Pretty Maids All In A Rove

Spin machines are always fascinating to watch; they probably come closer to a perpetual motion machine than anything in the physical universe. The latest demonstration of this principle is in the RNC's talking points regarding the downward spiral of one "Turd Blossom", aka Karl Rove.

I'd excerpt them but it's a large jpg, so check the whole thing out. Pretty hilarious -- you know, except for the whole let's-see-how-we-can-use-Clintonian-semantics-to-try-to-weasel-out-of-felonious-conduct-and-possibly-treason thing. Perhaps you recall the manufactured outrage over Clinton's parsing of the words "is" and "alone". I remember I was pretty pissed about it at the time, the nerve that that cracker thought we were all so stupid, we'd just sit back and pay no mind.

Obviously, the stakes are infinitely higher, Clinton has since been vindicated of his picayune sins, and the current gang apparently has séances with Richard Nixon to help them decide their strategies.

National Review waterboy Byron York clearly got the RNC memo:

The lawyer for top White House adviser Karl Rove says that Time reporter Matthew Cooper "burned" Rove after a conversation between the two men concerning former ambassador Joseph Wilson's fact-finding mission to Niger and the role Wilson's wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, played in arranging that trip. Nevertheless, attorney Robert Luskin says Rove long ago gave his permission for all reporters, including Cooper, to tell prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about their conversations with Rove.

....

According to a report in Newsweek, Cooper's e-mail to Time Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy said, "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation..." Cooper said that Rove had warned him away from getting "too far out on Wilson," and then passed on Rove's statement that neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor CIA Director George Tenet had picked Wilson for the trip; "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip." Finally — all of this is according to the Newsweek report — Cooper's e-mail said that "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly that there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger..."

Wow. So as you can see, this is all Cooper's fault, not Rove's. Rove was just trying to do the boy a solid here, and Cooper clearly knew that this was all "double super secret background" and stuff.

Rumor has it that Rove even made Cooper pinky-swear that he wouldn't say anything.

Clearly York has done yeoman's work, and his spindly little girlie arms will appreciate the well-earned promotion from carrying water to sniffing jocks and handing out towels. Eventually he may even be blessed with hair on his tingly parts, if he prays to Saint Reagan long and hard enough.

Another shameless water-lugger for these tools is Faux News' Carl Cameron, who helpfully parses the extemporaneous musing of his dark lord so as to eliminate the word "fire" from Bush's supposed action list in the instance that Turd Blossom, whether found guilty of a crime or not, is in fact a leaker.

CAMERON: Early on in the leak's probe, the president himself said those responsible would be held accountable.

BUSH (clip): If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.

CAMERON: The president never actually said the word "fired," but that is what some reporters and Democrats seemed to expect.

SENATE MINORITY LEADER HARRY REID [D-NV] (clip): The White House promised, if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration, his administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge.

CAMERON: Democrats have already begun to call for Rove's political scalp. Some want him fired, others want him suspended with his security clearances revoked. And still others are calling for congressional hearings with Rove to testify in person.

Apparently Carl figures that by "will be taken care of", Bush really meant a nice comfy sinecure away from the rough-and-tumble of reality-based governance. And perhaps a nice pizza. Leakers have to eat, too, and Karl looks like he does much more eating than leaking, though his overworked pores may beg to differ.

At any rate, just what the hell did this retard Cameron think Bush meant then, if he didn't mean that leaking national security information as political payback was a firing offense? Really, the mind wobbles at the possibilities here.

Anyway, nice job, Carl. I mean that. You've certainly done your part to make sure that Faux News is to serious journalism what gay porn is to cutting-edge film-making. Way to fluff the jocks, buddy. Hey, you got something on your chin.


As many on the internets have already linked today, Murray Waas brings the smackdown to the Bushies' favorite journo-toady -- Novakula, who is in this up to his leathery jowls.

And, as has now been widely reported, an email turned over last week by Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper to investigators shows that Cooper spoke to Rove just prior to Novak's column. The notes indicate that Rove told him that Plame worked for the CIA, and that Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, obtained an assignment from the CIA, on her recommendation, to go to the African nation of Niger to investigate allegations that the then-Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was attempting to covertly purchase uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

....

Also of interest to investigators have been a series of telephone contacts between Novak and Rove, and other White House officials, in the days just after press reports first disclosed the existence of a federal criminal investigation as to who leaked Plame's identity. Investigators have been concerned that Novak and his sources might have conceived or co-ordinated a cover story to disguise the nature of their conversations. That concern was a reason-- although only one of many-- that led prosecutors to press for the testimony of Cooper and Miller, sources said.

Lending credence to those suspicions was that a U.S. government official questioned by investigators said Novak specifically asked him whether Plame had some covert status with the CIA. The official told investigators that Novak appeared uncertain whether she was undercover or not. That account, on one hand, might lend credence to the claims by Rove and other Bush administration officials that they did not know Plame was a covert CIA officer. Conversely, however, the fact that Novak asked the question in the first place appeared to indicate that he might have indeed been told Plame was a covert operative, and was seeking confirmation of that fact.

And of course, the eternal Watergate question pops right back up -- what did Bush know about all this, and when did he know it? Remember, this has been going on for two years now, and Bush said at the outset that if he knew of a leak in the White House, he'd put an end to it. The implication is that said leak would be fired or forced to resign.

At any rate, the upshot is that the one small thing that Bush has been consistently able to hang his hat on with his dwindling coterie of teabaggers and toesuckers is that he "means what he says". He's a "straight shooter". This is obviously bullshit, and always has been, and now his supporters are going to have to face the truth and ask themselves some real tough questions.

This is the flipside of making your politics all about personal identification, of letting your preferred party vocalize your ambitions and frustrations. The Republicans, by cultivating the evangelical wingnuts, the delusional cracker nationalists and such, made a devil's bargain essentially. These people, far more than most, identify very strongly through their political preferences, and they're going to start feeling burned, much as if someone told them they were all closet cases. Which, of course, they are.

Wouldn't it have been nice if, say, instead of waiting for a federal grand jury to plod through thousands of pages of legal boilerplate, our free and independent press had done some digging and found these facts out last year -- when the story was only 1 year old -- so we could have done something about it at the voting booth when we had the chance?

It's nice that they're finally starting to grow a pair, but it would have helped matters greatly if they hadn't acted like nothing more than court stenographers for four damned years so far. Welcome back to the reality-based world, chumps. Now do your jobs, so guys like me typing one-handed in their shorts don't keep having to do it for you.