Okay, here's another thing I just don't get: Valerie Plame Wilson suddenly becoming some kind of hero to civil libertarians and other liberals. She was in Burlington today (I did not go, had plenty of exposure on last week's 60 Minutes and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, thanks). 

Her sound bite about her book (and all this exposure is definitely about selling the book) is that the story is “about speaking truth to power” and “holding your government to account for its misdeeds.”

Say what?! This from a CIA covert operative? I know lefties and liberals (being one myself) tend to support victims of tyrants, but come ON! Yes her cover was blown by vicious thugs making an example of a critic by targeting her as “collateral damage.” Yes, it ended her covert career (hence the book and the massive media exposure cum sellathon).

She said on 60 Minutes that some of her “assets” had disappeared, and one had likely been killed, IIRC. Those weren't “assets,” Valerie, but people who took risks, people whom you used. I'm sure you chalk their probable detainment and interrogation up to the misdeeds of the Bush administration. But they would not have been at risk if your agency  had not put them there in the first place.

Plame Wilson is hardly destitute, hardly liberal, and at least to my mind, hardly someone whose lectures on ethics and morals I would give credence to, much less the $28 cost of admission and the $26 list price for the book (though I found it on Overstock.com a mere week post-release for just over $14, and Amazon has it at under $16). Click here for an appropriately skeptical review of her talk in South Burlington.

Yes, I suppose she gets some points for not quietly going away, and Joe gets some points for having written the yellowcake fraud expose in the first place.

But, remember, folks, “The enemy of an enemy is NOT necessarily a friend.” And for a willing tool of an agency that specializes in deceit to suddenly feel victimized when her bosses use the same tactics on her and her husband is, IMO, the rankest hypocrisy that disqualifies Valerie Wilson Plame from even uttering the words “speak truth to power” and turns the phrase “holding one's government accountable for its misdeeds” in her mouth into a hollow mockery.

NanuqFC

In a Time of Universal Deceit, Telling the TRUTH is a Revolutionary Act. — George Orwell

One by one, Senators are coming out to express their reservations about the nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General. From John McCain and Lindsey Graham (both of whom, to be frank, everyone should expect to roll over in the end), to John Kerry, to Bernie Sanders, Senators have expressed puzzlement and astonishment at Mukasey’s inability to take a clear position on whether or not waterboarding is torture.

Still worse, if that’s possible, is the fact that Mukasey remains unwilling to say definitively whether or not the President of the United States is bound by statutory law of any kind.

In a NYT op-ed published last week, Prof. Jeb Rubenfeld of Yale Law School identified an answer given by Mukasey that should prove far more troubling than the horrifying but considerably narrower answer he gave to the torture question:

AT his confirmation hearings last week, Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee for attorney general, was asked whether the president is required to obey federal statutes. Judge Mukasey replied, “That would have to depend on whether what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country.”

Rubenfeld elaborates:

According to Judge Mukasey’s statement, as well as other parts of his testimony, the president’s authority “to defend the nation” trumps his obligation to obey the law. Take the federal statute governing military commissions in Guantánamo Bay. No one, including the president’s lawyers, argues that this statute is unconstitutional. The only question is whether the president is required to obey it even if in his judgment the statute is not the best way “to defend the nation.”

If he is not, we no longer live under the government the founders established.

True.

And thankfully, the op-ed caught the eye of Sen. Chris Dodd, who today announced his opposition to Mukasey’s nomination based specifically on this point.

Which, since it’s a point I’ve been making about this “administration” for going on two years now, brings me back to the position I took just a few days ago: Nobody for Attorney General.

What Mukasey has expressed here is really a basic tenet of the Bush “administration’s” view of constitutional law. Mukasey himself has expressed nothing here that puts him at odds with the policy-making elements of the “administration” with respect to executive powers, and that’s something Senators need to recognize if they’re going to approach this nomination, or indeed any dealings with the Bush White House at all, in any rational fashion.

Ask yourselves who could convince you – and how would they do it? – that they were serious about safeguarding the basic tenets of the Constitution and its separation of powers, and at the same time keep faith with this “administration?”

Any president — and I mean any president — ought to be able to depend on a certain amount of deference from his or her Attorney General, of course. This ordinarily goes without saying, but in this case must be said because it sets up an irreconcilable paradox. Is it even possible to serve an administration that regularly asserts constitutional interpretations like the one Judge Mukasey did and protect the fundamental rule of law which underlies our entire constitutional system of government? How could it be so?

Who could do that? Could anyone?

If not — and I assert that it is simply not possible to do — should Senators be operating under normal circumstances? That is, should they be proceeding with the nomination as if this president — who has himself created this irreconcilable paradox — were in fact entitled to this or indeed any nominee?

An “administration” that sends distinguished federal judges to Capitol Hill and puts them in a position requiring them to hedge on answers to such basic questions as must a president obey federal statutes is operating so far outside the bounds of normalcy already, that it hardly seems worth anyone’s time to pretend that an Attorney General is necessary to the functioning of the government at all.

Indeed, the confirmation of an Attorney General at this point does the country a considerable disservice, by glossing over the fact that the “administration” is operating in a manner that would actually require this kind of evasion from someone who supposedly aspires to the nation’s top law enforcement position.

This is a process that should come to a full stop, so that Senators may pause and take a good look around at what’s happened, and what they’re being asked to facilitate, in the name of “business as usual.”