I guess it will be a good thing if Rove gets the shaft for blowing a CIA agent’s cover for political reasons. Even better if he goes to jail (wildly unlikely). But it seems weird to me that after letting so many things pass — the bogus links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the bogus WMD, BS from Halliburton, the Downing Street Memo, all that stuff, going way back to 2000 when Jeb Bush disenfranchised thousands of black voters and gave the election to Dubya…
After all that, why did this Rove thing provoke the media to reach down and find a pair? They’ve been giving Bush a free ride for five years of fraud and abuse, but now suddenly, too late to do anything about it, after the reelection, they are outraged?
Don’t really get it.
I’m guessing the media are feeling more personally involved on this one – it’s not just about the bad stuff the administration is doing, but how the adminstration is using the media to accomplish the bad stuff. I know they were manipulated on the WMD, but that seems at a different level than being manipulated to break a law (The Intelligence Identities Protection Act).
But just a guess. I hope the pair-awareness continues.
Were they manipulated though? I mean, fine, somebody told them about this agent. But then they went and published it. I know it’s a natural human trait to do things like that, all those “don’t look in this one room” stories and such, but still, they did make a choice to write stories exposing this woman’s identity. Mind, I’m not saying they weren’t manipulated as such either, I’m just not seeing it right off. I personally wonder if the media doesn’t feel protected on this one. You have a criminal investigation going on, after all. But nobody really investigated, to my knowledge, the voter fraud, the WMD lies, etc. So the media would have been on its own there. Whereas here, they get to look like they’re doing something big, but still have deniability. “Oh no, *we* didn’t come up with those questions, we were just asking about this criminal investigation!” Or maybe I’ve been up too long and I ain’t making any sense. That perhaps seems more likely.
I’m inclined to think that it’s the specifics of the situation. With WMD’s there’s no evidence to say that they definitely knew no WMD’s existed. One can still plausibly argue that the administration had bad information available. Similarly, it’s not as if there’s a piece of paper giving the plan for disenfranchising black voters. As for the Downing Street Memo… I don’t know. I’m guessing that part of the problem might be that it’s a British perspective on what the US wants as opposed to a US memo covering the same issues i.e. you can always try to argue that UK officials were misinterpreting the US.
By contrast, it’s beyond doubt that Rove had some contact with reporters and that he referred to the fact that Plame’s wife was in the CIA.