Posted 1:47 PM by magnu231
PlameGate

Apparently, Scooter Libby has testified that the President authorized him to leak classified information to the press to defend the decision to go to war and contradict Joe Wilson's public statements on the reasons for going to war. Originally, some thought this meant that Bush was authorizing Libby to out Plame. This turns out not to be the case. I'm not going to go as far as Nick at genericheretic and say this is impeachable. In fact, I don't know all the facts and circumstances, so I'm not even going to say this was necessarily wrong. I do think that this administration has been rather inept, and in ways that has hurt its credibility. Again, I know that there are some for whom the credibility never existed, for whom the evidence needed to believe anything Bush says is comparable to the evidence desired by Dave Chapelle to prove that R. Kelly was a pedarast. However, I do think there were good reasons for going to war in Iraq, and although some of those reasons are a lot less credible in hindsight, there are still good reasons to defend the action. I have been troubled by the "spreading democracy" line, as well as the "freeing people from brutal dictators" line, because I'm not sure that's our job. But the President and administration have either not used the bully pulpit enough, or have come out with unpersuasive reasons. This war could have and still can be defended. But the defense of the war has so far been incompetent, and has been largely the reason for the decline in his opinion polls.

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