A whole letter...

And not a “fuck” in the carload?

Pictured is Ms. Dawn Turner Trice, who writes a liberal-ish column for the Chicago Tribune. She’s...eh...OK. So-so. Usually doesn’t leave a huge impression on me.

Her politics are all right, but she gets a little nagging for my tastes. Matter of taste and degree I suppose. Ms. Trice also worked her way under the leathery hide of the odious La Shawn Barber enough to provoke a rebuttal to one of her columns, so I have to give it to her for that.

She’s no Royko...but no one is – especially John Kass; the dyspeptic mope they gave Royko’s real estate to -- so there’s no sin in that. Clarence Page consorts with the Evil Ones, but still lays some solid board-feet upside the Administration’s skull often enough that I’ll read him. I find Ms. Trice just a little...too nice. She hedges her words. Corks the tips of her sword and curls her prose inward in that Liberal, lets-all-try-to-get-along kind of way that bloggers have spoiled me out of.

Sometimes that drives me nuts.

Or, to paraphrase a Morpheus-line from “The Matrix”, “Stop trying to hit them...and HIT them.”

So she had a column in the paper today, and I sent her an email about, and here they both are. This is not some outraged “open letter” to Ms. Trice: just what she wrote, and then what I wrote to her, printed here for two reasons;

First, her column today caught my eye because in addition to what I wrote to her, I disagree with the premise -- “Rove's role, fate in CIA scandal just a sideshow” – on general principle.

Iraqgate may be the worst scandal in the history of the United States...and it is only now rousing the interest of the Rip Van Winkle press who climbed into bed after the Clinton Impeachment and have stubbornly slept though everything since. It may well be the worst in our history for the simple reason that it combines the most despicable elements of both Vietnam and Watergate. It is -- in itself -- both the greatest foreign policy disaster in at least a generation and a filthier and more cancerously metastasized example than Watergate of a criminally corrupt Presidency subverting the Constitution and using its Executive powers to cover up its crimes, personally destroy its critics and raze Democracy itself.

I would agree that the Karl Rove Treason is a sideshow only if we can agree that “sideshow” in this context means an important, Second Ring act in the overall, Three Ring Circus that is Iraq.

Rove is to Iraqgate what the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, or finding ten’s of thousands of dollars in bribe money in the wreckage of the plane crash outside of Chicago that killed Mrs. Howard Hunt, was to Watergate: They are each part of a much larger, more horrifying, despotic whole.

Rove is also a sideshow only if you believe that we are only competent to focus one thing at a time, and I think and most of us are smarter than that.


And, second, I wanted to prove to myself that – if needed -- I could put on a rhetorical suit and tie and compose a whole, proper letter on the subject of The Rove that was courteous, had a “thank you” in the right place and refrained from using the following phrases: “zombie cocksucker”, “toeing the NASCAR of State into the Wall of Clusterfuck at 220 mph”, and “White House political Schistosomiasis.”

And still get my point across.

So there ya’ go.

Here's her article:

Rove's role, fate in CIA scandal just a sideshow

Dawn Turner Trice

Published July 18, 2005

I'm considering printing up T-shirts that say: It's the war, stupid!

If we look at the story about Karl Rove and the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in the narrow scope of whether special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be able to indict Rove, we miss a bigger story.

That's the one about how the Bush administration consistently has used questionable tactics (paying "journalists," prepackaging news stories, disparaging adversaries) to promote its policies, seemingly at any cost.

If administration officials merely were peddling "No Child Left Behind" or the privatization of Social Security to the party faithful, we probably would tune it out as we would an infomercial.

But this is war, and the truth about our involvement in it has to trump toeing the policy line. Soldiers, civilians and their families are paying the ultimate price daily. The war continues to raise the question of whether, as the Downing Street Memo says, "intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy."
...

It doesn't matter that the assertions that Iraq was amassing WMDs have been proved unfounded. It doesn't matter that there has been no connection between Iraq and Sept. 11. The administration has taken a "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" stance that's bordering on shameful.

But the marketing of this war hasn't happened without the media and the public being willing consumers.

We, the media, faced with our own scandals, have been skittish about ferreting out missteps in Washington. The media get hot on the trail of something gone awry in this administration, but have cooled by the time the spin doctors do their thing. Consider Newsweek's speedy retraction of its story about accusations of prison guards mutilating the Koran at Guantanamo Bay.

We, the public, haven't been clamoring for more information about whether we were misled about invading Iraq. In part, we can blame our short-term memory and attention deficits. But there's also our fear, which this administration has been adept at parlaying into big-time political capital.
...

But when it comes to the war, the truth shouldn't be glossed over or distorted to fit into sound bites.

Whether Rove is indicted in the Plame scandal or not shouldn't cloud our getting to the bottom of whether this whole ordeal began as a way to get revenge on Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. He accused the administration of twisting facts to justify an Iraq war. Were the facts really twisted?
...

And here's me:

Dear Ms. Trice,

Thank you for today's column; "Rove's role, fate in CIA scandal just a sideshow." I would, however, disagree with you in two particulars.

You wrote, "We, the public, haven't been clamoring for more information about whether we were misled about invading Iraq. In part, we can blame our short-term memory and attention deficits."

That simply is not true.

About 49 million of us went to the polls last Fall and voted Democratic EXPLICITLY because it was obvious to us that the current Administration had lied to us. What became equally -- and frighteningly -- clear to us was that 51 million Americans (especially the so-called Red Staters) couldn't care less about the fact the President lied, about Iraq, about Global Warming, about Social Security.

About anything.

If you look at the PIPA poll of voters before the election, a staggeringly high number of Republican voters passionately believed things that were just flat-out wrong. That Saddam Hussein had planned 9/11. That he had a nuclear program. That there were AQ training camps in Iraq.

Wanna bet how many of these same people also believe in Creationism?

This is not an accident. The GOP relies heavily on the fact that its base is stupid, superstitious, fearful, racist and easily led by what I can only describe as radical right-wing Christian clerics . Democrats I know are more than happy to talk about this war and where it is going and always have been: "clamoring" would putting it mildly. However more and more my Moderate Republican friends are the ones who are stuffing their ears with cotton and saying they don't want to hear any more "negative" stuff about their Dear Leader. Apparently lying, cheating, stealing -- even treason -- are all IOKIYAR ("It's OK...If you're a Republican.")

The only "virtue" left in the GOP seems to be blind loyalty to the person of George Bush -- no matter how much he lies -- and the only sin is ever admitting any error or any kind. And remember, this is the same moralizing, hectoring, holier-than-thou crowd that tirelessly hunted Bill Clinton for seven years and impeached him over trivia.

There is no "we" in this equation.

So when you say, "We the public..." you mean "Republicans."

Which leads me to the second point which I would dispute.

You wrote, "We, the media, faced with our own scandals, have been skittish about ferreting out missteps in Washington." Skittish? I'm sorry, but this language is entirely too weak: the media, in fact, has simply abandoned its responsibilites and deserted its post, en masse.

Actually, it would probably be fairer to say that we don't really have a media at all any more. We have Hate Radio and Fox News, which are unapologetically the Bush Administration's "Pravda". Then we have the "objective" media who refuse to take a position on...anything. Did the Holocaust happen or not? Is Creationism just as valid as Evolution? Global Warming?

Or, as Paul Krugman famously said, if the Mainstream Media had to report on the shape of the planet, the headline would read, "Earth Flat or Round? Opinions differ."

So with half the press useless, craven and, for reasons I find unfathomable, completely unwilling to confront those in power...and the other half of "the press" little more than the propoganda arm of the Bush White House, I think "skittish" is putting far too mildly.

Thank you again for your column.