Backwards Through the Gotcha Roladex

Little blogging yesterday. Did leave a few comments at the Margolis sites, but it turned out that's all I had time for, what with my nose getting stuck in a book I hadn't read for ages last night until I conked out at midnight. C'est la vie.

Besides, with pap like this dominating the headlines, can you blame me for my disinterest?

Nearly two years after stating that any Administration official found to have been involved in leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer would be fired, and assuring that Karl Rove and other senior aides to President Bush had nothing to do with the disclosure, the White House refused on Monday to answer any questions about new evidence of Mr. Rove's role in the matter.

With the White House silent, Democrats rushed in, demanding that the Administration provide a full account of any involvement by Mr. Rove, one of the president's closest advisers, turning up the political heat in the case and leaving some Republicans worried about the possible effects on Mr. Bush's second-term agenda.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, cited Mr. Bush's statements about firing anyone involved in the leak and said, "I trust they will follow through on this pledge."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Rove, given his stature and the principles involved in the case, could not hide behind legal advice not to comment.

"The lesson of history for George Bush and Karl Rove is that the best way to help themselves is to bring out all the facts, on their own, quickly," Mr. Schumer said, citing the second-term scandals that have beset previous administrations.

First of all, that isn't what the President said. What he said was that any member of his Administration who was found to have broken the law would be "taken care of." "Nearly two years" later nothing of the sort has been found, vis-a-vie Karl the Great or anyone else.

Second of all, Valerie Plame was neither an "officer" nor an "operative" nor "undercover." She was and is a CIA analyst whose occupation and relationship to "Yellowcake Joe" Wilson was not only common Beltway knowledge but was (and is) disclosed on Wilson's own webpage.

Thirdly, what Time reporter Matt Cooper has disclosed that Karl the Great told him vis-a-vie this Clintonoid couple - in answer to Cooper's question - was that Wilson was full of crap on everything he was claiming about his "mission" to Niger and his so-called report on the Niger/Saddam/uranium business "discrediting" the White House's WMD case for invading Iraq. Wilson claimed that the White House sent him on this "fact-finding" junket and when he didn't tell them what they wanted to hear they "outted" his spook spouse in retaliation. But the truth is it was his wife who recommended that her Clinton appointee hubby be sent to Niger, and when the Nigerians didn't tell Wilson what he wanted to hear, he blew it off and wrote the fictional report he wanted to write anyway, as he was forced to admit under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee. You know, the august body whose own final report a year ago conclusively debunked the whole "BUSH LIED!!!!" canard.

In other words, Mr. Rove, as John Podhoretz gleefully pointed out yesterday, was not trying to do anything to Valerie Plame, but simply do Cooper the favor of not letting Wilson make him look like a doofus:

I offered my speculation of what an Administration official might have said to a journalist to explain just how Wilson — a Clinton administration official — got the assignment in the first place: "Administration official: 'We didn't send him there. Cheney's office asked CIA to get more information. CIA picked Wilson . . . Look, I hear his wife's in the CIA. He's got nothing to do. She wanted to throw him a bone.' "

Hate to say I told you so, but . . .

According to this week's Newsweek, Karl Rove said something very similar indeed to Time magazine's Matthew Cooper:

In the Cooper e-mails just surrendered by Time to the prosecutor looking into the Plame case, "Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a 'big warning' not to 'get too far out on Wilson.' Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by . . . CIA Director George Tenet . . . or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, 'it was, [Rove] said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.'"

There's no mistaking the purpose of this conversation between Cooper and Rove. It wasn't intended to discredit, defame or injure Wilson's wife. It was intended to throw cold water on the import, seriousness and supposedly high level of Wilson's findings.

Presumably Cooper released this material to federal prosecutors primarily to avoid going to jail for contempt. And, also presumably, at least one of the reasons he didn't want to release it is because it would, on its substance, serve to exonorate Karl the Great, which helps explain why the rest of the Extreme Media and the Democrats are frothingly and frantically moving the definitional goalposts of what the President said all over hell's half-acre in order to try futilely to gin up yet another "scandal" that isn't there.

More to the point, it seems to me, is that this itself is an attempt at retaliating against Mr. Rove for his dead-on comments of a few weeks back nailing the Left's foolish and seditious motivations in the GWOT.

In the bigger picture, though, I turn to what I wrote yesterday at B4B:

Is it my imagination, or has the Extreme Media reached the end of their "Get Bush" roladex with the TANG/Killian memos BS and started rifling back toward the front?

Think about it - the National Guard stuff was tried in early spring 2004 and then again six months later. Abu Ghraib erupted in late spring/early summer 2004, and a year later they were recycling the same card vis-a-vie Gitmo. Now they've shuffled back two years to re-run the "yellowcake"/Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame kerfuffle. That one had gotten so stale that I couldn't remember which Bushie Wilson wanted to see "frog-marched out of the White House in hand cuffs."

Does this mean that after the Battle of Olympus is over they're going to trot out Ken Lay and Enron for an encore?

Don't believe me? Listen to this former Clinton staffer:

"I just don't see what - beyond their screwing with Rove - this accomplishes. And I gotta believe that there are people on our side pushing this thing, and if they are, it's not smart. This kind of thing has a way of biting you on the ass. That 60 Minutes II story on Bush's military record should be on everyone's mind right now. I don't think the media wants anyone looking into how they develop stories, and this is where this Rove thing is going."

Thing is, they don't care how they look to the general public. If the Extreme Media cared about the public knowing how they develop "stories," Rathergate would have been the triple-decibel warning siren that they needed to, shall we say, "alter course." And, of course, we saw what their reaction was to that - damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. In their minds it's not they who need to change, it's all the rest of us who need to "come to our senses." And they think that if they keep scandalmongering, eventually one of their gambits will stick, even by blind luck, and then they'll be vindicated.

And if not, well, Hillary Clinton will win in 2008, just as George W. Bush did in 2000 for the GOP, and they can "move on."

I happen to agree with that projection, but what if it doesn't turn out that way? What if the pressies wake up on November 5th, 2008 and hear the words "President-Elect George Allen"? Having made Bushophobia a cottage industry, and completely atomized their professional reputations in the process, all to utterly no avail, what will they do then? Invent "Allenophobia"? If it does not profit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his soul, how much less when he doesn't even gain a majority of one country, even if it is the global hegemon?

I don't know what the record depth is for a dry well, but metaphorically speaking, the Extreme Media has drilled clear through the core and is working its way toward the other side.

[HT's: Cap'n's Quarters]

UPDATE: The aforementioned John Podhoretz possibly closes the loop this morning by suggesting that the "leaker" of Valerie Plame's identity may have been none other than the currently incarcerated Judith Miller of the New York Times. This would explain why the "Gay Lady" won't let her disclose her sources to federal prosecutors - not only would it take the trumped-up heat (such as it is) off of Karl the Great, but it would place it squarely on the "paper of trash cans."

And of the two, the former would be far, far worse in what passes for their minds.

UPDATE II: Brother Hinderaker reminds us of yet another dollop of left/media hypocrisy:

In all of the liberal huffing and puffing over the supposed "outing" of Valerie Plame - as though she might be in danger as she drove to and from her desk job in Langley, and as though she hadn't posed for a photo shoot in Vanity Fair, dressed up as a spy - I've seen no liberal criticism of a more recent, real outing of a clandestine CIA operation. In this case, those who outed a CIA operation exposed secret agents operating in the field, in circumstances of great personal danger, not a civilian desk employee. The outing of the CIA operation undoubtedly forced the CIA to terminate or change what had been an effective means of protecting the nation's security, and likely did endanger the lives of real covert agents.

I'm referring, of course, to the exposure of a purportedly civilian airline as a CIA operation:

"While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.

"An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

"The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation."

Who was it who "outed" these CIA employees, blew their cover and perhaps endangered their lives? The New York Times, of course! In an article that was based largely on leaks by former CIA employees, who were out to embarrass the Administration. Ah, but that's the "good" kind of leak - the kind that exposes the Agency's real covert operatives, not the kind that tries to correct lies told by Democratic Party loyalists in the pages of the New York Times.

Drill, drill, drill....