They’ve got to be kidding: Last Sunday, George Stephanapolous dropped a bombshell on his ABC show when he said that a source told him that both the President and Vice President were aware of the efforts of their flying monkeys – including Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and others – to smear ambassador Joe Wilson that led to the leaking the secret identity of his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame. Now we get this malarkey from the spin room at the White House:
Senior aide Karl Rove denied to President Bush that he engaged in an effort to disclose the identity of a covert CIA operative to discredit her husband’s criticism of Iraq policy, say people familiar with Rove’s statements in a criminal investigation…
Beginning two years ago, the White House flatly denied that Rove had been involved in unlawfully leaking the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
The White House denials collapsed in July amid the disclosure of Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper’s conversations in July 2003 about Wilson’s wife with Rove and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
Bush asked Rove in the fall of 2003 to assure him he was not involved in an effort to divulge Plame’s identity and punish Wilson, and the longtime confidant assured the president so, people familiar with Rove’s account say…
Bush’s discussion with Rove did not get into specifics concerning Rove’s conversations in July 2003 with syndicated columnist Robert Novak and Cooper, who wrote stories identifying Plame, the people familiar with Rove’s account said.
Maybe the Unsmart Americans who comprise Bush’s base will buy this load of crap but count us out! What did the president know – and when did he know it?
we can make all of the snarky comments about this we like — fact is he stole an election in 2000 and the whole world knows it. He is still our pResident though, isn’t he.
He stole another “accountability moment” in 2004 — exit polls cannot possibly be wrong only in communities where chimpy “won” and votes were tabulated with vote-flipping software.
He’s still our pResident, isn’t he.
He started a war of conquest based on conquest, didn’t he.
You get my point — he has a “get out of jail free card” in the SCOTUS and you want to make snarky comments about the his statements about plame?
I always mentally compare an incident that happens in the Bush administration with how that incident would have played out if it had occurred in the Clinton administration. Can you just imagine if someone in Bill Clinton’s administration had “outed” an undercover CIA agent who was focused on WMDs??? There would have been umpteen special prosecutors named, squads of FBI agents would have been mobilized and the outcry from Republicans in Congress would have been deafening. There is such a disparity of treatment between the two administrations, that it is appalling!