Caught flat-footed

I caught a moment of the Lehrer News hour on PBS and didn't like what I saw.

A little Mark Shields- David Brooks Crossfire type action about the Plamegate. It was shocking to me the persistence of old rotten disinformation in this debate, particularly from David Brooks, whose reputation has long been that of a reasonable and moderate conservative.

Among empty falsehoods- the old chestnut that Wilson insisted Cheney had sent him. Any careful reading of his NY Times op ed demonstrate this is not true. But most alarming was Brooks' unshaken belief that Iraq had in fact sought Nigerien yellowcake. The basis for this is apparently Sue Schmidt's erroneous assertion in an old column that the Senate investigation had confirmed an attempted purchase from 1998. It should shock Brooks, then, that it was not Saddam who had sought said uranium but rather the Ayatollah Khamenei, as a helpful correction on that Schmidt story tells us.

Karl Rove was wrong. If Cooper's email is typical of Rove's mad dash to mislead, Rove identified Valerie Plame Wilson as the person who had sent Wilson to Niger. We now know that isn't true. She didn't have the authority. Rove wasn't right on any merits. Wilson was right about Saddam's failure to seek, or have any relevant channel to seek, Nigerien uranium. The Iraqis didn't actually have any of these WMD precursors. Iraq didn't have any WMDs. Rove was trying to preempt a critic of a war fought on false premises. Karl Rove has had a long illustrious career of spreading lies and doubt upon people who have opposed his employers. Shields was right, then, to call Brooks' talking point (and there is no question that that is exactly what it was) that Rove was trying to altruistically steer Cooper among others away from Wilsons falsehoods one of the more absurd talking points imaginable.

Brooks of course said that this is just liberals assuming Rove is the devil himself. But when you've been spreading lies about people, setting up dirty tricks, and acting like a machiavellian dickhead for decades, you don't deserve this slack. It's almost sad to see Brooks, who, although he maintains this amiable simpleton persona, is clearly no idiot, carrying water for one of the most powerful and despicable men in a city of powerful, despicable men. Reasonableness, really, isn't writing pseudosociological sketches of far-off red state people in a way that both flatters its largely liberal, bourgeouis audience and convinces them they are insufficiently pious and salt-of the-earthy. Reasonableness, really, is every once in a while, not carrying water for your deeply corrupt party.