The Wall Street Journal has a good piece on the real intentions behind the Wilson/Plame scandal. This isn’t about sealing leaks. The media was perfectly fine with publishing The Pentagon Papers and other classified documents. The media lives for leaks.
This is a concerted effort by the Democrats and their allies in the media to take down Karl Rove. As the article states:
The media, and the Democrats now slip-streaming behind them, understand that the what of this mystery matters much less than the who. It’s no accident that Tony Blair’s recent and evanescent scandal over WMD evidence concerned his long-time political aide and intimate, Alastair Campbell. We’re also old enough to recall what happened to Jimmy Carter’s Presidency once his old Georgia friend Bert Lance was run out of town. If they can take down Mr. Rove, the lead planner for Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign, they will have knocked the props out of his Presidency.
However, the evidence behind this scandal is flimsy at best. You have Bob Novak, the originator of this affair, saying that the White House did not contact him. You have evidence that Plame was not a "covert operative" but an analyst at Langley who would not have been in a position where her identity was hidden. You have the fact that determining Plame’s identity wouldn’t take much effort, especially since she was the wife of a high-profile former ambassador. In fact, Novak found that her name even appeared in Who’s Who of America – hardly the sign of some great matter of state security.
In other words, this scandal is entirely political. The Democrats have been trying to systematically gut the CIA for years, and its disingenuous at best for them to suddenly care about the leak of a CIA official who was unlikely to have had any significant overseas contacts and whose name is hardly a matter of national security. The Democrats are playing politics and trying to do what they can to undermine the Bush Administration. In a time of peace such an action would be disgusting, in a time of war it’s simply unacceptable.
Mr. Clean apparently isn’t above partisan strawman-building of his own on this crisp autumn evening where straw is at a surplus and men are at a deficit. No investigation has even begun yet, but Jay Reding already has a monopoly on the truth because he read a Wall Street Journal editorial discounting the entire would-be scandal as “Democrats being mean”.
If this is a conspiracy by the Democratic party, it’s one that’s highly unlikely to work. My money says that Rove is behind this, but even if he is, nobody will care. George Bush has just murdered thousands of people by waging a war based on intelligence he knew was false. If the public were to hold the White House accountable for its bad behavior, George Bush’s head would be hollowed out by the rifle bullets from a firing squad right now for committing war crimes. Instead, he picks the public’s pocket for $87 billion to continue his fraudulent war, and it’s only now that the public is starting to scratch their head since Bush’s pathological lies are now about to affect THEM. There is no chance of exciting the public about Karl Rove or whoever in the Bush administration committed this act of treason against an active CIA agent since it simply doesn’t affect THEM. The Democrats would be wise to just let this die and let Republicans get away with their latest criminal activities, instead focusing public ire on the Bush administration’s toll on their pocketbook, which is the only thing that they can be bothered to pay attention to.
If it’s not Rove, GWBush can out whomever it is. If he was so concerned about running a clean White House, on matters of character and principle, not to mention law, then the President could easily chuck the offender. But the President is not chucking the offender, he is not truly interested in getting to the bottom of this, and evidently could care less if identifying CIA operatives is the price of his politics.
Rove is the only one people believe is cagey enough to do something this dirty, but it doesn’t matter that it’s Rove, it matters that whomever is exposed and expunged. The longer it takes, the more shit that sticks to Bush. For me, it has already been too long.
It should be obvious that this is a fight between the CIA and the White House with Novak as a pawn. It’s absolutely stupid to blame it on Democrats. Wilson is not a Democrate and it was the White House, specifically the Vice President’s office, that sent him to Niger in the first place.
So here is another case when GWBush has stumbled on the matter of Niger, and this time it’s a bit more serious than 16 little words. It’s one big federal felony. It took him a long time to own up the first time, this time he has to be squeezed. That says to me that GWBush has proven beyond a doubt that he’s a poor example of a leader. He’s outclassed in his own house and can’t even clean it up.
Gee Toto, We’re not it Texas anymore.
I’m also interested to see if Tenet’s people have any responsibility for the leak. Somebody had to know that Plame was undercover, otherwise this could have been dismissed as easily as some ostriches would like. But as the DOJ memos make clear, Plame was an operative working under cover, probably Official Cover.
I find it difficult to believe that it was just ‘a lucky guess’ by the White House that she was doing CIA work. She’s a WMD expert. The White House had to know.