Rove outed Wilson's wife. Hardball talks up possible impeachment

theim said:
Are you John McCain's online persona?

You just see nothing wrong at all for someone getting fired for doing nothing wrong?
Look, you know from my previous posts I am no John McCain...

Look, it is not the point of breaking the law or not. It is the point of a man keeping his word. Bush never should have said what he said if what he said had preconditions... i.e. "I will fire whoever it was... unless it was Karl Rove".

I come from the old school and I was lucky enough during my career in the military to work for officers and senior NCO's that instilled in me a sense of character and an understanding that a man's word is about all he really has. It defines a man's character. If the tables were turned and this was Clinton in office and one of his advisers, we would all be yelling how Clinton should keep his word.
 
GotZoom said:
Go back to post # 59. From Fox.

I know they reported it, but I still have the opinion that Fox is very biased. This one article won't change my view on Fox.


And again, can people forget Bush's promise to fire the source of the leak? If he doesn't, my mistrust of politicians in general will be reinforced.
 
theim said:
At least now I see where those RINO senators get their votes.



LOL...I am more conservative than the RINO's you are refering too...however I have very few choices at this time in political BS............ :firing:
 
bock2911 said:
...still, it is an email that confirms that Rove was talking about Plume with Cooper.
Sorry bro, but after what we have seen over the last couple of years, an "email" from one reporter to another (or their boss) holds absolutely no water with me...
 
1.) If Rove outed a CIA agent and his motivation was political revenge against her husband, that is an outrageous abuse of power and a crime and he should be prosecuted for it. If the President knew about it before hand, that's bad news for the President.

Of course, this scenario doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

An American goes to Niger to follow up on a lead concerning sales of Uranium to Saddam, comes to a different conclusion than the Administration, and claims that the Administration sent him there even though it didn't (so he lies, and that's established, not to mention the fact that he's conclusions were found to be erroneous as well). And in response, as revenge, the President's personal advisor tells a reporter that that man's wife works for the CIA.....this is the story?

That's the stupidest thing I've heard all week.

2.) If Rove outed a CIA agent and it was accidental, and that is a crime, he should be prosecuted.

Also, because the President said he would take care of whoever the leaker was, he should ask for Rove's resignation. a.) because that would be alot easier than trying to spin the whole thing into a pretzel in an attempt to justify why Rove was somehow exempt, and b.) Rove could continue to advise the President in a non-official capacity and there wouldn't be anything anyone could do about it.


3.) Why is that other reporter still in jail if Rove is the leaker? What/who is she protecting?

4.) Ultimately, concerning the whole thing, it doesn't much hold my interest, and I don't expect it to hold many other people's (not counting Congressional D's of course) interest after Rehquist retires (or dies).
 
Bonnie said:
Of course we can still be friends :beer:


Thats kinda like the old"you are a nice guy"...shit and ya just blew my fantasy...
Oh well "if the shoe fits" ya must wear it....lucky guys in here who are cute,young and macho....sigh! Just kidding ya hun...still #1 in my books...even though we can just be friends!
:ssex: in my dreams............... :bangheads lol have a great one!
 
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006955

Karl Rove, Whistleblower
He told the truth about Joe Wilson.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

Media chants aside, there's no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband's selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger. To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he'd obtained in an official capacity. But it appears Mr. Rove didn't even know Ms. Plame's name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.

On the "no underlying crime" point, moreover, no less than the New York Times and Washington Post now agree. So do the 36 major news organizations that filed a legal brief in March aimed at keeping Mr. Cooper and the New York Times's Judith Miller out of jail.

"While an investigation of the leak was justified, it is far from clear--at least on the public record--that a crime took place," the Post noted the other day. Granted the media have come a bit late to this understanding, and then only to protect their own, but the logic of their argument is that Mr. Rove did nothing wrong either.

The same can't be said for Mr. Wilson, who first "outed" himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous "16 words" on the subject in that year's State of the Union address.

Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC's "Meet the Press" and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.

But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. "Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip," said the report.

The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn't even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.

About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain's Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: "We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."

In short, Joe Wilson hadn't told the truth about what he'd discovered in Africa, how he'd discovered it, what he'd told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission. The media and the Kerry campaign promptly abandoned him, though the former never did give as much prominence to his debunking as they did to his original accusations. But if anyone can remember another public figure so entirely and thoroughly discredited, let us know.

If there's any scandal at all here, it is that this entire episode has been allowed to waste so much government time and media attention, not to mention inspire a "special counsel" probe. The Bush Administration is also guilty on this count, since it went along with the appointment of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in an election year in order to punt the issue down the road. But now Mr. Fitzgerald has become an unguided missile, holding reporters in contempt for not disclosing their sources even as it becomes clearer all the time that no underlying crime was at issue.

As for the press corps, rather than calling for Mr. Rove to be fired, they ought to be grateful to him for telling the truth.
 
And today Joe Wilson is in front of the MSM cameras as if he were the "font of truth". Pumped up liar..
 
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, SOURCE OUTS YOU!
James Lileks

The administration’s foes gets a Big Hot Scandal, and it’s in the Silly Season. O to be in Washington today; this is when the town is fun. This is the sort of thing that makes the smallest journalist feel Important and Part of Something. Of course, most people don’t care, but that just proves your point: you’re part of the Beltway herd, and we got us a stammmpede! Yee Hah!

Most of the country doesn’t care. This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the story, but these days you have to be caught bludgeoning an intern with a crystal vase you got at the Enron going-out-of-business auction to get people’s attention. And even then they’ll wonder if you got that vase legit, or had someone put it aside on your behalf. Most scandals float right over the heads of the average voter, who is either locked into a preexisting preference or inclined to vote on general concepts, e.g., candidate A is less likely to get me blown up at the mall, and the economy’s okay. Activists forget how little their core issues matter to most; I cannot tell you the number of earnest young door-knockers who show up at Jasperwood pulling long faces about arsenic in the water. It haunts their sleep, that extra .00000001 part per trillion. The very fact that we are standing there talking, not pasted to a fainting couch with our guts stabbed by invisible knives, would seem to indicate that arsenic is not the most pressing problem we face. But they are convinced the apocalypse is nigh.

It always is, for some, but it never comes. At least not in the form they predicted. And when it does show up in a different guise, it has to be explained away, put in context, folded into a shape that will fit in the box. This is what makes it possible for people who work for, say, an environmental advocacy group to go to work on Sept. 12, 2001 and write a passionate newsletter about the perils of species loss. Or Alaska oil drilling.

Anyway. The arguments over the Rove / Plame affair are best hashed out elsewhere. was nearly swayed by an interview with noted thinker and finger-painter Ted Rall today, until he said he wouldn’t believe the administration if they said the sky was blue. People say this as if it proves their bonafides as a critic, but really, that’s a rather easy thing to verify. If the sky is indeed blue and Scott McClellan makes that point, you could assume that they have painted the windows, I guess. In any case I’m amused how this Scandal seems disconnected from the issue of yellowcake in light of the post 9/11 atmosphere. Given all the tales in the 90s about the threat Saddam faced – a threat everyone accepted when Clinton was launching strikes and pulling serious faces – the idea that the whole Niger-yellowcake nexus should have gotten a big shrug in 2002, when the WTC rubble still smoked, seems to be another act of willful amnesia. If anyone in 02 could have thought we’d be parsing who said what about which agent re a politically motivated rewrite of the intel, they’d have heaved a sigh of relief: so we didn’t get hit again.

It’s all a luxury that seems vapid only after something bad happens again. You’ll note that when Blair gives a press conference nowadays the press doesn’t bring up the Downing Street Memo. Give them time, though; in due course the press will shake off that ill-fitting caot of national solidarity and start asking why the bombers weren’t detected by orbital satellites the day they were born. The role of the press is to reset the clock to yesterday morn, ferret out the slightest hint of imperfection, and splash the front page with the words that give them that priapic prang: Ongoing Investigation. Questions remain. But sources say.

The press always mistakes its own fascinations for important news, figuring that if the WaPo and the NYT and friendly radio outlets hammer the story like a sheet of tin on a blunt study anvil, and the stories appear on the front pages of the second-tier dailies, it will somehow move the needle. Sometimes, yes. But it doesn’t help that this is scandal #8732. The rightwing media spent eight years trying to convince people that Clinton had horns and a swishy forked tail, and it had little practical impact. Today Bill Clinton could run for president, and half the voters would give him a yea, even though they had reservations about his character. Which is what I mean by practical impact. It’s possible that vast swaths of moderate Bush voters will be recoiled by L’Affaire Rove, but that would mean they had to know who Rove is. In short: compared to the other recent Horrors, like the Ongoing Gulag of Gitmo, which now has added forced bra-wearing to its litany of atrocities, this smacks of the sort of inside-the-Beltway story that vulcanizes the faithful but has no impact on people who are otherwise occupied planning the summer car trip. They’re looking at gas prices. And even that isn’t a deal breaker. So they say we invaded for oil – when does that bennie kick in, then?

The only reason I mention this is because I heard an account of the daily press briefing, the usual raft of sanctimonious boilerplate. One reported went on and on and on about the effect this had on Wilson family, attempting perhaps to connect with those soccer moms who wouldn’t want to have their family business splashed all over the news. (As if Wilson had somehow been dragged screaming from obscurity.) Well: what of the families of the charter airline pilots?

You may recall the story. The xx ran big piece on a charter airline the CIA was using to transport suspects. This isn’t just outing a covert operative; it was outing a covert operation. In the case of Wilson / Plame, we had an attempt to point out how two opponents of the adminstration were trying to thwart the foreign policy of the US government via the pages of the NYT and Vanity Fair; in the case of the airline, we had an attempt to peel back the Tupperware lid of secrecy of an anti-terrorist organization in order to ruin – I’m sorry, let the people know what they needed to know about the operation. Did anyone wonder whether the families of the people in that charter airline might be harmed in anyway? Did anyone wonder whether this information might compromise attempts to interrogate suspects? Did anyone ask what the devil was served by running this story?

Imagine the war was prosecuted by a Democratic administration; imagine a GOP operative blowing the charter airline’s cover to make a point about billing irregularies. Imagine the GOP operative slipping photos of the planes on the tarmac, tailfin numbers visible, to the press.

Imagine the press running with the covert-ops story, outraged that the Democratic administration had covered up this crucial story. Can you see that happening? You can?

The air on Bizzaro World – what does it smell like, exactly? As fresh and sweet as one can only dream?

http://www.lileks.com/screedblog/
 
After watching the news the last couple of days, hearing how it was the REPORTER that told Rove about Plame, etc., I take back EVERYTHING I wrote. This IS nothing but a witchhunt and made up of nothing but lies. I hope Bush promotes Rove somehow just to rub it in the Dem's faces... The dems are nothing but a bunch of scumbag whining losers.
 
freeandfun1 said:
After watching the news the last couple of days, hearing how it was the REPORTER that told Rove about Plame, etc., I take back EVERYTHING I wrote. This IS nothing but a witchhunt and made up of nothing but lies. I hope Bush promotes Rove somehow just to rub it in the Dem's faces... The dems are nothing but a bunch of scumbag whining losers.

Welcome back into the light my friend :D

The Dems are nothing but a bunch of whining losers that put our country in jeopardy everytime they do this instead of working with their coleagues to keep this country safe in a very tumultuous world.

Plame, Plame, Bo Blame, Bananafana...
By MaryKatharineHam
Posted on Thu Jul 14th, 2005 at 02:23:52 PM EST

I haven't blogged about this much because it never really sparked my interest. At this point, it's actually three or four complex stories rolled up into one.

If you really want to understand it in detail, the go-to guy is Tom at JustOneMinute, who has been all over this from the beginning and continues to lead the pack by doing such great public services as helping Josh Marshall. Here's his in-depth timeline of the bundle of scandals, all rolled into one.

The New York Post does a great job of explaining all the twists and turns involved, and reminds everyone that it's Joe Wilson who's done most of the lying, not Rove:

That's how administrations — especially those that regularly have to contend with a rabidly hostile press corps — defend themselves.

And the Bush administration needed defending from Joseph Wilson — who shopped his lies and found a willing buyer in The New York Times.

Frankly, we wish Karl Rove had explained all this long ago. After all, he had done the right thing. But by denying any involvement, Rove undercut himself and the administration — not the first tactical error this White House has made.

Still, the bottom line here is that Karl Rove acted to protect the president against a partisan, blatantly false smear on a matter with grave national security implications.

Again, for the record, Rove did the right thing. It is simply outrageous that he is cast as the villain in this episode — while Joseph Wilson, a disgraceful liar, skates.

Dick Morris says Dems are stretching the statute to engage in a little political, ritual sacrifice:

But just as Rove did not intend to blow Plame’s cover, so the Democrats demanding his head are not very interested in upholding the statute in question. Their motives are totally political. They want revenge against Rove for his successful role in piloting the Bush election and reelection campaigns, and they want to be sure that Bush does not have access to Karl’s advice in the remaining years of his second term.

PowerLine notes the tendency to judge quickly.

As for me, this story reminds me a whole lot of the missing explosives story that broke--suprise!--in late October, 2004. At the time, I remember having a very serious conversation with a liberal friend of mine, who was appalled--appalled, I tell you!-- that the U.S. had let these 377 tons (later, only 3 tons) of explosives go missing. It wasn't about Bush, she said. It was about security, and how Bush obviously couldn't provide it.

But the story was very obviously only newsworthy because it was broken a couple days before the election (and it was broken then with just that in mind). It was useful as a political tool. I put forth that theory for my friend, but she was adamant that it was about the explosives and security, not a Bush "gotcha." The fact remains that I haven't heard her mention them since the election.

The New York Times shows a similar pattern, with 15 mentions of Al Qaqaa from Oct. 28 to Nov. 1, but only 5 mentions in the 7 months since then.

It's human nature. People generally get more incensed about things that can hurt their political adversaries, even if they don't realize they're doing it. But, frankly, it amazes me that people can do it with straight faces sometimes.

I'm not convinced by liberals' current security concerns because I've seen them fake it in the past. Lorie Byrd isn't buying it either. She'd be more likely to believe them had they shown concern for other, more serious security threats.

And, if you're still not interested, keep it on the lighter side with the Plaaaame Game from Pennywit.

http://soapbox.townhall.com/story/2005/7/14/142352/481
 
Well, my response to that last post comes from the NY times.

July 15, 2005
Karl Rove's America
By PAUL KRUGMAN

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 C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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?

E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15krugman.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print

BTW, I am still not sure if I believe what Rove said in the grand jury. Something about what he said doesn't sit well with me right now.
 
It's all falling apart....as we knew it would.

In an interview on CNN earlier Thursday before the latest revelation, Wilson kept up his criticism of the White House, saying Rove's conduct was an "outrageous abuse of power ... certainly worthy of frog-marching out of the White House."

But at the same time, Wilson acknowledged his wife was no longer in an undercover job at the time Novak's column first identified her. "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity," he said.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/natio...469,print.story?coll=nyc-nationhome-headlines

A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050715-121257-9887r.htm
 

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