Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

In the Washington Post's story on the Luskin announcement it was mentioned that special counsel Fitzgerald learned through his own investigation that Rove had spoken to two media sources during one particular week.  The story that appeared in CNN.com on Tuesday, June 13, contained the following disclosure:

"(Special Counsel Patrick) Fitzgerald was looking into why Rove initially did not disclose a conversation with Time magazine's Matt Cooper that included a discussion of the CIA job held by Plame."

Unless this report and others like it, extending back to the pre-investigation phase before Special Counsel Fitzgerald entered the scene, are thoroughly erroneous, it staggers logic and reason to exonerate Rove from culpability in this ongoing shabby affair.  

The only way that Rove could be seemingly exonerated was under a trouble shooter set of facts where he was attempting to coax media operatives not to become involved in the effort to expose CIA operative Valerie Plame.  

We know about Rove as a "take no prisoners" political partisan along with the reported anger in Cheney-Bush Administration circles over the activities of Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, in refuting a claim the Administration was pushing that Saddam Hussein had sought Uranium-enriching yellow cake from Niger to enhance his nuclear weapons capability.

The gut instinct,therefore, of any seasoned investigator would be to believe that Rove was involved in a political operation with the blessings of Dick Cheney, a vigilant hawk on the subject of Saddam Hussein and invading Iraq.

The question must also be asked as to whether the earlier reporting concerning Rove seeking mainly in vain for someone in the media to out Plame as a CIA operative was erroneous and irresponsible.  

This would also be an apparent walk down a misleading road since Robert Novak, the blindly partisan right wing media stalwart, took the bait that more ethically responsible reporters had refused.

Novak has paid no price for his unscrupulous and thoroughly unjustifiable act.  His pathetic excuse was that he had no idea that Plame was a covert operations officer for the CIA.  Novak first began covering Washington politics in the fifties, way back in the period when Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and Lyndon Baines Johnson Senate Majority Leader.  

Would this seasoned a professional have been unaware of the dangerous consequences of making public the name of a CIA operative?

It was, ironically enough, the father of the current White House occupant, George Herbert Walker Bush, who, speaking from the perspective of a former Central Intelligence Agency Director, delivered a stinging indictment against individuals who make public the identities of individuals serving in the CIA.  

The same kind of language used by Novak to justify his dastardly deed of breaking Valerie Plame's name to the world was used this week in connection with Rove being absolved of wrongdoing in Fitzgerald's investigation.  

It was said that Rove did not know that Plame was a CIA operative of officer's rank.  One thing we do know, that Joseph Wilson was not taking his wife to Georgetown cocktail parties and introducing her as "my wife Valerie, who works for the CIA."

Covert is covert and the very timing and circumstance of outing Joseph Wilson's wife in the manner that it occurred dovetailed with a political act of reprisal as potentially dangerous as it was irresponsible, scurrilous, and petty.  It appears to bear the modus operandi of undercover political operative Karl Rove.

A fascinating question arising from this case is whether Rove is taking a strategic page from the playbook of his hero, President Richard M. Nixon.  

When Nixon and his Administration was threatened with a strong backlash from the Watergate scandal he, along with White House operatives H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichmann, sought to pin the blame for all of the wrongdoing on then White House Counsel John Dean, who immediately saw what was afoot and refused to be used as a scapegoat.  

Could it be that Cheney's former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is fall guy designate this time around?  He is currently fighting charges that he lied to investigators and a grand jury about his knowledge of Valerie Plame.

Lying is one thing but what about being a catalyst and active participant in leaking the identity about someone involved in covert activities with the CIA?  

What about doing this as a ruthless act of political vengeance because her husband told the truth?  Has George W. Bush, who claims to commune with God, along with his religious right colleagues and supporters, ever read or heard about the Biblical maxim of "The truth shall set you free"?