Betting This Will Bring Down Bush? No Chance
By Mark Davis October 26, 2005
Sometimes controversies are not about what they appear to be.
We've been buried in anticipatory stories as reporters giddily anticipate what many of them see as The Next Watergate, the possible indictment of two lofty figures in the Bush White House.
Doubters say this is much ado about nothing, a story completely contrived by those who drool at the prospect of scandal tainting this administration.
What's an objective soul to do?
The first thing to do is question that objectivity. Is it even possible to approach the Karl Rove/"Scooter" Libby/Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame Wilson story with an eye unaffected by politics?
Probably not, so let's all be honest with ourselves. For me, as a general supporter of this president, my default settings are to hope that people I admire do not break the law and to question the motives of those who prematurely presume that laws have been broken.
But with that comes a hefty responsibility. I must have the spine to face it if Mr. Rove and/or Mr. Libby are indicted and to do it without the whining and denials heard from so many Clinton supporters as he faced the music for his prevarications.
At the risk of being dead wrong in a very short time, I am among those predicting that neither Mr. Rove nor Mr. Libby will be indicted for violating the law against revealing the name of a known covert CIA agent.
The only remote possibility I see is special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald viewing any inconsistent testimony from the two as malicious intent to deceive and not just faulty memory.
Rove and Libby enemies can roll their eyebrows at the flawed recollection scenario, but let's review the context.
As right-hand men for the president and vice president, Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby were properly involved in countering an effort by Joe Wilson, a disgruntled diplomat, to smear the war effort.
A bipartisan Senate committee has now discredited much of the story Mr. Wilson has paraded all over television on his way to becoming an anti-war hero, details ranging from who sparked his trip to Niger to what he found there.
But as the stories were breaking, it was thoroughly understandable for the Bush team to try to question the purity of Mr. Wilson's motives. Once the possibility arose of his CIA wife as a key advocate for his ideologically charged journey, one can additionally imagine a flurry of conversations about the significance of that angle.
So, a year or more later: Quick! Where did you first hear the name "Valerie Plame"? Was it from a reporter? Was it from the vice president? Those are the two answers Mr. Libby apparently gave on separate occasions, leading to yesterday's breathless story in The New York Times.
Egad! Mr. Libby may have heard this woman's name not from a journalist, but from Dick Cheney himself! Stop the presses!
It must have been quite the adrenaline rush three decades ago as reporters gleefully watched the self-destruction of a White House they despised. Many in the current media generation long for that same thrill.
They won't get it. Even if Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby go down, none of their misdeeds, real or imagined, will constitute an anchor heavy enough to drown the Bush presidency.
This White House is gurgling plenty on its own right now, with a Supreme Court nomination that is close to flat-lining and a war that yields good news that no one pays attention to. Between the Plame story and Hurricane Wilma, did anyone notice that the Iraqi constitution was proclaimed officially passed yesterday?
I wonder whether that story would have been so buried if it had failed. Which brings us to what this whole "Plamegate" mess is about: this presidency and this war.
Supporters of both have little time to be bothered with the Wilsons, while detractors long for an early Christmas – indictments that they will spin to discredit President Bush and the war as a whole.
We'll see who's smiling by the weekend.
Mark Davis is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. The Mark Davis Show is heard weekdays nationwide on the ABC Radio Network. His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.
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