Abracadabrah

I create as I speak

Duelling Portraits

A portrait of I. Lewis Libby Jr. here.

And a portrait of Patrick Fitzgerald here.

I'm curious as to why the NYTimes is hosting a relatively positive portrait of Libby. Can it be, maybe, for deniability purposes after the fact. Is it just to show, if there are indictments this week, that all of their coverage of Libby was not negative. Given all the loving attention directed to the Administration's team by the NYTimes, it's nigh on impossible to take the thing at face value, instead of a bit of Times strategy.

BTW, for those of you following the Plame-Game saga, I want to recommend Macsmind for digging into a lot of depth into this story in a way that is not available in much of the media, and certainly not the most superficial renditions of the story that we see on TV news, cable and otherwise.

With an intelligence background himself, he's demystified the context of this saga - explaining the war going on between the Administration and certain "rogue" branches of the CIA, who were seeking to lob missiles at the Bush Administration policies. His contention is that the narrative of the Plame Game was constructed deliberately by these rogue elements.

Scroll through the last week on his blog if you like this kind of stuff. He's done some excellent work on it. Whether his contentions actually bear fruit, we'll likely see later this see.

For a more conventional approach, but also plenty nuanced, see JustOneMinute

UPDATE: Here is another portrait of Libby, in the Washington Post, with some fascinating details:

Libby greatly admires the work of Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian who posits that warfare is an inevitable part of civilization, evil is a basic condition of humanity, and tyrants must be confronted by the harshest possible means. (In late 2002, a few months before the Iraq invasion, Cheney -- also a Hanson devotee -- invited the historian to the vice president's mansion for a small dinner gathering that included Libby.)

Hanson's stark perspective comports with Libby's view on Iraq....

Friends and associates say Libby remains unbowed about the U.S. action in Iraq, and despite the setbacks of recent months has shown no hint of doubt. In times of travail, Libby recalls the excitement of his job and the grandeur of his mission.

"Cheney and Scooter play chess on several different levels," Matalin says. "That's how their minds work. It's not about what's right in front of him. They look at things in the sweep of history.

And Stephen Hayes, writing in the Weekly Standard, presents his theories of Plame-Gate.

posted by Alcibiades @ 3:22 PM