So I have had my 15 minutes of blogular fame, in that my hit count massively rose while I liveblogged the trial to heights larger than ever before. Meaning, of course, not much. But much of it was due to some shameless advertising of it at the American liberal blog Firedoglake, which is doing regular live coverage of it. But while I have maybe the attention of a few you left as my micro-fame declines fast, I'll say a few words about what I think is the larger---really larger---context of this whole Plame business.
After reading my recent thoughts about the movie The Good Shepherd, you may come away with the impression that I don't have a great impression of the CIA, and I am not willing to feel terribly sympathetic to it. So I'm also not willing to feel very sorry for Valerie Plame's ruined career. I am willing to muster up sympathy for those who might have suffered in the exposure of Brewster, Jennings.
But this trial is still an interesting indicator of what is wrong with the way in which our existing political systems (and I include Canada and other countries in this) conceive and distribute power. This criminal trial is not about the original crime, which was really the deliberate attempt to mislead a country to war. It wasn't even about the metacrime---the leaking of Plame's identity in order to obfuscate the crime. No: this trial is about a metametacrime, a crime that is doubly meta---the attempt to mislead the criminal justice system about the attempt to mislead the public about another, bigger attempt to mislead public.
For this reason, a key piece of evidence, the Grand Jury tapes, consists of testimony about the metacrime, and most of it happens to discuss the convolutions of the White Hosue in attempting to salvage the original crime. And there were even arguments in front of the judge as to what metadocumentation would be admissible in court about what reporter said what when...
The Grand Jury tapes themselves were highly instructive in their own way. In some ways, it was even better than seeing live testimony. We got to see the internal life of the Bush administration during this period through Libby's eyes, and it was paranoid and confusing, a complex process of continuous mental editing on the part of its members. Continuous mental editing constrained, in face, by the need to sustain the neocon consensus in the face of contrary evidence. That's why the Grand Jury testimony was so confusing. So pull off the metametacrime, the mental editing required multiple layers of indirection.
But is this sort of thing unique to the neocon hothouse of the Bush White House? I would have a hard time believing that it is. Perhaps the neoconservatives are a more egregious and robustly dangerous breed of metametacriminals, but you can bet that every administraton in high office has some of that mentality. And that is because of entrenched advantage in the political system, which merely reflects systems of entrenched advantage in the society at learge.
I do not mean to offend a good chunk of my small readership, particularly those coming from American liberal blogs. But I don't think this kind of atmosphere in the US that produces these kinds of things can be sustained without the collusion of the entire system, including the Democratic Party. That's why I, a very unambitious radical indeed, am often surprised by how many people seem to be satisfied with the conception of politics embodied by the Democratic Party. That form of entrenchment-defence proliferates even there, and it provides the cover for more egregious offenders like the neocons.
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