The Meaning Of The Words "Broke The Law"

I guess the moral of this latest twist in the endless WilsonPlamegate rabbit hole is this: elect a Democrat president and get an avalanche of word-parsing; elect a Republican president and the Extreme Media will do it for him.

The press is claiming that President Bush has changed his pledge to fire anyone in his Administration involved in leaking Valerie Plame's name - saying he's now added the qualifier, "If someone committed a crime."

As usual, the press is on fecality overdrive.

Here's what the President originally said, September 30, 2003:

"If there is a leak out of my Administration, I want to know who it is," the President told reporters back then. "And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of." [emphasis added]

This comment didn't get sucked down a vacuum.

Dozens of news organizations quoted Bush's September 2003 proviso, "if the person has violated law", including USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, Fox and CNN.

Here is what the President said in response to, shall we say, an "imprecise" journo question, June 10, 2004:

REPORTER: Given recent developments in the CIA leak case, particularly Vice President Cheney's discussions with the investigators, do you still stand by what you said several months ago, suggesting that it might be difficult to identify anybody who leak the agent's name? And do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found to have done so? [emphases added]

BUSH: Yes. And that's up to the U.S. attorney to find the facts.

The "reporter" asked two supposedly related questions, to which the President provided a single affirmative answer. The EM is applying the lone "yes" to the second question and completely ignoring the first because the respective premises of the two questions are blatantly contradictory. But if the lone "yes" is to be applied to one or the other, logically it should be the first question since it is the fulcrum off of which the follow-up misleadingly pivots.

That is the only coherent conclusion to draw in light of what Mr. Bush said yesterday:

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my Administration."

It never fails to evoke a throaty chuckle how the stolid, centered, rooted 43rd president is endlessly accused of frenetic movement by enemies who themselves buzz and flit around and around him in perpetual frenzy like the fighter planes diving and bobbing and weaving around King Kong atop the Empire State Building. And when those guffaws subside, new ones burst forth at the spectacle of the president whose intelligence they've taken years of delight in belittling being "credited" with the very sort of etymological hairsplitting that sent them into orgasmic shivers when Bill Clinton did it over matters far more tawdry and real.

An impressive Gordian knot of partisan foolishness the Left has amassed; the more they go after Karl Rove, the squeakier clean he looks, and the worse their hack diplofixer Joe Wilson and his scheming spook moll Valerie Plame look. And now they can't even put words in GDub's mouth.

So what is the obvious thing to do now? Open an impeachment inquiry, of course!

Representative Barney Frank said late Monday that Congress should begin an impeachment investigation into the Bush Administration's handling of the Leakgate scandal and not wait for Special Proscecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to determine whether any laws were broken.

Well, you knew it was coming, whether the pretext was Abu Ghraib or "misleading us into war" or Gitmo or this equally discredited gambit. And you also knew the real reason:

"During the Clinton impeachment, the Republicans kept saying, remember, impeachment does not mean the end of the process. It is the beginning," Frank told MSNBC Hardball substitute host Campbell Brown.

We impeached Clinton - for one criminal act among a statistical universe of them, but in their minds because we couldn't beat him at the ballot box - so now that the shoe is on the other foot, they're determined to bite off every last one of our toes and finally carry out the bloodless coup de tat that Al Gore never quite pulled off four and a half years ago.

Which, of course, would mean that Halliburton would at long last have achieved world domination.

Perhaps Karl the Great and My Boy Lollipop have been having some secret phone conversations of late? An enterprising reporter could make his/her career by finding out.

Either that, or send in Joe Wilson. His second fifteen minutes of infamy are just about up.