Seems like all you hear now a days is Karl this and Karl
that. It has taken a time of year that is generally slow in our nation’s capital
and turned the heat up to rival that of the hot DC summers.
Turned up even more is the spin the right is putting onto
this story. Before Karl’s name was ever mentioned to the press and when
speculation was just going on, it was nothing for the White House to lay strong
warnings to whoever leaked information to the press. Now that the American
public knows Bush’s right hand man indeed talked to the press about the case the
tone has changed. It is now a eerie resemblance of White House press briefings
in the early 70’s, a time when another scandal rocked the office of President.
Scott McClellan has been getting grilled hard and long this
week by the White House press core. In a sudden turn of events Monday, the
robotic reporters that reminded you of something out of Stepford Wives seemed to
have been replaced with actual reporters. They have hammered away trying to get
McClellan to break his streak of silence on this issue, the streak that has only
been around for a few days.
So why should something be done about Karl Rove right now?
Well even though he has not been convicted or even charged with a crime, there
is still a question of our national security at stake here. It is evident that
Karl Rove talked to reporters about Valerie Plame but he did not mention her by
name. He did say that Joe Wilsons wife who worked for the CIA on WMD sent Wilson
on the trip to Niger. AHHH a clue Sherlock. Instead of just saying a WMD analyst
at Langley sent the former Ambassador to Niger, he had to offer that extra spicy
piece of gossip that it was also Wilson’s wife.
Joe Wilson did mention his wife by name in his biography,
but never mentioned what she did for a living. This made it relatively easy for
reporters to put the pieces together. Media Matters looked into the issue and
found out that before Novak’s article appeared it took six minutes of Googling
to find out the name of Wilson’s wife.
Ironically now the right wing has come back with their
gun’s loaded and cocked. They are claiming this is nothing more than a game of
partisan politics. Even in a “talking points†memo put out by RNC chairmen Ken
Mehlman, they make a strong final point that Wilson was a supporter of Kerry.
Could this be the reason why an issue involving a leak of national secrets has
taken so long to uncover? Ahh yes! They had to wait until after the 2004
election and Bush getting returned to the White House to let people see what
happened.
Karl Rove did not enter uncharted territory by providing a
leak to reporters. In 1992 he was fired from the re-election campaign of George
H.W. Bush for leaking campaign information to Robert Novak. Wait! Robert Novak?
Yup, he leaked to the very same reporter 11 years ago that published the now
infamous article about one of our secret agents.
Now this is why we should be concerned. We are currently
fighting two wars. One of the constant fears that our leaders put into us during
these wars is the possibility of our enemies using some sort of Weapon of Mass
Destruction. Should we not protect our assets in the intelligence fields that
are working on this important issue? Well I guess not when it comes to Karl
Rove.
Ironically this all started because the White House wanted
to discredit Joe Wilson, who in turn was discrediting the White Houses claim
that Saddam was seeking to buy uranium yellow cake, which is used to nuclear
weapons, from Niger. Even though Wilson came back with evidence this claim was
false, a President who was determined to go to war with Iraq could not leave a
shadow of doubt amongst the American people. Enter Karl Rove who leaks the
information to the press to try and discredit Wilson. The most ironic part about
it is the fact that what Wilson found out was true. Saddam was not trying to buy
uranium from Niger. So Wilson went to Africa and discovered the god awful truth
and had to be discredited by Bush’s brain AKA Karl Rove.
I think we have only begun to scratch the surface on this
story. In actuality it all joins in together. This story also coincides with the
Downing Street Memo in which it says that Bush was “fixing†the intelligence to
justify a war in Iraq. So while it has a haunting resemblance of Watergate right
now, the rabbit hole in fact is proving to go much deeper. In fact it might go
as deep as a good Tom Clancy novel.