Paul Craig Roberts: Still crazy after fours years

I hadn’t read anything by ranting Roberts for quite a while, but happened on his column at NewsMax about the Lewis Libby indictment. Naturally he sees it as confirmation of everything that it is not a confirmation of: that President Bush, under the control of a sinister neoconservative conspiracy, lied us into the war. Before I go further, a reminder. Joseph Wilson’s charge that Bush had lied in his comments about African uranium was itself a complete lie. Wilson said he determined and reported that Niger had not sold any uranium to Iraq, and therefore that President Bush’s 16 words to the contrary were a lie; but Bush had only asserted that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African country, not that it had succeeded in doing so. In fact Wilson himself confirmed that Iraq had discussed a uranium deal with Niger officials in 1999. Further, when George Tenet said that it would have been better to leave the 16 words out of the president’s speech, he wasn’t saying that because the president’s statement was untrue, but because one of the documents used to back it up had turned out to be a forgery—a forgery, some now believe, that was deliberately created to mislead Bush into making a false statement and so undermine his case for the war.

The upshot is that everything about Wilson’s attack on Bush is a transparent lie, yet, because of the insane Bush hatred that dominates the left side of our body politic (and parts of the right side as well), this transparent lie has had a spectacular life. Also, that Libby may have lied about his conversations with reporters about Valerie Plame tells us nothing, absolutely nothing, about the validity of the many facts and arguments brought forward by Bush in the year-long debate leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

Yet on the basis of the Libby indictment, Roberts runs wild, spewing out a picture of the Bush administration that reads like an updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

There was a conspiracy among neoconservatives holding high positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, the vice president’s office and the National Security Council. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, described the conspirators as “a secretive, little-known cabal … made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” Wilkerson says that the secret workings of this furtive cabal took foreign policy and decisions about war out of the normal government channels.

And this:

Now that there is blood in the water, media executives will not be able to continue to muzzle reporters. Democrats might find some backbone. Republicans might realize that they are facing a far worse crisis than Watergate.

Will the unindicted co-conspirators at Fox News, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, New York Post and The Washington Times learn the Judith Miller lesson, or will they continue to serve the conspiracy that hijacked U.S. foreign policy and deceived the country and, perhaps, President Bush himself?

Will neoconservative strongholds such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution and the Heritage Foundation continue to back the agenda of a cabal that deceived our country into a disastrous war of aggression?

Unless America has lost its soul, Libby’s indictment is the first step in the unraveling of a criminal conspiracy of high treason. Fitzgerald’s continuing investigation could serve as the counterrevolution that overthrows the neo-Jacobin coup engineered by the neoconservative cabal.

Why does NewsMax editor Christopher Ruddy, who is a conservative and a supporter of Bush, publish this lunatic?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 03, 2005 12:16 PM | Send