Trusted No More

President Bush's personal credibility appears to be eroding at a time when Iraq has become the top public priority and the White House is engulfed in controversy over senior Bush adviser Karl Rove, a poll released on Wednesday suggested.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed the percentage of Americans who believe Bush is "honest and straightforward" fell to 41 percent from 50 percent in January, while those who say they doubt his veracity climbed to 45 percent from 36 percent.


Print Story: Poll suggests drop in Bush's personal credibility on Yahoo! News

Blood in the water

The Rove affair continues to obsess Washington and the political blogosphere, where it is becoming mortal political combat.

There is a certain blood lust in the glee with which anti-Bushites are going after Rove, and there is the give-no-quarter distortions and lies of the GOPer defenders. The result is a lot of ugly noise, a little light, and it seems to me a short-sighted strategy ending with getting rid of Rove, while indications accumulate that everybody may be missing the true dimensions of the situation.

Having outrageously slandered war heroes who happened to be Democrats running for office, and gained advantage by doing so, the GOPers are now defaming a CIA undercover agent and a number of unknown people who worked with her, all of whom risked their lives believing it to be in service of their country. In short, these GOPers are cowards and liars, and the Democrats are treating Rove a bit too much as an opportunity for vengeance.

Rove certainly deserves to be taken down, although to get him for this offense is a lot like getting Al Capone on tax evasion.

But in the "fire Rove" campaign, besides vengeance and some temporary political gain, what is the point? Of course, Bush should fire Rove, but he won't. And "getting rid of Rove" alone will accomplish little.

The White House is stonewalling and absent anything more substantive but this noisy frenzy, they can keep it up long enough for Rove to resign. If things quiet a bit, he will resign "to pursue opportunities in the private sector" or "to spend more time with his family," and the apologists will point out that presidential aides often resign in the last couple of years of a second term.

If the frenzy continues, Rove will resign "to spare the president the distraction of this controversy."

Then what? That's what I wish some folks would be thinking about, but at the moment it seems everybody's thinking with their glands.

The savagery of this conflict is a pale but apt reflection of the savagery in Iraq. The whole idea of civilization is unraveling before our eyes.

In the meantime, some observers are suggesting that there is more to the ongoing investigation than the naming of an undercover CIA agent. There may be widespread violation of the Espionage Act in the Bush White House, as asserted in this summary from dkos.

This could get bigger than Watergate, and it could bring down the Bush White House. But the key will be the criminal investigation, not the Washington political bloodsport.

Rove, Rove, Rove your Boat

The plot thickens in the latest Washington drama. It's a bit of Greek theatre, and a lot of a Wahington novel of intrigue.

Last week the New York Times "reporter" Judith Miller, a well-documented apologist and mouthpiece for Bushcorp, went to jail for refusing to turn over notes to the federal prosecutor trying to find out who in the White House told the press that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent, and whether a crime was committed---either the crime of knowingly revealing the identity of a covert agent, or lying to a grand jury about it.

That was the Greek drama part. Everyone acted their role exactly as they should. The prosecutor prosecuted. The judge judged according to the law. The reporter nobly refused to give up her source. Her newspaper wrote a noble editorial about it.

Now comes the novel of intrigue. What did who know and when did they know it? And who knows what now?

All eyes (the one's that are watching that is) are on Karl Rove. Several reporters have publicly named him as the source for the Plame info, and the source for the Time Magazine reporter who had also been threatened with jail, until Time took his notes away from him so their stock wouldn't tumble, and his source gave him permission to name him.

(If you haven't read the earlier chapters, Plame was outed to try to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, who blew the whistle on Bushcorps phony assertion that Saddam was collecting the makings of nuclear weapons.)

There's still some key information missing. But if I were plotting this for a novel, I'd see the silence of J. Miller as the key.

If Rove started this whole thing off with Miller, or if in fact it was Miller who came up with the info on Plame, then Rove now knows what the prosecutor can prove, and he can play the legalisms. No, he didn't name her (just called her Wilson's wife.) No, he didn't know she was covert, just a CIA analyst.

What the recent relevations indicate is how closely key members of the press listen to Rove. He felt perfectly comfortable "advising" the Time reporter.

So now a key question is: If Miller doesn't have anything on Rove, why wouldn't he do for her what he did for the Time reporter, and give her permission to name him and turn over notes, so she could avoid jail?

As it is, Miller in jail is a winner for both Rove and Miller. Rove gets her silence, and she gets to be the hero and martyr of the fourth estate. So if Rove is confident that she won't talk, he can play it as it lays now.

Can't wait for the next chapter. Maybe a new character comes on the scene?

UPDATE : In court papers, the prosecutor reveals that Miller has received permission from her source to name this person, but she still refuses. Speculation now is that Miller has something to hide, and several stories (including one in the Washington Post) suggest the prosecutor is looking at the possibility of a journalist being indicted for revealing the covert agent's name.

Under repeated questioning at an afternoon press conference, White House press secretary refused to comment or answer any question about Rove's role, even refusing to repeat past statements that Rove is blameless, or that the President believes anyone leaking this information should be fired.

Welcome to the One False Church


Welcome to the One False Church. Many if not implicitly all those other churches and religions claim to be the one, the only truth. The Catholics: the One True Church© from way back. The various Evangelical/Fundamentalist Churches, sects and subsects (nothing succeeds like subsects) all claim sole proprietorship of the truth.

So how do you know, how do you really know? You’re not choosing a toothpaste here, this is your soul. So why not choose certainty? You may never know which is the true church, but you can be completely confident that this is the False Church.

Everything about it is guaranteed false. Our version of the Bible (soon to be Revealed right here) is completely bogus. Our cosmological explanation of life, the universe and everything: all false. Our rules and regs, our Dogma and Patrimony Show, all 100% bullshit. All our names for the Almighty---totally wrong, you’ll never get Him/Her/Them/Whatever/ on your cell. Actually, even these statements are utterly without merit.

And I, the self-appointed Pope George-Ringo I, otherwise known as the Perky Pontiff, will guide you through the labyrinthine, yet perfectly simplistic, paths to the Eternal Falsehood, with plenty of pompous yet empty meanderings, bold lies, skillful deceptions, key inaccuracies, plus assorted minor deceits, half-truths, phoniness, misdirection, calumny, meaningless balderdash, random mendacity, and holy nonsense along the way, the False and the Twilight Zone.

Oh, and the maps are worthless as well.

Our theological arguments are known throughout the world for being dependably dependent on outrageously bad logic and complex but (rest assured) circular reasoning, selective and out of context quotation, distorted descriptions and insupportable conclusions, and such time-honored rhetorical devices of deceit as ad hominem attacks, poisoning the well, selectively distorted statistics, unsupported assertions masked as facts, deceptive and non-existent sources, serial misquotation, name-calling, and referencing well known statements that were false in the first place. In other words, truly false---and proud of it.

The One False Church: in good times and bad, it’s comforting to know you’re wrong, every damned time.

Stay tuned for more elaborate fabrications. In the meantime, remember: The One False Church: Falsehoods You Can Count On.