A Little More "Roveing"

My computer time has been limited this last week, but I have kept up with the hysterics surrounding the Karl Rove/Valerie Plame "scandal" which is blowing up in the faces of the Dems and the media. Since I had a few minutes this afternoon I thought I'd post an update.

Yesterday Chuckie Schumer, who never met a TV camera that he didn't want to have carnal relations with, and Joe Wilson, the thoroughly discredited former ambassador and husband of the alleged "victim" of the CIA outing, held a presser in which Wilson vowed that he would not rest until justice was done. The news reports today did not help their case.

Chief presidential adviser Karl Rove testified to a grand jury that he talked with two journalists before they divulged the identity of an undercover CIA officer but that he originally learned about the operative from the news media and not government sources, according to a person briefed on the testimony.

The person, who works in the legal profession and spoke only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, told The Associated Press that Rove testified last year that he remembers specifically being told by columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of a harsh Iraq war critic, worked for the CIA.

Rove testified that Novak originally called him the Tuesday before Plame's identity was revealed in July 2003 to discuss another story.

The conversation eventually turned to Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who was strongly criticizing the Bush administration's use of faulty intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, the person said.

Rove testified that Novak told him he planned to report in a weekend column that Plame had worked for the CIA, and the circumstances on how her husband traveled to Africa to check bogus claims that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Niger, according to the source.

Novak's column, citing two Bush administration officials, appeared six days later, touching off a political firestorm and leading to a federal criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's undercover identity. That probe has ensnared presidential aides and reporters in a two-year legal battle.

Rove told the grand jury that by the time Novak had called him, he believes he had similar information about Wilson's wife from another member of the news media but he could not recall which reporter had told him about it first, the person said.

Apparently, instead of Rove telling the reporters about Plame as alleged by the wacky left, it was the reporters telling Rove about her. Yesterday a bunch of MoveOn.dopes protested outside the White House (sorry I missed that, it would have been entertaining). Perhaps they should move a few blocks east and set up in front of the National Press Building, if they're really so terribly concerned about this dreadful abuse of an innocent CIA employee. (For a good description of the MoveOn protest, click here.)

The fact is, the Dems and the left are desperate to remove Rove from the White House for one reason and one reason only - he's a political genius who has handed the Dems their heads in the last three national elections. Getting rid of him may be their only hope for 2006, but alas, it's not going to happen. Rove's job is safe and no matter of lefty handwringing is going to change that.

Political Diary today addresses the real problem in the Plame case:

The Real Plame Scandal: Media Incest

With each revelation, the storyline that the Bush administration was shopping around Valerie Plame's identity to discredit her husband, the Iraq war opponent and former ambassador Joe Wilson, becomes less tenable and a new storyline takes shape: Ms. Plame's identity was common beltway knowledge, which (as in today's New York Times revelation) even Karl Rove heard about from gossiping pressies.

Of course, this dynamic was always possible and even likely, as is the seldom-mentioned corollary -- that the "source" New York Times reporter Judith Miller is protecting is herself. She may have been a spreader of gossip about Ms. Plame and not its recipient. Indeed, was there a leaker at all? Was it effectively Mr. Wilson himself? Had he and his wife made themselves so conspicuous on the Washington social circuit that their friends and fellow socialites in the press corps naturally and effortlessly connected his notorious Niger escapade to his wife's work at the CIA? That would be the same CIA, by the way, whose middle levels were then simultaneously leaking a deluge of innuendo to favored pressies aimed at blocking the administration policy of removing Saddam.

At the time of the alleged leak, let's recall, President Bush, Mr. Rove and the rest of the White House entourage were recent transplants to Washington, having arrived just two years earlier. What was common knowledge to permanent residents of Georgetown, Kalorama Circle, Bethesda and McLean would have been a mystery to them -- though not to the Judith Millers and Bob Novaks of this world.

Finally, I liked this quote, also on Political Diary but related to another issue. It's getting a little tiresome to turn on the news every day and find another lefty group claiming some sort of outrage or another and demanding apologies. Perhaps it's time they all grew up:

The ritual of taking offense itself is starting to become offensive. That grown men and women who aspire to be our leaders spend their days engaged in a microscopic examination of each other's statements in search of something to take umbrage at is hardly to their credit. Perhaps both parties might gain some credibility with the American people if they left aside the gasconade for matters of substance.