*UPDATE*
White House Says Rove Retains Bush’s Backing After CIA Leak
Oh, man, I don’t even know if I can comment on this one. Here’s a potent quotable from Scott McClellan:
“Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president… Everybody who is working here is helping us to advance an agenda, and that includes Karl in a big way.“
I`m 45% body fat. I do everything in a big way.
What? So because he works for you, and he’s useful, he can do no wrong? Remind me to use this defense if Jake pees on your pant leg: “He has my confidence, and he’s helping me advance an agenda.”
I`ll go R. Kelly on yo ass!
At least the press is finally asking real questions, not like this hot potato from July 6:
“Scott, anything on the Olympics? Sorry to bother you on that.”
*/UPDATE*
So after two years the press has finally figured out Karl Rove was who leaked that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. Crack journalism, there. The White House has burped up a couple of weak-ass excuses, like “he didn’t say her name — just that he was Joe Wilson’s wife” (aargh) and “he didn’t do it to be mean — he did it to help a journalist” (AARGH!)
A few thoughts:
- This isn’t a no-big. This is a BIG. Plame was working undercover to investigate unconventional weapons, and outing her put her and everyone she worked with in real, you-are-a-spy danger.
- You don’t work your way all the way up to super double cosmic top secret or whatever and then flake out on what’s supposed to be secret. That would be like working to gain someone’s trust for ten years and then taking out an ad in the News & Observer to print that she cheated on her husband. You wouldn’t do that, no. Because that would be evil.
Evil’s my middle name! Right between “Adolf” and “I hate black people” - Why does Karl Rove know this stuff anyway? He’s a *political strategist.* A pollster. A spin doctor. This would be like HR letting me come upstairs to read everybody’s health insurance claims. They wouldn’t do it, no. Because that would be evil.
- Did he really leak this information to be nice `n` sweet, not mean `n` nasty? There were plenty of other ways to make his point — that Joe Wilson was an unreliable source — without personally hurting him, his wife, the CIA and dozens of operatives all over the world. So it’s sort of weird that that’s the one he picked…
Does this flag pin play down all the evil? - …but *why* Rove did it doesn’t matter. He did it intentionally. That’s a crime. It’s not an option for everybody in the White House to kind of look at each other and go “durr.”
It’s hard to say who’s in charge, really — Rove, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney. But two things are true. 1) Bush should be in charge. 2) This outfit has a history of saying something is important, and then acting like you’re dumb for thinking it is important.
A good example? The Valerie Plame thing. Two years ago, Bush said he wanted to know who was responsible for the leak, and that he would fire the person responsible. Now we know the person responsible, and suddenly you hear nothing but crickets.
Image stolen from X-entertainment
Another one leaps to mind: Bush, September 2001: Bin Laden wanted “dead or alive.” Bush, March 13, 2002: “I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. […] I don’t know where he is. I — I`ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.”
Then when Kerry cited this quote in a presidential debate, word for freakin` word, Bush said, “Gosh, I just don’t think I ever said I`m not worried about Osama bin Laden. It’s kind of one of those exaggerations.” Heh heh. Kinda like when Gore said he`d be a better president than me. Exaggerater!
Ain’t I a stinker?
Not for nothing, but I would call finding and catching the only clear, recognizable head of Al Qaeda terrorist operations the BIGGEST PRIORITY EVER.
Then there’s Dick “last throes” Cheney, who tells a Sen. Leahy (D-VT) to “fuck off” — on the Senate floor — and then gets all sniffy about civility in public discourse when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) quotes an FBI agent’s report of Gitmo.
This photo-op is wa-a-ay better than going to real funerals.
What exactly is going on at Gitmo is its own discussion. You can read Durbin’s full remarks here. But, just to stay on topic, Durbin reads this:
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more… The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night.
And then makes this obscenity-laden, hateful, irrational observation:
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners…
…I hope we will change course. The President could declare the Unites States will apply the Geneva Conventions to the war on terrorism.
I tell you, it’s lonely being the only Dem with balls…
HOW LONELY IS IT?
I can’t stop here — Durbin’s got more crazy ideas:
The administration could give all detainees a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a neutral decisionmaker. Such a change of course would dramatically improve our image and it would make us safer.
And Cheney’s prissy, missing-the-point-so-far-it-must-be-intentional reaction is:
I thought Durbin was totally out of line. I watched some of his comments on the floor of the United States Senate. For him to make those comparisons was one of the more egregious things I`d ever heard uttered on the floor of the United States Senate.
What a dick. What’s way fun is how he and his interviewer turn “please don’t torture people” into “U.S. soldiers are Nazis.” If Cheney — or Bush, or Rumsfeld, or Rove — had served, they would know that *soldiers follow orders*, and whatever’s rotten in the chain of command is considerably closer to the Commander in Chief.
I know I`m not blowing any minds here. Everything I’ve listed here was easy to read about when it happened — it just didn’t seem to hurt anyone’s feelings. Bush’s people did something creepy? Self-contradicting? Headache-inducing? Oh. Huh.
