Karl Rove, Traitor?
All right, so my civility didn't make it through the 4th of July weekend.
But the news that
Karl Rove was probably the source of the leak that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent is huge. Now we know that the president's right-hand man told at least one reporter of the identity of an undercover CIA agent, very possibly breaking the law.
What, I wonder, would conservatives say had this episode happened in the Clinton White House?
Well, they probably would have said that the perpetrator was, um, a traitor; that it was typical of how Democrats don't love America; and they'd call for his firing, at the very least, and probably his prosecution.
Is turnabout fair play? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the White House deserves it, and Rove certainly does, what with his talk about how Democrats want to put terrorists in therapy.
On the other hand, the Democrats shouldn't hit below the belt just because some conservatives would. It'd be unfair to say that Rove's treason--because, yes, that really is what it is--says anything in general about this White House or the Republican Party.
But it does seem to me that it becomes very tricky for the White House to maintain in its employ a man who deliberately disclosed the covert identity of a CIA agent in order to discredit a political opponent who happened to be that agent's spouse.
The question is, Will the White House do the right thing and fire Rove?
And close on its heels: How could the president not have known that Rove was the leaker? After all, President Bush announced that he was calling for an internal review of the episode long ago, and called for the people involved to reveal themselves.... So hasn't Karl Rove, at least in theory, been disobeying the president for many months now?
