Poetic Justice

Hubris is a common theme in Greek tragedies and mythology, whose stories often featured protagonists suffering from hubris and subsequently being punished by the gods for it. In Greek law, it most often refers to violent outrage wreaked by the powerful upon the weak. In poetry and mythology, the term was used of those individuals esteeming themselves as equal to or greater than the gods. Hubris was often the "tragic flaw", or Hamartia, of characters in Greek drama.

There was also a goddess called Hubris (or Hybris), the embodiment of the above concept, insolence, lack of restraint and instinct. She spent most of her time among mortals.

....Wikipedia....

Jack Shannon is back and he directed me over to this piece by Howard Fineman, a guy I usually don't read much anymore. Although Fineman never mentions the word hubris that's really what it's all about.

Live by spin, die by spin.

That will be the lesson if Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicts anyone in the Valerie Plame leak case. Poetic justice [aka hubris] is a concept as old as drama, but it applies time and again in the theater of presidential politics. Traits and tactics that lead to power lead to overreach, and ruin. In our day, justice is administered (and balance restored) by law, not by gods. Still, the idea is the same.

Selling the war, a modern day Greek drama? Bush and Rove built a political machine to win elections....

But the machine they built may have run amok — at least that seems to be what Fitzgerald is examining, as he looks at the leaking of Plame’s identity and of other classified information.

In essence, the Bush-Rove campaign machine was redeployed in the service of selling of the Iraq war and, later, in defense of that sale. Did they go over the line in doing so? We’re about to find out.

[......]

The campaign sales structure for the political runup to the war was clear from the start. White House Chief of Staff Andy Card talked openly about new-car style “rollouts” in the fall of 2002; it soon became well-known that, among those in the so-called “White House Iraq Group” — WHIG for short — were campaign honchos such as Rove, Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer and Mary Matalin.

Treason for politics?

And there he was in the WHIG, along with several of the heaviest hitters of substantive foreign policy, including Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then-National Security Advisor Condi Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley.

What, if any, classified information was floating around at WHIG meetings? What, if any, of it was “put out,” as they say, or used in other ways? What, if any, info might some of the more enthusiastic WHIG members have tried to cadge on the side, perhaps for their own somewhat freelance use? Who leaked what to whom among the Judy Miller types in the national media?

These questions were not asked for the most part at the time, either by the media or the Democrats who now oppose the war. But in American politics we tend to replay every cataclysmic political issue in the courts: Nixon’s reelection in 1972 in Watergate, Clinton’s in 1996 in Monica Madness.

Now comes — again — the war in Iraq and, by extension, the reelection of the self-described “war president.”

I think Fineman gets the big picture about right, they used dirty politics to sell a war that was thought to have political advantages. I think where Fineman gets it wrong is when he compares it to Clinton, and yes even Nixon. As John Dean said, it's Worse Than Watergate.