Thursday July 14, 2005
Three’s a Crowd Pleaser
Now that Karl Rove has been outed as the outer of Valerie Plame, it should come as no surpise that Bush’s chief political advisor is mounting a three-pronged defense. The talking points seem to be these: 1) He didn’t actually name her, 2) He didn’t know she was undercover, and 3) He was just trying to help Matt Cooper understand that it wasn’t Dick Cheney who sent Joseph Wilson to Nigeria. (It wasn’t Valerie Plame, either, but nevermind.) Now, none of these alibis pass muster, but—we know from the run up to the war—that this is what the White House calls consensus building.
If you’ll recall, we supposedly invaded Iraq for three reasons: 1) In retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, in which it supposedly particpated, 2) To head off an imminent threat posed by the country’s stockpiles of WMDs, and 3) To liberate the country from tyranny. Today we know that 1) and 2) were based on falsehoods. By floating them as rationales, however, the White House was able to scrape together enough popular opinion to move forward with the invasion and win a presidential election. Could the administration have built this kind of consenus on 3) alone? Doubtful, as the declining popularlity of the war now suggests. But as 1) and 2) have faded, 3) has been taken up by the faithful as the reason they were for the war in the first place, whichever argument roused their support in the beginning. This is the sense in which the administration has been dishonest. Its strategy has consistently been to offer as many rationales as possible—each one picking up a constituency of its own—and then making its stand on whichever one sticks.
And that’s how Rove is handling his embarrassing involvement in the Plame affair—with a scattershot of alibis, any one of which might get him off the hook. While this isn’t quite the “kettle logic” described by Freud—since the explanations aren’t mutually exclusive—it does show a healthy respect for the relativism conservatives are always fretting about, and raises the question, once again, of who’s postmodern now?
