He's a Crackpot

Frank Rich provides the best precis of the Libby/Plame trial and Dick Cheney's cloak and dagger role in the CIA's spy outing, in his NYTimes column, Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up.

Rich also provides the explanation for Cheney's recent nutty outbursts, see, e.g., It's D.C. Dick, which is the Libby trial itself:

The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious.

As Rich notes, the Plame matter has long been obfuscated by the White House spin machine to confuse and detract the public from the truth of what happened:

The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president’s men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson’s modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration’s W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy. Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq’s purchase of uranium in Africa might be dubious or fabricated.

* * * *

If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration’s deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article appeared — some five months after the State of the Union and two months after “Mission Accomplished” — there was something terribly wrong with the White House’s triumphal picture.

* * * *

But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being retrofitted to expand and extend it.

* * * *

Call it a coincidence — though there are no coincidences — but it’s only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later. Still, we can’t push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country can’t wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood.

(Rich article also available at Rozius)

See also, Dan Froomkin's take on Cheney's involvement, Cheney's Fingerprint? and Vice President's Shadow Hangs Over Trial.

The role of Cheney first began to leak out about nine months ago, see All Roads Lead to Dick, but the media basically moved on without probing this claim once Libby was indicted.

Tags: Commentary, Frank Rich, Cheney, Plame, Law, News & Media, Politics