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if Rove gets indicted. His new, rather demoted, job is to oversee their campaigns--and I imagine that some of them would rather like to distance themselves from the White House these days, especially from Rove.
I tend to think Rove was a player in this treason, but not the architect of it. My candidate for chief architect is Rumsfeld, who's hardly been mentioned, if at all. (I call him "The Lurker.") Fitzgerald seems to have his sights on Cheney. And I'm not sure how doofus fits in--he would be agreeable to treason, revenge, coverup and putting CIA covert counter-proliferation agents' lives in danger. That would be no problem for him. But, a) I don't think they tell him much--so he may have deniability; and b) the rich, the corporate and the war profiteers need to salvage the Bush name and all its attendant tax cuts, deregulation and trillion dollar no-bid contracts military budget, and Libby and Rove may go to the mat for that, and not give up their bosses. We'll see.
There is no love lost between Libby and Rove. Apparently, Libby tried to set Rove up to take the rap for this. (Something in Joe Wilson's book.) But, likely, Rove was just doing what Rove does: he was the front man, the publicity man, for the outing--and maybe they even lied to him about its legality. That's my guess. I tend to think Rove wasn't in on the deeper aspects of the case--what-all was going on with the Rome meetings and Manucher Ghorbanifar, the forging of the Niger documents (and what may be worse--efforts to actually plant nukes in Iraq, to be "found" by U.S. troops after the invasion--troops who were accompanied by NYT's war propagandist Judith Miller, on a special "embed" contract signed by Rumsfeld--a plan that got foiled, which may be what Plamegate was trying to cover up). Rove was even set up with a motive--political revenge against Joe Wilson for his whistleblowing on the Niger docs. It all seems so Rovian. But was it, really?
Likely the charges against Rove will be similar to those against Libby--perjury and obstruction of justice. The question is, when will these two, or one of them, crack--see the real prospect before them of jail time, and tell all? Both probably have pardons in their back pockets. (I figure that's what Rove was negotiating for, when he went on strike during Katrina.) But future pardons depend on Bush remaining in office--probable but not certain, at this point--on Bush retaining sufficient authority and political capital to get away with such pardons (very iffy, I think)--or on the potential good will of his replacement. Pardons from Bush (whose own ass may be on the line) are not as certain now as they would have been a year ago, or back when these crimes took place.
I'm just beginning to realize what the Clinton impeachment may have been all about!!!
:think:
Could they have been setting all this up that early? They set PNAC up way back when. And were they consciously trying to set up precedents--with a completely baseless case against Clinton, which they mercilessly pursued--in order to create an anti-impeachment mood? Or, to set up some procedures they knew they would need, to try to protect the Bush and other junta criminals? I recall they objected to some Clinton pardons--but I believe they went through anyway. It might be worth rehashing those events, to try to suss out what they're up to now.
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