At the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum has a copy of Cheney’s note about Scooter Libby, with what to me is a very revealing strike-out. Cheney is writing that they need to give Scooter the same cover that they had given to Karl Rove about revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent. He wrote:
Now, I don’t know how to read that other than he was going to write that “this President” asked Libby to stick his neck in the meat grinder.
Doesn’t that mean that the President directed the effort to release Plame’s name?
Is the upshot of this just one more example of Bush being a lying shitheel? Or will this have put him in the position of having perjured himself during the investigation in any way?
Now, I doubt anything official will come of this, since Cheney can clearly just claim that he erred, which is why he struck out the reference to “the Pres”. Also, I’m not surprised that Bush lied to the American people about his role and about the idea that he would fire anyone involved. Perhaps the upshot of this will be nothing, just like most of the other shenanigans of this administration.
(On preview, I don’t know how to maintain the strikeout over “this Pres.” that was in the original quote. Can someone help me with that, please?)
No, it just means that Cheney thought someone (presumably Libby) was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder. That could mean that Bush told him to release Plame’s name, or it could mean any of a number of different things. Maybe Bush said “get Libby to take care of this somehow”, without specifying the “somehow”. Maybe he told Cheney to tell Libby to make sure the press knew that the WH didn’t send Wilson to Africa, full stop.
Why did Armitage release Plame’s name? Surely he wasn’t acting on input from Bush. Maybe Libby wasn’t either.
Anyway, that was the first thing that popped to my mind as well. Loyal minions who know how to interpret and carry out a non-explicit order are highly prized.
An explanation is said to be more parsimonious than an alternative if it uses fewer assumptions. You explanation uses more assumptions-- eg, that Bush even knew who Valerie Plame was.
Cheney was the one doing the declassifying, not Bush.
That’s not an argument about parsimony. But I’ll point out that even if Bush did know who Plame was, Hentor’s explanation is still less parsimonious than the ones I offered. I simply used that assumption as the most obvious example.
I don’t think so. Your interpretations require assumptions that 1) despite apparently being prompted by a statement by the White House that Karl Rove was not involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name, Cheney asked that the same statement be made for Scooter about a different act; 2) That Cheney would not see the politically bad position of later adding “Oh yeah, Scooter didn’t have anything to do with it either” when he was really talking about some other act; 3) That Libby would be given a non-specific directive to “take care of it somehow”; 4) That “sticking his neck into the meat grinder” would be used by Cheney to refer to a request that did not involve putting him in jeopardy (as in your hypothetical that he wanted Libby to say that the WH did not send Wilson, which was true).
There’s a hell of a lot of assumptions right there. A more parsimonious explanation was that “this Pres.” refers to the current President, that a request for the same statement for Scooter as Karl would cover the same act as the statement for Karl had, and that “putting his neck in the meat grinder” describes placing himself in some jeopardy, consistent with the leak of classified information versus unclassified information.
Let’s go back to the beginning. You have a piece of paper with a note on it. We don’t know what reason “The pres” is on that note, and we don’t know what would have followed afterwards if it hadn’t been crossed out and the original thought had been written down. We have some indication that it might have been what you suspect, but we have to make a series of very specific assumptions for that to be correct. Alternatively, we can make no assumptions at all, or we can make much more general assumptions, and in either case we can be led to many different explanations.
So, if I were to make the assumption (and remember that we needn’t make any assumptions at all) that Bush asked Cheney to tell Libby to take care of this issue “somehow”, that is a more parsimonious explanation than assuming Bush told Cheny to take care of the issue specifically by outing Plame.
Now, there might be a very good reason to assume that Bush did direct Cheney and/or Libby to out Plame, but argument by parsimony isn’t one of them.
How does all of this take into account that the note says “Say the same thing about Scooter as Karl?” That’s not an assumption - that’s a given, right there in the note. That means we don’t have to assume it’s about the release of Plame’s name. It’s a given, since that is what was said about Karl.
Bush signed the Executive Order giving Cheney the authorization, though, so it amounts to the same thing, unless you think Bush didn’t know what he was giving Cheney permission to declassify.
First, to whom is the note written? Scott McClellen? If so, how does that implicate Bush in anything.
Second, “say the same thing about Scooter” is just that Cheney wants the WH spokesman to say Libby wasn’t involved in the release. How does that indicate that Bush ordered the release of Plame’s identity?
The author of the article you cited in the OP is suggesting that “The President” was purposely left off the note in order to offer plausible deniability. That’s one possibility. It might even be the most likely possibility. But it isn’t the most parsimonious possibility by a long shot.
And just to be clear, it’s not my idea to nitpick about what “parsimony” means-- I only bring this up because you made an argument by parsimony against my first post. I just don’t see any compelling evidence that Bush knew who Plame was prior to the leak to the press, and so I don’t see a reason to assume that he specifically ordered that someone release her name-- especially since we can be pretty sure that one other person did leak her name w/o being directed by Bush to do so.