Quote of the Day~"it is often best to keep the lights off"

The above quote comes from a column in today's Washington Post by Richard Cohen. In his column at Salon, Glenn Greenwald demonsrates beautifully how the position that Cohen takes in his column, and more particularly, the mentality evident in the this sentence, so spectacularly "captur[es] the essence of our Beltway media."


Cohen is essentially lamenting the fate of Scooter Libby, the guy who more or less formed the basis of the my previous post. Greenwald spells out exactly what this quote means when he states that "when it comes to the behavior of our highest and most powerful government officials, our Beltway media preaches, 'it is often best to keep the lights off."' But the real quote of the day comes from Greenwald himself. The quote is rather long, but Greenwald outdoes himself in exposing the profound sense of victimzation that the powerful feel when they are called to account for their actions:


The Libby prosecution clearly was the dirty work of the leftist anti-war movement in this country, just as Cohen describes. After all, the reason Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate this matter was because a left-wing government agency (known as the "Central Intelligence Agency") filed a criminal referral with the Justice Department, as the MoveOn-sympathizer CIA officials were apparently unhappy about the public unmasking of one of their covert agents.


In response, Bush's left-wing anti-war Attorney General, John Ashcroft, judged the matter serious enough to recuse himself, leading Bush's left-wing anti-war Deputy Attorney General, James Comey, to conclude that a Special Prosecutor was needed. In turn, Comey appointed Fitzgerald, the left-wing anti-war Republican Prosecutor and Bush appointee, who secured a conviction of Libby, in response to which left-wing anti-war Bush appointee Judge Reggie Walton imposed Libby's sentence.





http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/19/cohen/index.html