DID?
1. Because you've violated laws that the investigation might disclose, if
the "surface truth" becomes known.
2. Because your stock-in-trade is honesty and principle, and the revelation
of your true venality will call into question
that patina of honesty and principle, and render you susceptible to
legitimate criticism, something you just can't stand.
3. Because you are a bully, and bullies just can't stand to have their
bullying exposed.

Hitchens misses the final and most personal irony: That he has the gall to
write columns defending the Iraq policy, after years as a left-wing gadfly
who decried the sort of disingenuous nonsense his column above contained. It
takes a man of far less wit and perspicacity than Hitchens to understand
that the underlying charges of outing an agent need not be proved in order
for one to be convicted for knowingly and intentionally lying to a Grand
Jury. A Grand Jury can still indict Libby, Rove and half a dozen others for
outing. That case is not closed, as Hitchens conveniently leaves out of his
column. The Grand Jury transcripts evidently contain a self-proving case for
perjury, among other things. It will be the rest of the investigation, and
the leverage it yields to Fitzgerald, that tells us whether substantive
crimes were committed unrelated to their investigation. Hitchens creates a
clumsy straw man here. It's really a reach. In order to reach his
conclusions, he has to ignore the law, the ongoing nature of the
investigation, and the damage to the rule of law that lying to Grand Juries
can wreak. That's a big hump to get over, even for a former Trotskyite who
gets all of his intellectual mileage these days from shocking the people he
used to run with as a drunken lefty.

Hitchens has usually shown more insight than this, even when he has been
dead wrong, which is quite often. His lack of familiarity with law leads him
down the wrong logical path. In short, he criticizes Fitzgerald for being a
good lawyer. A good lawyer, as ANY good lawyer will tell you, DOES NOT SEEK
TO PROVE WHAT HE DOES NOT NEED TO PROVE. At this stage, Fitzgerald needed to
report triable indictments. He did so. He did not need to report them all,
to try them in front of petit juries yet, or to foreclose the results that
plea bargaining can yield in the coming months. Unlike the showboating MSNBC
talking head lawyers that Hitchens sits across microphones from every other
night, this Prosecutor did precisely what he should have done thus far, and
did it consistently with ethical boundaries.

Isn't it ironic that Hitchens left the Clinton prosecution out of his list
of ironies in this little column? It would have made a nice final line:
"Didn't this White House learn anything from what they and their GOP
operatives did to the last White House?"

And by the way, why hasn't Balloon published one of his usual crack analyses
of the polls about the Bush Administration, lately? Too hard to spin?


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