Taking the Plame
Q: Does the President continue to have confidence in Mr. Rove?
MR. McCLELLAN: Again, these are all questions coming up in the context of an ongoing criminal investigation. And you've heard my response on this.
Q: So you're not going to respond as to whether or not the President has confidence in his Deputy Chief of Staff?
MR. McCLELLAN: Carl, you're asking this question in the context of an ongoing investigation. And I would not read anything into it other than I'm simply not going to comment on an ongoing --
from 7/11 White House press conference
Some things speak for themselves.
Oh heck, I have to say that Mr. Rove's comment about liberals seeking indictments and/or therapy post 9/11 now has a double meaning. I'd assumed he was referring to indictments of Al Qaeda, not himself. What are the chances that the president will pardon Karl Rove? How do you criticize anonymous unconfirmed sources when you've been one yourself? I imagine the White House misses having Jeff Gannon to call on in these press conferences.
link to 1982 law in question
link to John Dean article on the laws that were broken
Labels: valerie plame karl rove
posted by Chancelucky @ 4:49 PM
4 Comments:
I wish someone would out or plame Karlsputin Rove.
You might object hither & yon that my acid remarks about Mr. Rove are ad hominem -- but that would incorrectly assume he was hominem rather than lizardem.
I'm going to sleep to dream of frogmarching.
Methinks this investigation has no teeth. Liberals aren't very good at summoning moral outrage.
Christopher,
thanks for dropping by. I can think of two US investigations that were "liberal", one was Watergate where the president actually wound up resigning (so there was moral outrage there). The second was Iran-Contra, where the independent prosecutor's report certainly said that crimes had been committed and the president was at best benignly negligent and out of the loop. (btw, Iran-Contra is the root of our problems w/ Iraq in some ways since Saddam was our ally until the US essentially double-crossed him in the deal) One unfortunate part of the ending was the very non-liberal president George Bush senior wound up pardoning several of the principals in Iran-Contra, some of them now work for the younger Bush in various capacities. But that wasn't a case of a lack of moral outrage among the American left, it was Republican presidents pardoning other Republicans.
The one where maybe there wasn't enough moral outrage was the follow up to the Contra-Drug scandal which was a close relative to Iran-Contra.
On the right, I can think of 2 investigations. There was the McCarthy HUAC red scare in the 1950's which mostly ran out of gas when Roy Cohn decided to use government resources to get his boyfriend an exemption from the draft and when Joe McCarthy went after someone who clearly had no involvement in Communist causes, the "have you no shame" thing. (so moral outrage from the left played some role in stopping McCarthy/Cohn)
The second was the Clinton Impeachment. No members of the administration were successfully prosecuted for anything that I know of. There was a conviction in the Macdougall case, but he wasn't part of the administration. So whatever moral outrage the republicans summoned didn't have many concrete results, though Bob Livingston and Newt Gingrich both found themselves out of power after the impeachment played out.
I imagine you have some historical examples of your own. Hope you take the time to share them here.
chancelucky .. This could be the smoking flamethrower! I'm posting it around on blogs in hopes of keeping this book from getting soap-bubble-popped.
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friends of pogblog,
I'm posting this to as many blogs with more blognads than me as I can so the info can maybe be saved from being disappeared.
This Jeremy Greenstock info below is hiroshimic to the reigning hypocrisies if someone will bravely do a Pentagon Papers on rescuing it and get the unredacted copy into the blogbrain and to the few remaining uncowed columnists. Please pursue with your greater blognads, er, ah, resources. pogblog
http://pogblog.myblogsite.com
pogblog@yahoo.com
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1530311,00.html
"Publication of The Costs of War by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the 2003 war and the Prime Minister's special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath, has been halted. In an extract seen by The Observer, Greenstock describes the American decision to go to war as 'politically illegitimate' and says that UN negotiations 'never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration'. Although he admits that 'honourable decisions' were made to remove the threat of Saddam, the opportunities of the post-conflict period were 'dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution'. . . . Greenstock is also thought to be scathing about Bremer and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice." from Sunday July 17 Observer/Bright & Beaumont. (emphases mine). 7.18.05 1:10:22 am
If the url link doesn't work, copy & paste this: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/
0,6903,1530311,00.html
or yahoo search for Guardian, then do Observer for July 17 & do site search for Greenstock.
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