'Fair game' question for Bush

[tk2kewl]

'Fair game' question for Bush

Has the president asked Karl Rove, his indispensable aide, about his role in the Valerie Plame case?

BY HAROLD MEYERSON
Harold Meyerson is political editor of the L.A. Weekly and a columnist for The Washington Post, where this first appeared.

July 14, 2005

Now Karl Rove has become "fair game."

That was the term the president's consigliere applied to Valerie Plame, according to Newsweek, in a conversation with MSNBC's Chris Matthews immediately after the publication of Robert D. Novak's column that identified Plame as a CIA operative.

And, of course, Plame was fair game: Her identity was a tool to discredit, however obliquely, the report from her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger was a bunch of hooey.

<snip>

And becoming Karl Rove's fair game means you're in for a bumpy ride. Rove did not become George W. Bush's indispensable op only because of his strategic smarts. He's also the kind of ethically unconstrained guy Bush has wanted around when the going gets tough - when the case Bush is making is unconvincing on its own merits, when he needs to divert attention from himself with a stunning attack on somebody else.

That's been the hallmark of Rove's career - and Bush's. After Bush lost the 2000 New Hampshire primary to John McCain, Rove directed a slanderous campaign in South Carolina that knocked McCain virtually out of the race with a barrage of fabrications about the personal lives of the senator and his family. Once Bush decided to invade Iraq, Rove orchestrated the campaign to depict the war's critics as terrorist sympathizers. Rove recently told a right-wing audience that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Get in Bush's way and Rove turns you or your loved ones into the scum of the earth.

<snip>

Although we can't be certain it was Rove who disclosed Plame's identity, we can be sure that, if he did, it was all in a day's work on behalf of George W. Bush.

[Dhalgren]

1. What did the President know and when did he know it?

These have always been good questions - and they are excellent questions now. This is a clearcut case for a preliminary impeachment investigation. There should be House and Senate committee hearings on this precise issue. If the President knew that Karl had talked with reporters about Plame/Wilson and has remained silent, that is obstruction of justice, isn't it?

[fooj]

2. Who brought Karl Rove into the White House?

Bingo!

peace.

[Cocoa]

3. Richard Cohen makes the same point, but in Rove's DEFENSE

in this incredible column, Meyerson's Post colleague, Cohen, argues that this is what Rove is SUPPOSED TO DO.

Cohen even throws some cheap sentimentality about dead Iraqi children in there, in DEFENSE of Rove.

This is as Orwellian as it gets, folks...

The truth about that truth was contained in a Post story about the leaks. It quoted "a senior administration official" who said that the outing of Plame was "meant purely and simply for revenge." It also said that two -- not one -- "top White House officials" had called "at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife." This response might be reprehensible, but it was routine for the town and, particularly, the vindictive Bush White House. What it was not, though, was a crime. The law prohibiting the outing of a CIA agent is so restrictive that it has been applied only once and does not seem to fit this case. I find it hard to believe that Rove or anyone at the White House specifically intended to blow the cover of a CIA agent. Rove is a political opportunist, not a traitor.

Washington loves farce the way Vienna loves the waltz. It once extravagantly inflated a sex act into the impeachment of a president, and it has now reduced the momentous debacle of the Iraq war into a question of what Rove or someone else said to a reporter on the phone. Soon, the question will turn on whether Rove or others actually cited Plame by name and whether the president's oath to fire anyone who identified Plame as a CIA operative applies to someone who just mentioned her job title. It will all depend on what "is" is or, to put it another way, whether Bush will concede that he inhaled.

None of this matters -- not really. The persistent criminalization of politics does no one any good. This is a parody of Clausewitz. He said war is the continuation of politics by other means. Now, we have special prosecutors as the continuation of politics by other means. The New York Times called for one and now, as a result, its own reporter is in jail.

Washington is electrified with the abundant energy of buzz from a scandal -- speculation about Rove, about Bush, about Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby. Who leaked? Who may have lied? How did Novak slip the noose? But the real scandal is the ongoing mess in Iraq, the murder just the other day of innocent children (is there any other kind?) and the false notion that, somehow, taking out Hussein would make us all safer. London gives the lie to that.

[tk2kewl]

4. fuck that... they can spin it all they want, but

ordinary people are beginnig to realize that this about lying the country to war.