Thanks, Frank, I Needed That

Thanks to Frank Rich of the New York Times, I won't have to write the piece I was planning entitled, "Why I Don't Give Much of a Rat's Ass About the Plame/Wilson Investigation or Who Said What to Whom When so Stop Talking About It Already," or something like that.

Rich, an awesome writer and awesomer reporter (he has a talent for stripping away irrelevancy and getting to the germ of things) has already done a better job than I could have of explaining why we needn't waste any more time reconstructing hypothetical conversations between Lewis Libby and Judy Miller. The left-leaning bloggers, most of whom I've temporarily stopped reading because of their obsession with the Plame case, are perfectly free to waste as many hours as they want bogged down in tinier and tinier increments of minutiae relating to this sleazy affair, and consequently missing the big picture out of obsessive attention to detail. Sounds like great fun, if you've nothing else to do.

But the fact is we'll never know all the tiny details of the Plame case, since neither Libby nor Miller nor Karl Rove is ever going to give a straight answer about any of this stuff.

And as Rich points out, none of this matters anyway, because Plamegate is only a minor and barely significant chapter in the epic story of the gigantic disinformation campaign mounted by the White House during the six-months runup to the Iraq invasion, to sell said invasion to the semi-literate, television addled citizens of the World's Greatest Democracy, not to mention hyping its necessity to the tweed-clad and furrow-browed sensation pedlars of the establishment media, who, incredibly and with breathtaking abdication of their responsibilities, bought it like a bunch of virgin schoolgirls.

We need know nothing more of Libby than the fact that he's Dick Cheney's water boy, whose job is to deliver the boss's sulpheric messages, and that he's a grown man who calls himself "Scooter."

The cryptic and inscrutable Ms. Miller is even less worthy of attention. A transparent media whore who gained unlimited access to the highest echelons of power by agreeing to act as the administration's sewer pipe, delivering its daily dose of overheated and underdocumented war drek to a breathless nation on the Times's front page, she'll now hopefully fade from the scene and take up a quiet life of knitting and cat husbandry, as most used-up harlots do.

Rich brings us back into focus by pointing out that the Plame incident will be remembered as a footnote to a much greater constellation of events, and that the real story is not Rove-Libby, but Bush-Cheney, and the secret deliberations of a nefarious sounding Star Chamber which bears the name of an extinct political party, called WHIG.

What was WHIG? Read Frank Rich and find out. Did Judy Miller sit in on WHIG's deliberations? She'll never tell. Maybe somebody can leak a picture.

Besides thanking Frank Rich for the re-focus, we should also show some appreciation for the on-line news organ truthout.org, who somehow bypassed the legally-available channels and made it possible for us to read Rich's column without paying money to subscibe to the mercenary and totally-out-of-line Times Select service. I'm boycotting Times Select, and I hope you are too, but I must admit I miss my regular doses of Frank, Paul, Mo, and Bob.

Finally, a word of appreciation for The Poor Man (see links listing in the right column), who steered me to the Truthout piece, and without whom the world would be a drearier and less well-informed place.