My first comment on the Karl Rove business in a while

And probably my last for another while, too. I'll note at the top that I'm not going to consider the option that, as one person suggested, Karl Rove should be praised because outing a CIA agent is a good thing. The legitimacy of having an intelligence service and the differences among intelligence gathering, covert intelligence gathering (i.e., spying), and covert action (e.g., engineering a coup) is a discussion for another day. What I'm concerned with here are the political considerations involved.

Those start with the fact that Matthew Cooper of "Time," having decided that it was okay to talk, has decided to go all the way: He has written an article about what he told the grand jury when he testified last week. The key part is that Cooper says, according to Reuters for Sunday, that Rove was the one who put him onto Valerie Plame as someone who

worked at the "agency," or CIA, on weapons of mass destruction issues, and ended the call by saying "I've already said too much." ...

"So did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'WMD'? Yes," Cooper wrote in Time's current edition.

Personally, I've not given much attention to the arguments over whether or not a crime was committed precisely because it gets into technical details of what constitutes "knowing" in a legal sense - did Rove "knowingly" leak Plame's identity, "knowing" she was covert and please don't say "of course he did," you don't know that for a fact; rather, it's something you want to be true but that doesn't mean it is. I'll let others argue the legalities for the time being, except to note the "defense" that he didn't say her name, that referring to "Joseph Wilson's wife" was not identifying her, is so laughably absurd that even Rove's lawyer dismissed it.

I leave the issue of criminality aside because I regard the question, while certainly worthy of investigation (and we would not be at this point otherwise), as not relevant to the broader, the real, issue: Someone in the Bush administration - apparently but not necessarily Rove and certainly not only Rove (Novak referred to two senior officials in the column that started all this) - blew the cover of a CIA agent, something under which other circumstances they would have considered at least borderline treason, for the purpose of punishing and damaging someone who had embarrassed them. (Have we forgotten that the day after Wilson's New York Times op-ed appeared the White House had to admit the infamous "16 words" should not have been in the State of the Union address?)

Even if not technically illegal, that behavior is truly scummy, a clear abuse of power, and because of that disturbing, frightening, and revealing. Revealing not only of their style and their ethics, but also of their methods. It's almost been fun (in the Molly Ivins sense of the word) watching the spin machine rev up, spewing out bits and pieces of arguments, seeing what sticks. Raw Story got hold of a copy of the GOPper talking points on Rove and it's been a treat seeing them emerge from the mouths and keyboards of various reactionaries and their apologists who present them with straight faces and sober expressions as their own original thoughts. Initially, it's all scattershot, all the points get a workout, even the truly lame ones, but over time it gets focused down to the few that seem to have the biggest effect.

The main methods are nitpicking and distraction: Was she technically "covert" and did he "name" her are two obvious examples of the former. The latter is equally easy to see: The talking points (and much of the discussion using them) spend much more energy on attacking Joseph Wilson than on defending Karl Rove. Someone - I don't recall who just now - called it the "Look over there! TITS!" defense. The attacks range from the clever to the bogus to the pathetic, but the point isn't their quality or accuracy - it's to try to make the conversation about something, anything, else.

But of course, this is not about Joe Wilson or Valerie Plame. They are not the issue here. Karl Rove is. Joe Wilson could be the worst lying bastard in all of humanity who got a cushy junket through nepotism and the issue would still be what Karl Rove did. Anyone who is serious about inflicting political damage on the White House in this needs to keep that in mind.

The final tactic is simply stalling: The Washington Post said last week that

[t]he emerging GOP strategy ... is to try to undermine those Democrats calling for Rove's ouster, play down Rove's role and wait for President Bush's forthcoming Supreme Court selection to drown out the controversy....

Facing an "opposition" party that seems incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, that just might work.