Rove plays word games

It appears that Rove's best defense is to spew utter nonsense. Shakespeare's Sister points us to Newsweek's confirmation that Rove is the source of the Plame leak. Karl dismisses charges of treasonous conduct by proffering as a defense that he didn't identify Plame by name and didn't know she was an undercover CIA operative.

And maybe he really didn't know. It appears as the story unfolds, that the goal wasn't to out Plame but to discredit her husband's report that WMDs were a sham. Government insiders, which include Rove and probably Scooter Libby, were conducting a whisper campaign by contacting the White House press corps steno pool in order to get them to ignore Wilson's allegations that (as the Downing Street Minutes confirm), they were fixing intelligence around the policy at that point in time. Perhaps Rove was so busy figuring out ways to smear Wilson that he neglected to do his homework to see if there were larger ramifications to promulgating this particular web of lies.

But that only matters to Fitzgerald's investigation. If it's true that Rove didn't know, and it stretches credibility to the breaking point, it may release him from legal culpability but it also means he's the most incompetent deputy Chief of Staff in the history of the US government. It's his job to know these things and if he really didn't, he should be fired immediately anyway.

Either way, the Plame case establishes that this White House is willing to go to any lengths, including compromising national security in order to advance their own deceitful agenda. As Shakespeare's Sister puts it.

How much more of this shit are the American people going to swallow before they demand that the entire lot of criminals running the joint are roughly escorted out the fucking door?

Couldn't have said it better myself.