The GOP's penchant for reversing accusations

This tactic is all too predictable:

Sources tell Drudge that early this afternoon House Speaker Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Frist will announce a bicameral investigation into the leak of classified information to the WASHINGTON POST regarding the "black sites" where high value al Qaeda terrorists are being held and interrogated.

Said one Hill source: "Talk about a leak that damaged national security! How will we ever get our allies to cooperate if they fear that their people will be targeted by al Qaeda."

As a prelude, per Josh Marshall, let's hope our society is capable of making the moral distinction between "betraying the identity of [one] of the country's own spies as a tool of government policy and revealing information about government policy to the press" -- especially when that information is about a secret, outside-the-law network of detention centers where torture is inflicted on prisoners.

But I want to note something else. This is part of a long-term Republican strategy of reversing accusations back at their accusers, trying to confuse voters and tar Democrats as hypocrites. Republicans had been criticized for exploiting wedge politics, so they have increasingly accused Democrats of anti-Catholic/Hispanic/religious/women bias for opposing various judicial nominees. Republicans have been criticized for being on the side of the rich, so they have waged a decades-long campaign to portray Democrats as being the party of cultural/coastal elites. (Etc.) Now that the Libby indictment is starting to do serious damage to the administration, it shouldn't be any surprise that the GOP is looking for a way to implicate Democrats in a security leak.

Comments

[SomeCallMeTim]

Apparently Lott said (on CNN) that the leaker must have been a Republican. IIRC, via Atrios.