[Mb-civic] Rove & Novak

[Linda Hassler]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/071505Y.shtml

Karl Rove's America
      By Paul Krugman
      The New York Times

      Friday 15 July 2005

      John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a  
medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American  
Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about  
modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to  
his prison cell.

      What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that  
we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans  
sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're  
living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as  
nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to  
what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will  
follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would  
have pleased the Comintern.

      I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during  
the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things  
about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply  
false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake -  
that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent  
Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who  
had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal  
responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to  
praise Mr. Bush's proposals.

      But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American  
politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.

      Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national  
unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was  
watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while  
ground zero was still smoldering.

      Mr. Rove has been much criticized for saying that liberals  
responded to the attack by wanting to offer the terrorists therapy -  
but what he said about conservatives, that they "saw the savagery of  
9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war," is equally false. What many  
of them actually saw was a domestic political opportunity - and none  
more so than Mr. Rove.

      A less insightful political strategist might have hesitated right  
after 9/11 before using it to cast the Democrats as weak on national  
security. After all, there were no facts to support that accusation.

      But Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one  
thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to  
obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after  
columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they  
castigated the CIA for understating the threat posed by Saddam's  
W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the CIA for exaggerating the very  
same threat.

      Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American  
politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who  
contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible,  
to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a  
lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be  
something wrong with the guy.

      And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear  
tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove  
leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the CIA I don't know  
whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question  
that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat  
had done that, Republicans would call it treason.

      But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive  
demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another,  
prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their  
allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the  
diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr.  
Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later  
identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily  
refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're  
now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.

      Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr.  
Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a  
disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President  
Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no  
attempt to find out if he was the leaker.

      Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our  
political system get to this point?

 FEAR
------------------------------------------------------------------------

      Go to Original

      It's Clear the Leakers Knew What They Were Doing
      By Josh Marshall
      The Hill

      Friday 15 July 2005

      Strip away all the stress and fury on both sides of the aisle this  
week and you'll find one key question at the heart of both the legal  
and political storm surrounding the president's top political adviser.

      That is, did Karl Rove and other top administration officials, for  
whatever reason, knowingly reveal the identity of a covert CIA agent or  
were they unaware of her covert status? As prosecutor Patrick  
Fitzgerald would no doubt tell us if he were at liberty to speak,  
divining, let alone proving, knowledge and intent in such a case is a  
very tricky business. But there's a good bit of circumstantial evidence  
pointing to the conclusion that Rove and others knew exactly what they  
were doing.

      Allow me to explain.

      The best evidence for the "they knew" version of events has always  
been the column that started it all - Robert Novak's July 14 column in  
which he named Valerie Plame as "an agency operative on weapons of mass  
destruction."

      In intelligence jargon, "operative" has a very specific meaning.  
It means a covert or clandestine officer. Novak's been a journalist for  
50 years. So clearly he used that term because he knew Plame was  
covert. And if he knew, the logical assumption is that he knew because  
his sources - "two senior administration officials" - told him.

      That much seemed clear. But not long after the Plame case stormed  
onto the front pages almost two years ago, Novak changed his story. He  
said that he made a mistake when he used the word "operative." He  
didn't know she was covert, and neither did his sources.

      Here's what he told Tim Russert in October 2003:

      "The one thing I regret I wrote, I used the word 'operative,' and  
I think Mr. [David] Broder ['Meet the Press' panelist] will agree that  
I use the word too much. I use it about hat politicians. I use it about  
people on the Hill. And if somebody did a Nexis search of my columns,  
they'd find an overuse of 'operative.' I did not mean it. I don't know  
what she did. But the indication given to me by this senior official  
and another senior official I checked with was not that she was deep  
undercover."

      Is that really true? Was it just Novak's laziness or sloppiness  
that started this whole train running down the tracks? Quite a lot  
depends on the answer.

      There's a good deal of circumstantial evidence - thus far largely  
ignored - that points strongly to the conclusion that Novak is being  
much less than honest.

      First, consider timing. What Novak told Russert was not only after  
the story had caught fire in the media but, probably even more  
important, after it had spawned a Justice Department criminal  
investigation.

      What about what he said earlier? It turns out we have some good  
evidence for that.

      The first newspaper article written about Novak's role in exposing  
a covert agent was a July 22, 2003, Newsday article by Timothy Phelps  
and Newt Royce. That's about a week after Novak's column ran and well  
before the story caught fire in Washington. The article focuses  
squarely on the controversy over and damage caused by the exposure of  
covert agent. Phelps and Royce interviewed Novak for the column, too.  
And he said nothing about any misunderstanding about Plame's status.

      What he told them was this: "I didn't dig it out. It was given to  
me. They thought it was significant. They gave me the name and I used  
it."

      If Novak then thought he or his sources didn't know Plame was  
covert, he didn't think to mention it. And it was the whole point of  
the article he was being interviewed for.

      Then there's another clue. Novak's story has always relied on the  
belief that he committed a monumental act of sloppiness or carelessness  
- a claim hard to credit about a reporter who's been doing this as long  
as Novak.

      As I said above, "operative" has a very specific meaning in  
intelligence argot. So how does Novak usually use the word?

      Not long after Novak's appearance on Russert's show, I used the  
Nexis database to find all the examples I could in which Novak used the  
word "operative" in the context of intelligence work or the CIA. Not  
surprisingly, in every example I found he used the term "operative" to  
refer to clandestine CIA officers. And that makes sense, since the term  
has a specific meaning in the context and he's a veteran reporter.

      Novak wants us to believe that on this one occasion he lapsed into  
the colloquial meaning of the word and used it to mean no more than you  
might if you were referring to a Democratic or Republican "operative."  
With all due respect to Novak and his decades as a Washington reporter  
- indeed, precisely because of them - that's just not credible.

      There's no way to get inside someone else's mind. But all the  
available evidence points to the conclusion that Novak's claims on  
Russert and elsewhere are an after-the-fact attempt to get himself and  
his sources out of a very uncomfortable bind.

   
------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column  
appears in The Hill each week.
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