Flaming Limbaugh and The Plame Game

Alas, this blog is feeling (yes, I know, how can a blog feel, you're asking; well it can, it's developed sentience on its own, even if it's a very limited sentience) rather dessicated lately, mainly because there's been a lot of other stuff going. Especially with setting up the new academic year and catching up-- admittedly laggardly-- on email, exploring the net and/or writing my own thoughts and ramblings has taken the brunt of my distraction and general fatigue. *Sigh* There's never enough time, or enough energy, to get everything done. As horrible as this sounds, this entry is a kind of palliative, not so much for this blog's readers but for its creator who's feeling intolerably guilty about not keeping this thing sufficiently updated. It's like, I imagine, how some feel when they fall off a diet ('Dr. J' and 'diet' are utterly oxymoronic, because as many of you know, were Dr. J to diet per se, he'd vanish into oblivion). It becomes about failing to keep disciplined....

On to matters....

My Lord, is this possible? Can I find myself actually wanting to defend Rush Limbaugh? This must be a sign of a pending apocalypse. Limbaugh was pushed to resign from ESPN after making some remarks that riled many to accuse him of racism. The fact is, I agree with Limbaugh's defense, that his remarks were not so much about the football player per se than they were about the media's desire to see him as a deliverant success story. Let's face it, Limbaugh only said that he thought McNabb is 'overrated,' a statement many can make about the likes of Laurence Olivier or Wayne Gretzky or William Shakespeare. To say someone is 'overrated' is a personal opinion, and usually flies in the face of statistics or other legacies. Limbaugh may indeed be a racist for all I know, and Lord knows that I find just about every word that comes out of his mouth to be objectionable, but the outcry that resulted from Limbaugh's remarks was the response of the righteous and the indignant, and not the thoughtful or the considerate.

Ironically, the outcry seems to me to have proven Limbaugh's point, about the tendency in the media, and in some parts of society, to champion certain people as icons to the point that criticism and questioning cannot be brooked. Look at the text, the actual words, of what Limbaugh actually said. As someone in part trained to detect verbal nuances and implications, I do not detect any trace of actual racism. Unfortunately, those that raised the rallying cry against Limbaugh over this have done the worst possible thing: they've proven the NeoCon contention that liberals, in the name of politics, are willing to overlook that which they supposedly champion, freedom of expression and interrogation, in the name of racial moralism. These liberals-- not all liberals, but those that sought to vilify Limbaugh on very flimsy grounds-- are the worst representatives of that which they ostensibly but by no means truly believe. If you want to take on Limbaugh, or anyone, make sure you're doing it for the right reasons and on solid ground. Listening to people like Howard Dean and Wesley Clark declaim Limbaugh was genuinely embarrassing, and indicative of a society that aspires toward political correctness but has absolutely no idea what correctness means or entails. And people wonder why I disdain politics, and especially political 'correctness.'

On the flip side of things, there's the unconscienable story of what has befallen CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked, apparently by White House officials, to conservative columnist Bob Novak in a kind of retribution for her husband Joseph Wilson's criticism of the proclamations about Iraq's supposed WMD production. All of this remains a horrible muddle, but it seems to me that if this information was leaked from the White House, for whatever reasons, then the whole scenario could indeed be one of worse dimensions and implications than the Whitewater affair and even Watergate. Not only is there no justification for the leaking of Plame's name to the press, but it reflects a disgusting indifference to both national security and individual human life. This is cheap, not to mention dangerous, scapegoating -- and it's eerily resonant of the David Kelley affair in England, with even more insidious implications about the Bush administration's already questionable moral authority to govern. (I say more insidious because although the Kelley situation led to a fatality, there seems to me to be a lesser degree of political childishness; Kelley's suicide was as much the media's responsibility as it was the UK government's, even Kelley's own sense of despair proved the final deciding factor.) It's a bit ironic that I'm writing this just as I'm about to teach Richard II, a play very much concerned with what happens when a leader, whether implicity or complicitly, loses the moral authority to govern. If it is proven that the White House did indeed leak Plame's name to Novak, and that the administration has dragged its feet in the investigation (which it pretty much seems to have), then -- even if the leakers were only aides and officials-- the Bush administration should be impeached. In a way, it's telling that Nixon eventually resigned over a matter that seems small by comparison, and the origin of which was marginally less petty. We're an appallingly cynical society, aren't we?

Word of reminder to politicos of all stripes: In Richard II, the cruellest irony is that Richard's usurpation is premised on a loss of moral authority and injudicious goverment, crimes of which his replacement Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) becomes guilty himself, whether implicitly or complicitly. Beware at all costs becoming that which you claim to oppose. Beware becoming your own worst enemy.

And word to President Bush: Appoint an independent counsel. Anything else looks like coverup. And if it turns out one of your officials did indeed leak said information, do the dignified and responsible thing, in the final words of Eliot's "Difficulties of A Stateman":

RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN