The latest on Rove-Plame

Hunter at dKos provides an interesting summary of the recent pronouncements and articles on the growing Rove-Plame controversy.

The criminal issues being handled by Fitzgerald and the grand jury are small, single item points at issue which can be pinned down and the truly behind them approached pretty closely. Did Rove lie to the grand jury when he said he did not tell Cooper about Valerie Plame's identity? Did Libby lie to the investigators when he said he learned of Plame's identity from reporters? The reporters notes and testimony apparently do not match what Rove and Libby have testified under oath. MSNBC has reported that John Bolton has testified before the grand jury, but he did not include that in his statement to the Senate when he was being investigated for confirmation to the post of Ambassador to the UN. MSNBC stands by its story. There are a lot of small issues of this kind surrounding much of the Bush administration, and every day seems to add more.

The big issues are not going to be so easy to investigate and resolve. The single largest issue is - did the Bush administration lie to the American public to initiate the war in Iraq they wanted so badly?

Occupation of the White house has always (in my life time anyway) given the occupant a presumption that he was working for America and upholding his oath to protect and defend the Constitution. The effect of these many small issues has been to wither away whatever there was of the presumption that the Bush administration was telling us the truth.

There remains the question of whether the Bush administration can stop the slide into oblivion. American politics are interesting. Losers can sometimes turn things around. I think this set of issues has passed the tipping point. They are going to flop and flail, but it has gone too far. Any indictment of Rove will put the final lock on the measures by which this administration is measured.

Bush is quoted as saying in 1999 that to be a great President, he had to be a Wartime President. As every other discussed motivation for the attack on Iraq is demonstrated to be false or inadequate, and when you consider that Bush makes his decisions based on intuition rather than on careful analysis, the only standing reason for the war in Iraq seems to be that Bush needed it to be a great President, so he used whatever excuses he could to invade Iraq.

The result is clear. Bush-is-the-worst-American-President-Ever.