David Brooks on Lehrer: Why Scooter was obsessed w/ Wilson?

[funflower]

Hmmm..... I could give him a reason or two....

[marbuc]

1. What did DB say on this matter? Did Oliphant have a comment?

Oliphant is one of the most insightful people in the MSM. Most merely regurgitate what others say. Oliphant always drops pearls of wisdom that leave me smarter for having listened to him.

[spooky3]

2. I didn't catch it all, but DB was using the One Bad Apple theory

Libby is the only wrongdoer, nothing to see here, move along, etc., etc.

[marbuc]

6. Ah, he's usually better than that

Of course this is much deeper than we will probably ever confirm. David Brooks knows this.

[funflower]

8. He must have said 15 times that this is about one person.

However, I thought he was sending a different with the "why was Scooter obsessed?" bit. He was publicly drawing attention to the idea that maybe Libby (and Cheney and Rove) were "obsessed" because Wilson and Plame and Plame's organization at CIA were onto their plan to use forged evidence to justify a war.

[funflower]

9. Oliphant wasn't on. It was Brooks, Mark Shields and Jan Greenberg.

[Old and In the Way]

3. They never really mounted much of an effort to refute the facts of

Wilson's assertion...that documents were bogus. You'd think they'd have cranked up the Wurlitzer and challenged Wilson's arguement head-on. But they never did that. Instead, they ran a covert campaign to assassinate his character, punish his wife, and wreck a CIA network.

For such an important piece of evidence that it made Bush's SOTU Address, you'd have thought that they'd have had mountains of facts and reams of corroborating documents to back their assertion. Nada. They did everything to make the public just forget about it. Let it blow over. That one little bit of nasty work...outing Plame really was quite stupid in retrospect. Instead of coming clean a year ago when the allegations of WH leaks became know, the administration should have jetisonned Rove back to Houston and that would have been the end of it. Hubris or stupidity? Probably both.

But the real damage is just getting underway. Everyone is looking for the truth on who fabricated the forgeries. And it seems to be getting clearer and clearer that all roads lead back to the White House.

I think the end game is underway....Big Time.

[Cha]

4. "Obsessed"? Is that

the latest crazywing talking point?

These lackeys have no sense of boundaries..outing an undercover CIA agent is considered very serious.

[Cassandra]

5. Since he completely discounted...

the relevance of the trip to Niger, it wasn't surprising that he was mystified. He said Libby never leaked anything to him; I guess even Libby knows a dimwit when he sees one.

[Ilsa]

7. Brooks looked and sounded awful, like he was way out of the

usual loop of republicans in office, like they were keeping secrets from him. He had rapid eye blinking and looked very uncomfortable. At one point during the Miers discussion he called the religious right "wing nuts".