Reply #31: Because they were flying high and felt Above It All [View All]

[Lexingtonian]

Wilson was the unwanted guy at the party, not catching on that the whole idea of this Iraq thing was to get drunk with power and feel invincible and beat up on some Third World people and steal their lunch money. A square like him was unwanted as a poop in the punch bowl. So, feeling all full of themselves and entitled to having A Good Time without the annoyance of a moralizer, they got together and threw him out in the street and gave his wife a bitchslap too just to round out the moment.

He was harshing their mellow. He was killing their buzz. He was freaking on a good trip. He was being a f-ing downer while everyone else was getting high. He was the guy ratting out the gang to his dad the cop.

Outing Valerie Plame is ultimately a pretty small crime, as crimes go in a legal and empirical sense. But it was a crime born of hubris and secret fear, utterly senseless until you see the context of people operating without any grip on reality and in fact full of groupthink that they had eluded reality's grip on themselves.

As an offense in a social and political sense, though, it's so revealing of a group of people operating outside any pretense of morality or the rule of law that the political sentencing upon trial and conviction has to be political capital punishment.