Schadenrove
Schadenrove: Happiness at the misfortune of Karl Rove.
I’ve been watching the slow outing of Karl Rove with a giddy kind of joy for the past couple of weeks. It’s now clear that he’s the one who told Time magazine that Joseph Wilson’s wife was an undercover CIA operative. Wilson had just written an editorial debunking the administration’s carefully-worded claim that Iraq had sought the makings of a nuclear weapon from Niger, and this was SS Rove’s shot across Wilson’s bow: stop fucking with us before someone gets hurt. Given Rove’s cultivated image as Bush’s evil enabler, though, I’m not sure how much political hay the democrats are going to get out of this. It’s like Darth Vader admitting he occasionally jaywalks.
But still: it’s something. This administration has been remarkably successful at hiding its clearly visible mountains of malfeasance behind limp denials and implacable stonewalling; they’ve gotten away with so much in plain sight that a revelation of actual backroom wrongdoing seems almost miraculous.
And funny. Rove’s latest denial: I never told anymore her actual name. All he did was mention the person who’s married to Joseph Wilson, which is to say his wife, the wife of Joseph Wilson, the one standing over there, in the brown suit talking to that other lady, yeah, that one. No no, that one. Right. Yeah. She’s an undercover CIA operative. But I won’t give you her name. That’d be illegal.
This is, of course, the Republicans’ “is is” moment — as in Bill Clinton’s painful dodge during his Lewinski deposition, in which he uttered the fateful phrase: “That depends on what the definition of is … is.” That was just as laughable then as Rove’s circumlocutions are now, but the stakes were slightly different: Clinton was trying to hide an embarrassing affair with an intern; Rove is trying to conceal his role in outing a CIA operative, endangering her life in the process. What a devil weasel that man is.
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