Traitors

You know, if I wasn’t pissed enough about liberals being called traitors by the operatives and supporters of this administration, in addition to the thinly veiled with-us-or-against-us charges issued by the administration itself, the fact that these reprobates have been proven to be traitors—and not in some hyperbolic way, but in a very real, criminal way—just makes my blood absolutely boil.

Arthur Silber:

[A]ll that matters is that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, and one who worked in the especially critical area of weapons of mass destruction. Despite this overwhelmingly important fact, the Bush administration—the administration that claims its “War on Terror” is more important than anything else in the world, and that relies on its “determination” to fight our nation’s enemies to quell all doubts and questions about any of its actions—made Plame’s identity known to the public, via leaks to the press…

By exposing her identity, the administration undercut the CIA’s ability to work against the spread of dangerous weapons, it put our nation at greater risk, and it placed not only Plame’s life in danger—but also the lives of all those in Plame’s network of contacts, a network built up over many years of work. We will never know how many people may have been endangered by the administration’s actions, or how many people may have died as a result…

The point is a simple one: Bush and many of those in his administration are untrustworthy on the most fundamental level. They don’t care about national security, and they don’t care about the lives of those whose safety they are sworn to protect, despite all their vacuous statements to the contrary. When their own credibility was put in question, they were prepared to endanger our safety, and they were prepared to put people’s lives in peril—including those people who worked the hardest and took the greatest risks in seeking to protect the United States from
danger.

In moral and political terms, if not in strictly legal ones, these people are traitors—to the United States, and to each and every one of us. These people are unfit to serve. They should be denounced and forced out of government, now and forevermore.

trai·tor n. One who betrays one's country, a cause, or a trust
We cannot leave our country in the hands of these people any longer. And any conservative who claims to love America would do well to forego any protestations about this and see the abject danger we all face being led by those who value vengeance over national security. This battle has begun in earnest, and it’s time to pick sides. Are you going to be an ideologue, or a real American patriot? The two have become mutually exclusive.

As for the rest of us, we’d better batten down the hatches. RJ wisely notes at Skippy:

it's way too early to celebrate. this is a chess game, and they've got a grand strategy. special prosecutor fitzgerald, it's your move.

And if we can’t call checkmate, we’ll lose a hell of a lot more than a chess game.