Like a spider making a web. The threads I'm going to link are the Plame Game and the Downing Street Memos (DSM). And this is better than Umberto Eco's theories in Foucault's Pendulum. For one thing, I'm probably completely correct.
What are the wonderful hidden connections, you might ask? They are not that wonderful or not that hidden, but they are very basic. Like the way one ties a simple knot:
First, there is the stonewalling and the denials. Nothing was wrong with the way the White House decided to go to war in Iraq, nothing. So the White House says. Never mind the Downing Street Memo which indicates that the U.S. was determined to use military force; didn't the U.S. go to the U.N. first? Never mind that they did that exactly because the British wouldn't otherwise go along with the military force option, the very thing that is apparent from the DSM. Nothing to see here, move along, please. And look! There is a white woman over there being bitten by a shark.
The same approach is now being taken in the Plame Game. Nobody knows anything whatsoever, and the White House has complete confidence in Karl Rove:
After two days of questions, the White House said Tuesday that President Bush continues to have confidence in Karl Rove, the presidential adviser at the center of the investigation into the leak identifying a female CIA officer. Meanwhile, prominent Democrats are calling for Rove to be fired.
Bush did not respond to a reporter's question Tuesday about whether he would fire Rove, in keeping with a June 2004 pledge to dismiss any leakers of Valerie Plame's identity.
At a White House briefing afterward, spokesman Scott McClellan was pressed about Rove's future.
"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the president's confidence," McClellan said.
Second, there is the fact that the Niger expedition Joseph Wilson was leading, the one that found no evidence on Saddam Hussein having tried to purchase uranium from Niger, led directly to the Plame Game. The Bush administration chose to pretend that the Niger link was a real one and used this as "evidence" for the urgent need to go to war against Saddam. That Wilson then stated the lack of any such "evidence" created the need to punish him by outing his wife. Hence, the DSM and the Plame Game are telling us different pieces about the dishonesties of this administration in the pre-Iraq phase.
Third, but certainly not the least important, is the way both these scandals tell us something about the ethics of this administration. The only real crime seems to be getting caught.