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My nomination for Man of the Year in 2005 is Patrick Fitzgerald. Anyone who could flush out a sleazy journalist like Judy Miller and toss her in jail without blinking an eye gets my vote. More significantly, though, it was only after Fitzgerald’s tenacious investigation that the media woke from its stupor and discovered that the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity was more than just another Washington scandal – which is where they seemed happy to leave it. So we began reading about – get this now --possible attempts by the Bush administration to dissemble, deceive and distort, as they “fixed the intelligence” to sell the Iraq war to Congress and the American people. It’s clear that Fitzgerald’s dogged efforts had that hard-to-define tipping effect, where what had been obvious all along, but was being ignored for lack of momentum, suddenly gets new life.
But the media still has some catching up to do. When discussing the Plame affair, they frequently describe the White House’s actions as an attempt to "discredit” Joseph Wilson. This has never made any sense. Wilson was a career diplomat from 1976 until 1998, specializing in African affairs, and was the first president Bush’s acting ambassador to Iraq during the period of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He was a perfectly logical choice to undertake the CIA mission to assess whether Hussein had attempted to buy uranium ore from the African country of Niger. So, why would revealing his wife’s clandestine CIA status discredit him? If Plame was known to be anti-Bush it might be different. But Plame worked undercover for the CIA and her political views—if she even had any – were surely anything but common knowledge.
And just this week the New York Times, in an otherwise hard-hitting editorial critical of the Bush administration’s “leak investigations,” called the Plame outing “an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband.” Then later in the same editorial the Times says the whole incident “began with a cynical effort by the administration to deflect public attention from hyped prewar intelligence on Iraq.”
No, Joe Wilson’s wife was outed in a purely vindictive act to punish Wilson, and secondarily, to frighten off others who might question the Bush war propaganda machine which was then in high gear. In one of the more inane articles on the Plame affair, Washington Post columnist, Jim Hoagland, asked why the White House had to resort to this tactic. Asks Hoagland, “Why didn’t they just write a countering op-ed?” You have to wonder where Hoagland has been for the last five years. The answer is, this is not how the Bush administration works. They are juvenile and petty – like school yard bullies who steal your lunch and defy you to do something about it. Thanks to the Fitzgerald investigation, we see this now more clearly than ever.
The administration’s conduct in the Plame affair calls to mind Peter Singer’s dissection of George Bush in his book, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. Singer is professor of philosophy at Princeton and a prolific author on a range of subjects. It is Singer’s view that Bush suffers from “arrested moral development.”
He supports his argument by citing work of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg who studied moral judgment in children, adolescents and adults from the United States and other countries. Kohlberg found that we all move through three major stages of moral development, the last being what he calls the “postconventional stage,” where one moves away from “an orientation toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of social order” that characterize the prior stage, to a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of rules and the possibility of altering these by “appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality and consistency.”
For Singer, Bush is stuck in the second stage of moral reasoning which is “typically reached by teenage boys in the thirteen to sixteen age group.” [emphasis added]. “Bush’s childishly literal notion of what is truthful has set the tone for his entire administration,” writes Singer… "Handicapped by a naïve idea of ethics as conformity to a small number of fixed rules, [Bush] has been unable to handle adequately the difficult choices that any chief executive of a major nation must face.”
And just this week we got yet another revelation of George Bush’s “arrested moral development.” According to an article in the UK Independent, New York Times journalist, James Risen, in his recently released book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, tells of a telephone conversation between Bush and his father, the former President. After the elder Bush challenged his son for allowing Don Rumsfeld "and a cadre of neoconservative ideologues" to exert excessive influence over foreign policy, the younger Bush simply hung up the phone.
While attention is now focused on Bush’s secret domestic surveillance program, don’t dismiss Fitzgerald’s investigation. It’s not over yet. Hanging in the balance is the fate of Dick Cheney, still believed to be a Fitzgerald target. Wouldn’t a Cheney indictment be sweet justice? The match up between Fitzgerald and the White House is the stuff of movies. Compare Fitzgerald’s leading man stats -- 6’ 2”, 215 pounds, handsome, and a former rugby player at Amherst and Harvard – with those of George Bush, the pom-pom waving cheerleader at Andover and Yale, and Dick Cheney, the Yale flunk-out and draft dodger, and you have the beginnings of a script for a modern day version of Gladiator II.
So I’m looking forward to an interesting 2006. If anyone can wipe that smirk off George Bush’s face, it’s Pat Fitzgerald.
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Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in aerospace industry for 22 years. He now teaches in the California Community College system.
But the media still has some catching up to do. When discussing the Plame affair, they frequently describe the White House’s actions as an attempt to "discredit” Joseph Wilson. This has never made any sense. Wilson was a career diplomat from 1976 until 1998, specializing in African affairs, and was the first president Bush’s acting ambassador to Iraq during the period of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He was a perfectly logical choice to undertake the CIA mission to assess whether Hussein had attempted to buy uranium ore from the African country of Niger. So, why would revealing his wife’s clandestine CIA status discredit him? If Plame was known to be anti-Bush it might be different. But Plame worked undercover for the CIA and her political views—if she even had any – were surely anything but common knowledge.
And just this week the New York Times, in an otherwise hard-hitting editorial critical of the Bush administration’s “leak investigations,” called the Plame outing “an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband.” Then later in the same editorial the Times says the whole incident “began with a cynical effort by the administration to deflect public attention from hyped prewar intelligence on Iraq.”
No, Joe Wilson’s wife was outed in a purely vindictive act to punish Wilson, and secondarily, to frighten off others who might question the Bush war propaganda machine which was then in high gear. In one of the more inane articles on the Plame affair, Washington Post columnist, Jim Hoagland, asked why the White House had to resort to this tactic. Asks Hoagland, “Why didn’t they just write a countering op-ed?” You have to wonder where Hoagland has been for the last five years. The answer is, this is not how the Bush administration works. They are juvenile and petty – like school yard bullies who steal your lunch and defy you to do something about it. Thanks to the Fitzgerald investigation, we see this now more clearly than ever.
The administration’s conduct in the Plame affair calls to mind Peter Singer’s dissection of George Bush in his book, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. Singer is professor of philosophy at Princeton and a prolific author on a range of subjects. It is Singer’s view that Bush suffers from “arrested moral development.”
He supports his argument by citing work of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg who studied moral judgment in children, adolescents and adults from the United States and other countries. Kohlberg found that we all move through three major stages of moral development, the last being what he calls the “postconventional stage,” where one moves away from “an orientation toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of social order” that characterize the prior stage, to a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of rules and the possibility of altering these by “appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality and consistency.”
For Singer, Bush is stuck in the second stage of moral reasoning which is “typically reached by teenage boys in the thirteen to sixteen age group.” [emphasis added]. “Bush’s childishly literal notion of what is truthful has set the tone for his entire administration,” writes Singer… "Handicapped by a naïve idea of ethics as conformity to a small number of fixed rules, [Bush] has been unable to handle adequately the difficult choices that any chief executive of a major nation must face.”
And just this week we got yet another revelation of George Bush’s “arrested moral development.” According to an article in the UK Independent, New York Times journalist, James Risen, in his recently released book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, tells of a telephone conversation between Bush and his father, the former President. After the elder Bush challenged his son for allowing Don Rumsfeld "and a cadre of neoconservative ideologues" to exert excessive influence over foreign policy, the younger Bush simply hung up the phone.
While attention is now focused on Bush’s secret domestic surveillance program, don’t dismiss Fitzgerald’s investigation. It’s not over yet. Hanging in the balance is the fate of Dick Cheney, still believed to be a Fitzgerald target. Wouldn’t a Cheney indictment be sweet justice? The match up between Fitzgerald and the White House is the stuff of movies. Compare Fitzgerald’s leading man stats -- 6’ 2”, 215 pounds, handsome, and a former rugby player at Amherst and Harvard – with those of George Bush, the pom-pom waving cheerleader at Andover and Yale, and Dick Cheney, the Yale flunk-out and draft dodger, and you have the beginnings of a script for a modern day version of Gladiator II.
So I’m looking forward to an interesting 2006. If anyone can wipe that smirk off George Bush’s face, it’s Pat Fitzgerald.
---
Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in aerospace industry for 22 years. He now teaches in the California Community College system.