Sen. Kennedy,
I find your dKos diary -- "
This Indictment Is Not the End" -- truly disheartening. Your unwillingness to honestly name that which has ripped apart our country since 2001, reads more like the reflexive equivocation of a career politician, than the call from a champion of the people.
You sir, more than anyone here and perhaps the majority of your colleagues, know well that the premise of "failed intelligence" is a disception. And by promoting the image that this administration was incompetent, and not willful, you are doing your country a grave disservice.
In truth, the Bush adminstration's "intelligence" was a ringing success, accomplishing exactly that which they sought, before crumbling into dust: Saddam Hussein has been removed and we have an occupying force in the heart of the Middle East.
By coming here you have chosen to use your celebrity to preach to the choir. And judging by the hundreds of adoring comments, at dKos you are exactly that: a celebrity.
But where were you in 2003? In his State of the Union address, President Bush lied to the American people, citing debunked and forged intelligence. The president directly contradicted the Oct. 1, 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to state as fact that which George Tenet had called "weak" and "not particularly significant" four months earlier.
You and your colleagues allowed this campaign of fear to continue without significant challenge, as our soldiers were used like chess pieces and poker chips. And you were not hoodwinked by misrepresentations and hidden documents, because as we now know, in 2002 the CIA told Congress "that the Africa story [was] overblown" and that Iraq's reported attempt to purchase uranium was "one of the two issues where [the CIA] differed with the British." (SSCI report on the IC's Prewar Intelliegence Assessment).
To the dKos users preparing to flay me alive, first, take note of that: not the Niger story, as Rice and Fleischer would later claim, but the Africa story. In Oct. 2002, the CIA told Congress that claims about Iraq, AFRICA, and uranium were unsupportable. Yet only Joesph Wilson would finally call him on it.
So why, Sen. Kennedy, is there such a deficit of courage and leadership that our country's best hope for redemption sits on the shoulders of a former U.S. ambassador? Though Wilson could only say that he had been tasked to investigate a report and found it wanting, he still took the chance, risked his reputation, his safety, and heavy legal consequences to try and stop what he saw as an abominable abuse of power. Yet all the while, our elected representatives who knew that which Wilson suspected to be true, refused to draw the same line in the sand. They refused to join him in open and honest rebellion.
But I'd like to return to "celebrity," Sen. Kennedy because we have become a nation governed by them and that is really the issue. Buried deep in the warren of American culture is a cancer that threatens to undo 200 years of democracy. And its expression is manifest in the comments to your diary, full of hero-worship and deference to your lineage.
In 1801, Thomas Jefferson asked:
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."
"Have we found angels in the form of kings?" Jefferson didn't think so, believing that the people were the "safest depository of the ultimate powers of government," and not a select few who were pre-ordained to rule.
And yet in 2005, we find ourselves once again suffering at the whims of an aristocracy, ruled by the prince of not one "royal family" but the union of two. We have become an infantilized society that believes "freedom" means having the right to chose a new monarch every four years, assuming of course, that the election isn't close.
So today, when a member of perhaps our most famous American political dynasty uses that cachet to ask for my help, from the safety of faultlessness and uncontroversial euphemisms, I am not moved. I am instead terrified that we seemingly have learned nothing in the last 5 years, so thirsty for leadership we're willing to trade one ruling family in for another.
Forgive me if am I not compelled, Senator Kennedy, to step forward at your call to arms, the timing of which, quite frankly, feels a little like opportunism. To be clear, no one wants this adminstration held accountable more than I, but during this current dearth of leadership, I've been learning to do it myself.
So, I am instead compelled to ask "where were you, Sen. Kennedy, when your country needed you most," because the indictment of I. Lewis Libby did not result from the "Kennedy Investigation."