How would you explain Libby to a kid?

This week's edition of the New Yorker has an opinion piece by Nicholas Lemann, Washington correspondent turned dean of the Columbia University school of journalism, on the "Scooter" Libby trial. It's opinionated. (Well, duh. That's why they call 'em opinion pieces.) But it gives as good a brief explanation as I've seen anywhere of how Libby wound up in the dock.

Lemann begins by asking:

It’s a good thing that you’re unlikely to be approached by a small, inquisitive child who wants an explanation of the trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s former chief of staff, because what would you say? The trial has the air of a proxy prosecution of the Bush Administration, but its outcome won’t have any effect on the White House. Libby’s legal tormentor, Patrick Fitzgerald, a special prosecutor from Chicago, has a reputation as a tormentor of the Washington press corps. (He put one prominent reporter in jail and threatened to lock up another.) Yet, given that we think of the press and the White House as opposing forces, it’s difficult to wrap our minds around the notion of them being in the dock together.

Well, that's Lemann's opinion. Or, more likely, his summary of the conventional wisdom. Me, as long as we're talking about opinion, I don't have any problem getting my mind around the conventional wisdom. I think the press and the politicians have a thoroughly incestuous relationship. Especially in Washington, D.C.

But I love his question. How would you explain this mess to a kid?

I like Lemann's answer even better. He makes it clear he doesn't have a very high opinion of the Bush administration. But he also makes it clear how all this politicking led to perjury and obstruction of justice charges agains Libby:

What’s ultimately behind Libby’s trial is the Administration’s obsession with finding hard evidence for what it already believes. President Bush is often said to have misled the country into war in Iraq. But it’s equally true—and more illuminating of how the White House thinks and works—that the Administration misled itself into war. Since it was convinced that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, the absence of proof showed only that the wrong people (the C.I.A. and the United Nations) had been looking in the wrong places. So, during the run-up to the war, the search had to be conducted with a little more creativity.

In that spirit, the White House dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger, in February of 2002, to find proof that the country had shipped yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson not only came up empty-handed; he said so publicly, in a Times Op-Ed piece that he published five months later. The Administration then went on another search for evidence—the kind that could be used to discredit Wilson—and began disseminating it, off the record, to a few trusted reporters. That led to the unlawful exposure of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent. And that, in turn, brought the appointment of a special prosecutor, and another over-the-top search for evidence, this time against the Administration. Libby’s trial is the result.

To read the rest of it (which you'll enjoy if you don't like Bush and can safely ignore if you do), click on this link to the current New Yorker. Do it in the next few days, though, because they update the website every weekend and don't archive the last week's stories.