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Fri Nov 4 09:55:40 PST 2005

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SAINT PATRICK
Oct 27th 2005  

Republicans should think twice before trying to demonise the White
House's tormentor

THIS Monday's NEW YORK DAILY NEWS printed a delicious bit of character
assassination: "He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no
heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very
important things." No, this was not yet another vacuous actress moaning
about George Bush. It was a "White House ally" describing Patrick
Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who is leading the investigation
into who leaked the name of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, to the
press. 

For the past two years the Republican noise machine has been remarkably
quiet about Mr Fitzgerald. Now Republicans are starting to crank up the
volume against the man from Chicago, accusing him of suffering from an
advanced case of "special prosecutor disease", suggesting that he
doesn't know the difference between a legal technicality such as
perjury and a real crime, and even suggesting that he has political
leanings. 

Before they start shouting any louder, conservatives might study what
happened to the liberal noise machine when it took on Mr Fitzgerald.
Few organs on America's tattered left have as much heft as the NEW YORK
TIMES, which decided to put the full weight of its authority behind one
of its star reporters, Judith Miller, when she refused to divulge her
sources to Mr Fitzgerald. Editorials hammered him for mounting a "major
assault" on journalistic freedom. Both the editor, Bill Keller, and the
publisher, Arthur ("Pinch") Sulzberger, accompanied Ms Miller to court;
and, when she was incarcerated, the newspaper thundered that she was
"surrendering her liberty in defence of a greater liberty, granted to a
free press by the Founding Fathers so journalists can work on behalf of
the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of
government."

The affair has ended with the TIMES looking as if "the runaway Chicago
prosecutor" has reversed over it repeatedly. Not only did Ms Miller end
up testifying about her breakfasts with Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's
chief of staff, but the TIMES's use of its "great liberty" is under
attack from all sides. Mr Keller has now circulated a memo accusing Ms
Miller of "misleading" her boss about her relationship with her sources
and of being "entangled" with Mr Libby. (Ms Miller calls this memo
"ugly" and "inaccurate".) Byron Calame, the paper's public editor, has
penned an article entitled "The Miller mess". In a notably catty
column, Maureen Dowd described her colleague as a "woman of mass
destruction"--a mild rebuke compared with what TIMES people say in
private.

This should serve as a powerful warning to the Republicans. After all,
the TIMES could claim it was defending a grand constitutional
principle. The White House has fewer options. (The right to leak
confidential information to the press? The right to smear a critic of
your policies? The right to tell half-truths to a grand jury?) And the
Republicans suffer from three handicaps that could turn any campaign
against Mr Fitzgerald into a farce. 

The first is that they are starting too late. The Democrats began to
demonise Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor in the Lewinsky affair,
as soon as he appeared on the scene. The Republicans have been
excessively nice about Mr Fitzgerald, who was appointed by a Republican
official rather than a panel of judges (as Mr Starr was). James Comey,
the deputy attorney-general, introduced Mr Fitzgerald as "Eliot Ness
with a Harvard law degree and a sense of humour". Mr Bush, to his
credit (and completely unlike Mr Clinton), has insisted on the
seriousness of the inquiry; only the other week, he praised Mr
Fitzgerald for handling the case in "a very dignified way".

Second, Mr Fitzgerald is no Ken Starr. Mr Fitzgerald is as apolitical
as Mr Starr was partisan. When he registered to vote in New York, Mr
Fitzgerald registered as an independent only to discover that the
Independents were a political party, so he changed his registration to
"no affiliation" (a label he kept when he moved to Chicago). He is an
equal-opportunity prosecutor. In Illinois he is currently embroiled in
two big corruption cases--one directed against George Ryan, a former
Republican governor, the other against various aides to Richard Daley,
Chicago's Democratic mayor. He is repeatedly described by the locals as
a "straight arrow" and "a straight shooter".

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE
Mr Starr, a conservative and a God-fearer who sang hymns on his morning
jog, was a ready-made BeTE NOIRE for the left. Mr Fitzgerald embodies
everything that conservatives ought to admire. He is the son of Irish
immigrants who worked his way through Amherst and Harvard Law School
(his doorman father found him work as a doorman). He is a workaholic
who made his reputation prosecuting gangsters and terrorists, starting
with the Gambinos. (In good Godfather fashion, he even had a witness
flown in from Sicily.) He convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman of the 1993
World Trade Centre bombings, travelled to Africa to investigate the
embassy bombings of 1998 and brought the first American indictment of
Osama bin Laden. 

The third handicap for Republicans is that their arguments during the
Lewinsky affair may be thrown back in their faces. How can they moan
that Mr Fitzgerald has broadened his inquiry well beyond the original
leak, when they supported Mr Starr's leap from dodgy land deals to oral
sex? How can they say that perjury and obstruction of justice are
technicalities when, during the Lewinsky affair, they declared that
"perjury and obstruction of justice are high crimes and misdemeanours"
(Senator Bill Frist) and that "perjury and obstruction of justice are
crimes against the state" (Senator Sam Brownback)? 

One of the golden rules of politics is to choose your enemies wisely.
So far, Mr Bush has been lucky or skilful in this regard. Mr Fitzgerald
is somebody who can do Mr Bush great harm; but conservatives attack him
at their peril.

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5084726

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