red rover

The Rove thing is, thankfully, still in the news. Here are a few highlights, in case you haven’t already seen them.

From Frank Rich’s column, “Follow the Uranium“:

These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock’s parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops.” Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam’s supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife’s outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh’s theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in “Psycho.”

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit – the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes – is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

From Paul Krugman:

What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we’re not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we’re living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.

See also Refuting the Talking Points at the Left Coaster and Civil vs. Criminal Contempt at Talk Left.

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2 Comments

  1. CNN
    Posted July 19, 2005 at 1:50 am | Permalink

    http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/18/how.dumb/

  2. mark
    Posted July 19, 2005 at 8:44 pm | Permalink

    I didn’t post the link yesterday, but apparenlty the President has also raised the bar with regard to what he’ll consider a fireable offense. First, when the whole story broke, he said that he’d fire the person responsible for the leak. Now, however, he’s saying that he’ll fire the person only if it becomes clear that a “criminal” offense has taken place… Scumy

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