PEJ News - C. L. Cook - Over the past two months, it's been difficult to choose which scandal would be THE one that would bring down the Bush administration. In years past, any one of the stories seeping around the media dyke would be ruinous, but this administration as proven unprecedented in its ability to dodge, deflect, and defer disaster. But the Bush team's canny ability to dexterously maintain balance ended today with the implosion of "Bush Brain" Karl Rove.
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Scandal Confluence Tears
at Bush Administration
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
July 6, 2005
With the arrest and jailing of New York Times columnist, Judith Miller for her refusal to reveal the White House source of a leak exposing a CIA deep-cover operative, and the acquiescence of Time Magazine journalist Mathew Cooper to reveal his, criminal proceedings are now bound to be duly filed. But, the despicable outing of Valerie Plame is just the nexus of a web of criminal activity leading directly to the Oval office.
More than any single player, Karl Rove has been the keystone to George Bush's political career, his acute reading of public sentiment and mastery of the media propelling Bush, the unlikeliest of candidates, to the apex of power. Rove's ruthlessness is legendary. Fellow Texan and Rove Biographer, James Morris documented the means and methods of the Mayberry Machiavelli in the best-seller, "Bush's Brain."
In a recent article, Morris commented on the Plame Affair cautiously, warning those who saw this as the end of Bush/Rove, saying, "Since the late 1970's, we [Texans] have watched Karl Rove push so hard on ethical boundaries that he has turned lying into a conventional political tactic. Instead of being prosecuted or humiliated, he has risen in the Republican Party." Morris figures (July 5th) Rove is already one step ahead of prosecutors, and will come out of this smelling like, if not a rose, then W.'s favourite nickname for him, a "turd blossom." And that may have been true in the past.
You can't blame Morris his skepticism; it must be particularly cruel to watch the antithetical embodiment of all you believe succeed despite the law and common decency, again and again. But every dog has his day, and Rove's came the day he decided to take a bite out of Joe Wilson. Though criminality is not new to Rove, by outing Plame, the former ambassador Wilson's wife, he took a bite too big for even the man many consider the most powerful non-elected official in America to swallow. And he will choke on it. But that's not what will kill this administration.
Bush could survive losing Rove; a lame duck president doesn't really need a campaign guru, even one as effective as Karl Rove has proven these many years. The real unravelling will come as the details of his devilry reveal the network of scandals leading to it, implicating directly all members of the close-knit coterie comprising the Bush administration.
According to journalist and former National Security Agency insider, Wayne Madsen it’s inconceivable that Rove would be able to initiate the plot to disclose Plame’s secret identity. He reasons, “Given the fact that Rove has been called “Bush’s brain” and his political alter ego, it is difficult to believe that Bush would not have known about Rove’s plans.”
And it’s not just the president in on this. Madsen cites Belt Way whispers implicating the so-called ‘White House Iraq Group’ an “entity created to manage the propaganda for the war. Its members included Rove, Cheney’s assistant Mary Matalin, White House communications assistants Karen Hughes and James Wilkinson, and Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, Legislative liaison Nicholas Calio, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her deputy Stephen Hadley, and Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter" Libby.”
What’s resulted is what Madsen calls the “dovetailing” of several criminal scandal that include the Downing Street Memos, Plame’s outing, the bogus Niger yellow-cake fantasy, and the discovery of espionage carried out against the United States by high-placed members of AIPAC the powerful pro-Israel lobby inextricably linked to the Neo-cons at the heart of the Bush administration. And all threads lead to war with Baghdad, and then Tehran.
It begins with the Bush administration’s determination to go to war in Iraq. As the Downing Street Memos instruct, Bush and company were determined, before the 9/11 attacks to “take him [Saddam] out.” What was lacking was a credible pretence to cloth the naked aggression, illegal both in international and domestic U.S. law. The first choice was WMD and Saddam’s determination to construct an atomic bomb.
Former ambassador, Joseph Wilson IV was sent to Niger to investigate claims made in a document provided circuitously from the Italian spy agency SISMI that Saddam was seeking yellow-cake uranium to produce a bomb. He debunked the claims and the documents were revealed to be forgeries. But that didn’t stop President Bush from including them in his 2003 State of the Union speech.
It was a claim endlessly repeated in the run up to the war, most famously by Condoleezza Rice’s invocation of the “mushroom cloud” smoking gun. Wilson went public with his findings refuting the administration, in essence calling the president a liar. Enter Rove and the leaking of Plame’s secret identity to several “friendly” journalists. It was a ploy that had served Rove well in days past, when he used Robert Novak’s newspaper column to strategically dismember political opponents. Oddly, Novak, the man who first published the Plame identity has not been put through the rigours of Miller and Cooper, yet.
Every hour brings further developments, all bad for Bush. Like his erstwhile hero Nixon, Bush will find his fall into ignominy fast and his disgrace lasting. Americans are tired of this war and this war-president. They are disgusted with the abu Ghraib horrors and what it makes of their reputation. And, they're afraid: Not of Osama, or the fictional al Qaida, but of George Bush and what had become of their nation under his watch. Just today, the administration announced plans to further erode the Posse Comatitus act, allowing the military to more deeply integrate with domestic agencies.
No, the time is fast approaching when George W. Bush waves goodbye, whether from the lawn of the White House, or the steps of a court house remains to be seen.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. He’s also a contributing editor to PEJ News. You can check out the GR blog here.
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