Karl Rove's Blow-Job

My opinion on Karl Rove is pretty straightforward. The man represents the very worst impulses of a representative republic. But at least the man's no mystery. You know what you're going to get. You'd think that by knowing their enemy so well the Dems would enjoy at least a modest edge, but for them to actually leverage an advantage would really be too much to hope for.

However, even though Rove himself nauseates me, how I feel about how to proceed in the Plame case is very simple. Indictment, trial, verdict, judgment. If he is found guilty of blowing the cover of a CIA covert operative, then he deserves the appropriate penalty for that crime. I don't think that anyone could argue that this is not a reasonable approach. He stands accused of having violated some very sacred written and unwritten laws. I can rant and rave in my blog about the unwritten stuff, but I realize that only the written stuff actually carries any weight. So let's whip out those scales of justice and see just exactly how much it weighs. Either Rove is guilty and he goes to jail, or he's not guilty and he goes on being the same wretched incubus that he is today.

But I know for a fact how this is going to come down. All the ex-felon (voting?) Fox News types, like Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy, will start to rationalize that the crime itself wasn't really that bad. I'm sorry, but let me say this again: either Rove is guilty of an extremely serious crime or he is not. There is not an option C here where Rove can be guilty of "just a harmless prank." After all, compromising the ability of the intelligence service to act in the interests of the US in order to score a political victory is an incredibly serious charge. A bit more serious, I would say, than a blowjob, which is certainly not illegal, at least outside of Texas. Personally, I would like to know what those to my right feel is an appropriate punishment for such an offense. That's the exposing of the CIA agent, fellas, not the blowjob.

"But it's not the act itself, it's the lying," they used to say. Great. Great. Well in this case, I fully expect both.