The MSM and liberal bloggers have been going gaga over the thought that perhaps they FINALLY have a White House scandal with teeth in regards to the Plame controversy. Never mind the fact that even some of the most liberal members of the media are now admitting that no crime was committed, there’s still the hope of getting SOMETHING from this whole story.

I’ve seen posts all over the place and heard the incessant harping of the press during White House press briefings. Everyone in the MSM, it seems, is trying to find a new angle on this story, and it’s getting quite ridiculous.

Here is an interesting — and ridiculous too — example of the liberal media’s seeking after new ways to mine this story:

Washington is electrified with the abundant energy of buzz from a scandal — speculation about Rove, about Bush, about Cheney’s aide, Scooter Libby. Who leaked? Who may have lied? How did Novak slip the noose? But the real scandal is the ongoing mess in Iraq, the murder just the other day of innocent children (is there any other kind?) and the false notion that, somehow, taking out Hussein would make us all safer. London gives the lie to that.
Richard Cohen, Washington Post

Interesting segue here, don’t you think? The Plame controversy as a circuitous path towards yet another liberal statement regarding the evils of the Iraq war… Man, these folks are good!

Of course, how do we know that something MORE serious would not have already happened had we NOT taken Saddam out in 2003? Or a second incident in this country, for that matter. Wasn’t Saddam the one who boasted that he was paying $25,000 to the family of every suicide bomber? But, of course, when you are emoting as Mr. Cohen does in his article, there really is little room for reasoned argument.

Let me offer a relevant thought for those who decry the Iraq war and have recently taken to giving us a body count (probably because there are not enough Americans soldiers dying these days to satisfy liberals in the media) of those civilians in Iraq who are being murdered, on a near-daily basis, by the hundreds at the hands of the same people who were killing them in the thousands and tens of thousands BEFORE we invaded… There is a major difference regarding the death of civilians in Iraq now vs. while Saddam was still in power.

What’s the difference? Before we took Saddam out, his murderous henchmen would take their heavy machinery and dig huge long trenches in the desert sand. After digging these trenches, they would line up innocent civilians by the hundreds and thousands, then casually walk down the line and shoot them in the head or chest Nazi-style. Then they would push the sand back in place and move on to dig their next mass grave and reload their weapons for the next random group of civilians.

Today? Saddam’s old henchmen and these suicide bombers hide in the shadows, hoping to kill as many as possible and hoping against hope that they are not killed first. Yes, they kill dozens at a time. At the same time, however, they are no longer the hunters, they are now the hunted. And we know (as do they) that eventually they’ll either die killing other human beings, die in a confrontation with American or Iraqi forces, or be captured and thrown into jail.

As an Iraqi or American citizen, which scenario would you prefer?

Nuff said for now.

David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com