Posted on 07/13/2005 8:21:43 PM PDT by kcvl
Leak? What Leak?
Submitted by editor on July 13, 2005 - 12:12pm.
By Howard Kurtz Source: Washington Post
From the moment the Karl Rove story exploded over the weekend, I've been intensely curious as to what tack the conservatives would take.
This is a big political embarrassment, no question about it, and while Scott McClellan could try the old can't-comment-during-the-investigation (though he had earlier denied any Rove involvement during the same investigation), what would the denizens of the right do?
I tuned into O'Reilly and Hannity on Monday night, but there was no mention, none, of the Rove/Plame affair. Imagine if an e-mail had surfaced showing that a top aide to Clinton--say, Sid Blumenthal--had told a reporter about a covert CIA agent. Would those Fox shows have given the controversy a bit of air time? (Last night, O'Reilly said "some in the media are foaming" over the story but did call on Rove to "clear the air," then hosted Newt Gingrich, who attacked Joe Wilson. Hannity said Rove "wasn't on a witchhunt" because Matt Cooper called him , and guest G. Gordon Liddy ripped Cooper and said Valerie Plame wasn't really undercover. At least the show had a liberal guest, Bill Press, who got overheated in accusing Rove of "treason" and saying he "should be marched off to prison." No trial, Bill?)
(Excerpt) Read more at mediachannel.org ...
OK, let's say Slugger Jones hits a homerun over the left field fence. I want to get that baseball so I can get Slugger's autograph on it and sell it on e-bay. So I proceed to look for the baseball in the stands behind home plate. Meanwhile, another fan looks for the ball behind the left field fence and finds it. I then accuse the other fan that found the ball of cheating because I didn't find it.
Oooooookay.
I didn't know liberals were still defending Wilson.
The left still has a comprehension problem. Rove did not leak the name of anyone but of course they wish to pretend he did and as for the Clinton White House we didn't have to make up scandle, it came straight from the source and forceful and bold.
Is it just me noticing this or is the left completely incapable of reading a news item and gleaning the facts without attaching their hopes and biases on every point?
They have to--he's the key to their "Bush Lied, People Died" mantra. Wilson is the dupe looking for the ball behind home plate in my little analogy. The British government is the fan that found the ball (the Brits stand by their story that Saddam bought uranium from Niger).
It even goes deeper than that. It's beginning to look like Wilson was just the point man in an effort to discredit Bush in his effort to go to war with Iraq. If Wilson goes down then a lot of rats follow him.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
Karl Rove, Whistleblower
He told the truth about Joe Wilson.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.
For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
Media chants aside, there's no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband's selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger. To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he'd obtained in an official capacity. But it appears Mr. Rove didn't even know Ms. Plame's name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.
On the "no underlying crime" point, moreover, no less than the New York Times and Washington Post now agree. So do the 36 major news organizations that filed a legal brief in March aimed at keeping Mr. Cooper and the New York Times's Judith Miller out of jail.
"While an investigation of the leak was justified, it is far from clear--at least on the public record--that a crime took place," the Post noted the other day. Granted the media have come a bit late to this understanding, and then only to protect their own, but the logic of their argument is that Mr. Rove did nothing wrong either.
The same can't be said for Mr. Wilson, who first "outed" himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous "16 words" on the subject in that year's State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC's "Meet the Press" and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.
But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. "Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip," said the report.
The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn't even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.
About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain's Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: "We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."
In short, Joe Wilson hadn't told the truth about what he'd discovered in Africa, how he'd discovered it, what he'd told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission. The media and the Kerry campaign promptly abandoned him, though the former never did give as much prominence to his debunking as they did to his original accusations. But if anyone can remember another public figure so entirely and thoroughly discredited, let us know.
If there's any scandal at all here, it is that this entire episode has been allowed to waste so much government time and media attention, not to mention inspire a "special counsel" probe. The Bush Administration is also guilty on this count, since it went along with the appointment of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in an election year in order to punt the issue down the road. But now Mr. Fitzgerald has become an unguided missile, holding reporters in contempt for not disclosing their sources even as it becomes clearer all the time that no underlying crime was at issue.
As for the press corps, rather than calling for Mr. Rove to be fired, they ought to be grateful to him for telling the truth.
Probably why Kerry is try to distance himself from Wilson removing all ties to him from his website.
The Kerry Campaign dropped him like a stone after the Senate Intelligence Report came out. This whole story would be history except that the media hates Rove and could never pass up a chance to do him in. The WH punted this one down the road during the campaign and now they're paying for it. Not a bad play considering they won the election.
I love how Plame's importance as a super-secret agent who looks good in sunglasses and scarf keeps increasing. If Joe Biden leaked this stuff, she'd be a cubicle monkey
Who do you guys think Miller is protecting and when will she crack?
If it's a Democrat (Plame herself, please God), another Journo or her own butt, I think Rove will ride this one out and probably have a good laugh.
If it's another Bushie, this will probably suck.
What was Berger's sentence? I don't recall a word about it in the media. . .Fox or elsewhere.
Another thing that Kurtz is glossing over here is the literal truth of Bush's "16 words" that got this whole Wilson/Plame thing started. He said the British government believes Iraq sough to buy African Uranium. The British goverment did believe that and they still do (See Lord Butler).
The reason Kurtz didn't hear or see any talk about Karl Rove is because all the talk was aimed at what has becomethe bigger story in this affair: barking moonbat media hysteria.
I guess Howie missed that part...
I can't help it. I keep having this vision of Bush and the WH standing behind a huge elephant pit with a tarp over it, and they keep enticing the press and the moronic democrats to come a little closer, come a little closer. "What's that? We can't hear you, come a little closer." LOL. The WH plays chess while the democrats and their lapdog media insist on playing checkers.
Berger's sentencing was delayed, until sometime in September. Nobody seems to know why.
You are not alone.
The big story is not: Rove "Outs" Plame.
The big story is: Barking Moonbat Media Hysteria Overtakes MSM.
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