My Bad

Bob Somerby takes John Aravosis and me to task today for some good reasons. He says:

Liberals and Dems simply can’t afford to play the dim games of the kooky-con right. But all across the liberal web, we find the virus spreading—a virus in which every bit of reasoning, no matter how daft, is accepted as seminal brilliance as long as it “proves” King Karl’s guilt. Yesterday, we were amazed when the sagacious Digby praised this post from John Aravosis:

ARAVOSIS (7/11/05): Perhaps it’s legally relevant if Rove “knew” Plame was undercover or not, but it’s not relevant in terms of him keeping his job. Rove intentionally outed a CIA agent working on WMD, it is irrelevant whether he did or didn’t know if she was an undercover agent. First off, he knew she wasn’t THAT public about her identity or there’d have been no need to “out” here—everyone would have known her already.

Aravosis makes some excellent points in his longer post. But that paragraph, which Digby featured, makes almost no sense at all. The last sentence is completely absurd. The second sentence isn’t much better.

The point I was making, and that I think Aravosis was making, is really captured in the first sentence: “It doesn’t matter if Rove ‘knew’ Plame was undercover or not, it’s not relevant in terms of him keeping his job.” If I had it to do over again I would leave it at that.

The issue I was concerned with was that political and legal culpability aren’t the same thing, not so much that King Karl was guilty of outing Plame. The newsweak article proved that Rove disclosed to a reporter on deep backround that Joseph Wilson’s wife was with the CIA, working on weapons of mass destruction. That was a reckless thing for a top White House official to do if he did not know her status — and possibly illegal if he did. We don’t know if he committed a crime, but we do know that what he did was at least negligent. Valerie Plame WAS an undercover operative whose cover was blown when white house officials leaked the fact that she worked with the CIA to the press. He should resign for having done that, regardless of his motives or knowledge of her undercover status. It’s the act, not the intent, that should govern whether he remains in the White House with a top security clearance.

I admit that John’s paragraph was not the clearest thing he’s ever written, or that I ever endorsed. I suspect that we were both a little bit overexcited and mentally fatigued. (Aravosis at least has the excuse that he’d been crammed like a sardine on airplanes all week — I’m just overdosing on schaudenfreude.) The larger point, however, remains valid.

But Somerby’s not an ass for pointing this out. It’s what he does. If you can’t take the heat, y’know…

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