Reading Is Fun Again

Ice cream for freaks

If there's one thing more enjoyable than reading about your Seattle Mariners' recent four game sweep in Anaheim, it's the press smelling blood in the water as Karl Rove get exposed. As a released e-mail now shows, he was Matthew Cooper's source in the infamous Plame Affair. You are now instructed to register surprise (didn't see that one coming). And to think they were trying to implicate that poor, innocent Scooter Libby. After numerous denials (see here), Rove is now backed into corner and spinning his wheels in a positively Clintonian (as the right likes to say) way. Big Karl's main defense is that while he told Cooper that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA agent, it's not like he used her name or anything. Thus if I said I had been smoking crack with George W. Bush's wife, but didn't use her name, I would protect her anonymity.

Of course, nothing bad will happen to Rove. He's probably even going to keep his job. The Bush Administration will figure out some way to spin this, or just ignore it, and all will be business as usual. On the miniscule chance that he gets sent to jail, Bush will pardon him. As George Clooney so tenderly puts it in Out of Sight, in big boy prison people like Rove are "ice cream for freaks." But let's not be silly: menaces to society like Martha Stewart and Li'l Kim go to jail, not political masterminds. Bushie-Bush won't let his little boy genius come to any harm.

Actually, I'll retract an earlier statement. Reading about a Mariners sweep is more fun.