The Rude Pundit has a piece up today that explains why this Rove story has legs where the other stories of Bush lies didn’t. It’s the simplicity. “White House hack outs CIA agent for revenge.” You can express the whole story with one- and two-syllable words and any defense of Rove requires intricate webs of explanation, refutation, legal minutiae, and Clintonesque parsing.
Better news is the recent Wall Street Journal report of a memo that made it very clear that the White House knew it shouldn’t be blabbing about Mrs. Joseph Wilson:
On July 6, 2003, former diplomat Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, disputing administration arguments that Iraq had sought to buy uranium ore from Africa to make nuclear weapons. The following day, President Bush and top cabinet officials left for Africa, and the memo was aboard Air Force One.
The paragraph in the memo discussing Ms. Wilson’s involvement in her husband’s trip is marked at the beginning with a letter designation in brackets to indicate the information shouldn’t be shared, according to the person familiar with the memo. Such a designation would indicate to a reader that the information was sensitive. The memo, though, doesn’t specifically describe Ms. Wilson as an undercover agent, the person familiar with the memo said.
Also there is the Standard Form 312 that all White House staff have to sign. It states pretty plainly (well, for a government form) that a White House official isn’t supposed to reveal any classified information nor confirm the accuracy of any information without determining its classified status:
One of the most basic rules of safeguarding classified information is that an official who has signed a nondisclosure agreement cannot confirm classified information obtained by a reporter. In fact, this obligation is highlighted in the “briefing booklet” that new security clearance recipients receive when they sign their nondisclosure agreements:
Before confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.
By all accounts, Rove and Libby have already violated that nondisclosure agreement and an executive order and a law or two. But now that George Bush has changed the Lose My White House Job Alert Level from Yellow (“involved” in leaks = fired!) to Red (caught on videotape leaking information, corroborated by two virgin Christian witnesses, indicted by the grand jury, and convicted unanimously by a jury of balding fat white Texan males of a “crime” = fired!), Rove’s got some breathing room to play the old distance-and-distract game with Chimpy’s upcoming SCOTUS nomination.
Sorry, Flightsuit-in-Chief, this one ain’t goin’ nowhere. The Rove leak is just the biggest, brightest, most obvious straw on the back of the American people. Sure, the Bush White House has lied to us before — WMD’s, nuclear materials from Niger, the cost of the Medicare bill, we’d be greeted as liberators, Iraq can finance its own reconstruction, smears against the honorable military records of John Kerry, Max Cleland, and John McCain, that Abu Ghraib was just “a few bad apples”, the Downing Street Minutes showing that “intelligence was being fixed around the policy”, and so much more.
So they were lying. They knew they were lying. We knew they were lying. They knew we knew they were lying. As comedian Lewis Black says, “I’m used to my government lying to me. I’m comfortable with it.”
What’s happened with the Rove leak, though, is that people are beginning to see that they know we know they are lying… and they don’t care if we know. It’s not the lying now, it’s the pattern of abusing power that’s starting to show through. It’s the condescension to the American people, the Bush White House pattern of the ends justifying the means, their belief that their agenda is divinely ordained and the feeling that they have to cook up a rationale to get the people to accept what’s best for them.
When Colin Powell was showing drawings of supposed mobile chem labs in Iraq or Bush was making claims about uranium from Niger or Condoleezza Rice was warning us of mushroom clouds that would be our smoking gun, we may have sensed deep down there was some lying, but who among us are international arms watchdogs? We didn’t feel stupid for not knowing.
Then when Abu Ghraib happened, we couldn’t be swayed from what our lyin’ eyes were telling us. But it was so horrible that no one wanted to believe it was officially sanctioned government policy to torture prisoners. We jumped at the chance to believe it was “a few bad apples”. After all, who among us are military police and psychological operations experts? Maybe it was an aberration.
Things started to smell funny when the Downing Street memos surfaced. It seemed pretty obvious to us that the Administration was pursuing an end-justifies-the-means strategy Then the Bush apologists tried to tell us that “fix” means something different in British usage. Not many among us are Anglophiles, but we all grew up speaking English. It’s a little hard to believe that “fix” is some sort of tricky British word that would mean something entirely different in America (for example, a British student asking his teacher for a “rubber” would be scandalous in America and routine in Britain). This was starting to sound a lot like “what the definition of ‘is’ is”, and it wasn’t the blow jobs so much as the lying, cover-up, and assumption that the American people were stupid that grated on our nerves.
But now with all that’s happening around this Rove case it is obvious that they think they can still play us for fools. When it’s shown that Rove leaked a CIA operative’s identity, the White House spinmeisters try to tell us that he didn’t reveal her name. When that falls flat, we point out how the man who’d bring accountability and responsibility back to the Oval Office said he’d fire anyone involved in the leak. So then he moves the goal posts and says he’ll only fire someone for a crime. All pretense is gone – they don’t care what we think, they don’t care what they said. They’ve got the power, they’re keeping the power, and they’ll do what they want with the power without feeling any need to get the approval of the people or even bother to explain their rationale to the people.
Because, you know, 9/11 changed everything.
This should be a fun week (and by “fun” I mean “can’t wait to see what Jon Stewart does with this one”) in politics with the continuing Rove Leak, a new Supreme Court nominee, and this Friday’s scheduled release of new photos and videos from Abu Ghraib (you know, the videos with the forced group masturbation sessions, the beating and stacking of naked prisoners, and the rape of Iraqi teenagers — the ones Congress saw about a year ago and to a man described as far worse than what we’d seen out of Abu Ghraib so far.)
