Washington Post: Classic Rove

[tuvor]

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, July 13, 2005; Page A21

Now Karl Rove has become "fair game."

That was the term that the president's consigliere applied to Valerie Plame, according to Newsweek, in a conversation with MSNBC's Chris Matthews immediately after the publication of Robert D. Novak's column that identified Plame as a CIA operative. And, of course, Plame was fair game: Her identity was a tool to discredit, however obliquely, the report from her husband, Joe Wilson, that the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger was a bunch of hooey.


Rove's lawyer now admits that, in attempting to warn Time's Matt Cooper off the Wilson story, Rove mentioned Wilson's wife, though not by name. Attention is now focused on whether this violated the law that forbids revealing the identity of our undercover intelligence agents. But it's also worth pondering the quintessential Rovishness of his conversation with Cooper, as reported in Newsweek. Bringing up Plame, after all, did nothing to discredit Wilson's central findings. It was a distraction, an ad hominem attack. Wilson had undermined the administration's tenuous case for its war. To Rove, that made Plame fair game.

And becoming Karl Rove's fair game means you're in for a bumpy ride. Rove did not become George W. Bush's indispensable op only because of his strategic smarts. He's also the kind of ethically unconstrained guy Bush has wanted around when the going gets tough -- when the case Bush is making is unconvincing on its own merits, when he needs to divert attention from himself with a stunning attack on somebody else.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/12/AR2005071201367.html

[Mari333]

1. Rove and Bush, real cellbitches arent they?

good article. shows Rove as the bastard he is.

[Inland]

2. the Bush adminsitration is one long negative campaign

All its ideas are unpopular, and all its assertions of fact are contrary to truth, so in each issue it smears anyone who opposes.

It works better in election campaigns than, say, pushing privatization of Social security, but they do it every time. It's all they have.

[emulatorloo]

3. Three more key paragraphs that need DU immortalizing

<snip>

Rove did not become George W. Bush's indispensable op only because of his strategic smarts. He's also the kind of ethically unconstrained guy Bush has wanted around when the going gets tough -- when the case Bush is making is unconvincing on its own merits, when he needs to divert attention from himself with a stunning attack on somebody else.

That's been the hallmark of Rove's career -- and Bush's. After Bush lost the 2000 New Hampshire primary to John McCain, Rove directed a slanderous campaign in South Carolina that knocked McCain virtually out of the race with a barrage of fabrications about the personal lives of the senator and his family. Once Bush decided to invade Iraq, and particularly after the weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, Rove orchestrated the campaign to depict the war's critics as terrorist sympathizers. Just a few weeks ago Rove told a right-wing audience that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Get in Bush's way and Rove turns you or your loved ones into the scum of the earth.

You can go pretty far with this kind of modus operandi, particularly if the press is complaisant. Sometimes, you can go too far, as Joe McCarthy discovered when he leveled his woozy allegations against the Army. As Karl Rove is discovering, with ever clearer indications that in his zeal to bring down Wilson he went after a CIA agent, too.

<snip>