Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Cheney and Company

(Reprinted from the issue of November 3, 2005)

As your own television has probably told you by now, the nation’s capital is buzzing with excitement about who knew what and when they knew it — “they,” possibly, being Vice President Dick Cheney, his aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Bush’s advisor Karl Rove, despite their denials — in the technically illegal (if not actually criminal) disclosure, via certain journalists, that Valerie Plame Wilson was an undercover CIA operative.

Her husband, Joseph Wilson, a minor diplomat, had been publicly critical of the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program that might threaten the United States. Exposing his wife was a way of punishing Wilson.

Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who I’m reliably informed has what let’s call close ties to some key players in the administration, has already spent 85 days in jail for contempt of court for protecting her source, Libby, until he waived confidentiality and she was released, only to find that her paper was no longer backing her. It transpired that she’d not only concealed her source, but misrepresented him as “a Capitol Hill staffer.”

The case is getting so snarled that even Beltway journalists (and lawyers) who delight in this sort of thing are having difficulty following it, and it recalls the Watergate imbroglio in its crisscrossing plots and subplots of claims, schemes, legal technicalities, accusations, denials, leaks, and sudden twists.

But if Cheney has been lying to the public about his previous denials (he has said publicly that he had no knowledge of Wilson, for example), it may prove an even worse embarrassment for the administration than it already is.

As I write, there are rumors of indictments coming at any moment, maybe of Rove, Libby, or even Cheney, as the grand jury is about to expire. Even if nobody is prosecuted, at least one of them may have to resign.

Bush himself doesn’t seem to be directly implicated in all this, and he appears to have had no knowledge of it, but the claim that he has restored a high standard of honor to the executive branch has been damaged. If he set a good example for his subordinates, it evidently hasn’t been very contagious. Politics remains the same petty, vindictive game it always was.
 
Rosa Parks RIP

The death of Rosa Parks, 92, icon of the civil rights movement, serves to remind us how completely — and unfortunately — the cause of civil rights has become synonymous with narrow racial interests. It has become a secular dogma that the problems of black people are essentially the fault of whites.

Mrs. Parks became famous in 1955 when, as a 42-year-old seamstress, she defied Alabama’s racial segregation laws by refusing to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man; her arrest touched off a powerful protest movement, led by the young Martin Luther King Jr.

Today it’s oddly touching to see the old news photo of her being fingerprinted by the Montgomery police. She appears dressed in a tweed suit and comporting herself with a perfect dignity, so at odds with the humiliation being inflicted on her.

But the civil rights movement soon turned from protesting official discrimination to making inordinate demands on personal freedom. This was the point where “civil rights” became a misnomer. Discrimination in private life — that is, freedom of association — should be a civil right.

Yes, it can be abused; so can the right to choose one’s own spouse, for that matter. But the abuse doesn’t invalidate the proper use.

Putting all their eggs into the misconceived basket of civil rights, far too many blacks came to expect politics not only to redress all their grievances, but to solve problems that had little or nothing to do with race. Politicians like Lyndon Johnson did everything to foster this delusion. The inevitable result was frustration, racial bitterness, and the further (though unofficial) isolation of blacks.

The genteel Mrs. Parks was forced by death threats to move north, and she settled in Detroit, where, a couple of years before her death, she was mugged. Nobody seemed to see an irony, let alone a moral, in the incident. She had helped achieve something called “civil rights,” but in the process she had lost even the basic physical safety that could once be taken for granted in the segregated South of her youth.

Today the image of America’s blacks is found not in the soft-spoken, well-dressed, and dignified Negroes of the early civil rights movement, but in the feckless poor blacks wading through flooded New Orleans, blaming whites for their plight while demanding that whites rescue them from it.

Gone is the old idea that black people, delivered from legal oppression, might flourish as capable, self-sufficient human beings. And nobody has more thoroughly abandoned that conception of black people than those backward souls who are now presented to us as their “leaders.”

In their habitual outlook, these “leaders” weirdly combine the views of Marxists and white supremacists. They assume that blacks are nothing but what whites make them; that blacks can’t control their own destiny and can achieve nothing on their own; that they depend entirely on the surplus of what whites produce. They seem unable to imagine blacks creating wealth or inventing anything useful to others; and they ignore the blacks who actually do so. And they expect to be respected by those who buy them off with handouts.

I don’t think this is what Mrs. Parks had in mind when she took her stand in Montgomery 50 years ago. Her life spanned the era from the exquisite crooning of Nat “King” Cole to the obscenity and violence of rap. What does that tell us?


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Joseph Sobran