Rove Death Watch: the Scandal Expands

I just loved waking up to this Asia Times headline today:

Bush's 'brain' leaked: Did Bush know?

You can just imagine the graphics at FreakingNews (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, read this excellent overview of the Rove-Plame scandal at Salon.com).

The GOP noise machine continues to thrash about, lashing out at anything and anyone - particularly their accusers - in an effort to undermine the allegations against them, or at least create enough confusion to throw most semi-interested spectators off-track. As Billmon suggests:

I won't be too surprised if we wake up tomorrow to find Bill O'Reilly claiming that Karl Rove used to be an undercover CIA operative (a kind of fat, ugly version of Keifer Sutherland) until he was outed by Valerie Plame...

Defensive offence, the favourite Rove fall-back play - works every time. Josh Marshall calls it "terror by grand moral inversion, the lie so total and audacious that it almost knocks opponents off their feet":

John Kerry decorated war hero? No, coward and showboat...

In one state supreme court race [Rove's] candidate went up against an opponent who'd developed an impeccable reputation on child welfare issues (he was a former family court judge). Once you understand the pattern, the strategy suggests itself. Rove orchestrated a whispering campaign to spread the word that the man was a pedophile. Like I said, audacious.

And so here now. Wilson, a whistleblower administration officials were trying to punish? A whistleblower calling out White House manipulated intelligence during the lead-up to war?

Not at all. Rove was the whistleblower trying to knock down a campaign of disinformation from Joe Wilson. The audacity of it is enough to knock some people off their feet.

But this time (so far) Rove's favourite tactic doesn't seem to be working. In fact, the White House silence on this issue is only encouraging more and more people to link the Rove-Plame scandal to the related, but much wider, scandal of the bogus reasons for invading Iraq.

For example, this from the Christian Science Monitor:

Let me remind you that the underlying issue in the Karl Rove controversy is not a leak, but a war and how America was misled into that war...

The role of Rove and associates added up to a small incident in a very large scandal - the effort to delude America into thinking it faced a threat dire enough to justify a war.

Or this from Richard Cohen at the WP:

It was supposed to be additional evidence that Iraq had, in the memorable word uttered by Vice President Cheney, "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program. That, of course, is the real smoking gun in this matter -- the crime, if there is one at all, in what should now be called Karlgate. (It encompasses so much -- the outing of Plame, the jailing of reporter Judith Miller, the moral collapse of the press, the preening of Wilson -- that it sorely needs a moniker.) The inspired exaggeration of the case against Iraq, the hype about weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda's links to Hussein, makes everything else pale in comparison. It was to protect those lies, those exaggerations, that incredible train wreck of incompetence, ideologically induced optimism and, of course, contempt for the quaint working of the democratic process, that everything else stems from. Wilson was both armed and dangerous. He claimed the truth.

Let's keep the pressure on, folks. This fool is in trouble!