Karl Rove's America
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 15 July 2005
John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.
What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.
I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake - that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to praise Mr. Bush's proposals.
But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.
Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero was still smoldering.
Mr. Rove has been much criticized for saying that liberals responded to the attack by wanting to offer the terrorists therapy - but what he said about conservatives, that they "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war," is equally false. What many of them actually saw was a domestic political opportunity - and none more so than Mr. Rove.
A less insightful political strategist might have hesitated right after 9/11 before using it to cast the Democrats as weak on national security. After all, there were no facts to support that accusation.
But Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they castigated the CIA for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the CIA for exaggerating the very same threat.
Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.
And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the CIA I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.
But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.
Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker.
Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?
Go to Original
It's Clear the Leakers Knew What They Were Doing
By Josh Marshall
The Hill
Friday 15 July 2005
Strip away all the stress and fury on both sides of the aisle this week and you'll find one key question at the heart of both the legal and political storm surrounding the president's top political adviser.
That is, did Karl Rove and other top administration officials, for whatever reason, knowingly reveal the identity of a covert CIA agent or were they unaware of her covert status? As prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald would no doubt tell us if he were at liberty to speak, divining, let alone proving, knowledge and intent in such a case is a very tricky business. But there's a good bit of circumstantial evidence pointing to the conclusion that Rove and others knew exactly what they were doing.
Allow me to explain.
The best evidence for the "they knew" version of events has always been the column that started it all - Robert Novak's July 14 column in which he named Valerie Plame as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
In intelligence jargon, "operative" has a very specific meaning. It means a covert or clandestine officer. Novak's been a journalist for 50 years. So clearly he used that term because he knew Plame was covert. And if he knew, the logical assumption is that he knew because his sources - "two senior administration officials" - told him.
That much seemed clear. But not long after the Plame case stormed onto the front pages almost two years ago, Novak changed his story. He said that he made a mistake when he used the word "operative." He didn't know she was covert, and neither did his sources.
Here's what he told Tim Russert in October 2003:
"The one thing I regret I wrote, I used the word 'operative,' and I think Mr. [David] Broder ['Meet the Press' panelist] will agree that I use the word too much. I use it about hat politicians. I use it about people on the Hill. And if somebody did a Nexis search of my columns, they'd find an overuse of 'operative.' I did not mean it. I don't know what she did. But the indication given to me by this senior official and another senior official I checked with was not that she was deep undercover."
Is that really true? Was it just Novak's laziness or sloppiness that started this whole train running down the tracks? Quite a lot depends on the answer.
There's a good deal of circumstantial evidence - thus far largely ignored - that points strongly to the conclusion that Novak is being much less than honest.
First, consider timing. What Novak told Russert was not only after the story had caught fire in the media but, probably even more important, after it had spawned a Justice Department criminal investigation.
What about what he said earlier? It turns out we have some good evidence for that.
The first newspaper article written about Novak's role in exposing a covert agent was a July 22, 2003, Newsday article by Timothy Phelps and Newt Royce. That's about a week after Novak's column ran and well before the story caught fire in Washington. The article focuses squarely on the controversy over and damage caused by the exposure of covert agent. Phelps and Royce interviewed Novak for the column, too. And he said nothing about any misunderstanding about Plame's status.
What he told them was this: "I didn't dig it out. It was given to me. They thought it was significant. They gave me the name and I used it."
If Novak then thought he or his sources didn't know Plame was covert, he didn't think to mention it. And it was the whole point of the article he was being interviewed for.
Then there's another clue. Novak's story has always relied on the belief that he committed a monumental act of sloppiness or carelessness - a claim hard to credit about a reporter who's been doing this as long as Novak.
As I said above, "operative" has a very specific meaning in intelligence argot. So how does Novak usually use the word?
Not long after Novak's appearance on Russert's show, I used the Nexis database to find all the examples I could in which Novak used the word "operative" in the context of intelligence work or the CIA. Not surprisingly, in every example I found he used the term "operative" to refer to clandestine CIA officers. And that makes sense, since the term has a specific meaning in the context and he's a veteran reporter.
Novak wants us to believe that on this one occasion he lapsed into the colloquial meaning of the word and used it to mean no more than you might if you were referring to a Democratic or Republican "operative." With all due respect to Novak and his decades as a Washington reporter - indeed, precisely because of them - that's just not credible.
There's no way to get inside someone else's mind. But all the available evidence points to the conclusion that Novak's claims on Russert and elsewhere are an after-the-fact attempt to get himself and his sources out of a very uncomfortable bind.
Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. |
