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One impediment to Gillespie's appointment is how outspoken he's been about the seriousness of the leak. It's fashionable in Washington to say this is a scandal about nothing and that everyone smears everyone in this least perfect of worlds. Yet two years ago on MSNBC TV's "Hardball,"' when host Chris Matthews asked whether the leak was more serious than Watergate, Gillespie said it was, in that it wasn't just about politics.
"If the allegation is true -- to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative -- it's abhorrent, and it should be a crime, and it is a crime," Gillespie said Sept. 30, 2003.
What makes Rove's smear so bad this time (as opposed to those aimed at former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and presidential candidates John McCain and John Kerry and White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke) is that he made an uncharacteristic mistake.
His purpose wasn't to out a CIA agent. Quite the contrary. Former ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was collateral roadkill. Rove was just using her to show that Wilson was a twit who couldn't have gotten an assignment but for her, so his finding that Saddam Hussein had not tried to buy uranium in Niger was worthless. If Wilson's wife had worked at the State Department, Rove's effort to turn Wilson into a girlie man would have happened without consequence.
Last week the New York Daily News reported that a senior White House aide is cooperating with the prosecutor, although it didn't say who. Maybe this turns out to be the usual footrace to save yourself at the expense of others. There is no more honor among leakers than among thieves. You leave this political world as you came into it, alone.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/245478_carlson23.html
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