Blinded By The Foam

The smell of blood, the smell of blood ...

Rove has now resigned his policy-making post and is focusing primarily on politics. Given Rove’s public intentions to make national security the focus of the 2006 elections, the White House should reveal whether Rove will be doing his political job while holding a security clearance. -- John Podesta, Think Progress

The excuse for this suggestion, of course, is that Rove "mishandled classified information" in the Plame Game. Podesta, like so many on the Left is simply refusing to turn on that little light bulb that floats over their heads. (Concern about global warming?)

For the Bush-bashers to play the Plame Game to win, they have to take it to the Prez, and yes indeed, they're all the more gleeful the more they can point at Bush as the instigator of the nefarious Niger leak.

But if Rove leaked the truth to counter Joe Wilson's lying spree, and did it at the direction of the Prez, where's the mishandling? The action (if true) would have been a completely legit use of classified info.

Coincidentally, as all this is clogging the blogs, Hugh interviewed Christopher Hitchens on the matter. For those of you who missed it, it was one of the best summaries of why Wilson had to be countered (complete transcript at RadioBlogger):

I mean, in case your listeners don't all know this, and what I've established beyond any doubt, is that a man named Wissam Zawahie, Saddam Hussein's chief diplomat for nuclear matters, he'd been Iraq's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, he'd been its delegate to non-proliferation conferences at the U.N., senior point man on nukes, went, on February 9, 1999, to Niger. Now I'm sorry. I cannot be brought to believe that he went there to discuss the price of goats or ground nuts. Niger and its president testified, was reported as testifying to, I think, the 9/11 Commission. No one ever comes here, save for, I think, yellowcake uranium. That's all we've got. Now Wilson's book, ridiculous book, called The Politics Of Truth, does not mention the name Wissam Zawahie in this connection. He says he knows the man from Baghdad, but that's in another connection entirely. He appears to have never understood that this had happened. So the value of his mission, as a means of ruling out an Iraq connection to Niger, is not even nil. It's less than nil. A positive threat to national security. It's a man who didn't even try to find if there was a threat coming up, and who missed something very conspicuous, and who has been, I have to...can't mince words, simply lying his head off about it ever since.

HH: Well this is why I welcome a trial, Christopher Hitchens, because he...

CH: Yes, absolutely.

HH: He will be in the dock, and he be obliged to answer these questions, don't you think?

CH: Let's bring it on. He lied about whether his wife, who works for the CIA, nominated him for the trip, which he did, on the grounds that he was, of all things, friendly with the Niger minister of mines, who had been in the 80's the supplier of Saddam Hussein's uranium. So they send a friend who has no curiosity, who doesn't discover that Saddam's point man on nukes has come calling a few months before, in fact. So I mean, it's astonishing, and I don't think, even though he's been so far hugely overpraised in the media, I don't think that his reputation can last very much longer. I think he's through.

The Left's Bush-hatred and Roveanoia continue to drive them to the cliff. They can't see through all the foam in their mouths, so they miss where the path is leading, and they charge on to the point where the little lightbulb finally goes on, and they say in chorus, "Uh-oh!"

Cake image: Bongo News
Tags: Rove, Bush, Wilson, Plame, Niger, Yellowcake, Hitchens, Hewitt