What if Vice President Gore had made the identity of a secret CIA agent public?

Can you even imagine the level of outcry we would have seen if Clinton had fabricated the justifications for sending military to Kosovo, and had outright lied about it to the American people in a State of the Union address in order to get their support for going to war; and after going to war in Kosovo with ground troops and a few hundred deaths already, someone in the intelligence community who had been sent several months earlier to verify one of the most critical pieces of information that ended up in that address – call him JW -- had found the information almost certainly was not true; and when nobody in the Clinton government would do anything when JW tried to stay within the system to get the lie corrected, he wrote in the New York Times that what Clinton had said in his State of the Union address as a certain fact was false; and in order to protect the administration and continue keeping most of the American people from learning the truth – how many read the New York Times, after all? -- Vice President Gore, knowing that JW’s wife worked at the CIA, and knowing that he did not know whether or not she was a covert agent for the CIA – or actually knowing that she was -- had ordered his chief-of-staff to disclose her identity as a CIA official to “friendly” pundits and reporters in the press in order, presumably, either to discredit JW or intimidate others who knew the truth from talking to the press; that President Clinton’s main advisor in the White House did basically the same thing with other “friendly” reporters or pundits; and it turned out her duties involved trying to prevent the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, and thus, that all of the operations she was involved in for gathering intelligence on the spread of weapons of mass destruction, wherever in the world they were, had to be shut down by the CIA; and CIA agents overseas involved in those operations may or may not have been put at risk, or may or may not have been killed as a result of the disclosure (the CIA, of course, would not tell); and the CIA formally requested the Justice Department to investigate the unauthorized disclosure for possible violations of law, including criminal violations of a law against disclosing the identity of American intelligence personnel; and Janet Reno had appointed a Democratic U.S. Attorney as the special counsel for investigation and any prosecution; and during the special counsel’s investigation, Gore’s chief-of-staff (let’s call him Skip, even if it does seem a bit of a frivolous name for identifying the head of the Vice President of the United States of America’s White House organization) told the FBI and the grand jury that he had not participated in disclosing the confidential information about JW’s wife, but had only re-circulated to certain reporters information he had heard from other reporters; and the other reporters denied under oath that they had even known about the identity of JW’s wife, much less mentioned it to Skip; and in the case presided over by a Democratic judge who had been appointed by Clinton, the jury found those statements by Skip to investigators to be false, and found Skip guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice; and that the judge had sentenced Skip to prison for a couple of years.

Now, how many Republicans – remember, this is Democrats doing all this, and it’s all precipitated by a lie in Clinton’s State of the Union address to get the country to go to war in Kosovo -- would have been whining about how mean the prosecutor was for going after Skip for lying to FBI investigators and the grand jury? Or about how Skip’s attempt to get public disclosure of the identity of a covert CIA agent wasn’t an “underlying crime” even though there is a specific law saying that it is a crime (and even though we had gone to war based on an actual lie by Clinton that JW was exposing to the American public); or how JW’s wife was not really covert even though the CIA officially and formally declared on various occasions she had, in fact, been covert at the time; or how the sentence was too steep given what a great guy Skip was?

In fact, do you think it possible Republicans would have been calling Skip a traitor for revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent? Do you think it possible that some Republicans would have been beside themselves in white fury that the special counsel had not included a count against Skip under the law prohibiting a government official from revealing the identity of a covert intelligence official? Or even a treason count in the indictment against Skip so that Skip could be given the death penalty, and, duh, that Vice President Gore and the President’s main White House advisor should have been indicted as well?

We know the answer to that. Disclosing the identity of a secret American agent for personal political reasons would have been treated as an event of historic, world-changing proportions, and almost without doubt would have led to sustained efforts to impeach Clinton. And so we have not only Republicans and neo-conservative supporters of the Iraq War making us virtually puke over their over-the-top praise for a convicted liar trying to protect higher-up liars, but so-called centrist or moderately liberal commentators like David Broder (Wash Post) and Joe Klein (Time) picking up and regurgitating Republican talking points that make the whole thing so much ado about nothing. Yet not one of these press people can in good faith deny the scenario above would have happened had it been Clinton.

The degree of corruption in the Beltway press as evidenced by this Free-Scooter episode is almost beyond comprehension. Someone spilled the beans on a lie made by the President; the president’s henchmen deliberately concocted a plan to discredit or punish the person by disclosing the secret identity of a CIA agent as his wife, thus compromising operations to protect the American people from nuclear or biological attack; and Libby lied about his role in furthering that plan. And that’s a ho-hum? They just do not care. They do not care. Joe Klein is more worried about being criticized by liberal bloggers than he is about the top person in the Vice President's office lying to duly-constituted investigators. What more can one say to show they really and truly do not care.