Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels. - Owlb
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
ReplyDeleteBut the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.
But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.
Karl Rove is the person who
warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).
Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb
UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb
UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.
John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.
UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.
Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.
It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.
"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."
Republican analysts don't disagree.
"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."
On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."
So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels.
Fortieth Anniversary Symposium:
ReplyDeleteScience, Religion, and Secularity in a
Technological Society
ATHENS, JERUSALEM, AND THE ARRIVAL OF
TECHNO-SECULARISM
by John C. Caiazza
Abstract. Western civilization historically has tried to balance secular
knowledge with revealed religion. Science is the modern world’s
version of secular knowledge and resists the kind of integration
achieved by Augustine and Aquinas. Managing the conflict between
religion and evolution by containing them in separate “frames,” as
Stephen J. Gould suggested, does not resolve the issue. Science may
have displaced religion from the public square, but the traditional
science-religion conflict has become threadbare in intellectual terms.
Scientific theories have become increasingly abstract, and science has
been attacked from the left as a source of objective knowledge. However,
technology, not science, has displaced religious belief, a phenomenon
I call techno-secularism. Robert Coles’s suggestion that
secularism is a form of doubt inevitably attached to religious belief,
and William James’s reduction of religious experiences to psychological
states, evaluating them according to their “cash value,” are unhelpful.
Technology enables us to remake our environment according
to our wishes and has become a kind of magic that replaces not just
revealed religion but also theoretical science. Techno-secularism has
an ethical vision that focuses on healthful living, self-fulfillment, and
avoiding the struggles of human life and the inevitability of death.
Keywords: evolution and religion; Stephen J. Gould; psychology
and religion; religion; science; science and religion; secularism; technology;
techno-secularism.
[Zygon, vol. 40, no. 1 (March 2005).]
© 2005 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon. ISSN 0591-2385
9
10 Zygon
In the third century the dissident Christian theologian Tertullian asked
rhetorically in the midst of a theological controversy, “What has Athens to
do with Jerusalem?”—condemning in effect the use of Platonic philosophy
to defend the Christian religion and provide an intellectual basis for
its theology (Copleston 1961, 10). The theme of the two competing cities
has characterized the relationship of the Christian religion with Western
civilization to this day. According to Leo Strauss, Western civilization attains
its vitality and uniqueness because in it two major sources of knowledge
and inspiration contend, the secular and the revealed (Hart 2000,
63–71). Ironically, the integration of revealed knowledge found in the
Bible and religious tradition with secular knowledge has never actually
been accomplished, and it is that fact that provides the essential motive
force for the advance of Western civilization, at least so far. In the third
century the form that secular knowledge took was the neo-Platonic philosophy
that Hellenistic culture of the time inherited from the Greeks,
hence Tertullian’s reference to Athens. This was the same neo-Platonism
later integrated into Christian theology by the great Saint Augustine.
Whereas the source of revelation—the Gospels and the authority of the
Western and Eastern bishops of the Christian church—remained constant,
the source of secular knowledge changed from ambient neo-Platonism in
the late ancient world to rediscovered Aristotelianism in the High Middle
Ages (Copleston 1961, 13, 14).
In modern times secular knowledge has been represented not by ancient
philosophy but by modern empirical science, and the conflict has continued
under the rubric of “religion versus science.” This conflict between
religion and science has taken many turns, and while as the latest manifestation
of an 1,800-year-old tension in theology it presents unique difficulties,
understanding its history supplies a context in which to understand
and I hope clarify current controversies, including whether the conflict is a
necessary one and the profound importance of technology in the current
stage of the debate. It is in the historical context of the separation between
secular and revealed knowledge that the 150-year-old controversy between
evolutionary theory and religion is best understood.
STEPHEN J. GOULD, THEOLOGIAN
One of the late Stephen J. Gould’s last books is Rocks of Ages: Science and
Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999). Its tone is, if not elegiac, somewhat
tired, for in this short book Gould gives us the benefit of a professional
lifetime’s effort of a Darwinian publicist and scientist contending with the
religious enemies of Darwinian evolution. It may seem odd, therefore,
that in it Gould praises no fewer than three popes, including Pius IX, Pius
XII, and John Paul II. The latter two published documents permitting
Roman Catholics to research and even accept some (but not all) of the main
John C. Caiazza 11
tenets of “orthodox” evolution.1 That is, Catholic doctrine excludes the
Darwinian materialist thesis that all life is solely a mechanical process and
asserts instead that all human beings have been provided by the Creator
with an immortal soul. It appears that Gould sets up these popes as a
firewall against the objections of religious critics including neo-Creationists
and fundamentalists who oppose Darwinism as atheistic and
unscriptural.
American public opinion has never accepted Darwinism wholeheartedly,
and serious thinkers continue to make effective responses to it, most
recently Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box (Behe 1997; see Caiazza 1997).
Although neo-Creationists may have lost the recent court cases, their argument
that alternatives to Darwinism ought to be presented in high schools
is an agreeable one to Americans. Gould probably feared that at some
point one of these cases might incorporate Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia’s contention that American citizens ought to have a say in what their
children are taught in public schools, thus countering the Darwinians, and
his book must be seen in this light. Gould’s proposed resolution of the
religion/evolution controversy is “non-overlapping magisteria,” or NOMA.
The basic idea is easily expressed: science and religion each occupies its
own “frame” (a term he borrowed from G. K. Chesterton), and each field
should not exceed its proper limit. Gould willingly concedes that evolutionists
have often overreached with declarations about matters that are
religious, but of course his main concern is with religious believers who
use revelation and the Bible to confute evolution (Gould 1999, 125–50).
The frames are important for Gould, because he perceives that if science
and religion stay within their own frames, there will be no further conflicts,
and neither side will be able to suppress the other. It sounds plausible,
but religious believers who agree to accept Gould’s NOMA may be
duped, because clearly he expects science to continue as it has in the past to
confine religion into ever narrower and more constricted frames while it
expands its own frame into areas formerly occupied by religion. Gould’s
understanding of religion is completely secular. He sees religion as something
that cannot be ignored because of its influence but that should be
kept within rigid social boundaries. Further, as one critic pointed out,
Gould’s understanding of religion is “glaringly inadequate” in that it includes
none of the things we normally associate with religion, even belief
in God (Carey 2001).
The surprising thing about Gould’s NOMA proposal is that it is not
new, and he apparently did not realize it. In the thirteenth century at the
University of Paris such a proposal was the thesis of a group of philosophers
including Siger deBrabant, who was accused of proposing the theory
of the “double truth.” In those days the issue of conflict was not the Bible
versus evolution but the tradition of revelation versus the newly discovered
12 Zygon
philosophy of Aristotle. A group of radical theologians, including Albert
the Great and Thomas Aquinas, was attempting to integrate this newly
discovered secular knowledge with Christian revelation and facing heavy
opposition from reactionary theologians. Siger’s double-truth theory, like
Gould’s NOMA, was meant to quell the conflict, which had become fierce
and would eventually bring an ecclesiastical condemnation of Aristotelianism
(Copleston 1961, 104–5). Aquinas, however, vehemently opposed
the theory of the double truth with his famous dictum that all truth, secular
and revealed, is from the Holy Spirit (Aquinas 1955, Book 1 Chap. 7).
Although it is useful to understand the present debate surrounding evolution
as the latest reflection of an age-old contest between secular and
revealed knowledge, there does seem to be something different, more oppositional,
in this latest incarnation. Perhaps the reason we sense this is
that we are going through it, but I do not think that our sense of an ultimate
conflict between secular and revealed knowledge in the contemporary
case is just a question of loss of historical perspective. Greek philosophy
acknowledges the reality of spirit and the existence of God, whereas science
tends, as Cardinal John Newman pointed out, to be atheistic. In
other words, Saints Augustine and Thomas had an easier time of it because
both neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism are philosophies that acknowledge
or attempt to prove the existence of one immaterial God, the reality
of mind, and the immortality of the human soul, whereas modern science
emphatically does not. Further, science traditionally has tended to deny
the legitimacy of the perception of purpose in the universe and to pursue a
reductive agenda that attempted to delegitimize revealed knowledge. I
question whether modern science is necessarily materialistic, atheistic, and
reductive; nonetheless, it is a historical fact that, with the rise of modern
science, what was previously a controversy about secular and revealed knowledge
between theological academics has become a steel-cage death match.
SCIENCE VERSUS RELIGION—A DRAW
The present state of affairs in Western culture is that religion as part of civil
discourse is in retreat even in debates in which a religious perspective would
be most helpful, such as those about human cloning or fetal research, while
science and utilitarian ethics have seemingly captured the field. It may
even seem that the tension between secular and revealed knowledge in its
present form of science versus religion has been resolved; science has won,
and religion is discounted as irrelevant, as a mere survivor from a less progressive
time such as the Dark Ages or the 1950s. It must be admitted that
there are good intellectual reasons, translatable into formal arguments, for
opposition between modern science and revealed religion (just as there are
good reasons to observe their deep commonalities). Science has its own
implied metaphysics of the Galilean atomism that reduces physical reality
John C. Caiazza 13
to abstract mass points while discounting colors, motion, and other evidence
of our senses as merely secondary qualities. Science has its uncompromising
theory of causality, which combines materialism with mathematics
so that the actions of bodies can be understood dualistically—as contact
and movement of basic particles and as the result of invisible forces described
by calculus or probability. Science also benefits in the latest version
of the conflict from its own proclamations of impartiality and from
the putative superiority of its method, which supposedly produces at the
end of its process a sure result, undeniable and irrefutable, so unlike theology
and metaphysics. The triumph of the secular in our culture is largely
the result of the triumph of empirical science, and considering the formidable
arsenal of scientistic arguments it seems as if scientific secularism
may have finally carried the day among Western intellectuals.
The triumph of science over religion, however, comes at a peculiar time,
namely, when science itself faces challenges to its cultural hegemony as
never before since the Enlightenment, challenged not by a Romantic rejection
of its distancing from humane values and religious context but by the
denial of its very basis that science is a special method of discovering ultimate
truth. This challenge comes from postmodernist academics on college
and university faculties who have developed entire schools dedicated
to the denial of meaning in language that promote the cultural relativity of
truth. After attacking the humanities and social sciences, they are aiming
now at the hard sciences. In this context, science is fighting for its academic
life, for the oxygen of intellectual probity, and for the continued
acknowledgment of its epistemological superiority, all of which have provided
scientists with approbation, authority, and funding. This postmodernist
movement among philosophers, literatteurs, historicists, sociologists,
feminists, and multiculturalists is antiprogressive, of course, more reactionary
in its way than were the theologians and Aristotelian philosophers
who fought against Galileo, who at least believed that the universe could
be understood by the human intellect (Gross and Levitt 1998). The leftwing
attack nonetheless constitutes an intellectual challenge that has not
yet been successfully met by defenders of scientific objectivity.
The triumph of science also has been obstructed by developments from
within science itself, since some of its basic theories, especially in physics,
have developed beyond the simple-minded materialism characteristic of
nineteenth-century thinking. Relativity theory and quantum physics propel
us into levels of physical and methodological speculation so abstract
that, according to philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin (1982), philosophers
and theologians have now reentered controversies about cosmology.
It seems that physics, the base science, can no longer give us visually
precise pictures of either the atom, with its myriad attendant particles and
intermingling forces, or outer space, now filled with waves of gravity, black
holes, and dark matter. A further effect is that pop culture now freely uses
14 Zygon
the terms of contemporary physics—“quantum jump,” “expanding universe,”
“uncertainty principle,” “anthropic principle” (in a novel by John
Updike), “event horizon” (the name of a television program), and “Big
Bang” (the name of a chicken sandwich offered by a restaurant chain).
Within his own field of evolutionary biology Gould was involved in sharp
controversies surrounding determinism and chaos and was accused by other
evolutionists of giving inadvertent support to neo-Creationist deniers of
Darwinism. The upshot of these developments is that, as John Polkinghorne
has stated, in the arena of religion-science conflicts “we have all left
the realm of knockdown argument behind” (1983, 6). No longer are the
triumphant put-downs available that allegedly prove that scientific reason
must prevail over religious revelation, such as enabled Laplace to assure the
Emperor Napoleon that God was an unneeded hypothesis.
Yet scientific secularism still prevails, even as we are beyond the deployment
of formal arguments in civilized contexts (as when Bertrand Russell
debated Frederick Copleston, S.J., on the BBC about the existence of God2).
Today instead, the formal science-religion debate has become so trivialized
that the form was satirized by Monty Python and has degenerated to the
point that a revival underwritten by the Templeton Foundation that took
place in 1999 between two particle physicists was notable not for the deployment
of further refined arguments but for Polkinghorne’s sanguine
assertion that religion and science are no longer in opposition and Stephen
Weinberg’s assertion that religion is “an insult to human dignity” (Kiernan
1999, 17; see also Goldberg 1999). Not only is the day of the knockdown
argument over; it seems as if the day of any argument is over in the
formal sense that Gould’s Rocks of Ages implies, because the current state of
the science-religion controversy can no longer be settled decisively in intellectual
terms. In that sense science and religion have gained some form of
parity.
But in what terms can the present state of the science-religion controversy
be understood if not in intellectual terms? Ultimately, it seems that
the issue is not one of intellectual debate, since scientists must now explain
themselves in terms that are as abstract and arcane as those used in theology.
Are string theory and multiple universes any easier to explain than
the doctrines of justification or the Trinity, and are they not as frankly
distant from direct observation or experiment? (Pannenberg 1991, 37–52)
What has transpired so as to leave science triumphant despite ferocious
questioning of its methodological legitimacy from left-wing academics and,
despite its recent turn to high abstractions, amenable to philosophical and
theological treatment? To answer these questions we must distinguish scientific
theory from its applications—that is, science as explanation from
science as technology.
John C. Caiazza 15
THE ARRIVAL OF TECHNO-SECULARISM
Robert Coles claims in his recent book The Secular Mind that the origins
of secularism and its recent upsurge are not to be found so much in scientific
thought as in the nature of religious faith itself. As religious ideals rub
up against the quotidian, secularism as a form of doubt becomes the inevitable
psychological complement to faith, he argues. He quotes a conversation
with Catholic activist Dorothy Day: “I think you underestimate doubt
as a constant part of faith—in any century; and I think you are making too
much of science (and social science) as the (recent) ‘causes’ of secularism. I
don’t deny that today there is the authority of scientific knowledge to elicit
or encourage or give a kind of imprimatur to secularism; but for Heaven’s
sake, the secular world has always been ‘there’ or ‘here’” (Coles 1999, 40).
Coles’s meditations are in response to the dramatic event of Freudianism’s
replacing religion in the understanding and treatment of individuals suffering
from mental distress. As a psychiatrist and a man of religious sensibility,
Coles might well be expected to put the issue of contemporary
secularism in the context of the stresses attached to personal religious belief.
The circumstances of his writing his book, however, belie his understanding
of doubt as a constant twin of religious faith, because what he is
describing is the displacement of religious concepts by those of science. As
Day points out, there was secularism before there was science, but now
secularism has become a social movement defended by philosophers, scientists,
politicians, and writers. It is therefore not enough to see secularism
as another name for doubt and as the inevitable complement of religious
faith, for this subtle psychotheological observation does not explain the
roaring reality of rampant secularism seen in the present day and of science
in the form of technological application as its chief agent.
Science changed from a form of praise of God’s creation by such early
giants as Galileo and Newton into an aggressive competitor of religious
faith through a long process. Influential American philosopher William
James provided an illustration of how this transformation took place, and
not as an unintended consequence but deliberately. In 1902 he published
his Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The republication
of the book nearly one hundred years later by the Modern Library
(James [1902] 1999) reflects its importance as a cultural event. Its initial
publication marked a transition point from a science whose purpose was
to reflect the glory of God to a science whose intent is to replace religion
with the glorification of the human intellect. Varieties has been influential
just because it is not an example of blatant atheism but proceeds more
subtly and more powerfully as a phenomenology of religious experience,
examining religious belief not in doctrinal or historical terms but by means
of the then newly developing science of empirical psychology. The book
consists largely of reports of religious experiences, internal states that the
16 Zygon
subjects connect with divine or other external spiritual entities, which James
analyzes in terms of his pragmatic theory of truth. His conclusion is that
such experiences do not validate any particular religious tradition and especially
not the Calvinist Protestant one. James’s case against the Protestantism
of his day as a form of psychological strain and excess is easy to
make, because he defines all religious experiences in psychopathological
terms and applies a pragmatic, practical, businesslike criterion of meaning
to them ([1902] 1999, 9, 11, 29). On the other hand, his phenomenology
of religious experience tends against a reductive point of view, for he takes
reports of religious experience at face value and thereby eliminates the intellectual
possibility of scientific materialism. Metaphysically James reached
the conclusion that the variety of religious experience was best explained
by seeing reality not as a duality of mind and matter, that is, as a competition
between religion and secularism, but as a monism that combines both
elements of mind and matter and could in effect support either religion or
secularism. Such an approach may seem expansive or contradictory or
even two-faced, leaving James’s readers to wonder which side he is really
on. As a practical matter, however, given a choice between the opportunity
to make good in a time of burgeoning industry and commerce or to
observe the stringent demands of Calvinist ethics, who would embrace the
latter?
What James accomplished socially was to provide a scientific rationale
for displacing evangelical Protestantism with a variety of free thought among
the elites of American society. His philosophy of religion made possible
for them indulgence in new kinds of religious experiences including spiritualism,
seances, reincarnation, theosophy, and Eastern mysticism without
the traditional Christian elements of judgment and hellfire. In this
way James was the prophet of current self-affirming “new age” religion. It
was a time when technology and industry were transforming American
life, and the glorification of business and greed seen in the gospel of Herbert
Spencer’s philosophical evolutionism was destined to come into conflict
with the rigorous ethics of the Calvinist Christian gospel, which
counseled humility, doing good for others, and subservience of self—ethical
ideals that hardly suit the exploitation of business opportunities. James
prepares the way for a secular outlook by applying his famous pragmatic
theory of meaning to religious beliefs in which their practical effects are
their warrant for validity and value. An example is his harsh criticism of
Theresa of Avila, whose extraordinary mystical experiences had, he says,
only a “paltry” practical effect (James [1902] 1999, 379–80). Actually,
Theresa was the most practical of mystics, and her works had great practical
effect, but for James the reform of the convent system in Renaissance
Spain and the enhancement of the spiritual life of Christians through her
writings are not practical enough. Frequently in Varieties James uses the
term “cash value” as a metaphor for the pragmatic theory of meaning, but
John C. Caiazza 17
in time the reader begins to realize that “cash value” is not a metaphor but
designates the real thing, the real sense of what James believes the value of
meanings and beliefs to be.3
I have presented James’s Varieties as if it were an ideology, that is, less the
product of the independent thought of a philosopher than a reflection of
the change in the technological structures of production, to use a Marxist
turn of phrase. This is justified, I believe, because the practical effect of
their writing and thought is the criterion James employs in judging others,
and the cash value of his Varieties is that it gave leave to the elites of American
society to disregard the stringent ethics of Calvinistic Protestantism
and invent an ersatz spiritual life for their own comfort. The business
ethic was thereby able to overcome the Protestant ethic, and technology
succeeded in displacing religion to give secularism a social reality it had
never before had in American thought and life. By emphasizing the cash
value of religion James had in effect turned it into a technology, a means of
production. The technologization of our culture has had the same effect
on science itself.
THE MAGICAL QUALITY OF TECHNO-SECULARISM
In our day, technology-based secularism threatens to displace religion entirely
from the national consensus. The success of secularism is based on
the effects of technological advance rather than on the victory of scientific
ideas in the conflict with religious beliefs. How this happened can be
gleaned from a remark by science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who
stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.”4 It would be impossible to describe technology’s effects on contemporary
life in a few words, because technology is ubiquitous and its
manifestations manifold. However, one point of recent technological development
is worth making in general terms, namely, how technology itself
is evolving from its nineteenth-century mechanical phase to a
twenty-first century phase that Clarke called “magical.” That the difference
is qualitative and not merely quantitative can be imaged by reference
to the steam engine and the personal computer.
In Victorian times steam power was the main force used for technological
advance, most obviously the steam train engines that even today have
not lost their evocative power. The point of the nostalgia is that every
aspect of the technology of a steam engine was open and available for inspection:
fire box, water pipes, smoke stack, steam valves, reciprocating
rods, driving wheels. The immense force of steam power pulling tons of
iron and steel was understandable just through observation; there was romance
but no mystery. The most typical example of twenty-first-century
technology is not the steam engine but the computer, whose product is not
motion and force but organized information. The appearance of words on
18 Zygon
a computer screen can, of course, be connected to the keys we hit on a
keyboard, but we cannot see the causal links from the keyboard to the
screen, for the keystrokes are transmitted by an electronic and not a mechanical
process, unlike the typewriter in which the keys are connected to
push rods with a character for each letter that strike the paper on the platen.
Further, if we take apart the computer we see its components—electric
motor, fan, transformer, cables and wires, boards and chips—but these do
not directly convey how the process of computerization takes place, because
the calculations and the sortings and arrangings of data are done
within the chip, which has no moving parts. How the computer works
thus remains a mystery even after inspection of its innards. It is a “black
box” whose inner logic and workings are a mystery to most of us. Unknowable,
it is often unrepairable by its users, and, as with many appliances
today, usually cheaper and more efficient to replace than to repair.
We have retreated from mechanical explanations in terms of Victorian
forces—explicit, competent, and muscular—to a postmodern realm of
magical effects whose causes cannot be explained: mysterious, astonishing,
the province of experts who may regard mere users with disdain.
The transformation of technology from a mechanical to a magical phase
indicates its enormously enhanced power and influence. Steam-powered
trains provided a visible replacement for horses and walking, but information
processing is so prevalent that, even if we do not own a personal computer,
we are still beholden to computerization in appliances, television
sets, weaponry, and libraries. Technology has become so ubiquitous in
manipulating and transforming our world that it has in a way overcome
theoretical science, for by “science” the general public now perceives not
an empirical or mathematical explanation of physical phenomena but the
power to change our lives, to make them more comfortable by making our
personal environments more responsive to our wishes. According to one
qualified observer, we “like science and technology but are happy enough
not knowing very much about it. . . . We can blame the state of public
education for this, but there is something willful in it” (Mowbray 2004,
6). Applying James’s terminology, it has been said that technology is the
cash value of science, and, as in the case of religion, the reduction to cash
value empties out the true value of the scientific enterprise, which is to
increase humankind’s knowledge (Roy 2002). In this way science is reduced
to its technological expression and the scientist perceived less as a
discoverer than as a magician. Our personal environments have become so
much the result of technological manipulation that when we reflect on
them we perceive the creative power of human scientists, whereas in earlier
times when we reflected upon nature we could see the creative power of
God. Technological effects have acquired a life of their own, achieving a
qualitative level of change so that now technology has its own ethics, theology,
and unanticipated consequences. The displacement of religion from
John C. Caiazza 19
civic life is more the effect of technological ubiquity and power than the
result of direct cultural and intellectual causes, a phenomenon that I call
techno-secularism.
One particularly important result of technological ubiquity is the degree
to which it has sustained and extended the power of the state over our
lives. The increase in the amount of data and reports required of corporations,
colleges, businesses, and nonprofit institutions could not have taken
place without new developments in technology. In turn, the increased
sophistication of technology has empowered an exponential increase in
the amount and particularity of regulations imposed on individuals and
institutions in civil society. Thus, the recent electronic revolution has only
intensified the impulse to bureaucratize power that followed upon such
technological advances as air mail delivery, carbon paper, telephones, skyscrapers
for office space, mechanically powered transportation, typewriters,
and, not least, automatic weapons. Computerization and the ability
to electronically replicate, organize, and transmit data over the Internet
have made possible a massive expansion of federal and state control over
our lives. In fact, the technologically amplified power of the bureaucratic
state has made the state the chief object of concern and worry for its citizens,
because its permission and benefits are required to conduct virtually
every aspect of the daily business of contemporary life.
THE ETHICS OF TECHNO-SECULARISM
I emphasize here techno-secularism’s ethical and religious dimensions, which
are mediated through its implicit concepts as well as its practical effects.
The implicit ethical theory of techno-secularism is instrumental, accepting
that what technology can provide should be used for the betterment of
the human condition without consideration of prescriptive ethical rules
and humane traditions. It is utilitarian, opting for the greatest good for
the greatest number, with the “good” being understood in relentlessly material
terms—that is, terms amenable to technological control. The ethic
is eudaimonian rather than hedonistic, concerned with bodily well-being
rather than the maximization of pleasure. The techno-secular ethic is diet
conscious, encourages the drinking of light wines rather than beer or whiskey,
is anti-smoking, promotes safe sex practices, and is mightily concerned
with attaining a long, fulfilled, healthful life. It is nonetheless a materialistic
ethic with a “horizon” that ends with death, and so encourages a fearful
rather than an heroic lifestyle, justifying abortion and euthanasia because
of the demands that children and the aged make: disfiguring women’s bodies,
taking up precious time (the one commodity that technology cannot provide
in abundance), and stultifying the careers and personal goals of both
men and women. Techno-secularism is fearful even before the point of
death, fearing the incompetence and dependence of old age and sequestering
the dying, unseen, to hospital rooms and the ministration of experts
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on death and dying. It emphasizes extending the period of healthful living
for as long as possible, putting forth the possibilities of extending youthfulness
by medical technology and of technologically sustained immortality
in the form of cryogenics and cloning. Avoiding the inevitability of
death, techno-secularism refuses to deal with the issue of what comes after,
if anything, and its ethics is formed without reference to God and religion,
because these are possibilities that extend beyond its horizon.
With regard to religion, techno-secularism attempts to empty out the
doctrinal teaching from religious belief in order to co-opt religion’s ability
to change lives and to generate major social movements that are, in James’s
terms, religion’s cash value. Techno-secularism has a fear of religion’s ability
to motivate people and social events effectively and occasionally attempts
to refocus religious belief from religious ends to those in line with
the aims of the bureaucratic state. For religion to “work,” however, the
religious believer must actually think that the objects of his or her beliefs
are real and that the doctrines of his or her religion are true. Technosecularism
hits the fatal shoals on this point, for it cannot provide a doctrine
that it believes itself and yet will motivate others in a religious way.5
Unable to divorce cause from effect, that is, the content of religious belief
from its effectiveness as a personal motivator and social force, techno-secularism
relies on the smooth and unnoticed transition from faith-based explanations
to scientific causes, as a result not of logical arguments but of
the ubiquity of technology in our daily lives. Thus has magic made a
revival as the unseen scientific causes of technology are appealed to for the
improvement of our lives while true religion is trivialized and marginalized
seemingly without effort.
Must magic prevail? Modern science and revealed religion are united
on the point that “magic” in the ancient sense, by which incantation and
commerce with spirits could influence fate, is a superstition unworthy of
acceptance by educated people, and in modern times “magic” has come to
describe a form of entertainment in which a magician performs tricks and
illusions on stage. The doves do not appear magically from the wave of a
colorful kerchief but were already in the magician’s sleeve; the woman does
not really float in the air but is is suspended on thin wires hidden by the
darkened stage. The magic that prevails in the dominance of technology
in contemporary life is also a form of fakery, for its effects depend on the
highly trained intelligence and hard, sustained work of armies of scientists,
researchers, technicians, and planners, all of whom work on materials already
provided in nature. Tertullian, who was quoted at the beginning of
this essay, also said, in a controversy about Creation, “If I give you a rose,
will you disdain its creator?” The technologist would reply that the rose is
fabricated, first by selective breeding and subsequently by genetic engineering;
but first there was the rose itself, the rose as a natural phenomenon,
the rose that is a symbol of mystical intuition of Creation.
John C. Caiazza 21
NOTES
A version of this article first appeared in Modern Age: A Quarterly Review (Summer 2002) and
is reprinted with permission of the publisher.
1. The terms orthodox Darwinism and central dogma are frequently, and revealingly, used by
evolutionary scientists to describe the core tenets of the contemporary theory of evolution. Gould
is not seen as someone who subscribed to the orthodox view.
2. The text of the debate is available at http://www.ditext.com/russell/debate.html.
3. James’s appreciation for the cash value of ideas reflects the fact that the family had been left
well-to-do by the financial success of his grandfather, which enabled William, his brother Henry,
and their father Henry Sr. to pursue lives of study and writing.
4. Quotation is found at http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Arthur_C._Clarke.
5. Dianetics, the movement founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, is an explicit
attempt to organize a religion on a technological basis that has not been notably successful except
among those in the entertainment community.
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