Did Rove out Valerie Plame intentionally. Newsweek reports that last year, Rove stated to CNN, "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Currently, his lawyer is equivocating, saying that since he didn’t say her name, it doesn’t count. What a pile of shinola. If I tell you to go spit on Laura Bush’s husband and you spit on George W. Bush, then I can’t use the excuse that I didn’t say his name.
The thing is, according to The Progress Report, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said it was a "ridiculous suggestion" that Rove was "involved in leaking classified information." Clearly, it was NOT ridiculous.
WE have to ask, when Bush promoted Rove to deputy chief of staff, did Bush know that Rove had made the calls and told the reporters about Joe Wilson’s wife (so what that he didn’t use her name. It wasn’t necessary.) There are two possibilities. First, Bush knew, in which case, he has been covering up for Rove and failed the nation in allowing Rove to stay in office. The alternative consideration is that Rove denied his guilt. This makes him a liar. Even if he uses his equivocative evasions to explain his lie, it is clear that by reasonable standards, he lied to the president. Since it is likely that the fanatic Bush loyalists will all be willing to hop on their swords to protect the president, we can assume that the story will be that Rove didn’t tell Bush. That means that Rove will have to confess that he lied to the president. We may never know if Bush and others knew.
But there may be a simple solution. Have Karl Rove take a lie detector test. Under the law, he’s not required to do so, but this is not about little technicalities. This is about the honesty and credibility of the chief advisor to the president. If Karl Rove is as innocent as he says he is, he shouldn’t have a problem submitting to a polygraph test. And, since George W. Bush is so confident that his first advisor is honest, he shouldn’t object to Rove undergoing the exam.
Let’s ask some simple questions.
Did you call the reporters with the intention of outing Valerie Plame? If he is innocent, the answer should be no.
If the answer is no, then he should be willing to answer this question: If you did not intend to “out” Valerie Plame, what was your intention?
While we have him hooked up to the polygraph, it would be nice to ask these questions: Did President Bush know you were making the calls?
Did President Bush encourage you to make the calls.
Who else knew you were going to make the calls.
Who else has known that you made the calls?
The first announcement of the Time’s Cooper e-mail was almost two weeks ago. Did President Bush discuss this with you at that time? If Bush did discuss it then, then he should have said or done something then. There’s no excuse for silence any more on this. Loyalty for an ally becomes treachery when the facts are clear that the ally betrayed the nation.
This is such a nice simple way to clear up this whole mess. Answers to these basic questions could clear Bush and Cheney out of the Whitehouse and could easily get some of the top right wingers out of the senate.
There’s one hitch—the right wing echo chamber. Right wing billionaires and extremists have invested billions of dollars into the most powerful political weapon ever developed and they are using it full blast to neutralize the real story that Rove is a despicable traitor who sold out an undercover agent for the sake of petty revenge, and that Bush was probably in on it. Instead, they are using distraction techniques, counterattacking Joe Wilson, suggesting poor Karl Rove was just trying to talk a reporter out of covering Wilson’s bad information about the yellowcake uranium from Niger.
On Fox, they emphasize that at Newsweek only one reporter mentioned Rove. So what? There were reporters at other publications. They parrot the pathetic talking point that Rove never mentioned Valerie Plame’s name. So what? Rove referred to Joe Wilson’s wife. Same thing.
I love it. The more they evade and delay, the longer they hold off facing this head-on, the worse they look. Maybe they can’t face it head on because it’s such a can of worms, the whole administration is involved. Can you say “President Frist?”
The sad thing is, the USA doesn’t win, the Democrats don’t win. These white collar thugs have penetrated so deeply into all levels of government, it’s like hosing down a pile of sewage. You might get the scum and garbage off the top. But that just exposes more of the same vile filth that’s beneath the surface.
The fact is, we on the left have a toehold here, an opportunity to start the Herculean task of shifting the river to clean out the king’s stables. We have to stay on this issue as aggressively as possible. We have to stay on message. We have to keep asking tough questions. We have to get the democrats in the house and senate to stand united, to not allow the right wing echo chamber to weaken or distract from the message. We have to support the usually pathetic mainstream media, since it appears they are finding some dregs of courage and integrity. Maybe once they remember what it feels like to do their jobs, they’ll start doing more of them.
Rove is a traitor. He belongs in jail and so do the people who protect him. He must have his security clearance taken away from him immediately and he must be thrown out of the Whitehouse. Anything less is treachery and failure to follow the responsibilities of due diligence any responsible public officer must be held to.
Authors Bio:
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.
To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.