With the delicious details flying and the layers of hypocrisy growing ever thicker, I am as guilty of the next blogger of of wanting to follow the Rove/Libby Leak story in its most finite detail.
Still, as has been widely noted, and best noted by Frank Rich in his column last Sunday, this story isn't about a the two-bit thug Rove outing a covert agent. As aweful as that was, and as likely as that leak might have been to lead directly to the death's of US covert agents abroad, this story is about the false Uranium pretext used to send us to war.
More below the flip . . .
In Rich's words
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
Clearly true, and well-stated by Rich on Sunday, and many others since.
How to connect the stories? Well for one, efforts by the press to pin Bush down on Rove, such as the White House press briefing yesterday are entertaining, but imprecise.
The quoted article, and Kos's front page post yesterday outline Bush's attempts to Move the Golaposts with regards to firing Rove and Libby.
Interesting yes, important no.
The question I'd like to hear a reporter ask is
"Mr. President, were you aware of the intelligence, including Wilson's Niger document, saying that Saddam Hussein had not obtained Uranium from Africa?
If so, why did you say Hussein had tried to obtain Uranium from Africa in your State of the Union Address? If you were not aware of it, how was it that the President of the United States was kept ignorant of such important information?"
If we are going to hold Bush's feet to the fire, let's do it regarding the Uranium and the phony war.