Being and Nothingness

"Other possible headlines in this vein: 'Tom DeLay Not Yet Convicted,' 'Al-Qaida Doesn't Strike Again in U.S.,' and 'Judy Miller Not Yet Canned By Times.' The headlines anybody can write. It takes a pro to write the stories."

But that's the whole post. Just when I was getting interested!

Arianna Huffington says Plamegate is worse than Watergate:

"The reason why Cheney, Rove, and Libby were so aggressive in attacking anyone who questioned their rationale for war is because, by the summer of 2003, it was becoming embarrassingly clear how wrong they had been about Iraq -- wrong about WMD, wrong about flowers thrown at our feet, wrong about the cost of the war. Had their incompetence not been so grotesquely manifest, there would have been no need for the attack on Wilson -- and the resulting cover-up -- that has now landed them all in such legal hot water.

"If Rove and Libby are indeed indicted (adding Cheney to our Merry Fitz-mas gift list would just be getting greedy), I believe it will shake up our government in a way we haven't seen since Watergate.

"To borrow a phrase from that era, let me make myself perfectly clear: I'm not saying that Plamegate is the same as Watergate. I'm saying it's worse. Much, much worse. No one died as a result of Watergate, but 2,000 American soldiers have now been killed and thousands more wounded to rid the world of an imminent threat that wasn't.

"Could there be anything bigger?"

Of course, Arianna is using the neat debater's trick of morphing the who-outed-Valerie story into the entire reason for invading Iraq--but it's also true that the two are intertwined.

Jason Zengerle of the New Republic weighs whether TV has shirked its Plame duty:

"Over at HuffPo, Eric Boehlert complains that the network's primetime news shows have given short shrift to PlameGate. Doing the dark and lonely work of Nexis searches, Boehlert reports that over the course of nearly 900 broadcasts, '60 Minutes' and 'Dateline' have done no PlameGate stories, and 'Nightline' has done only three.

"I suppose that's a somewhat surprising number, but the point Boehlert is trying to make with it -- that the mainstream media has been unaccountably wimpy when it comes to exposing the Bush administration's wrongdoing -- seems like a stretch. For one thing, I don't think the primetime news shows -- particularly 'Dateline' and increasingly '60 Minutes' -- are the venue for any serious news these days. But even more than that, I think one of the reasons PlameGate hasn't exactly been made for TV is the fact that Fitzgerald has run such a tight ship.

"With the leaks about the investigation being so few and far between, what, exactly, would these television shows be able to report? The dribs and drabs we've been getting are enough for newspaper and magazine articles, but I don't think they're sufficient for highly visual, 10-minute TV segments. No, this investigation -- and the heated, quasi-informed speculation it has spawned -- is better left to cable shoutfests and blogs. After all, who'd want to see Stone Phillips lower himself to that sort of thing?"