Josh Marshall continues his one-man jihad against the Bush administration, once again trying to pin the blame for the whole Plame leak on President Bush:
President Bush could make it known either implicitly or explicitly that he wants to get to the bottom of this mystery and that anyone who is asked should free journalists in the way Libby has. If they don’t feel they can do so — which is certainly their right, working in the White House doesn’t mean you lose your right to defend yourself — they should take a leave of absence from their job or quit….
Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath waiting for this to happen. But let’s not lose sight of the president’s passivity and indifference to this probe. He’s dragging the country through this. And the reason, I think, is obvious. He doesn’t want the probe to succeed.
Or Bush could do the appropriate thing, which is to stay the hell out of the way of the investigation. Is there ANYONE who doubts that if Bush did anything to involve himself in the case, Marshall would not then immediately accuse him of a cover-up or improperly meddling with and impeding the investigation? Anyone?
I thought so. Also, I love the rhetoric:
He’s dragging the country through this.
Yes, indeed- President Bush is indeed dragging us through this long national nightmare known as the Plame investigation. The horrors of it all.
Our long national nightmare will be over when the world stops paying attention to people like Josh.
Dodd
Speaking of “passivity and indifference”, the word “Cambodia” does not appear anywhere on the front page of Josh Marshall’s Spin Machine (which goes back a week) and the only mentions of the SBVFT issue at all are 1) an ad hominem attack on the straw man that they’re all Republican pals of Bush thinly disguised as an lame attempt at humour and 2) a single, not-terribly-accurate quotation from a single reporter that suggests that one of the 250 men involved didn’t serve with Kerry.
I guess he’s too busy flogging his favourite dead hobby horse – l’affaire Plame – to concern himself with the biggest story of the week. He insists that the President could bring the matter to a close in an instant (which seems unlikely, actually, since the investigators just got their subpoenas upheld yesterday) but doesn’t seem inclined to note that Kerry could put the Swifties’ charges to bed with the stroke of a pen by executing a Standard Form 180. If the Swifties are lying, that is….
M. Scott Eiland
JM jumped the shark for good when he made that post a few days back raving about how it was good that the US was democratizing the Middle East, because they’d have to come back and re-democratize *us* someday. Pure moonbatty, Kimmitt-on-crack brand psychosis.
Karen
And do you suppose Josh was outraged that Clinton didn’t get personally involved in the investigation of what over 900 FBI files were doing in the White House? Sorry to drag Clinton into this but this one still outrages me. Snafu, my butt.