Scooter Libby: Shark Bait (Fabulous and funny article on Irving Libby)

[No Exit]

Scooter Libby: Shark Bait

Posted by James Wolcott

Imagine you're I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

I know, it's not easy.

It's not easy imagining yourself striding manfully down the corridors of power or plotting the overthrow of tyrants while answering to the name of "Scooter."

"Scooter, how's it hangin'?" "Scooter, have to seen the TKA-143 report?" "Scooter, are you going to eat all those fries?" Or, in intimate moments of scalding passion, "Oh, Scooter, Scooter--scooter me like you've never scootered me before!"

But let's pretend.

You're Scooter Libby, and you're being royally, publicly screwed.

Before you had a low profile within the neocon hierarchy and the red-hot circle of the White House decision-making machine. You didn't have the mouthy, controversial profile of a Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz, or the negative rap of a Doug Feith, a.k.a., the dumbest fucking man on the planet. But as Dick Cheney's chief of staff you were in what Seymour Krim called "the High Inside," the hum of power vibrating through your bones, a major player, a force.

And now look at you.

Your image, hitherto unknown to most of the public, is being flashed regularly on the TV screen like a playing card next to Karl Rove's more familiar babyface. Your names are linked too, as if you've formed a factoidal duo: Rove and Libby, Rove and Libby--which Don Imus has deliberately, mumblingly confused with Hunt and Liddy, two infamous names from the Watergate scandal.

It's not enough that you've been implicated in the Valerie Plame investigation, already indicted in the media's mind, but now you're being oiled and seasoned for ritual sacrifice by your former friends and associates in the White House, people you've trusted, people who share your convictions and zeal, but now avert their eyes or tense their smiles in the presence of a dead man walking. There's the gang plank, keep moving, say hello to the sharks.

You're not even being treated as a honorable warrior whose crime (if it was a crime) and sin (if it was a sin) was standing up for your boss against that showboating prick Joe Wilson.

No, those you've been loyal to are now disloyally sliding the blade into your back and not even allowing you a dignified sacrifice. They've broken the code of silence are leaking like mad to the LA Times (leaking: the perfect euphemism for being pissed on), drawing a lurid portrait of you as a zealous obsessive with an almost homoerotic fixation on Joe Wilson.

The blame game has become the frame game.

As Josh Marshall wrote today at Talking Points Memo:

"This certainly seems like an attempt to pin this whole thing on Libby.

"Leaks like that won't affect Fitzgerald; they're not intended to. They're aimed at shaping perceptions of indictments if they come down. If Libby and Rove are indicted, then, yes Rove got caught up in it. And it shouldn't have happened. But the whole unfortunate mess was spawned by the bitter Libby-Wilson antagonsim. It wasn't something that involved the whole White House team, not something characteristic of how it functions.

"That would be the argument.

"And it's one everyone should have their eyes out for, since the key players in the White House appear to have decided that Libby is already a fatality in this battle."

Karl Rove may be the one who more closely resembles Ned Beatty, but you're the one getting oinked in public, and it's not pretty.

(snip)


http://jameswolcott.com/

[AndyTiedye]

1. SING, Scooter, SING!