The Left's Obsession with Karl Rove

Reviewing the left-wing websites and blogs about the so-called "outing" of Valery Plame by the guy they may hate even more than George W. Bush—Karl Rove—one can only come to the conclusion that the Angry Left is living in some kind of parallel universe. Many of these Angry Leftists (AL) are convinced that Rove illegally "outed" Valerie Plame as a NOC (non-official cover) during a phone conversation with columnist Robert Novak.

However, many of the facts don't actually fit the "crime". First, for a crime to have been committed, the agent must be actively working to keep their affiliation secret. Second, the person 'leaking' the information must knowingly do so knowing that the person in question is undercover.

In the Plame case, she was openly working at CIA headquarters, her friends and neighbors knew she worked there, and, reports suggest that a State Department memo had circulated through Airforce One, including the press corps, as well as in other places in Washington. That she was a NOC CIA operative is not in dispute, but the fact that she was hardly concealing her relationship to the CIA, and the apparent fact that most of the Washington press corps knew about it seems to have been conveniently forgotten by the MSM.

And speaking of the MSM, a consortium of 36 major MSM outlets (all the mainstream media, including NYT, WP, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc.) filed an amicas brief (scroll down) with the court in the case of the two reporters ordered to divulge their sources or go to jail, arguing that the two reporters should not be required to divulge sources since no crime was committed. How convenient that they now seem to believe otherwise.

Despite the obvious "no there there" to this matter, the left is all a tingle, thinking that Bush will even be impeached over this! I will admit that with a special prosecutor involved, anything could happen, but based on what I know about this case, I don't even foresee an admonition coming down. No crime was committed, and no breach of trust was committed, and the facts will continue to support this contention.


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