[Mb-civic] Rove Isn't the Real Outrage - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Rove Isn't the Real Outrage

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, July 14, 2005; Page A25

If I were a nicer person, I would have some sympathy for Karl Rove. 
After all, in a town where many of the people, if they're honest about 
their job titles, would put down "character assassin," Rove merely tried 
to impugn the bona fides of a Bush administration critic, the former 
diplomat Joseph Wilson IV. This is what Rove is supposed to do and what 
he has done for so long. It was only last month, after all, that Rove 
impugned the sanity and patriotism of all liberals by saying that the 
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 produced in them the desire to "offer 
therapy and understanding for our attackers." This was to political 
rhetoric what the spitball is to pitching.

So I am not predisposed to feel Rove's pain, assuming he has any feeling 
at all. But I do have to concede that he probably did not set out to 
expose a CIA operative, the by-now overexposed Valerie Wilson (nee 
Plame), a specialist in weapons of mass destruction. It was Plame, 
administration sources told columnist Robert D. Novak and others, who 
chose her husband to go to Africa to see if Saddam Hussein's Iraq had 
tried to buy uranium in Niger. He went and later said that he found 
nothing, but George W. Bush said otherwise in his 2003 State of the 
Union address. It was supposed to be additional evidence that Iraq had, 
in the memorable word uttered by Vice President Cheney, "reconstituted" 
its nuclear weapons program. That, of course, is the real smoking gun in 
this matter -- the crime, if there is one at all, in what should now be 
called Karlgate. (It encompasses so much -- the outing of Plame, the 
jailing of reporter Judith Miller, the moral collapse of the press, the 
preening of Wilson -- that it sorely needs a moniker.) The inspired 
exaggeration of the case against Iraq, the hype about weapons of mass 
destruction and al Qaeda's links to Hussein, makes everything else pale 
in comparison. It was to protect those lies, those exaggerations, that 
incredible train wreck of incompetence, ideologically induced optimism 
and, of course, contempt for the quaint working of the democratic 
process, that everything else stems from. Wilson was both armed and 
dangerous. He claimed the truth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071301989.html?nav=hcmodule

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