UPDATE: Thank you, Senator Wyden (D-OR) for signing on to Senator Kerry’s letter!
Today, Senator John Kerry; Senator Carl Levin, Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; and 24 other Senators formally requested that Congress investigate the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity — a leak a senior administration official described at the time as “meant purely and simply for revenge.”
“Americans deserve a Congress that holds Washington accountable for the truth about our national security. Can anyone argue with a straight face that Congress has time to look at steroid use in baseball but doesn’t have the will to provide congressional oversight of the leak of a CIA agent’s name? It’s long past time to stop putting politics ahead of the public good, get to the bottom of a national security breach and restore credibility to Washington,” said John Kerry, who authored the letter.
Congratulations, John Kerry, you win the “Radical” Russ Nail on the Head Award for the day! Unfortunately you lost the election by an incredible 2.48% mandate, and baseball’s home run records are far more sacrosanct to the American people than some political game of who said what to whom and why. Ask any American, particularly in a red state, who Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds are. Then ask them who Valerie Plame and Karl Rove are.
I want to believe I’m wrong and that the American people are waking up to the criminality and deceit of the Bushites. But I think since Watergate, most people just assume that Washington is lying to us and that dirty-dealing, backstabbing, scandal-ridden hardball partisan politics is just the way things get done and there’s nothing we can do about it. And as long as there are no gas lines, no military draft, and cheap comestibles at Wal-Mart, I can’t see Americans in general getting riled up about it.
