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Just checking the CNN website. I guess we can proclaim this official now, vis-?-vis the Sandy Berger story here and the sloppily stolen, inadvertently-stuffed-in-my-pants documents. David Gergen today on the Today Show — I know we have those bites but I’m not going to waste time with them right now — David Gergen questioned the timing, the timing of the leak. Why now? Tom Daschle, just heard him say, (doing Daschle impression) “This is very strange. This has been going on for six months. Why now? Sandy inadvertently said he made a mistake. It’s time to extend the benefit of the doubt. Why now?” And on the CNN website, one of these sources questioned the timing of the leak three days before the public release, the 9/11 commission report. “‘There is a story here, and Sandy concedes he made an inadvertent mistake,’ one source said, a formal Clinton administration colleague. ‘But this has been kept confidential for months, so why now?'”
So the usual focus of the left has shifted. Usually, it is “the seriousness of the charge” that inspires, motivates, and demands an investigation, not the nature of the evidence, because that could disqualify the seriousness of the charge. So you ignore the nature of the evidence; you look at the seriousness of the charge. We have a serious charge here. Well, we’re not going to look at that now. Instead, we are going to focus on the timing of the leak. That’s what’s interesting to the left about this: the timing of the leak, three days before the commission report comes out. Hmm. Now, I am interested in that aspect of it. There’s no question. I’d like to know who did this. I’d like to know if our side is getting some teeth. I’d like to know if our side is getting ginned up to play this game. If somebody on our side did this, well, you can see pros and cons about it, but the game is the game. The aggressor sets the rules and the aggressors aren’t us in this situation.
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I had a thought here. No, when I think it’s not dangerous. When others think, yes, I would agree, there is danger involved, but not me. When I think, no, no, no. The world is the oyster, our oyster, when I start thinking — and actually I have not stopped thinking about this Berger business, this Sandy Berger business. Here you’ve got Daschle picking up the Gergen theme, which basically says it’s “the timing of the leak that is the real concern here.” So I guess we can say that Tom Daschle agrees with people stuffing classified information into their pants and socks and walking off with it — and we’ll find out if the people of South Dakota agree in November — but the larger point is this. Who is a leaker? When you get down to it, what is a leaker? There’s a term for somebody who leaks things. Begins with a W. It’s called a whistle-blower, and who are some of the Democrats’ best friends and people they regale and support almost unilaterally? That’s right: whistle-blowers.
In fact, TIME Magazine had a cover photo of three famous whistle-blowers. Whistle-blowers are to be celebrated and honored. Now this particular whistle-blower who informed the American people that Sandy Berger attempted to undermine a federal investigation into the 9/11 attack chooses not to come forward. Whoever the leaker is, choose not to come forward. And, of course, there was a whistle-blower in Joe Wilson.
Somebody blew the whistle on Joe Wilson. And it turns out they may have been telling the truth while Wilson was telling lies. So I guess our appreciation for whistle-blowers is also selective. But this effort deserves praise. Just as those who blew the whistle at Enron and these FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis, who blew the whistle on the FBI in Washington for not connecting dots on 9/11, they received praise. This person receives praise whoever leaked this. The timing is not important to me. It’s curious, but the fact of the matter is there’s an investigation here going on that we were told was crucial and important, and we even delayed this investigation for a number of days for people to get ginned up for it. And guess what? The extension of 60 days allowed for the televised hearings to include an appearance by Richard Clarke after his book came out. Well! And who was Richard Clarke but a whistle-blower? Richard Clarke wrote a book detailing the utter incompetence of the Bush administration, and I suggest to you that Richard Clarke was celebrated as a whistle-blower. I mean, you wouldn’t say he leaked, but his book told the truth that people supposedly didn’t know.
The point is, we have a corrupted investigation here. We have documents. These are the top of the classification list, folks. I mean, I know it sounds funny and it’s humorous because we got things being stuffed down the front of people’s pants. I could sit here and say, “We don’t know if the FBI got a search warrant to get into Sandy Berger’s pants and we can feel sorry for the FBI agent who had to run the prints on those documents, came out of his pants.” We can say all these funny things, but the fact of the matter is there was an investigation here that was corrupt and we don’t know if what this commission is going to report is altogether accurate because we don’t know whether they were told everything or given everything that they sought because some of this stuff has disappeared. And yet, we have to be focused on the timing of this leak.
You know, there’s an analogy. Remember all this kerfuffle that happened at the Senate, the judiciary committee? There was a problem with the server in the staff office, and apparently some members of the Republican staff saw some memos of the Democratic staff on that committee, and they got hold of a memo which detailed the Democrats’ policy on the judiciary committee to thwart Bush nominations for political purposes and detailed how to do it and who they were going to go after and why. And in the case the Miguel Estrada (EIB Archive), it was “We got to be careful about this because there was some Hispanic ramifications and so forth.” There was no interest in the nature of the evidence there,nor the seriousness of the charge — what was in the memo. No, all the Democrats cared about there was who leaked this, who found this, not what was in it. Same thing here. Question is: Who leaked this? not, “What did Berger do?” That’s common. It’s understandable that somebody didn’t have his briefcase with him and only had a portfolio, he couldn’t take everything he wanted in the portfolio so it’s perfectly reasonable that he would stuff this stuff down his pants and then when thinks pants got full it’s perfectly reasonable he stuffed some stuff in his socks. Totally understandable! What’s the big deal, Limbaugh? What you ought to be interested in is who told us this, who leaked this.
So we’ve arrived at this curious moment where the whistle-blower has fallen out of favor in Washington, D.C. Whoever leaked this will not be on the cover of TIME Magazine. Well, you could say that. Yes, Mr. Snerdley this could be somebody “trying to connect the dots as to what happened before 9/1.” This is just a continuation, the continuing of the connect-the-dots process and now the effort to connect the dots has been thwarted because Sandy Berger took some of the dots and stuffed the dots in his pants, and left the archives room. So we can’t get those dots and we can’t connect ’em. It’s a shame. Don’t you just hate it when this happens?
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