George's Bomb

ThinkProgress watched the Sunday Roundup today, and they caught George Stephanopolus' bomb concerning, possibly, George Bush's in the Plame Affair:

GS: "Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions."

This would explain why Bush spent more than an hour answering questions from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It would also fundamentally change the dynamics of the scandal. President Bush could no longer claim he was merely a bystander who wants to “get to the bottom of it.” As Stephanopoulos notes, if Bush played a direct role it could make this scandal completely unmanageable.

And meanwhile, it is clearer and clearer that both Karl Rove of Bush's office and Scooter Libby of Cheney's office were much more intimately involved in the affair than either have promoted. Of course, in teh game of CYA, they don't have any interest of doing anything other than looking out for themselves, but it is still in the American interest to uncover why a CIA operative was publicly uncovered in a time of war for clearly political partisan reasons:

As the CIA leak investigation heads toward its expected conclusion this month, it has become increasingly clear that two of the most powerful men in the Bush administration were more involved in the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame than the White House originally indicated.

With New York Times reporter Judith Miller's release from jail Thursday and testimony Friday before a federal grand jury, the role of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, came into clearer focus. Libby, a central figure in the probe since its earliest days and the vice president's main counselor, discussed Plame with at least two reporters but testified that he never mentioned her name or her covert status at the CIA, according to lawyers in the case.

His story is similar to that of Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser. Rove, who was not an initial focus of the investigation, testified that he, too, talked with two reporters about Plame but never supplied her name or CIA role.

Their testimony seems to contradict what the White House was saying a few months after Plame's CIA job became public.

In October 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that he personally asked Libby and Rove whether they were involved, "so I could come back to you and say they were not involved." Asked if that was a categorical denial of their involvement, he said, "That is correct."

The Plame Affair is a vital part of this Administration's sense of accontability and value for the American public. It is the core illustration of the many ways that they have advanced an ideological agenda without any merit to trigger the drums of war; and at the same time sacrificing every vital aspect of the American value system to get there. They manipulated individuals and intelligence; they exposed the identity of an undercover agent who was working on the intelligence they needed for the war [but who's involvement helped prove that they were simply fabricating intelligence to justify their war, and that none of it was true]; and it's shown how political cronyism and self-righteous maintenence takes precendence over justice and accountability in The Administration.

It is the shining example of how corrupt The Administrations' value-system is: it helps to explain how easy it was for The Administration to be ignorant of the needs of the victims of Katrina [because they've always shown ignorance, incompentence, and cronyism as dominant values in they're system of administration] and it shows how they were incapable of leading this country into a successful Invasion of Iraq [more concerned with their own ideology than with any of the practical intelligence, more concerned with ideology than wisdom, experience, planning, or foresight].

Why is the Plame Affair important? It shows how incongruent This Administration's value systems are with both what they've advertised them to be and with the values that America needs, and has needed, today and for the past 5 years.