from juan cole, you gotta love the old philosophical rub:
The strategy of calling Valerie Plame Wilson “Joe Wilson’s wife” rather than naming her is a lawyer’s strategy. It allowed Karl Rove to tell White House spokesman Scott McClellan that no one in the White House had revealed VPW’s name to the press. As late as last week it seems clear that Irving Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, was still hoping to get New York Times reporter Judith Miller to tell special council Patrick Fitzgerald that Libby had not revealed Plame Wilson’s actual name.
The problem with the strategy is that the philosopher Gottlob Frege had already in 1891 demonstrated that even though there might be a difference between the sense or connotation of two phrases, their referent could be the same. His famous example is “the morning star” and “the evening star.” Both of these phrases have the same referent, which is the planet Venus.
………………….
Or in this case, Valerie. Maybe they we’re thinking they were in the the third realm innstead?

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 20 2005 8:59 utc | 3

An often overlooked but eminently plausible theory for Cheney’s obsession with Plame’s status is that Cheney did not want Bush and the neo-cons to think he had been the one who picked Wilson for the Niger mission in the first place.
Remember that Wilson says Cheney asked the CIA to find someone to check out the yellowcake story. Its hard to imagine Cheney would not also sign off on the Agency’s eventual recommendation prior to the mission. THe CIA picks Wilson. Cheney thinks an old Bush 41 hand can be expected to play ball, and OKs the Wilson.
But then Dick’s pick comes back bucking hard against the party line, and Cheney is forced to find some where to pin the blame for his highly embarrassing pick. To cover his tracks, he blames nepotism at the Agency (i.e., Wilson’s wife). Also that during this time Cheney repeated claims he doesn’t even know Wilson (sure Dick).
It’s all about pecking order in the neo-con vulture venue, and Cheney did not want to lose his tailfeathers on the Wilson pick if he could help it. What’s a one little WMD intelligence network compared to that?
One theory at least.

Posted by: Night Owl | Oct 20 2005 9:55 utc | 5

W’s body language in this picture is also interesting. He is sitting up straight and leaning forward with an attentive, almost boyish look toward Powell while Powell is leaning back comfortably. Bush is showing deference to Powell despite Bush’s superior position, something Bush is not known for. Is Powell saying something that provoked Cheney’s look in their battle for Bush’s “mind” over Iraq? It’s a revealing moment, but not exactly a Strong Leader moment.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Oct 20 2005 13:16 utc | 7

I concur Cassandra, I have written before here at moon, that even if the top players go down (which I highly doubt) the system’s switch key has been thrown away and will run it’s course to it’s logical detrimental end. The break lines have been cut and there is not stopping coming crash. I’ll state again, Bush is just a symptom of a deeper underlying problem… whats behind the potimkin?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 20 2005 14:12 utc | 9

You can watch the Wilkerson speech here
Newsday on the speech

Speaking at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, Wilkerson said his central complaint was that too much power was centered in too few people who kept the rest of the bureaucracy in the dark.
There was a “cabal between Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on critical decisions that the bureaucracy did not know was being made.”
Asked what role Bush played with the “cabal,” Wilkerson said the president “was very integral to the process. When the president’s [intervention] was needed the president’s office was entered by one person and the president’s consent was obtained,” Wilkerson said.
Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who succeeded Powell, failed to intervene to stop the “cabal” because she made a calculated decision “to build her intimacy with the president,” rather than confront his other advisers, Wilkerson charged.
He indicated that this flawed, secretive process contributed to what he thought was a bad decision to go to war in Iraq.

and his prediction on Iraq is not rosy and he his an Imperialist if there ever was one:

But Wilkerson said that any decision by the Bush administration to leave Iraq “precipitously” would result in Iraq’s neighbors sending in troops and creation of a breeding ground for terrorists like Afghanistan, leading to another major war involving the United States.
“We will have to go back and take the Middle East within a decade,” if that happens, he said.

Posted by: b | Oct 20 2005 16:07 utc | 11

“It’s a revealing moment, but not exactly a Strong Leader moment.”
Actually it is — if the strong leader is Powell.

Posted by: Billmon | Oct 20 2005 17:50 utc | 13

“Actually it is — if the strong leader is Powell.”
The group dynamic is odd. Look at the chair Bush ended up in. That ain’t the boss seat.

Posted by: ~ | Oct 20 2005 19:27 utc | 15

We have to be careful not to read to much into a snapshot of an instant where everyone may just be rearranging their attire, but if I had to put a title on the snap it would be:
‘The Confederacy of Dunces’
They are (presumably) discussing the fate of fellow humans. Dubya has 2 heads or a large hairy hump on his shoulders behind the main head. Cheney looks like an insurance salesman (A breed I loath with a passion if only because no matter how rude you are to them they come back for more) with a catalogue of latest products, ones with the largest commission on top of course. (Yeah right Dick that’ll work. Wanna buy an asbestos factory?)
Colin Powell is trying the old lean back legs spread wide and show em who’s the boss really is…but he knows he hasn’t got the package you need for that pose so he’s hanging on to what he has got, hoping Dubya won’t be saying what his wife said this morning. “OK you can have a hummer but YOU get the magnifying glass and tweezers from the bathroom”.
These guys are 3rd and 4th rate minds which is why they crawled and cajoled their way into the Whitehouse in the first place. They are desperate for others to tell them that what they believe deep down just isn’t true. That is they are all as stupid as paint and as silly as a wheel.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 20 2005 21:15 utc | 17

We have to be careful not to read to much into a snapshot of an instant where everyone may just be rearranging their attire, but if I had to put a title on the snap it would be:
‘The Confederacy of Dunces’
They are (presumably) discussing the fate of fellow humans. Dubya has 2 heads or a large hairy hump on his shoulders behind the main head. Cheney looks like an insurance salesman (A breed I loath with a passion if only because no matter how rude you are to them they come back for more) with a catalogue of latest products, ones with the largest commission on top of course. (Yeah right Dick that’ll work. Wanna buy an asbestos factory?)
Colin Powell is trying the old lean back legs spread wide and show em who’s the boss really is…but he knows he hasn’t got the package you need for that pose so he’s hanging on to what he has got, hoping Dubya won’t be saying what his wife said this morning. “OK you can have a hummer but YOU get the magnifying glass and tweezers from the bathroom”.
These guys are 3rd and 4th rate minds which is why they crawled and cajoled their way into the Whitehouse in the first place. They are desperate for others to tell them that what they believe deep down just isn’t true. That is they are all as stupid as paint and as silly as a wheel.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 20 2005 21:18 utc | 19

@Cassandra
“Beware Scheissenbedauern – the disappointment one feels when something turns out not nearly as badly as one had hoped.”
That is actually something to which I have been giving a great deal of thought. It was not only the tinfoil hat wearing segment of the population who had cultivated dire, apocalyptic fears about the coming of the third millennium. Despite the fact that it has become something of a joke, it was taken seriously enough at the time to warrant its own Senate Special Committee to address and assuage people’s fears. When the world didn’t come to a screeching halt on 1st January, 2000, people were less relieved than disappointed. So much so, in fact, that the die-hard doomsayer simply looked elsewhere to satisfy their fatalism. I think this disappointment played a pivotal rôle in the meek acceptance of the US public to the Supreme Court’s unprecedented selection of the President of the United States later that year. More fuss might have been made about this deviation from procedure without the consensus that we are living in some extreme, magical end-times.
When 11 September, 2001 rolled around, it did not create a feeling of insecurity and outrage in the USA, but rather justified the embarrassments from the year before. Here at last was something we could call apocalyptic! We had been braced for so long for something truly devastating to break up our routine that the outpouring of emotions on that day were not shock and numbness as might be expected, but righteous indignation and outrage. In fact, we had been rehearsing ourselves for the past decade to see some real carnage that we were beginning to grow a little impatient that it was taking so long to materialise. Now we could justify all of our eccentricities and no longer feel embarrassed by our persistent feelings that the pressure-cooker we were living in was going to burst!
But it didn’t last long enough. Once again, confound it, life was going on! We could shriek our lungs out about how we needed new, sweeping laws to inconvenience us at airports, suspend due process for American citizens, and sacrifice all we hold dear (to protect it from being taken away from us by someone else, of course)… but no matter how many more rolls of duct tape we had than our neighbours, they did not seem to be getting any more junk mail from the nebulous forces of Evil than we were.
Once again, to our chagrin, life was going on. And then, in 2003, we began hearing about the imminent danger to our lives that lurked in Iraq. All right, nobody really bought it (as testified by the shifting rationales for it), but after a few short months of constant drum beating and sabre rattling, many of the perpetually disappointed just wanted something to happen! Maybe it isn’t the end of the world we had been so geared up three years earlier, but, damn it, somebody needs to die here!
And now here we are, simultaneously addicted and disappointed with our endless parade of apocalypses, scandals, disgraces, hopes and fears. Every new terror, no matter how unfulfilling it eventually proves to be, offers the promise that things might be different, that “the other” will somehow “get it” this time around, that there will be an eventual end to the suffering, whether through the wise leadership and initiative of activists and leaders or through the complete and total annihilation of the species. Either option becomes more and more attractive as we are crushed by increasing debts and embarrassed anew over our disappointments. And with every new hope (for either good or ill, we don’t even care anymore), we up the ante about what it takes to satisfy us… and demand that next catastrophe be total.
After Fitzgerald, what? If every homocidal, corrupt and bloodstained opportunist were removed from the political arena, what? Will we allow our collective despair that life keeps going on to provoke us into newer and better bloodbaths? Will we actually learn a lesson that over 200 years of bloodshed have failed to teach us? Or will we continue pursuing our need to suffer… to make others suffer… at all costs, driven on by the continual Scheissenbedauern that life, despite our best efforts, hasn’t yet been totally and irrevocably crushed? Is this really the human condition?

Posted by: Monolycus | Oct 20 2005 22:00 utc | 21

@rapt
I’m tired and depressed… for a second, I thought you were asking where else we were going to get our invective.

Posted by: Monolycus | Oct 20 2005 22:32 utc | 23

A chronolgy of the hidden face of Colin Powell (till ’96):
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: A Warning — Gen. Colin Powell’s
career as a military bureaucrat often has been viewed through
rose-colored glasses rather than a clear eye. But critics,
including some who served in Vietnam, feel Powell may have
carried the wrong lessons out of the bloody jungles. (6-24-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Lesson’s from Vietnam — Powell’s
service in Vietnam distinguished him as a
“water-walker.” But what were the hard lessons of war
he learned in the Vietnam jungles? (7-8-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: My Lai — When American specialist
fourth class Tom Glen accused American soldiers in the Americal
division of routine brutality against Vietnamese civilians, Maj.
Powell undertook the assignment to review Glen’s complaints.
Powell’s report derided Glen’s charges and showed Powell to be
the consummate team player. (7-22-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Pentagon-Man — The middle years of
Powell’s military career were a time for networking and
advancement. Here, Powell learned that a military bureaucrat
succeeds best by sidestepping controversy and keeping quiet when
superiors screw up. (8-5-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Back to the Future — When Colin
Powell returned to Washington in the early ’80s, he returned to
the terrain he knew best–a professional home he often called
“Ground Zero.” On the fast track to success, Powell
became deeply entangled in Reagan/Casey war-games. (8-19-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Iran-Contra Amnesia — In 1984-85,
Colin Powell was the “filter” for information flowing
to Defense Secretary Casper Weinburger. But what kind of
information flowed through the “filter?” (9-2-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Arms to Iran — Would the disastrous
Iran-contra scandal have happened without Colin Powell’s work as
Defense Secretary Casper Weinburger’s “filter?”
(9-16-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Saving Reagan — Just as Colin Powell
played an important behind-the-scenes role in missile shipments
to Iran, he would be equally instrumental in the next phase, the
scandal’s cover-up in 1987-88. (9-30-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Panama War — Going by the
“Powell Doctrine” that “it is better to win than
to loose,” Powell shows his stuff in Panama. (10-14-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Arms to Iraq? — Newly declassified
documents suggest that Powell was a player in the secret U.S.
policy to supply Saddam Hussein with military equipment.
(11-11-96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Dodging Peace — Powell played a key
role in ensuring a ground war pitting American troops against an
Iraqi enemy trying to surrender. (11/25/96)
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: The Media Icon — Though the media has
unanimously embraced him, Colin Powell’s record deserves further
review.

Posted by: Outraged | Oct 22 2005 12:14 utc | 25