"I don't remember ever worrying about whether the facts that I felt were public knowledge might have been classified. But even if I had, I would probably have rationalized that anything I had heard on the grapevine couldn't possibly be a state secret. If every political aide was prosecuted for those kinds of conversations with the press corps, I'm afraid there wouldn't be enough jails to hold us."
Davis expressed an essential truth here. The entire rationale fueling the media frenzy over the outing of Valerie Plane came from the left' s allegations that the administration {Acting in furtherence of a CONSPIRACY] willfully damaged national security to cover lies which wrongly justified our going to war. Now that fuel is completely out of the tank. No one has been indicted for jeopardizing national security in any way. No one has been indicted for revealing the name of a CIA agent. Karl Rove has not been indicted at all. And the only man indicted, Libby, has been indicted for allegedly lying about who "first" told him that the CIA agent in question, although not covert, was in fact a CIA agent. Libby has testified he was so informed by press reporters but notes of conversations indicate the source of his knowledge might have come from an official in the state Department or from the vice president. It doesn't matter a whit. There are no national security implications in either alternative. Twist as it will, the left cannot make a scandal of this.
Middle America will scratch its head when it becomes aware that this entire flap has been reduced to alleged perjury about the source of an innocent fact. Davis sees that now, so he is attempting to show his fellow Democrats a path to the higher ground before middle American gets really angry that there was so much ado about nothing and begins to resent those who manufactured this flap.
With all the fuel gone the scandal, which never was a scandal, will quickly fade from the popular consciousness. While I do not agree with the armchair defense lawyers on this thread who believe that the prosecutor has no case, I do believe that he has no [grave]crime -that is, he has a technical violation which at worst is a knowing misstatement of a inmaterial and inconsequential innocent fact. How long will the judge sentence Scooter Libby to jail for such an innocuous act?
I believe the corner has been turned for the Bush administration. He will appoint a rock ribbed conservative and the battle will be joined in the Senate which the administration will win even if it loses the battle over a given nominee. The Democrats will be shown it to be filibusterers and obstructionists, characteristics which cost them Senate seats in the last elections. Bush needs only to put up a man or a woman with first-class legal credentials without worry over ideology providing the nominee has an originalist ideology. Then let the Democrats bring it on.
Before the next by elections the administration will begin to build down troops in Iraq as Iraqi forces are built up and the political situation there continues to improve with the election of new leaders in December. The administration must only show that there is a plan for the ultimate success in Iraq but it need not actually achieve that success before the election a year away.
The president has already signaled that he is changing course and will pull his head out of the sand on the issue of immigration. If he does not wobble and persists in this course he will further shore up the base and steal a huge potential issue from Hillary and the other Democrats.
There remains only for the administration to couple its campaign for permanent tax cuts with meaningful spending limits. If that is offered the whole of the country will respond because we have a booming economy. What we don't have as a booming voice in the bully pulpit. Somehow, George Bush has got to learn how to tell his side of the story.
