It’s Out There

Arianna has the hot gossip on Plamegate and it’s very intriguing:

Chatter about the Rove story has come to dominate the downtime at the Aspen Institute’s five-day Ideas Festival. Whenever participants are not in sessions, they’re gathering in small groups and dissecting, analyzing, and speculating about the outcome of this surprisingly slow-breaking scandal.

One such discussion took place just after David Gergen had finished a conversation with Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, which has sold 25 million copies in hardback! A cluster of high-powered media insiders quickly switched over to “The Gossip-Driven Reality.” The well-informed suppositions were flying faster than the peloton at the Tour de France. I can tell you what was said, I just can’t tell you who was saying it (Just look at it as an anonymous twist on the HuffPost BozBlog).

According to the players, the key to whether this story has real legs — and whether it will spell the end of Rove — is determining intent. And a key to that is whether there was a meeting at the White House where Rove and Scooter Libby discussed what to do with the information they had gotten from the State Department about Valerie Plame being Joe Wilson’s wife, and her involvement in his being sent on the Niger/yellowcake mission. If it can be proven that such a meeting occurred, then Rove will be in deep trouble — especially if it is established that Rove made three phone calls leaking the info about Plame and her CIA gig… one to Matt Cooper, one to Walter Pincus, and one to Robert Novak.

Other than intent, the other big legal question raised was: will Rove be able to get away with claiming that he did not know Plame was an undercover agent?

We all know what happened after Rove placed those calls. The question is, what will happen now?

I don’t know if Arianna just slipped that in about the State department being the source of the information on Plame, but if that’s considered a known fact among the cogniscenti then we may well be looking at Bolton or one of his Jesse Helmsian minions. And this notion of a meeting between Libby and Rove is also very interesting. I’ll be curious to see if anything more about that emerges as the lid comes off the insider DC gossip, which seems to be happening despite the mainstream media’s apparent wariness. (And lord only knows what Judith Miller’s role in all this is.) Arianna continues:

From the way they’ve acted so far, the mainstream media would rather this scandal just go away (bloggers take note).

Just look at the way Newsweek handled the Rove-outed-Plame story in this week’s edition. The editors obviously knew they had a hot story and could have pushed it hard. Instead, it’s clear that they lawyered it within an inch of its life — a bunch of legal eagles with faint hearts removing any juice and most of the meat from it.

As one of the Aspen wags put it: “Once Newsweek flushed the Koran down the toilet, you can bet they’ll think twenty times before they pull down the handle again.”

On the other hand, Norah O’Donnell is reported to have said today on MSNBC (via The Daou Report):

“This has the potential of being a HUGE scandal in Bush’s second term. This involves several senior members of the White House staff. This case has been on the verge of blowing up for several months now but this story COULD BE HUGE.”

Arianna makes a very good point when she says that bloggers should take note of the fact that the mainstream media seems very uncomfortable with this story. Perhaps it is just because they are gunshy after the Rather and Eason Jordan scalpings and they’ve become confused because this story features them in an unflattering and bewildering light. They aren’t exactly profiles in courage in the best of times.

It is, therefore, a good time for the blogs to keep pushing. I believe that we were part of the reason that the DSMs finally gained some traction — enough to make the administration nervous anyway — and I think we can have an effect on this story as well. Nobody should ever forget that Drudge was fed quite a bit of his information during the Clinton scandals by journalists who were trying to find a way to get the story into the ether so they could say “it’s out there.”

This is a strange case. The administration used the press to spread a smear and is now counting on their integrity to keep quiet. But these very same people set the precedent of funneling gossip and innunedo through alternative media in order to promote scandal and give the media an excuse to report it. Integrity is no longer necessary in order to keep one’s resume respectable. The model they created may just do them in.

One of the things we have to remember is that putting pressure on the White House is an end unto itself. When they are off their game they cannot fuck things up with as much precision. They are already having to deal with a restive right wing — and because of that it is very much to our advantage to keep Karl in the crosshairs. The religious freaks are his babies. I’ve never gotten the impresion that he’s particularly cool under pressure.

More importantly, perhaps, we might just have a remote chance to force this guy’s resignation if the heat becomes too much, regardless of the frog marching fantasy we are all harboring. You never know where these scandals are going to go. They often take on a life of their own. And Arianna draws our attention to one potential pressure point — Scotty:

This is all the more significant because of the role McClellan may eventually play in Rove’s fate. As Newsweek reported and I blogged about, when this story began heating up, McClellan went out of his way to defend Rove — saying that he’d been “assured” that Rove was not involved in the leaking.

“Rove will have no compunction about lying through his teeth to save himself, counting on the fact that Cooper’s e-mails are, apparently, not cut and dried,” one of the group said. And it doesn’t hurt that Rove’s underlings would rather fall on their swords than tell the truth… which, in the Bush White House, is seen as selling out. All of which would leave McClellan to “take one for the team and eat major crow about all the assurances he’d given the press.” Of course, if they continue to avoid asking him about it, he may not even have to do that.

I’ve often said that if you want to kill the snake you have to cut off its head. The Republicans, in my opinion, are a three headed hydra — DeLay, Rove and Norquist. All three of them are being chased by scandal. We should be asking ourselves what the Republicans would be doing if the situation were reversed. I think we know the answer.

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