Right Wing Nut House

Think Progress has Bloomberg piece by Richard Keil (not available as of 5:00 AM Central) which states that both Lewis Libby and Karl Rove’s claims to have been informed of Valerie Wilson’s status as a CIA employee from reporters is at odds with the testimony given by the journalists in question before the grand jury.

Rove claims to have first heard of Wilson’s agency job from Bob Novak. Libby is reported to have testified that he heard the story first from NBC’s Tim Russert. According to the Bloomberg piece, both reporters tell a different story:

Two top White House aides have given accounts to the special prosecutor about how reporters told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to persons familiar with the case.

Lewis “Scooter’’ Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn’t tell Libby of Plame’s identity.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was first to report Plame’s name and connection to Wilson. Novak, according to a source familiar with the matter, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor.

These discrepancies may be important because one issue Fitzgerald is investigating is whether Libby, Rove, or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation. The Plame case has its genesis in whether any administration officials violated a 1982 law making it illegal to knowingly reveal the name of a CIA agent.

We already know of this “different version” given by Novak. Where Rove testfified that “I heard that too” when Novak told him of Mr.s Wilson’s employment at CIA Novak reportedly testified that Rove said something slightly different, but a similar gist.

Kos says:

What will the children think? It’s not the blowjob endangering national security by outing an undercover CIA agent, but the lies about it!

Actually, it is the national security thing. The lies are just the icinig on the cake.

Not so fast my boorish lickspittle. Before you hyperventilate yourself into a paroxysm of orgasmic ecstacy, perhaps you should have a look at Tom Maguire today:

Decison ‘08 sends me to this Bloomberg account of a discrepancy in Tim Russert’s story:

None of this came up when Russert chatted with Matt Cooper on his “Meet The Pravda” show last weekend.

Mr. Maguire is “steaming” over what he sees as a cover-up by the press. Perhaps not so much a coverup as a “CYA” exercise. It would appear that Mr. Fitzgerald is casting a wide net and, as demonstrated inumerable times in the past, special prosecutors feel duty bound to charge someone with something for all the time and money spent. No one wants to get caught up in the dragnet and that includes many members of the press who may or may not have known that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA.

It’s pretty clear that the Bloomberg article covers precious little new ground. But since notorious leftist Al Hunt took over as editor, Bloomberg has been agressively liberal in it’s slant of the news. A careful reading of Mr. Keil’s piece would seem to place it in the category of wishful thinking rather than good reporting. And as Mr. Keil reminds us at the end of his article:

Some Bush allies were hopeful that the Fitzgerald investigation, which dominated the news in Washington for the first part of July, would subside as the focus now is on Bush’s nomination of Judge John Roberts to fill the first vacancy on the Supreme Court in 11 years.

Yet special prosecutor Fitzgerald, not media coverage, will determine the outcome of this investigation.

Thankfully, that observation cuts both ways.

UPDATE

The Keil article is now up on Bloomberg’s website and differs slightly from the advance copy that Think Progress received.

One discrepancy I hadn’t noticed in the article was this ommission regarding Time Magazine’s Matt Cooper’s reported testimony before the grandy jury:

There also is a discrepancy between accounts given by Rove and Time magazine reporter Mat Cooper. The White House aide mentioned Wilson’s wife — though not by name — in a July 11, 2003, conversation with Cooper, the reporter said. Rove, 55, says that Cooper called him to talk about welfare reform and the Wilson connection was mentioned later, in passing.

Cooper wrote in Time magazine last week that he told the grand jury he never discussed welfare reform with Rove in that call

That’s true…up to a point. Cooper also wrote (and testified) that he originally called Rove to discuss welfare reform and left a message with Rove to that effect. When Rove returned the call, Cooper started by asking Rove about Wilson.

Gee…you don’t think the reason Mr. Keil left that little tidbit out of the story was because he’s like, ya know, biased or anything now, do you?

Kevin Alyward cuts to the heart of the matter:

If either Libby or Rove can be tied to the memo it’s game over for them. I’m still wholly underwhelmed by the story, but given the details that have emerged (and are likely to emerge), it’s just about time that both Rove and Libby take one for the team and step down.

I’ve been saying that for two weeks.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame leak has now gone off on so many different tangents that if you’re trying to follow his line of inquiry, you probably need a scorecard to keep track of the players. Does this activity, as Donald Lambro suggests in today’s WA Times, mean that Fitzgerald is desperately casting about for someone’s scalp to hang on his wall for any transgression?

Possibilities include lying to the FBI, lying to him, lying to the grand jury, trying to cover up the lying, or trying to cover up something else of which at present, we’re unaware.

One thing is almost certain; even if Plame was on covert status as the Walter Pincus piece in today’s Washington Post suggests, Fitzgerald will still have a very hard time charging someone with violating the Intelligence Identities act.

Today’s controversy centers around a State Department memo written on June 10, 2003 almost a month before Wilson’s Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times after which Wilson’s wife was identified by Bob Novak in a subsequent column. Since Pincus doesn’t have the memo, there is no way to judge in what context Mrs. Wilson’s name came up. What’s important, according to Pincus, is that the paragraph that names her is preceded by the letter “S” - an indication that what’s contained in the paragraph is “secret.”

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked “(S)” for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Plame — who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo — is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the “secret” level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as “secret” the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

After raising the specter of a violation of the law, Pincus adds this:

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame’s name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret

In other words, in what would have to be described as a sensitive document dealing with the Iraq-Niger uranium issue, Mrs. Wilson’s name (not her maiden name) was used in connection with…what? Pincus doesn’t know but that doesn’t stop him from using “former government officials” (the same “officials” who have been leaking information damaging to the Administration?) to tell us how anyone who read this memo and used any information contained in the paragraph marked “S” for “secret” is in trouble.

Rove has denied seeing the memo although according to Pincus, Colin Powell brought the memo aboard Air Force I for the President’s trip to Africa. Others who may have seen it include Ari Fleisher, the President’s former Press Secretary who some have been speculating was primarily responsible for shopping the Wilson-Plame connection to reporters around town in the days following Wilson’s Times Op-Ed. Fleisher has remained unavailable for comment on the issue which may in fact indicate that he is a target of Fitzgerald’s investigation.

What continues to bother me about the reporting of this story is the failure of the mainstream press to highlight the all out war going on at the time (and still going on to this day) between the White House and a faction at the CIA who were trying to shift blame for the failure to find WMD’s from the agency to the warhawks in the Administration. For the life of me, I can’t see how you can give this story any context at all if you pretend this conflict didn’t exist or ignore it as Pincus has done since he talked to Wilson back in June of 2003 about his Niger mission.

Joe Wilson’s attempt to cover-up his wife’s role in getting him the Niger assignment has to be seen as an effort by Wilson to cover his tracks. He would have us believe that the reason he got the CIA assignment was because of his “extensive contacts” in the area. More basic than that, he would have us believe the entire Niger adventure was in response to a question from the Vice President’s office. To believe that, you would have to acknowledge that the CIA didn’t have any assets in Niger to carry out what on its face was a routine investigation. If Joe Wilson could sit by a pool sipping mint tea and talk with a few officials, why couldn’t such an inquiry be handled by agency personnel already in country? Why a “special mission?”

The answer is that the CIA wanted to make sure they got the right answers from the “investigation.” So they send glory boy Wilson on a made up errand to insure that the intelligence is “fixed” to absolve the Niger government of colluding with the Iraqis in what two separate inquiries have concluded was a real attempt to circumvent sanctions to purchase uranium. And to obscure that fact, Wilson has to make it appear that his talent and contacts alone were the reason he was sent to Niger not that his wife was part of a faction out to discredit the Administration’s WMD claims prior to going to war with Iraq.

This may in fact be the real cover-up. What started as a policy dispute between WMD experts at CIA and the “Neocons” in the Bush Administration may have escalated to include the CIA selective leaking of classified information in order to swing an election. And right in the middle of this cover up may be the Wilson-Plame connection regarding the Niger mission.

UPDATE

John Cole shamelessly steals the title to one of my previous posts on the Rovian mess (”Drip…Drip…Drip) while linking to the Pincus piece in WAPO. The alliteration in the title of his post is sublime as is his observation that ” Things will be fast and furious tomorrow, though, as the spinning goes into high gear.” My spin, of course, is that the spooks are guilty of trying to sway an election while selectively leaking a heap of classified documents to show how clever they were.

If they were so clever, why’d they send such a clown as Wilson on such an “important” mission?

UPDATE II

The definitive word comes, of course, via Tom Maguire who believes a case is building against Rove. He also points to Ari Fleisher’s name being bandied about more as well as Steve Hadley.

Here’s Tom’s take on possible Rove exposure:

A quick summing up - it is getting easier to make the case that Rove knew, or should have know, that the info he passed to Cooper was sensitive. In other words (his words, actually), Rove had said too much. But the IIPA looks like the wrong statute.

Sidebar - Ari Fleischer’s name is appearing in more articles. He and Steve Hadley are the forgotten men here.

In other words, Rove’s trouble may hinge on when he told authorities he knew of the Wilson-Plame connection. If he heard about it from the memo, he may be cooked. If he heard about it from another journalist, he may be guilty of nothing more than confirming gossip.

Either way, I don’t think he can survive. The press will not let go of this. And Fitzgerald may not indict him but will certainly single him out for some stinging criticism. In short, he’s now damaged goods and needs to go.

James Joyner makes some interesting observations about the State Department memo:

It’s rather unlikely that Rove or Libby saw a memo for the eyes of an Undersecretary of State, let alone read the footnotes. It’s also unclear to me why her name would be classified “Secret,” given that she had not worked in a covert capacity or overseas for years. It’s rather odd for the fact that someone who works at CIA headquarters under their own name to be classified.

Of course, that won’t stop the conspiracy theorists. Kos and John of AmericaBlog think this thwarts the administration’s plan to divert attention from the Rove affair by rushing the appointment of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Because, goodness knows, trying to get a new Justice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, who is often the deciding vote against their interests, in place by October would not be something the Administration was interested in.

James makes an excellent point. The way the left is spinning this, it’s like Bush’s inner circle sat around passing a secret document back and forth trying to figure out how to smear Joe Wilson. I doubt if Powell let the darn thing out of his possesion however, he may have shared the tidbit about Mrs. Wilson with a few key people.

Tom Bowler agrees with my conclusion that the CIA may be undermining policies they disagree with by leaking classified material. Whether or not it would be within the scope of Fitzgerald’s mandate to investigate is another question.

UPDATE III

Ace’s post on this warrants its own update. First, he educates us about classifications:

I should note that “secret” is just about the lowest, if not the lowest, level of classified information. Not sure, but I think only “confidential” is lower on the scale. And the three classic categories — Confidential, Secret, Top Secret — don’t even cover real secrets. Those are bullshit classifications. Real secret stuff is protected by codeword-clearance, where only a limited number of folks are allowed to see the information, and you have to be cleared specifically to view information designated by a particular codeword.

Then he gives the most logical explanation for Plame’s continued “covert” classification:

But… there is the possibility that, while she was known by her neighbors as being a CIA officer (and of course known to every foreign intelligence service worth a damn, since she drove to Langely every day for the last five years), her identinty was still technically classified, owing to bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, and so it’s possible that someone is technically guilty of revealing classified information.

Assuming they read the memo at all, and did not in fact simply hear this from reporters

And finally, he jibes our memory about Sandy “The Burgler” Berger:

PS: The stuff Sandy Berger stole from the archives? Codeword-clearance. The press didn’t seem particularly interested in his theft (and admitted DESTRUCTION!) of original copies of genuine secret documents from the archives.

But some State Department memo has an (S) on it and Walter Pincus gets a dangerous erection lasting more than four hours.

He also makes the point via two of his commenters that they wouldn’t classify one paragraph of a document without classifying the rest.

Gee…do ya think those “former government officials” who’ve been leaking to Pincus for two years in order to damage the Administration may have taken Walter for a ride?

UPDATE IV

The Captain makes the same point I do in the main post - that Pincus only casually mentions that the “S” designation might not mean that Plame’s identity was covert.

That sounds pretty damning — and it might still be, but this description and the rest of the article doesn’t establish this as dispositive at all. In any classified document, each paragraph has to carry a label indicating the level of classification for the information contained within. Later in the article by Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei, we find out that the paragraph contains seven sentences, and that Plame only gets mentioned in two of them. That doesn’t establish that her identity was classified, although it could. It could just as easily mean that other information in the same paragraph carried that classification.

Again, we have to remember Pincus’ sourcing here. These are former CIA “officials” who have been passing on selective, damaging leaks to Pincus for more than two years. And Pincus, for whatever reason, is playing along.

The war continues.

That noise you hear is exploding heads over at Daily Kos:

President Bush named federal appeals court judge John G. Roberts Jr. to a seat on the Supreme Court Tuesday, delighting Republicans while unsettling some Democrats with the selection of a young jurist with impeccable conservative credentials.

“John Roberts has devoted his entire professional life to the cause of justice,” Bush said in a prime-time announcement at the White House, “and is widely admired for his intellect his sound judgment and his personal decency.”

If confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, the 50-year-old Roberts would succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has long been a swing vote on a court divided narrowly on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, states’ rights and the death penalty.

If people never say anything else good about Bush 50 years from now, they’ll say that the man had some major league gonads. All the talk over the last few weeks about Bush losing his mandate and already being a lame duck just went out the window. He’s slapped the left across the face and thrown down the gauntlet daring them to be obstructionists.

I’m sure they’ll oblige.

The fact is that this choice is armegeddon for the left. Roberts is on record in favor of overturning Roe and for every left wing political group that matters, this would be absolute catastrophe. The reason? Not because abortions would stop, because they wouldn’t. But the catastrophe would be that it would force these groups to fight 50 different fights in 50 different states rather than fighting one big fight in Washington. As the abortion battle moves to where it should have been all along - the state legislatures - some states will allow it, some won’t, and some will probably leave it up to local communities as to whether or not to allow it. The rules governing abortions will also vary from state to state with some rules being restrictive and others not.

This is how it should have been all along. Only when the people feel they have a voice in decisions like this - not the very personal decision of whether or not to abort a child - but the political decisions that set down rules to govern people’s live.

Is there a chance that Roe would be completely overturned and all abortions made illegal? I would place those chances at zero. The body of law that has grown up around Roe is too intertwined with other issues of privacy to completely jetison it. More likely, parts of Roe will be struck down which would allow states to regulate abortion.

As for other issues like federalism and property rights, if Roberts aligns himself with Scalia and Thomas on a regular basis, that would be four solid conservative votes (with Rhenquist or his successor) which means that one of the more moderate Republicans like Souter or Kennedy would hold the balance of power in the court. I’ll take my chances with Kennedy who has proven himself to be a thougtful jurist when it comes to issues like affirmative action and states rights.

So cinch it up and strap it down because Kansas just went bye bye. It’s going to get bloody and probably pretty dirty.

A few links for your reading pleasure.

Michele Malkin has her usual tremendous round-up of the big story.

The Captian was live blogging the announcement.

The boys over at Powerline have been all over the story and link to a good profile of Roberts.

Ace has some thoughts.

And Hugh Hewitt is extremely happy. Here in the midwest you can catch Hughe’s special show that will go on till midnight.

Polipundit: “Now watch the far left squirm.”

One thing consistent about the Bush haters over the years has been their enthusiasm for being on the losing side of just about everything.

Losing two elections was the easy part. All they had to do is put up two dummies who couldn’t empty pee out of a boot even if they held it upside down to read the directions. It’s much more difficult to be on the losing side of a war like the “quagmire” in Afghanistan or the “failed democracy” in Iraq. To be a loser there you have to ignore human nature and the forces of history, not to mention the lethality and fighting skills of the United States military.

When it comes to scandals though, the left has outdone itself. Just in the last year, three different “scandals” have been manufactured by the left. The common denominator in all three was the almost childlike faith held by the left that “this time” Bush is going down! This time we have him! There’s no escape for the Prince this time!

OOOPS!

First, there was the matter of the President’s National Guard service and the belief that their war-hero candidate could contrast his noble service with that of the draft-dodging, shirker Bush. Of course, within hours of the false memos being broadcast the left was already getting misty eyed, bemoaning the fact that with Bush gone, life just wouldn’t be fun anymore. The DU moonbats were pushing Ramsey Clark for Defense Secretary and Ted Kennedy for…well, anything he wanted in the new Kerry Administration that was surely a foregone conclusion now that Bush was revealed to be a classless jerk 30 years ago

But something weird happened on their way to the White House. First of all, a collective yawn emerged from the yaps of the overwhelming majority of the American people about what anybody was doing 30 years ago. Then there was the matter of the memos, Lucy Ramirez, and all of a sudden the fortunate son was standing tall and before you could say “Bush lied people died” the scandal petered out and disappeared, but only after much foot stomping and table thumping from left wing hacks who insist to this day that a 1970’s era typewriter, with a little hammering and some subtle and deft keystrokes, could have left the impressions on those memos.

Not content with creating one scandal, the left all of a sudden thought it shocking, shocking I say that a partisan reporter could have gotten into the White House press room to lob softball questions at Mark McClellan. I’m speaking of Jeff Gannon/Guckert, the Talon News reporter who by day, led a quiet, unassuming life poking his nose into the White House Press room on a daily basis to see if those correspondents for the big nets were actually taller in real life. By night, however, Mr. Gannon proved himself to be something a little different; a gay model and possible prostitute.

The apoplexy of the left at hearing the news (Gannon was outed by a kind soul who has made it his mission in life to “out” gay Republicans) knew no bounds. If ever there was a forum to display the utter irrationality and cluelessness of the liberals, it was with regards to Mr. Gannon. Did you know that Gannon may have compromised national security? Did you know that it was obvious that Mr. Gannon was sleeping with someone high up in the Administration in order to get his daily White House press pass? Did you know that God don’t make little green apples?

Needless to say, that scandal was great entertainment if only to watch as the left got madder and madder at their buddies in the mainstream press who just couldn’t see where the impeachable offense was in the White House letting a friendly reporter ask some innocuous questions. Eventually, even Oliver Willis got tired of flogging a dead horse and that scandal also fell by the wayside, a classic case of good intentions being outstripped by mundane reality. There just wasn’t any “there” there.

And now we have the yet-to-be-named scandal involving Rove, Plame, and Wilson - three more dissimilar characters could never be found in the same sentence. Rove, stodgy, smart, boring, and depending on your point of view, political genius or Dark Lord of the Sith.

Plame, the glam-spy, Vanity Fair’s favorite spook, and an operative whose closely guarded identity was apparently know by half the press corps, most of the socialites, and every major intelligence service in the world.

Then we have Ambassador Joe Wilson who has been described in the press as “flashy,” “smart,” “urbane” - anything except the low-life scumbag lying SOB that he is. Well, I take that back. The Washington Post said as much in an editorial:

Mr. Wilson’s portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted. It turned out his report to the CIA had not altered, and may even have strengthened, the agency’s conclusion that Iraq had explored uranium purchases from Niger. Moreover, his account had not reached Vice President Cheney or any other senior official. According to the Butler Commission, led by an independent jurist, the assertion about African uranium included in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech was “well-founded.”

And the blogswarms and media feeding frenzy continues, despite Mr. Wilson being discredited long ago by his betters. What remains to be seen is not who leaked Mrs. Wilson’s name to the press, but rather how far will the press go in unmasking the CIA-Plame-Wilson connection that was using the Niger uranium story to affect an election and bring down the President. Somehow, I don’t think that story will get a full airing.

We will, however, be treated to another couple of weeks or months of “What did the White House know and when did they know it” as once again, the left is going off the deep end over nothing. In the end, the people doing the “frog marching” may not be who the left thinks. Instead, some of the very people that the left is elevating to hero status - Wilson, Plame, Judith Miller - any or all could be doing the perp walk before this is all over.

I wonder if Kos’s head will explode if that happens?

The Karl Rove resignation watch continues here at the House with more information on the scandal being released like a Chinese water torture. And, just as the purpose of that torture is to drive the poor bastard experiencing it insane, the lefties are frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs with every new revelation.

You’ll recall yesterday that the secret Grand Jury testimony of Mr. Rove was published in several media outlets. It’s pretty much of a forgone conclusion in Washington scandals where there is a Special Prosecutor that testimony given before the Grand Jury is about as secret as the #1 telephone number for oral phone sex (1-900-BLOWME. Ask for Linda).

Today’s revelations involves a State Department memo that discussed Joe Wilson’s heroic campaign to undermine the credibility of the Administration and to carry out the wishes of his wife and the faction she was part of at CIA who were at war with the White House over Iraq policy. Those wishes involved not just Wilson’s bogus trip to Niger to investigate what his wife so objectively put as “crazy” information about the Iraqis and yellow cake, but to also have Mr. Wilson act as a conduit for information from the CIA to the press, most notably WAPO’s Walter Pincus.

Pincus could turn out to be the key player in the entire affair as apparently it was his source or sources who not only knew that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA but that her maiden name was Plame. It’s pretty certain Rove never spoke to Pincus about Wilson, Plame, or Niger yellow cake so the question of culpability for the Plame leak has narrowed to two people; Former DCIA George Tenet and perhaps Ari Fleisher, the President’s former press secretary.

And one other drop that hit Mr. Rove’s head today was the publication of evidence in the case that should be secret but is evidently as easy to get as the #1 web address for “Terrorist Apologists.” This was an email sent by Rove to Stephen Hadley, National Security Council Advisor for the Administration immediately after Rove’s session with Times reporter Matt Cooper:

After mentioning a CIA operative to a reporter, Bush confidant Karl Rove alerted the president’s No. 2 security adviser about the interview and said he tried to steer the journalist away from allegations the operative’s husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.

The July 11, 2003, e-mail between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is the first showing an intelligence official knew Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper just days before the Time magazine reporter wrote an article identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA officer.

“I didn’t take the bait,” Rove wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, recounting how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations.

My head is hurting from trying to keep all the players straight and fit them in the timeline so, instead of doing the hard, grinding work necessary for a good blog post, I’m going to be really lazy and instead refer you to Tom Maguire who I guarantee you will be so sick of this scandal’s twists and turns in another week he’ll wish he never started.

Be that as it may, see Tom’s post here on the State Department memo and go here for some great info and deductions on the probable culprit in this scandal-that-has-no-name-yet.

We really have start thinking seriously about one aspect of this scandal that seems to have eluded all blogs and most of the MSM. It is an absolutely essential component to any Washington partisan dust-up and so far, everyone who has taken a stab at resolving the issue has come up miserably short. I’m talking about giving this puppy a moniker - one that fits easily in both newspaper headlines and on-screen promo frames (theme music to be determined later).

What the heck are we going to call this thing?

So far, I’ve seen some pretty lame attempts by the left to give the imbroglio its nom de scandale. They’ve tried to hearken back to their halcyon days of Watergate and in the process, dream wet dreams of bringing down the President himself by attaching the suffix “gate” to the scandal. The problem they have with this approach is the remarkable number of possibilities available. You have “Rovegate,” Plamegate,” Leakgate,” Wilsongate,” and that’s just for starters.

Clearly, we may have finally reached a point in our national life when the attachment of the suffix “gate” to every scandal may have outlived its usefulness. At first, it was clever. Then it became annoying. And now, it’s simply boring. We need something sexier, something more descriptive. Something that will help sell newspapers (God knows they need help!) as well as tear people away from Greta Van Sustern and their Natalee obsession. In short, we need to create an entirely new national narrative for our scandal plagued, celebrity obsessed culture.

I wish there was someway we could incorporate O.J. Simpson’s name into scandal monikering but take a couple of stabs at it yourself and you’ll see what a waste of time that is. There are just too many vowels. Similar results are achieved trying to incorporate J-Lo or any one of the notorious rappers whose hijinks and hoodlum antics just never quite rise to the sublime level necessary to be ensconced in the public consciousness to the point where their notoriety on “E!” or Comedy Central can translate to the political sphere.

Clearly, this is a serious crisis - a crisis in American letters as well as journalism. It’s pretty obvious we just don’t produce enough BA candidates in our top schools anymore.: Too many JD’s and MBA’s. What we need are people with the heart of a poet and the soul of a serial killer to come up with names of our political scandals that will once again rivet people to their TV’s and watch as self-important Congressmen and politicos preen, prance, prattle, and pontificate in order to give us a deeper understanding of the media frenzy.

Since no ideas are forthcoming to change the basic nature of naming our scandals, it looks like we’ll just have to fall back on the time honored tradition of naming the current dust-up after that mother of all scandals, Watergate. It was a glorious moment in the history of journalism we commemorate by naming our scandals thusly. It was when the self congratulations the press gave itself became so overbearing that after a while they got a collective crimped neck from trying to pat themselves on the back. They’ve been trying to recapture those moments ever since.

John Tierney has an idea:

So what exactly is this scandal about? Why are the villagers still screaming to burn the witch? Well, there’s always the chance that the prosecutor will turn up evidence of perjury or obstruction of justice during the investigation, which would just prove once again that the easiest way to uncover corruption in Washington is to create it yourself by investigating nonexistent crimes.

For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it.

It would be logical to name it the Not-a-gate scandal, but I prefer a bilingual variation. It may someday make a good trivia question:

What do you call a scandal that’s not scandalous?

Nadagate.

That’s a pretty good try. I think, however, I prefer “Cotton Candygate” which is a little more descriptive of the actual impact this scandal will have on far less important issues like avoiding being blown to smithereens by fanatical Islamists, social security reform, naming Justices to the highest court in the land, or other such trivialities.

“Cotton Candygate” - tastes good, gives a nice pleasant rush of euphoria for a short time, but in the end isn’t very filling. Yes…I think that describes what’s going on perfectly.

Not content with using the 1970’s Viet Nam analogy to explain the Iraq war, the left is now resurrecting another one of their glory moments from the 1970’s - the Watergate affair - to draw a parallel with the not-yet-named Rove-Wilson-Plame kerfuffle.

This posting on Daily Kos asks the famous question “What did the President know and when did he know it?”

You’ve got one question on your plate, Scott McClellan.

When did the President first learn of Karl Rove’s involvement in this case?

As of this morning, Day 4 of the saga, this is where the President stands:

Stonewall.

Of course, you can’t resurrect an analogy unless you use the terminology of the time. Hence, the use of Senator Howard Baker’s famous question on the President’s involvement as well as the use of “stonewall” - another Watergate era term.

This got me to thinking. As long as the left wants to get in a time machine and go back to the 1970’s, perhaps while they’re at it, they can bring back a few more cultural touchstones:

TOP TEN 1970′S ICONS THE DEMOCRATS CAN BRING BACK ALONG WITH VIET NAM AND WATERGATE

10. Mood Rings
9. Beanbag chairs
8. Black Light posters
7. Blotter Acid on Mickey Mouse Stamped Paper
6. Decent One Hit Weed
5. Pooka Shell Necklaces
4. Consequence Free Sex
3. Donna Summers
2. Moon Landings

And the number one icon I’d like to see the Democrats bring back from the 1970’s?……

1. Robert Crumb Posters

“STONED AGAIN”

In an ideal world, the decision to go to war would be taken only with the agreement of the entire national security community. The CIA, the Department of Defense, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and all the bureaucracies that make up the complex world of national defense in a country that spends nearly one half a trillion dollars to protect itself - all would recognize a threat and agree that military action was necessary.

We don’t live in a perfect world. The fact is, as the military and national security state have grown over the last 50 years, the probability that a consensus can be achieved for action except in the most extraordinary circumstances has disappeared. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times the United States miliary has gone into action since the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the entire national security apparatus on the same page.

I use the Cuban Missile Crisis as a benchmark because of the herculean effort it took for the so-called “Ex-Com” or executive committee of the National Security Council to reach agreement on the blockade that eventually resolved the crisis. We know from declassified documents as well as the memoirs of particpants that there were heated disagreements on both the nature of the threat and what our response should be. Eventually, there was a recognition that the chances of a nuclear exchange with Russia were so great that something short of air strikes and invasion should at least be tried before the military options were used. The resulting blockade along with a secret deal for the US to remove medium range Jupiter missiles from Turkey defused the crisis.

The debates that raged during in the Viet Nam war in the defense establishment hindered the war effort and placed agencies at odds with both each other and at times the White House. To bomb or not to bomb? How many troops? What will China do? There were disagreements on all of these items and many more. And the way to have your position prevail was to try and discredit competing positions by leaking damaging information that undercuts the rationale for taking a particular action. The leaking wars got so bad in 1971 that Nixon sowed the seeds of his own destruction by organizing an anti-leaking squad known as the Plumbers. Their notorious activities with respect to not only leakers of classified information but also the President’s enemies have been well documented.

In the years following Viet Nam, military actions were taken in response to provocations like the hostage crisis or the disco bombing in Germany. And even here, consensus was difficult to achieve. For example, there was opposition from the CIA to the bombing of Libya in April of 1986 fearing it would make a hero of Gadhafi in the arab world and increase his influence. The reason we know this is because the information was leaked within 48 hours of the bombing. In this case, the objective was not to affect policy but rather give ammunition to the political opposition.

This factionalism at the CIA may be at the bottom of the entire Rove-Wilson-Plame affair. Flashback to 2003 and this interesting article by Howard Fineman of Newsweek. Fineman explains the historical context of the debate over Iraq going back to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. On the one hand, you had the realpolitik group who believed that we could use Saddam as a counterweight against Islamic radicalism. On the other hand you had then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and the “Neocons” agitating for regime change to start a democratic revolution in the middle east:

The “we-can-use Saddam” faction held the upper hand right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait a decade ago. Until then, the administration of Bush One (with its close CIA ties) had been hoping to talk sense with Saddam. Indeed, the last American to speak to Saddam before the war was none other than Joe Wilson, who was the State Department charge’ d’affaires in Baghdad. Fluent in French, with years of experience in Africa, he remained behind in Iraq after the United States withdrew its ambassador, and won high marks for bravery and steadfastness, supervising the protection of Americans there at the start of the first Gulf War. But, as a diplomat, he didn’t want the Americans to “march all the way to Baghdad.” Cheney, always a careful bureaucrat, publicly supported the decision. Wilson was for repelling a tyrant who grabbed land, but not for regime change by force.

That history is one reason why, in the eyes of the anti-Saddam crowd, Wilson was a bad choice to investigate the question of whether Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa.

It appears then, that Cheney and Wilson had a “history” long before the Iraq war even started.

Flash forward to February, 2002 when Ambassador Joe Wilson arrives in Niger seeking answers to the questions about Saddam’s efforts to purchase yellow cake uranium. In his New York Times Op-Ed of July 6, 2003 Wilson claims that he made the trip at the behest of…who? Here are his words:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990’s. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.

“Agency officials” asked him to make the trip so they could provide a response to Cheney’s office on the question of a “report” regarding yellow cake sales to Iraq. Wilson says that he never saw the “16″ word” document that some say is a forgery and some say otherwise, but that he believed it to be a forgery based on the names of government officials who were not even in the government at the time.

Fair enough. But here’s where things get very strange, indeed. In an interview with LA Weekly, Wilson admitted he had been talking to reporters for months about this story:

I was determined that the story was going to have to get out. I did not particularly want the story to have my name on it. I wanted the U.S. government to say what they said on July 7, that the 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address. So I began responding to reporters’ inquiries, but always on background. I didn’t want the publicity, but more to the point, there is a nasty habit in Washington of attempting to destroy or discredit the message by discrediting the messenger, and it was important to me that the message have legs before those who would want to discredit the messenger found out who the messenger was. So I spoke to a number of reporters over the ensuing months. Each time they asked the White House or the State Department about it, they would feign ignorance. I became even more convinced that I was going to have to tell the story myself.

Did you anticipate retaliation?

Nobody that I knew thought this was going to be any more than a two-day story. The day after, when the White House said the 16 words do not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address, I personally stopped accepting invitations to talk about this issue. I did those interviews I had previously agreed to do before the White House spoke, and then I didn’t speak again until the week after Mr. Novak’s article came out in which he leaked the name of my wife as a CIA operative.

In other words, between the President’s State of the Union speech on January 20th, 2003 and July 6th when he wrote the Op-Ed piece in the Times, Wilson was talking to reporters all over town, telling them that the President was using false information as a justification for war.

Now why would he do that? Is it possible he was doing at the behest of his wife? Tom Maguire asks that question and links to the Walter Pincus Washington Post article that quotes a “senior CIA analyst” about WMD intelligence and how it was handled by the Administration:

So, a CIA analyst is criticizing the President anonymously in June for mishandling intelligence. In July, a former ambassador comes forward, also criticizing the Administration’s handling of intelligence. Is the Ambassador simply a professional, detached, objective careerist from the State Department offering his own point of view?

Or is it at all relevant in assessing his credibility to know that he is in bed with a CIA professional? Does knowing that give a hint as to what side he might be on in this discussion?

What Maguire and others are speculating about is that Plame was using her husband to augment the CIA’s own leaking on the Administration’s handling of intelligence. And that given Wilson’s chattiness with the press, is it possible that Plame’s relationship with Wislon was not only “common knowledge” as Andrea Mitchell of NBC said, but got to be known as a result of Wilson’s own efforts to discredit the President?

Did Wilson “out” his own wife?

The fact that Wilson suspected Rove as the leaker as far back as July of 2003 opens up another interesting line of questions. Since Wilson had been talking to the press for months, could Wilson have gotten that information from a journalist who actually talked to Rove?

I think it’s fair to say that the CIA is an executive-branch agency that reports to the president of the United States. The act of outing the name of a national-security asset was a political act. There is a political office attached to the office of the president of the United States, and that political office is headed by Karl Rove. It seems to me a good place to start.

I would have thought a good place to start would have been the Vice President’s office, given the history between the two. We’ll probably have to wait until all the principals - Rove, Judith Miller, Cooper, Scooter Libby, and Novak - lay it all out for us. At that point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wilson-Plame-press connection was the axis of a faction in the CIA that for both political and policy reasons, opposed the war in Iraq.

This is the dirty business of government being exposed to the light of day. On the one hand, you have the White House with a President duly elected that has made the tough decision to go to war. On the other side, you have a political faction at the CIA who can justify their opposition to the Administration by chalking it up as differences in policy. The amazing number of selective leaks prior to the election that constantly put the administration on the defensive with regards to what they knew about WMD before the war was another manifestation of the partisanship of this faction. Given the mountains of intelligence analyses prior to the Iraq war on WMD, to cherry pick opposing views and then leak them to the press was an outrageously partisan attempt to discredit the President.

In an article for the Daily Telegraph that describes this “old guard” faction being in opposition to the President’s re-election, a retired CIA veteran explains the rift:

Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the former director George Tenet in July, acknowledged that there had been leaks from within the agency. “The intelligence community has been made the scapegoat for all the failings over Iraq,” he said. “It deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. People are chafing at that, and that’s the background to these leaks.”

Fighting to defend their patch ahead of the future review, anti-Bush CIA operatives have ensured that Iraq remains high on the election campaign agenda long after Republican strategists such as Karl Rove, the President’s closest adviser, had hoped that it would fade from the front pages.

Other recent leaks have included the contents of classified reports drawn up by CIA analysts before the invasion of Iraq, warning the White House about the dangers of post-war instability. Specifically, the reports said that rogue Ba’athist elements might team up with terrorist groups to wage a guerrilla war.

And this quote from another retired veteran illustrates the spin this faction was directing toward the press:

These have been an extraordinary four years for the CIA and the political pressure to come up with the right results has been enormous, particularly from Vice-President Cheney.

“I’m afraid that the agency is guilty of bending over backwards to please the administration. George Tenet was desperate to give them what they wanted and that was a complete disaster.”

With the simmering rows breaking out in public, the Wall Street Journal declared in an editorial that the administration was now fighting two insurgencies: one in Iraq and one at the CIA.

Having lived there for many years, I know that Washington is an insanely political town. Politics colors everything, from where you eat to what parties you attend. It’s a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week obsession. It should come as no surprise that even war takes a back seat to the jostling for power.

It’s doubtful that Rove will survive. If the President digs in his heels about letting him go, it will only make matters worse. The Special Prosecutor’s investigation will have it’s own leak factory going and every little tidbit that refects badly on Rove will be trumpeted to the skies by both lefty blogs and the MSM. The only thing that could possibly save Rove’s job is a revelation so shocking that it blows both the MSM and lefty blogs out of the water and proves them wrong. If Judith Miller is in jail because she’s protecting herself or some other source (Joe Wilson?) from prosecution, then Rove may be able to weather the storm.

If not, expect Rove’s resignation by the end of the month.

In an interview published this afternoon with Byron York of NRO, Karl Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin says that Cooper “burned” Rove on the Plame story.

As I pointed out yesterday, the Cooper memo actually clears Rove of the political aspect of the scandal by proving that the White House was not seeking revenge for Joe Wilson perfidy but rather Rove was trying to warn Cooper off on Wilson’s main thesis - that Saddam never attempted to buy yellow cake uranium from Nigeria.

Luskin expands on that theme to show that rather than the White House calling reporters all over town trying to sabotage his wife’s career, it was Cooper himself who initiated the dialog on Plame:

“By any definition, he burned Karl Rove,” Luskin said of Cooper. “If you read what Karl said to him and read how Cooper characterizes it in the article, he really spins it in a pretty ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to reporters to try to get them to them to report negative information about Plame.”

Luskin told NRO that the circumstances of Rove’s conversation with Cooper undercut Time’s suggestion of a White House “war on Wilson.” According to Luskin, Cooper originally called Rove — not the other way around — and said he was working on a story on welfare reform. After some conversation about that issue, Luskin said, Cooper changed the subject to the weapons of mass destruction issue, and that was when the two had the brief talk that became the subject of so much legal wrangling. According to Luskin, the fact that Rove did not call Cooper; that the original purpose of the call, as Cooper told Rove, was welfare reform; that only after Cooper brought the WMD issue up did Rove discuss Wilson — all are “indications that this was not a calculated effort by the White House to get this story out.”

“Look at the Cooper e-mail,” Luskin continues. “Karl speaks to him on double super secret background…I don’t think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish the name of Wilson’s wife.”

Nor, says Luskin, was Rove trying to “out” a covert CIA agent or “smear” her husband. “What Karl was trying to do, in a very short conversation initiated by Cooper on another subject, was to warn Time away from publishing things that were going to be established as false.” Luskin points out that on the evening of July 11, 2003, just hours after the Rove-Cooper conversation, then-CIA Director George Tenet released a statement that undermined some of Wilson’s public assertions about his report. “Karl knew that that [Tenet] statement was in gestation,” says Luskin. “I think a fair reading of the e-mail was that he was trying to warn Cooper off from going out on a limb on [Wilson's] allegations.”

Luskin also sheds some light on the waiver signed by Rove back in 2003 in which he gave permission for any journalist with which he had spoken to talk to the both Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald and the grand jury investigating the leak. For some reason, both Cooper and the jailed Times reporter Judith Miller didn’t think the waiver was broad enough - even though Fitzgerald had signed off on it:

Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller have expressed concerns that such waivers (top Cheney aide Lewis Libby also signed one) might have been coerced and thus might not have represented Rove’s true feelings. Yet from the end of 2003 or beginning of 2004, until last Wednesday, Luskin says, Rove had no idea that there might be any problem with the waiver.

It was not until that Wednesday, the day Cooper was to appear in court, that that changed. “Cooper’s lawyer called us and said, “Can you confirm that the waiver encompasses Cooper?” Luskin recalls. “I was amazed. He’s a lawyer. It’s not rocket science. [The waiver] says ‘any person.’ It’s that broad. So I said, ‘Look, I understand that you want reassurances. If Fitzgerald would like Karl to provide you with some other assurances, we will.’” Luskin says he got in touch with the prosecutor — “Rule number one is cooperate with Fitzgerald, and there is no rule number two,” Luskin says — and asked what to do. According to Luskin, Fitzgerald said to go ahead, and Luskin called Cooper’s lawyer back. “I said that I can reaffirm that the waiver that Karl signed applied to any conversations that Karl and Cooper had,” Luskin says. After that — which represented no change from the situation that had existed for 18 months — Cooper made a dramatic public announcement and agreed to testify.

Finally, Luskin says that Rove is not hiding behind the legalistic defense that he didn’t mention PLame by name. When asked if Rove was the target of Fitzgerald’s investigation, here’s what he said.

Luskin also addressed the question of whether Rove is a “subject” of the investigation. Luskin says Fitzgerald has told Rove he is not a “target” of the investigation, but, according to Luskin, Fitzgerald has also made it clear that virtually anyone whose conduct falls within the scope of the investigation, including Rove, is considered a “subject” of the probe. “‘Target’ is something we all understand, a very alarming term,” Luskin says. On the other hand, Fitzgerald “has indicated to us that he takes a very broad view of what a subject is.”

Finally, Luskin conceded that Rove is legally free to publicly discuss his actions, including his grand-jury testimony. Rove has not spoken publicly, Luskin says, because Fitzgerald specifically asked him not to.

What all this adds up to is something truly bizarre. It appears that someone is giving Judith Miller some of the worst legal advice in history. My guess would be that her attorney (or Miller herself) is a raving leftist who believes that Rove is going to do some kind of double back flip and land behind Miller pointing his finger at her as Plame’s outer. After all, everyone knows that Rove, the mastermind, is capable of anything.

If what Luskin says is true, Miller should be able to walk out of that jail free and clear. That is, unless she’s protecting someone else. And given the fact that Plame’s job at CIA was common knowledge in Washington, it could very well be that Miller’s main source is another reporter.

Or, if you prefer, this Rovian nightmare may soon be “Guckerted.”

What in the Sam Hill am I talking about?

Oh, c’mon now. You all remember Jeff Gannon. Mr. Gannon was a writer with the now defunct Talon News who by day, was a mild mannered reporter that got a daily White House pass to attend press briefings and ask softball questions of Scott McClellan.

It was Mr. Gannon’s nighthawk activities that were, um…a little, shall we say, unusual.

It turns out that Mr. Gannon was actually one Mr. Guckert, male model, escort, and possible homosexual prostitute. And the left, to put it mildly, went ballistic. It was all Gannon-Guckert all the time at Kos, DU, Atrios, and a host of other lefty blogs. There were questions that needed to be asked, screamed the lefties. What kind of questions?

So in the end, why does this matter? Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House. Big deal. If he was already a prostitute, why not be one in the White House briefing room as well?

This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we’re talking about. It’s looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a “daily basis.” They reportedly made a decision to give him - one of only six - access to documents, or information in those documents, that exposed a clandestine CIA operative. Say what you will about Monika Lewinsky - a tasteless episode, “inappropriate,” whatever. Monika wasn’t a gay prostitute running around the West Wing. What kind of leadership would let prostitutes roam the halls of the West Wing? What kind of war-time leadership can’t find the same information that took bloggers only days to find?

None of this is by accident.

Someone had to make a decision to let all this happen. Who? Someone committed a crime in exposing Valerie Plame and now it appears a gay hooker may be right in the middle of all of it? Who?

Since the White House knew…something, is it possible that someone in the White House was sleeping with Guckert?

This was the next phase of the blogswarm. Speculation on who was sleeping with Guckert ranged from Scott McClellan (”He’s cute!”) to Karl Rove (”He’s got the power!”), to Republican Chairman Ken Mehlman (”He’s single!”)

All the while the story was churning on the lefty side of the sphere, the rest of the world went on with its business, paying no attention to this three ring circus that got more and more bizarre as the weeks went on. The MSM paid no attention. Conservative bloggers paid no attention. Even the White House press corps let out a collective yawn. Then like spoiled children, the left began to throw a collective tantrum that this hugely important story wasn’t being covered by anyone. They whined that, as the idiot above from Americablog breathlessly pointed out, “Someone committed a crime in exposing Valerie Plame and now it appears a gay hooker may be right in the middle of all of it?”

Well, so much for the prescience of Americablog.

Finally, one by one, the lefty’s gave up and went back to what they’re good at - trashing America and spouting conspiracy theories. The Gannon-Guckert story passed into history, a victim of something the left could never grasp: Just because they said so didn’t make it true.

And now another lefty blogswarm is in full churning mode with the Rove-Wilson-Plame imbroglio and history has a chance of repeating itself. The Rove story may become “Guckerted.” That is, the lefties may once again be churning up a lot of froth that in a few days, may fizz out. After all, Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald has made it clear that Rove is not a target of his investigation. And as many bloggers have been pointing out all day, there’s a very good chance that Rove himself may have been informed of Plame’s status as an employee of the CIA by another reporter, which would explain Judith Miller’s hesitancy to name her source. She could be protecting a fellow journalist. The idea that she would be protecting Rove, who has released journalists from any pledge of confidentiality, is loony.

So Rove, legally at least, appears in the clear at this point. But, as I speculated yesterday, I doubt whether he’ll be able to hang on to his job. Judging by the very impolite and pointed questions asked by the White House press corps yesterday and today, Rove may be gone by the end of the month.

And this scandal, like the Gannon-Guckert brouhaha, will disappear from everywhere but the conspiracy minded lefty blogs who will cling to the idea that if they only try a little harder, they’ll be able to bring down the President himself.

UPDATE

Tom Maguire keeps plugging away at this story. One of the more fascinating aspects that hasn’t been talked about much in the MSM was this apparent war that was going on between the Administration and a faction at the CIA who were rabidly partisan Democrats. As the prospect for finding WMD in Iraq faded, this faction saw an opportunity to not only hurt the Presisdent’s re-election chances, but also shift blame for their titanic failure off the shoulders of the CIA and place it in the lap of the Administration:

Here’s Maguire post from yesterday.yesterday. I’m lazy so go to his site for all the links in this update:

MORE UPDATES: On the subject of CIA factions, here is Walter Pincus, in his famous June 12 piece that relied on Wilson as a source (and was ridiculed by the SSCI report):

And does the “indicative of larger problems” ring of the “fake but accurate” defense - ignore Wilson’s misprepresentations and confusions; if he brought “a little literary flair” to his storytelling, it was because Bush lied!