Yellowcake!: a journey back from ignorance

Hey, the Democrats are finally getting mad about something! (Harry Reid shut down Senate business today saying, “… this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions…”) I feel for them. I’m just working up a head of steam myself. Too late, unfortunately. We’ve already all been duped. Some of us (approximately 2025 and counting) are dead. A whole lot more Iraqis are dead. It was just last week, I think, that I noticed an old bumper sticker while driving to the Bowl (Berkeley Bowl – radical vegetables, brutal parking): “If you aren’t outraged you’re not paying attention.” I sneered to myself, “that’s so Berkeley,” facing off with a Lexus for the only remaining parking space. I bought my vegetables and drove smugly back home to Oakland.
And then I heard Patrick Fitzgerald on the radio, taking questions after announcing his indictment of the Vice President’s Chief of Staff (and Assistant to the President) I. Lewis Libby for lying to a grand jury: “You’re asking, do these charges vindicate a serious breach of the public trust? And Fitzgerald sounded like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.
The more I listened, the more I realized how little I really knew about what the heck was going on:Judith MIller goes to jail for the great cause and then it’s not such a great cause; Valerie Plame or Flame or Wilson is or is not a CIA agent, soccer mom, wife; there were or were not Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq that Joseph Wilson, husband or not of Valerie Plame/Flame Wilson was railing about in a newspaper and got Dick Cheney mad at him and perpetrated (or didn’t) the “Plame (or Flame or Wilson) Leak” for which I. (Scooter, which is or is not his real or baby name) Lewis Libby was indicted. Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera (quoting from The King and I).
Two days later on Sunday, Halloween eve (which itself is the eve of All Soul’s Day, the one day of the year when the veil of illusion between the living and the dead is momentarily lifted and ghosts and spirits are free to roam) I embarked on an obsessive Google-hunt to educate myself as to the origins of the Plame Leak Affair and everything and everyone associated with it. I mean everything I could dig up. It was my own personal search for truth in the muck of Washington war politics. I call this journey Yellowcake! because that is my new word for every lie that ever came out of a Washington official’s mouth in the service of a secret agenda. Yellowcake! It’s a lie.
Next: All Lies Lead to (or at least pass through) Rome