CLARK AND PLAME

Earlier today, Kevin Drum hypothesized that the Wilson/Plame/"senior administration officials" affair could help Wesley Clark's campaign. His reasoning?

First, this exposes an obviously casual attitude at very high levels of the Bush administration toward military (or at least military-like) secrets. This is going to make Clark look good by comparison. With his background, he's obviously a guy who knows the value of keeping operational secrets.

Second, I think there are plenty of moderate independents and conservatives who are wavering in their support for Bush right now but who have stuck with him because they just don't trust any of the original nine Democratic candidates. The Plame scandal will push them even farther from the Bush camp, and I suspect that many of them will find Clark an acceptable alternative.

Of course, this hits right at the essence of why Clark is running. The General's first two cents:

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said a Justice Department probe would be inadequate.

"This is too much for (Attorney General) John Ashcroft," he said. "It strikes right at the heart of our ability to gather intelligence."

Aside from the obvious, the subtext of his comment is both fair and clear. Clark, a Clintonite, but more importantly a Democrat, is drawing a contrast between this growing scandal and Clinton's "scandals". While this situation is "right at the heart of our ability to gather intelligence", the Lewinsky affair wasn't right at the heart of anything, let alone intelligence gathering abilities, unless when Clinton climaxed that one time, he shouted out "ohh . . . ohhh . . . COVERT OPERATIVE VALERIE PLAME!!!!!". (end scene, hehe)

All I can say about acts of treason for no purpose other than short-term revenge is: What, oh, what do we tell the children?

Also through Calpundit, the nominally conservative Daniel Drezner says:

If it is nevertheless true, however -- an important "if" -- then a Pandora's box gets opened by asking this question: if the White House was willing to commit an overtly illegal act in dealing with such a piddling matter, what lines have they crossed on not-so-piddling matters? In other words, if this turns out to be true, then suddenly do all of the crazy conspiracy theories acquire a thin veneer of surface plausibility?

More than just a willingness to deceive and manipulate intelligence to serve their ends, this affair shows something just as fundamental, that being a contempt for the intelligence-gathering process. Remember the administration's attitude toward Hans Blix and his team when they were inspecting their way through Iraq? It amounted to "this is bullshit, Saddam is not disarming" (Well of course not, he'd have to ARM first! -ed Good point!). When Iraq destroyed its Al Samoud missiles as the inspectors asked, the Bushies crowed "oh, they were always going to do that, they're deceiving us". And so on.

POSTSCRIPT: by the way, Dan Drezner will be happy to know that I have been assigned one of his writings for Political Science 121 (Prof. Gordon), here at SB. I'm reading a lot of conservatives in that class (Fukuyama and Kagan, among others).