What is the Scooter Libby trial really about?
In announcing the indictment of the vice-presidential aide in October 2005, the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald attempted to make it all perfectly clear, using a baseball analogy:
If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fast ball and hit a batter right smack in the head and it really, really hurt them, you’d want to know why the pitcher did that. And you’d wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, “I’ve got bad blood with this batter, he hit two home runs off me, I’m just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can.”
You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball, or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter’s head. And there’s a lots of shades of gray in between. You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back, it hit him in the head because he moved; you might want to throw it under his chin but ended up hitting on the head.
And what you’d want to do is have as much information as you could. You’d want to know what happened in the dugout. Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you’d want to know. And then you’d make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether he should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, “Hey, the person threw a bad pitch; get over it.”
After nearly a week of testimony the case is not much clearer than this botched analogy, the forensic equivalent of a “wardrobe malfunction.”
The Washington Post described Judith Miller’s testimony yesterday as “potentially damaging” to Libby. And this is surely accurate if one focuses on the word “potentially.” But her testimony was also even more potentially helpful to the defense.
Libby’s lawyers are expected to maintain that his “false” statements to the FBI and to a grand jury were the product of a faulty memory. So far, a number of prosecution witnesses have given testimony that differs significantly from what Libby told FBI investigators and the grand jury. But more importantly they have been shown to have strikingly deficient memories themselves.
Judith Miller had 85 days in the Alexandria jail in which to refresh her recollections about the sequence of events that brought her there. But no sooner was she released and brought before the grand jury, than she was compelled to acknowledge that she had entirely forgotten a critical meeting with Libby in June of 2003. If she could forget such a vital detail, will the jury convict Libby for lying, when the possibility that he simply forgot has been powerfully sketched by Miller and others in the witness parade?
It is possible that Scooter Libby is lying through his catcher’s mask. But my bet is that, if the jury takes seriously the meaning of the words “reasonable doubt,” Patrick Fitzgerald will have been judged to have pitched four balls, and Scooter, now up at bat, will get to walk.
To see key exhibits in the Scooter Libby case, click here.
To see key exhibits in the Baseball Hall of Fame, click here.
“Centuries” are not the same as calendar years. The 19th century began in 1815 with the Congress of Vienna, cleaning up the mess after the Napoleonic Wars. It ran until 1914, when WWI brought about the end of the Ancien Regime in Europe and the fall of the continental empires.
I’m not sure when the 20th century ended, but I have a feeling it was several years ago, and not necessarily Jan 1, 2000. Perhaps it can be dated from the rise of the personal computer and the internet, which will, over time, change us more than we know.
It’s certainly changing the employment prospects of people like Dionne.
So…the new narrative for the Loonie Lefties is to just blot out the last eight years because they are an anomaly. Well, I’d like to blot out the years 1929-1980, but somehow time prevents me from doing so. Thankfully, I was only alive for four of those years, and for those four years I was a snot-nosed brat.
Until I see Dionne make his first coherent argument — complete with the use of at least one — ANY — identifiable interpretive box — I will continue to withhold assent to his proclamations.
When we’re in the big middle, our own personal selves, of something really honkin’ huge, it always looks to us like the beginning of a new century. 9/11/01 looked like that on 9/12/01. We’re just acting like humans when we look back from the lofty remove of 12/30/08 and announce that, well, 9/11/01 was merely a rather interesting point in the continuous past, and not a watershed.
October 2008 — indeed, the entire autumn of this year — now seems like the onset of maybe even a new millennium, let alone a century, because of the gigantic size and implications of the numbers associated with the debt and finance crisis. Most of us are living mainly in apprehension, as we were after 9/11: worried, anxious, still commanding the necessities of life, but not sure what the next year will bring. The anxiety of not knowing may even turn out to be worse than whatever actually happens.
The funny thing is that not as much has changed as we think. In 2008, the same political parties in the US are promoting and arguing the same Keynesian, statist “remedies” for the economic crisis that we saw after 1929. There is also sentiment among voter constituencies for exactly the same protectionism and monetary policies that helped to deepen and prolong the Great Depression. Around the globe, other nations are restive, unreliable, predatory — watching and waiting for the US to stumble, making plans for that contingency, building their arsenals, intimidating their neighbors. The sense that this situation differs not at all from that enjoyed by man since he began organizing into centralized nations would be absolutely accurate.
In 2008, notably, we have applicable historical examples to show us that the empty bromides being uttered by the Obama cohort, about the economy and global security, have a terrible performance record. Keynesian pump-priming doesn’t work; in fact, it’s harmful. Government can’t stimulate, it can only confiscate. In international relations, negotiating accommodations with predatory states is weakness, and will bring on more predation as night follows day. History affords no other lesson from actual events.
When a century began is a matter for organizing theories. In one sense, we are still living in the “century” that began with Napoleon’s applied synthesis of politico-military ideas. That century effectively began in about 1795. Nothing really ended in 1914, and certainly not in 1918. Our technological and logistic capability to execute Napoleonic strategies has finally caught up with the reach of Bonaparte’s vision. Economically, we are all thinking well inside the same boxes delineated by both free-market and Marxist theorists (all products of the Western Enlightenment, as are we) — and are usually unaware of how much our terminology is biased by the invidious definitions of Marxism.
I think we can be sure of this. The century that will run from January 2009 to December 2108 will begin next month. Mazel tov!
J.E. Dyer, if we really stretch out the concept of “century,” let’s say this period began with the end of the Black Death in Europe. Since then, almost everything has been on an upward path. The question then becomes this: When will we have reached our peak?
Great to have you back.
I love articles about the future because they can be so wrong yet we seldom see people review past predictions for any accuracy or relevance.
What’s more, these articles always make me smile as they remind me of this quote:
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
Niels Bohr
Gordon C:
I’m afraid I’m unpersuaded by your reasoning as I am by Dionne’s! While he may offer tired 20th century bromides, the idea that the Bush administration didn’t substantially alter the geopolitical landscape strikes me as positively bizarre.
“Barack Obama: Creator of Centuries”
Truly magical.
JM Haynes, thanks for your provocative thoughts. If anyone altered the geopolitical landscape this decade, it was Bush, but only because he was the one who was the most responsible for creating the conditions for the global downturn. If you exclude economics, Osama did more than Bush to change things. Bush merely reacted–and not very well.
David S. Mazel, you love reading them and I love writing them. I welcome your holding me to what I say.
Gordon C:
How do “inevitable” geopolitical consequences also qualify as something entirely new? Aren’t there always geopolitical consequences to both economic highs and lows? Perhaps what’s new is simply your unwillingness to speculate as to what those consequences might be. The globalization and the IT revolution that forged our interlocking futures, and which defies traditional prognostication, is perhaps the seminal development dividing the 21st century from 20th. That geopolitical architecture achieved its operational majority in the new century’s opening decade, and, significantly, will be inherited by the Obama government. How creatively he will use the tools available to him, on everything but the fund raising front, is as yet unknown.
You state that, “If we were confident about the future at the beginning of this year, we had good cause for optimism,” which seems strange, when the logical point of your realization that progress is not foreordained, is that, in actual fact, you clearly had less cause for optimism than you thought. I would count that as a lesson learned, not the prelude to a new era. Similarly, though the source of your current anxiety has changed, you yourself compare it to post-9/11 anxiety — neither of which you could have predicted before the fact. Once again, isn’t your own lack of confidence in your ability to envision the future geopolitical shape of things what’s really new here?
The idea that Bush “was the one who was the most responsible for creating the conditions for the global downturn,” strikes me as an unsupportable assertion. The electorate, encouraged by politicians of many stripes, may accord presidents sole credit and blame for economic conditions, but it surprises me in someone I consider a more sophisticated observer. If you have actually made that argument concretely elsewhere, I’d be interested in reading it.
“If you exclude economics, Osama did more than Bush to change things. Bush merely reacted–and not very well.”
To accept your premise that Bush is responsible for precipitating a global economic meltdown that will change the world, is essentially to concede that the brave new world begins with Bush. Excluding economics altogether, the question of whether bin Laden did more to alter geopolitical realities than Bush is both arguable and beside the point. As Bush detractors on all sides have been at great pains to advise us for years, there were innumerable alternatives to the paths Bush chose to take, and to hear them tell it, those choices resulted in the most consequential foreign policy disaster EVAH. Whether one agrees or disagrees, writing off the policy of preemptive engagement, for example, as inconsequentially reactive is not a serious argument. You simply ignore the fact that Bush’s reaction was an entirely unprecedented departure from the traditional norm.
Frankly, I think you rather succinctly state the essence of your case in a single sentence: “Yet events today do have an end-of-era feel to them.”
But of course, they do! The Obama inauguration will bring the Bush era in the White House to a demonstrable end. If that end-of-era feeling is especially pronounced, it’s precisely because the past 8 years have been so fraught with conflict and change, and seemed so hard and long, on both the national and geopolitical stage. The question at issue is whether that tenure marks the end of a discreet historical period or the beginning of a new one. In my experience, the real agents of change are as likely to be hated or despised as they are loved or respected, and I think a lot of history suggests as much. Those who follow them, and often get the credity, are the beneficiaries of change.
Is your own assessment of Bush really confined to current economic circumstances and his response to bin Laden? I’ve long thought that the relentless political/media focus on al Qaeda and Iraq has almost completely obscured nearly everything else Bush has attempted and accomplished elsewhere on the global stage. 50 years out, when historians tie their own geopolitical landscape to its roots in time, I have little doubt that it is the Bush era which will be seen as a turning point, not a terminus. Regardless of where one plugs bin Laden in, the world Obama will inherit from Bush is, IMO, almost breathtakingly different that the world Bush inherited from Clinton. Indeed, it is Obama’s prospective government that looks increasingly like an attempt to turn back the clock. Even the response to the failures from Wall St. to Detroit will have already been shaped and set in motion by the time he takes the oath of office.
Gordon C:
Oops. I’m afraid I attributed J.E.Dyer’s reference to 9/11 anxiety to you. Please accept my apologies for the error and advise the jury to ignore it!
Alas, it’s a bummer when corrections land on a separate page!
Gordon,
underneath all his blather about jihadis not being a serious threat and America not being the sole superpower, E. J. Dionne jr. is prematurely (and idiotically) trying to define the 21st century as the Obama century. That’s the primary purpose of his article. Journos like him have been busy for a while now trying to elevate the Lackluster Senator to mytho-historic status with their ridiculous comparisons between him and influential Presidents like JFK, Roosevelt, and even more incredibly, the truly great President Lincoln. It’s excedingly unlikely that the 21st century can be defined by any of the unspectaclar events that have transpired so far, especially the 2008 presidential election, but the current state of American journalism is obviously defined by fanatical Obama reverance, rabid BDS and a fervent hope for America’s decline.
Few historical events define eras, and Obama’s election was about as historic as Hallie Berry winning an Oscar. The final sack of Rome which led to the Dark Ages defined an era of barbarism. The Reformation And Renaissance defined eras of enlightenment. Likewise I think it would take something similarly catastrophic or enlightening to shape the 21st century, much less an entire era. The collapse of America or a global termo-nuclear war would do so. So would the enlightenment of the world’s barbarous countries or a radical scientific advancement like cheap energy.
Dionne and his fellow sycophants ought to wait and see if their Anointed One actually accomplishes something of consequence before they have his likeness carved into Mount Rushmore. The Washington post article exemplifies the poor writing and analytical skills of our current journalism elites. Dionne confuses “era” with “epoch,” and the election of an empty suit to the Presidency as proof of an epoch. He helps define national standards of discourse downward.
You’re right to use him as an example of how the so called news media usually fail to recognize consequential events, but seldom fail to promote inconsequential ones.
I love how these theoretical arguments always start out about one thing and rapidly become about something else.
Dionne is indeed trying to make the case for Obama as the catalyst for a new era. We can deduce from his meandering text that this is related in his mind to the cosmic justice of an end to the Bush era, and all that it means to him in terms of personal irritation. But that doesn’t actually mean there is an inevitable, logical connection between these two concepts of an era hand-off in 2009. In fact, it’s all a big conceptual muddle, and invites a series of disconnected arguments on whether one era had to end from its own stupidity, and whether another had to start because of Obama, technology, or the precipice at the end of the Mayan calendars.
For what it’s worth, here are my $.02 on what ended in 2008 that will seem clear to us in a hundred years. The end we are seeing is of our ability to keep heaping overhead costs — entitlements and regulation — on our economic production. Our economy — our ability to produce, innovate, and prosper — can simply no longer bear the level of confiscation and resource diversion our government has imposed on it for the last 70+ years.
For a good 20 of those years we have been blinded to the effect of confiscation and resource diversion by our use of debt, both private and public. Regulation, effective taxation, and wealth/income transfers have steadily increased, but people have continued to accumulate increasingly expensive material blessings by borrowing against the future. If we could not borrow so easily, we would take much more notice of how expensive life has been made by regulation, and how much of our incomes government confiscates at every turn.
What we have reached in 2008 is the limit of our ability to pay the overhead costs of interventionist, redistributionist government, while also prospering in our private lives. I consider it no accident that the financial meltdown of 2008 occurred at precisely the point when America’s aggregate household wealth — estimated at some $58-60 trillion just before the Sep-Oct crisis — approximately equalled the respective totals of the projected US federal debt (almost entirely made up of unfunded entitlements — Social Security and Medicare), and of the outstanding aggregate of credit default swaps.
It’s a crude and simplistic concept, but a powerful one: the wealth was there to make good one or the other of those vast debt commitments — but not both. And if either was to be made good, every penny of every American’s household wealth was ALREADY COMMITTED.
It was stupid to go into all that debt, both private and public. But it was stupider still to act, starting as far back as the 1930s, as if we could pay for all the entitlements and regulations we could come up with by saddling our productivity and consumer purchases with them. That’s what we did. Gas, milk, notebook paper, and electricity all cost so much because with every unit you purchase, you are paying for social welfare programs and a colossal list of regulations. These things, in turn, cost so much relative to your income because the government skims so much of your income off the top — some of it before you even see it.
There really is no such thing as a free lunch. We can have a spiraling burden of entitlements and regulation, or we can have prosperity for the maximum number of us; but we cannot have both. The use of debt postponed the reckoning for us on this, but it is also going to make the reckoning more painful.
It remains to be seen when we, as a people, collectively see the truth about all this. That did not happen in 2008. But we did, in 2008, collide with the outer limit of our ability to impose political costs on the economy. If a new era does begin, its inception will occur when we do something about that other than try to apply the same old quasi-Keynesian remedies to the symptoms. A new era might begin if we recognize the underlying disease, and choose to treat it with less sacramental government, as opposed to more.
JM Hanes, apologies for the delayed response. My computer was down for most of yesterday.
You write: “If you have actually made that argument concretely elsewhere, I’d be interested in reading it.” Of course, the conditions creating the global downturn had been in the making for decades.
Yet I do not think it was a coincidence that the downturn occurred on his watch. First, he more than anyone else allowed regulation to lapse. Second, he was largely responsible for permitting the Chinese to build up trade surpluses that were recycled back into the United States and which overwhelmed what was left of regulation. Financial institutions blew up their balance sheets with the Chinese cash, and then it was virtually inevitable there would be a crash. Why was Bush partially at fault for what the Chinese did? He did not effectively challenge Chinese trade violations that led to their build-up of cash. Here is a partial explanation:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/chang/34092
Ziggy Zoggy, this may be a little of an exaggeration, but it is nonetheless a truly great line: “Few historical events define eras, and Obama’s election was about as historic as Hallie Berry winning an Oscar.” Thanks for brightening my morning.
J.E. Dyer, you wrote: “I consider it no accident that the financial meltdown of 2008 occurred at precisely the point when America’s aggregate household wealth — estimated at some $58-60 trillion just before the Sep-Oct crisis — approximately equalled the respective totals of the projected US federal debt (almost entirely made up of unfunded entitlements — Social Security and Medicare), and of the outstanding aggregate of credit default swaps.”
Now this is a truly interesting development, even if it was a coincidence. As you point out, the situation was unsustainable. People will be arguing about the immediate causes of the downturn for decades, but you have identified underlying conditions that made a downturn inevitable.