In praise of the cover-up

If you search Google today for the words "it's the cover-up Plame" you will get about 1.2 million hits. There are thousands of articles that either imply or state explicitly that the mistake that the Bush administration made was trying to cover up the crime, which made things much worse than the crime itself. This makes no sense to me at all. Perhaps in the case of Clinton, where having sex with an intern was not a crime, that would make sense, but in the Plame case, the crime is a felony. If they hadn't covered it up, Bush probably would have lost the 2004 election.

Moreover, what all these pundits neglect to consider is that in the case of the Bush administration, for every cover-up for which they got caught, there are probably 30 cover-ups that they got away with. These guys simply don't have any compunction about violating the law in order to enrich their friends and clobber their enemies. If they hadn't been covering up all of their transgressions, we would have seen the whole lot of them doing the perp walk by now.

Just imagine the sight of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove in orange jumpsuits. That would be a beautiful thing.