Shredded Heat
Where have you gone, Fawn Hall?
by Alan Bisbort

Oct. 1, 2003 -- HARTFORD (apj.us) -- Remember Fawn Hall?

She's the David-Bowie-lookalike who shredded the documents that would have put Ollie North in prison and implicated President Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Instead, Ronnie is now a living saint and Ollie is a full-time patriot, part-time radio pundit, and sometime candidate for higher office, not to mention a "bestselling author" and millionaire. Fawn Hall is -- well, it's not my fault she married Danny Sugarman and turned to drugs. If she'd played her GOP cards correctly, she could have risen at least as far as Linda Tripp has today.

Even as we speak, there must be another Fawn Hall in the making.

She is busying herself in a back cubicle at the Department of Homeland Security or in the basement of the Executive Office Building or maybe in that same subbasement office at the White House where Ollie's loose cannon was once mounted. She has a pile of folders as high as an oil derrick, and a shredder (and/or a computer mouse, permanently locked on the "delete" button). She has been told by her supervisors to shred. Of course, if she does so, she will break the law because these are public documents created under the auspices of the United States Government which was, at one time, a democracy beholden to, for and by the people.

Fawn II knows better than to ask questions, and she has been assured that her office is "above the law." More to the point, the law does not matter in this country -- not anymore -- thanks to those nasty terrorists. They hate us. They hate our freedom. They hate our prosperity. They hate our pursuit of happiness. They hate our happiness. So shred away, Fawn II, shred away. Make George and Herr Karl Röverer happy.

In the 24 hours between CIA director George Tenet's call for a Department of Justice investigation of the White House over the "outing" of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA operative and the actual commencement of said probe, the back offices at the White House must have sounded as though locusts were running amok on the shredders and crickets clicking away on those computer mice. Any scent of the trail from Karl Rove's mouth -- Rove was surely one of the two "senior White House officials" who called journalists with the damaging leak -- to George W. Bush's inbox will be eradicated.

Potentially, this may be the biggest crime ever committed from within the walls of the White House. It may even trump Bush's having lied to the American people and Congress to justify his war in Iraq. There should be yellow tape wrapped completely around the White House at this point. This is a crime scene. Bush staffers should be given a week off and Bush sent to his playpen in Crawford while the FBI combs the place for fingerprints.

The only comical aspect to the whole sordid nightmare is that Bush himself hasn't a clue that anything much is wrong. He is just pissed that someone has leaked something, anything. He's got no problem with outing a CIA agent simply for revenge. Besides, haven't we learned by now that the buck will NEVER stop on the desk of a member of the Bush family? Remember daddy's all-purpose excuse during Iran-Contra, "I was out of the loop"?

Just look at W's public statement about the Wilson Affair, made while on his usual whirlwind fundraising junket that someone more generous than I might call a presidential workday. It reads partly like the text from The Little Caterpillar, which is, we all know, his favorite book during times of national crisis, and partly like something Tony Soprano might say: "Leaks of classified information are bad things, and we've had too many lately in Washington. We've had leaks from the executive branch and leaks from the legislative branch. I want to know who the leakers are."

The first sentence is from The Little Caterpillar. The second and third sentences are from the Bushprano script: never take the blame; turn it around and blame others, if need be.

At a time when his office is implicated in one of the most serious crimes ever committed by a high-ranking federal official, he seeks to point a finger at the legislative branch (read: Democrats in Congress).

One hopes the Congress will point a finger right back at him.

A middle finger.

Alan Bisbort lives, sans wealth, in blue-blooded Connecticut, where he's a columnist for the Hartford Advocate. His most recent publication is "What Happened Here? New York City" (Pomegranate Communications).