Something in between

Looks like freedom but it feels like death
It's something in between, I guess
It's closing time - Leonard Cohen

This may be the day. Not the day, but still one of some hope. So why don't I feel it?

Wayne Madsen reports that there is informed anticipation that the Plame indictments may finally be handed down today. Patrick Fitzgerald's spokesman Randall Samborn has said that any announcement would be made from Washington, and not Chicago. The Grand Jury will be sitting Wednesday, and its mandate's expiration of Oct 28 has nearly arrived and is unlikely to be extended. Even if the indictments don't come today, they are coming: Fitzgerald will not be issuing a final report, which was considered an option if he did not mean to call out officials on their crimes.

If that wasn't enough, Tom DeLay should be booked in a Texas jail this week on money laundering charges, the Abramoff investigation "has the Republican political establishment holding its breath," Dick Cheney's principal Deputy National Security Adviser John Hannah has been cooperating with Fitzgerald (which should also trouble the sleep of John Bolton and Michael Ledeen), and "government officials and advisers" have even sent up the balloon that Cheney might resign and be replaced with Condoleeza Rice.

Under the dispensation of the New Normal, this should finally mean something like good news. But we need something more than something like, and this won't be enough.

Last week, Madsen wrote that "the main stream media is just beginning to take notice that a 'Watergate-level event' is about to occur in Washington." Now here's my problem with that: so what? The United States already had its Watergate-level event, called Watergate, and it brought nothing more promising than a false dawn.

This is how I concluded the June post "What Is Watergate?":

If the deeper truths of Watergate lead past the White House to the CIA, then Nixon himself is a victim, and not just of his own animus. And that muddies the morality tale. McCord got to play flawed hero during the Senate Hearings, and his and Hunt's CIA pedigree were not explored by legislators and journalists smelling the blood of an unpopular president. Former intelligence briefer Bob Woodward obligingly led the investigation away from the intelligence community, as did "Deep Throat," whether or not he really was the FBI's Mark Felt.

Nixon's cover-up - spurred by the fear that Hunt's arrest could lead to the reopening of the "Bay of Pigs thing" (his euphemism for the Kennedy assassination) - helped close the case that the story began and ended at his office.

Certainly no innocent, but not exactly guilty as charged, either. Nixon was himself, at last, a patsy.

To those for whom "Bush knew" is not inexact shorthand, but rather the kerygma of "9/11 Truth," a Fitzgerald decapitation strike upon the Vice President's office will be as good as it gets. And Cheney should be taken down for something, for everything, even if just by shrapnel from an indictment fired at Scooter Libby. But seeing him "step aside" rather than hauled away would be nothing like good news. Rice would be positioned for '08 (as America's realpolitik determined that only Nixon could go to China, so only the Republicans can nominate the first black and female presidential candidate). And Cheney would likely continue on in an "unofficial" capacity, from one undisclosed location or another, to advance the dark agenda with even less accountability than he now has.

We know it, but let's recall it as the tension between reality and myth are ratcheted up: public office has only a nominal correlation with influence and the exercise of power. Again, it's the China model brought home to America. Deng Xiaoping officially retired in 1989, but he ran the backrooms of Chinese power until his death in 1997. Even when Deng held office it was never the highest office, yet he was known to be the de facto ruler of party and state. (When was the last time, say, Henry Kissinger was a public official?)

Might Bush and his team be played for patsies by the spooks seeming to wear, in this light, the white hats? It must be awfully tempting; they've done worse before to sitting presidents. But there is institutional guilt in Washington that predates the late addendum of this administration which took office only because it was most in accord with the decadent and criminalized power structures.

John Dean once said there was a cancer on the White House. It can appear now as if the cancer is the White House, and all America needs is a good Bushectomy. That's a start. But the cancer is metastastic, and it didn't begin at the top five years ago. Whoever's indicted and for what, it's just a start. 9/11 wasn't the brainchild of Karl Rove, it just played one on TV. The covert networks of intelligence, drugs, arms and terror had been in place long before - even during Democratic administrations, for all the good that did - and the pattern of opening doors for Atta and friends while looking the other way was well established before November, 2000. Bush can be blamed for much, but there is much that remains beyond the reach of nominal leaders, even if they are wicked.

I don't mean to be the wet blanket here. I just want to suggest that the prize is more than a few heads on a plate, or even an entire White House. It must be, if it's to mean anything more than another false dawn.