Rising Hegemon
But it's good stuff, such as this from Mark Kleiman:
Notice how quickly the Republicans have moved to define deviancy down: now it's perfectly OK for Rove to have wrecked a CIA officer's career, exposed her assets to God-knows-what horrible treatment, and deceived his colleagues and the public for two years about his involvement in revealing Plame's identity, as long as he managed to skirt around actually violating the law in any way that can be proven in court.
A lot of people sure are talking out of their asses as to whether Rove broke the law or not. I don't know what Fitzgerald has, but frankly, what we do know about Rove's conversation with Matt Cooper leads me to believe that he is within a hair's breath of being charged with violating the act. He may not have, but Fitzgerald has more, much more, than just this conversation. It's apparent that Novakula sang like a canary, and that his spin about sloppily using the word "operative" is in fact just spin and untrue. Novak must have identified his two sources, and one of them was probably Rove (who'd leaked to him plenty of times before) and one other (Scooter Libby?).
What we know from Cooper's email is that Rove said that "Joe Wilson's wife" worked for the CIA in weapons of mass destruction.
Plame, did in fact work as a NOC on WMD issues; the argument about not specifically identifying her because he called her "Joe Wilson's wife" is about as lame an argument for "not naming" a person specifically that one can think of, next to spelling their name slightly wrong. It is an argument where if all other elements are met, I would not want to argue as Rove's lawyer. In short, its a stupid syntax argument, that makes no real-world difference, and which most jurors hate.
But even if he did not commit a crime, he did engage in an unbelievably low piece of political vileness, one which demands termination.
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