The righteous energy of a good press gaggle meltdown still buzzing in the ears of the left blogosphere, today seemed to be less about indignation and more the jocular dismissiveness of someone who had gotten laid the night before--"Whassamatta, didn't the rest of youse see the Bush media machine caught like a deer in the headlights, getting flayed like a sturgeon on CSpan?" Bull Moose gets a line in that sets the tone: "Short of a criminal indictment, Rove will remain in
place. For Bush to get rid of Rove would be like Charlie McCarthy
firing Edgar Bergen."
After Rove's lawyer tried to work the refs before Cooper's testimony tomorrow, bloggers like Digby went into rare fettle:
Gosh, is it ever too bad that whoever talked to Bob Novak didn't make it just as clear in their conversation (after they were done answering questions about welfare reform or maybe the latest news on stem cell research, of course) that they were only giving him this information to keep him from "going out on a limb."
Old Bob must be getting senile because he went right out and wrote a whole damned column about it, mentioning senior white house officials and everything. Man I'll bet whoever spoke to Bob is in the doghouse now, huh?
Here they were just trying to make sure the old duffer didn't embarrass himself by writing any supportive columns about Wilson (which you know he was planning to do) and look what happened. Now everybody thinks just because they had a few casual conversations on the run with a couple of reporters (only to to warn them off, of course) that this was a calculated effort to get the story out. What are the odds that two such different reporters would both get the story wrong in essentially the same way? Talk about bad luck. Do they all have egg on their faces or what?
The primary source material of the data well-throttled, Billmon looks over the dimunition meme on the right and writes Rove's political obituary by relying on the activist judiciary and rogue prosecutors of the federal system, long geared to stick it to The Man on behalf of the little guy (cough):
The Rovians, in other words, may be fghting the last war -- relying on the propaganda weapons that worked so well in a political campaign to try to defeat an opponent who doesn't have to worry about winning 270 electoral votes. You can defend yourself against an indictment or you can cop a plea. The one thing you can't do is spin it away.
Awhile back I wrote that truth no longer stands much of a chance in the political arena -- not when it's pitted against the best modern propaganda machine that money can buy. But the question now is whether the truth, armed with subpoena power and the federal rules of evidence, can still prevail in a court of law. By the time this particular legal battle is over, we may know the answer.
Taking on the recently repugnant Hindrocket at Powerline is The Light of Reason, a blog title that just oozes humility, but an analysis that justifiably embarrasses Powerline's daft reasoning.
More to the whodunit end of the story, TalkLeft tries to put together the puzzle pieces on who the "two senior administration officials" have to be: Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. They also make the interesting note about subpoeaned phone records from Air Force One during a 2003 trip to Nigeria. Why might this be important? For starters, it's a tiny list of people who have the ability to place calls from or to Air Force One. Secondly, the group that went to Nigeria included Colin Powell, who had with him a State Department brief that contained information about Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson's wife who worked at the CIA. Were Libby and Rove on that plane? Would it be an interesting coincidence that they passed along this information on a flight where the exact topic was discussed?
--TJ
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