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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (52873)	7/16/2005 2:26:30 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

"Reporters told Rove she was a CIA operative" Rove CONFIRMED it. From WHOM did the reporters learn this from in the first place? I doubt any of them have access to CIA NOC lists. Dick Cheney? He was hanging around at the CIA at the time, trying to coerce "evidence" of Saddam's WMD's. SOMEONE should fry - the Bushies WERE trying to punish Wilson. Rove is ON RECORD as saying "Wilson's wife is fair game". 'Fair game' question for Bush Has the president asked Karl Rove, his indispensable aide, about his role in the Valerie Plame case? newsday.com 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. Rove's lawyer now admits that in attempting to warn Time's Matt Cooper off the Wilson story, Rove mentioned Wilson's wife, although not by name. Attention is now focused on whether this violated the law that forbids revealing the identity of our undercover intelligence agents. But it's also worth pondering the quintessential Rovishness of his conversation with Cooper. Bringing up Plame, after all, did nothing to discredit Wilson's central findings. It was a distraction, an ad hominem attack. Wilson had undermined the administration's tenuous case for its war. To Rove, that made Plame fair game. 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. It's not just Rove who's been caught up in the cover-up. Bush press secretary Scott McClellan was beleaguered Monday as he sought to duck questions on how to square his previous assurances of Rove's noninvolvement with the new revelations. Twenty-two times he invoked the investigation by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald as a reason not to answer questions. But the investigation had earlier posed no such deterrent. On Oct. 1, 2003, McClellan, after noting that "there's an investigation going on," offered this assurance: "It's simply not true that ... [Rove] was involved in leaking classified information." But the most important questions that the Rove case raises are for Bush himself. In his zeal to get to the bottom of this matter, and to terminate the employment of any administration official involved in the leak, has the president spoken to Rove about this matter since Sunday, when Newsweek broke the story of the Cooper-Rove conversation? After all, on Sept. 30, 2003, Bush said, "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take appropriate action." Presumably, by "appropriate action," the president didn't mean promoting the culprit to deputy chief of staff, Rove's title for the past six months. Or did he? There's no basis to conclude that if Rove was the guy who outed Plame, he told his boss about it. But Rove was, and has always been, Bush's one indispensable aide precisely because he would do whatever it took to advance his boss' interests, no matter the consequences to his intended targets or innocent bystanders. 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. Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.