[Mb-civic] Classic Rove - a MUST READ - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Classic Rove

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, July 13, 2005; Page A21

Now Karl Rove has become "fair game."

That was the term that the president's consigliere applied to Valerie 
Plame, according to Newsweek, in a conversation with MSNBC's Chris 
Matthews immediately after the publication of Robert D. Novak's column 
that identified Plame as a CIA operative. And, of course, Plame was fair 
game: Her identity was a tool to discredit, however obliquely, the 
report from her husband, Joe Wilson, that the administration's claim 
that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger was 
a bunch of hooey.

<>Rove's lawyer now admits that, in attempting to warn Time's Matt 
Cooper off the Wilson story, Rove mentioned Wilson's wife, though not by 
name. Attention is now focused on whether this violated the law that 
forbids revealing the identity of our undercover intelligence agents. 
But it's also worth pondering the quintessential Rovishness of his 
conversation with Cooper, as reported in Newsweek. Bringing up Plame, 
after all, did nothing to discredit Wilson's central findings. It was a 
distraction, an ad hominem attack. Wilson had undermined the 
administration's tenuous case for its war. To Rove, that made Plame fair 
game.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/12/AR2005071201367.html?nav=hcmodule 

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