Caution is not without its merits, but I seem to remember the Howler advised extreme caution on the no WMDs argument long after it had become fairly clear there really weren't any WMDs. At some point, you have to abandon caution and actually throw some punches. Given the fairly strong appearance Rove at least lied and maybe even committed a serious crime, I think the "liberal web" is well within its rights not to wait silently for the grand jury to act. I guess I'm not convinced the examples below prove we're "dumb," but maybe as a liberal, I'm just too dumb to see it.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/<edit>
But then, the pseudo-con virus—sheer stupidty—is clearly infecting the left. Consider reaction to this week’s Newsweek piece about Rove’s contact with Matt Cooper. Michael Isikoff reports the text of a contemporaneous e-mail in which Cooper described his conversation with Rove. But does the e-mail show that Rove committed a crime? Such talk is widespread on the net. But here’s the key sentence in Isikoff’s report—a sentence which puts that conclusion in doubt:
ISIKOFF (7/18/05): Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative.
Did Rove know that Plame was “covert?” According to conventional understanding of the legal case, a leaker would have to know this fact to be guilty of criminal conduct. And the Newsweek report explicitly says that Rove may not have known. But so what? All over the web, triumphalist typists tell the world that we how have Rove dead to rights. And tortured reasoning is all around. See, for example, this illogical post, approvingly linked to by Atrios. Or see Josh Marshall’s “careful review,” which shows that Rove “almost certainly” knew. The review may be careful, but it doesn’t show much. For “careful,” we’d substitute “tortured.”
Did King Karl know that Plame was covert? Let’s note one key point for the record: Under terms of the most relevant statute, it isn’t clear that Plame really was such an agent. (Under terms of this statute, a “covert” agent is someone "who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States.” It isn’t clear that Plame qualifies.) At any rate, if Rove didn’t know that Plame was covert, it isn’t clear that he committed a crime—and no one has really begun to show that he had such knowledge. But so what? This hasn’t stopped the triumphalist liberal web from aping the pseudo-con world of the 90s. In that decade, everything Clinton did was a crime, and every bit of “evidence” “proved” it. This produced a decade of sheer stupidity—a decade the liberal web starts to match.
Did King Karl Rove commit a crime? We don’t have the slightest idea. But it’s sad to see the liberal web adopting the dumbness of Rush and his cronies. Over the course of the past several decades, sheer stupidity has been a core value of the talk-show pseudo-con right. Excitable people on the left are discovering the age-old appeal of this value—a value which is rapidly spreading into the liberal web.
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