It really was Rove
Over the past week, the facts have finally started to come out about the long ignored Valerie Plame fiasco. Back when she was outed as a CIA agent, many people speculated that it was Karl Rove who had leaked the information, in an effort to punish Joseph Wilson for blowing the whole uranium excuse for invading Iraq. Recent developments have shown that those people were most likely right.
From Jesse Berney on Democrats.org:
The revelation that Karl Rove was the source who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to Time’s Matt Cooper probably comes as a surprise to exactly nobody. After all, dirty tricks have been the hallmark of Rove’s political career since he was a teenager.
As this story continues to unfold over the next few weeks, Republicans are going to try to parse every word Rove ever uttered about the case. They’re going to dissect every letter of relevant law trying to find a loophole to prove that Karl Rove is innocent.
But let’s make one thing perfectly clear: Rove’s secret outing of Valerie Plame put partisan politics above the security of our nation. He chose to reveal Plame’s identity as a CIA agent, with no thought to the consequences to American national security, simply because it provided an opportunity to smear her husband.
From Atrios:
It’s incredible that our media has allowed coverage to resolve entirely around technically parsing of the law. Now, that technical parsing of the law is in fact important, both in the court of law and in the court of public opinion, but there’s a massive collusion here by the media to pretend that the legal issues are the only issues. The media won’t hold Bush here to any standard at all. It’s sickening.
From Jack K. of Ruminate This:
As far as Rove’s useless, dirty cover comment that he “didn’t know her name, didn’t leak her name” is concerned, this is all a hammered together backstory that is somehow supposed to convince a jury that a just world would make him come before. He didn’t have to use her name, for God’s Sake! Joe Wilson wasn’t some crazed hermit dropout living in a previously unmapped lava tube out here in Central Oregon; he was a former Ambassador living in a suburb with neighbors and had a history and a biography that my children could discover on the Internet with only a child’s googling skills. Rove gave Cooper, prior to any public revelation of the truth of
Valerie Plame, everything that was necessary to destroy her cover and ruin her usefulness to the CIA and – just perhaps – put her live personally at risk. His revelation to Matthew Cooper was nothing more than part of an effort to put the lash to Joe Wilson and show just how rough things could get if he didn’t shut up and get out of the way of the effort to launch George W. Bush’s Grand Nation-Building Adventure in Iraq. Sadly, for both the Wilson’s and the country, Cooper wasn’t bright enough to figure it out, probably in major part because that whole Big-Time Major League Hot-Shot “Time Magazine-Reporter-With-Deep-White-House-Contacts” gig is such a powerful brain-sucking drug that it just overpowers any sense of critical thought or journalistic integrity.
So now what? In past administrations, once things got to this point Rove would be shoved out as the scapegoat for the whole sordid affair, and the media would dutifully devour him. This is the Bush administration though, which never wants to admit that it’s wrong about anything, and Karl Rove is the power behind the throne. If the media does it’s usual bad job of pursuing this, then the only hope of anything happening will rest with the special prosecutor for the criminal case. Maybe I’m cynical (though after all these years of Bush it’s hard not to be), but I think that’s a pretty slim hope.
[via Atrios]