Rove Street Journal

Tim Grieve over at Salon breaks into the Wall Street Journal's strange idolatry of Rove's exposure of Wilson and CIA agent wife Plame:

The editors of the Wall Street Journal have just weighed in on the Karl Rove case. Their take: "The White House political guru deserves a prize" for telling the truth and "exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson as his wife."

The Journal says that Rove is "turning out to be the real 'whistleblower' in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove."

Along the way to the beatification, the Journal skips through an inconvenient fact or two and makes up at least one of its own. The Journal says "36 major newspaper organizations that filed a legal brief in March aimed at keeping Mr. Cooper and the New York Times's Judith Miller out of jail" agree that there's no evidence that a crime has been committed in the Plame case. But of course, a legal brief filed "in March" is necessarily one that was written before it was revealed that Karl Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.
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So the Journal works on what seems to be the primary talking point of the right in this case- that Wilson and Plame were acting somehow criminally and therefore they deserved what they got.

The primary rightist tactic seems to have taken the form of a variant on this theme: Either Rove's action is heroic because it exposed CIA nepotism; Wilson clearly was an Anti-Bush, Pro-Kerry activist and so he deserved to be outed as such; Plame's name wasn't secret to begin with, etc.

But none of these issues address, to me, the core ethical problem in this case: that a covert CIA operative who was working on Iraq WMD programs was outed because her husband turned in intelligence that did not corroborate a key justification to take a country to war; that this outing had only a devious political purpose.