Nicholas Kristof and John Tierney of the New York Times seem to have written variants of the same column today.
It had to happen sooner or later, but it’s a little jarring when the two columns appear adjacent to each other on the Times‘ op-ed page. And it’s a lot jarring when they’re both wrong.
Both columnists are dancing to a tune recently composed by Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, and elaborated upon by Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate. It goes like this:
Kristof (subscription required): “Before dragging any Bush administration official off to jail, we should pause and take a long, deep breath.” Kristof worries that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald “is said to be mulling indictments that aren’t based on his prime mandate,” which was to nab someone for blowing the cover of a covert intelligence agent Valeria Plame. Instead, Kristof opines, we may end up with trash indictments for “picayune” offenses like perjury or obstruction of justice.
And that’s the trouble with special prosecutors (see Starr, Ken), says Kristof. They “always seem to morph into Inspector Javert, the Victor Hugo character whose vision of justice is both mindless and merciless.”
Tierney’s variation on the same theme (subscription required) concludes thusly:
“No one deserves to be indicted on conspiracy charges for belonging to a group that believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”
It was Kristol who first sounded the alarm about White House apparatchiks facing possible indictments on lesser charges than endangering a spy and her foreign contacts, and who denounced the prospect of the “criminalization of politics” by an overzealous prosecutor. No one knows what Patrick Fitzgerald is going to do, of course, so this is all speculative. But it seems to us that from what evidence is available that one could just as easily fret about the politicization of crime by White House operatives as “the criminalization of politics” by a crazed prosecutor. The Plame leak wasn’t just politics, it was high-stakes politics, tied to the false case for the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and it may have also been a crime.
For our money, the last word on the subject on the Times opinion pages today comes not from Kristof or Tierney, but from reader David A. Jackson, of Greenville, Delaware, who writes in a letter to the editor:
“WMD was not a local story of minimal import. The stakes could hardly have been higher. Whether Iraq had stockpiles of WMD was the pivot point of a national decision about whether to go the war.”
As it happens, Jackson is writing about Judy Miller, not about Karl Rove or Lewis Libby or any administration factotums. But his words supply the context against which Valerie Plame’s name and identity were leaked by an official (or officials) yet to be named. Given that backdrop, what happened wasn’t just politics — it was likely a politically-inspired crime.
Give that man an op-ed page column.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.