For Shame

I'm not going to waste a lot of space here parsing the Valerie Plame issue, because it strikes me as small potatoes -- despite liberal wishes and efforts to the contrary.

Of course, as Howard Kurtz points out, lefty websites and the Dems are in full battle cry mode, joined, obviously, by the press. Their motives are -- needless to say -- less than pure; they include (1) getting Rove out of The White House; (2) scoring political points; and (3) attempting to whitewash the facts that have emerged about the case -- namely, that Joseph Wilson is a liar, and that his wife was indeed the person who was responsible for sending him to Africa (before he returned to lie about what he had found there).

After standing by a perjuring President Clinton to this day, if the liberals and the Democratic Party want to spend their time attacking Karl Rove, that's their business. It's also more evidence of just how deeply unserious they are about the war that's being waged, even in the streets of London, as this continues.

One word of warning to them: It's far from clear that Karl Rove broke any laws. With apologies to the libs for raining on their garden party, it might be useful actually to check the relevant statute.

There are three relevant sections to the law. The first two require that the perpetrator had access to classified information -- something Rove wouldn't have had, since at the time of the leak, he was a political person without that kind of security clearance.

Moreover:

Sections A & B require that Rove had to tell Cooper about a covert agent "knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States."

It's far from clear either that Valerie Plame was a covert agent or that the US was, indeed, taking such affirmative measures -- Joe Wilson obviously didn't think so. As John Pohoretz points out, Wilson had his own wife's name posted at his web site . . . hardly the sign of someone trying to stay privately undercover.

Section C requires the disclosure to have been part of a pattern, and the perpetrator had "reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States . .. "

Clearly not relevant here.

And even Newsweek notes that there's nothing in Rove's communication to suggest that he knew she was a covert agent or that he even knew her name. (I guess he could have checked Wilson's web site . ..)

The press loves this story because it puts them front and center. Some anti-administration peripheral erstwhile national-security "nobodies" love it, too, since it allows them to be outraged! outraged! and to pretend that their jobs are far more glamorous and dangerous than is, in fact, the case.

But one thing is clear: To the extent that liberals and the press have glorified whistle-blowers, well, as always, it appears that it's a "good thing" only when it's being used against conservatives or Republicans. Karl Rove was a whistle blower of the first order -- trying to prevent a batch of lies that really could damage our national security from being circulated by a publicity-seeking has-been who procured a trip to Niger on the government dime thanks to his wife. That's a scandal, too, but who has eyes to see it when they can try to bleed the President, instead?

Maybe this kind of judgment explains a lot about the Democrats' recent electoral fortunes.