He hates us for our freedom

I mentioned the other day, the specious effort to dismiss Pat Robertson’s blasphemy by equating it with George Stephanopolous’s suggestion that we kill Saddam Hussein without destroying his country in the act.

I believe the same fallacy factory that turned out that confection is also responsible for the Crock du jour now circulating at a newspaper or web site near you: Karl Rove didn’t do anything wrong by exposing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. In a letter in the Palm Beach Post the other day, a local Republican parrot explains the bias of the media in making it seem like Karl broke the law to any significant extent. Did you expect a new kind of argument?

Instead of trying to use the vocabulary of formal logic, let’s just say that I was a lawyer trying to defend a client against vehicular homicide charges. I would put on my lawyer tie and say: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury – the accusation that my client exceeded the speed limit when he deliberately ran down that pedestrian is wrong and therefore you must acquit.”

OK, so I’m not Johnnie Cochran, but you get the point that we are being led away from the fact that Karl and his puppet government are deliberately punishing people who embarrass the President by telling the truth? That’s where the crime is. It’s a crime, not against a single person, but against Truth, Justice and even patriotism. It’s a theft of our American Birthright; it’s a theft of our freedom.

Sooner or later the White House carpet will be forced to cover so much dirt that nothing further can be swept under it. Sooner or later this administration will trip over that rug – or we will pull it out from under them. My fear is that it will be later; perhaps too much later and we will be punished.