MORE PLAME REACTION….Over at Tapped today, Heidi Pauken says….
(Huh? Who? Tapped does anonymous posts, doesn’t it? Nope: as of this morning, all Tapped posts carry their author’s name. This is supposedly an attempt to make things “more lively,” but I smell an intern revolt here.)
….Ahem. Anyway, Heidi notes that Karl Rove biographer James Moore is pretty convinced that Rove was behind the Plame leak. He has no independent evidence, mind you, but after following Rove’s career for a couple of decades, he says, “I know full well, and anybody who knows the way he works, that something of this nature does not happen without Karl checking the yes box.”
Sounds about right to me. Whether Rove actually made the calls himself is anyone’s guess, but the idea that he didn’t know anything about this is a little hard to swallow. After all, by reputation anyway, Rove runs the political operation in the White House with an iron fist.
Elsewhere on Tapped, which is really getting into the Plame swing of things, Matt Yglesias suggests that James Taranto is spinning pretty desperately when he suggests that no law was broken because it’s unlikely ? based on remarkably thin evidence ? that Plame has worked outside of the country in the past five years.
Maybe she has, maybe she hasn’t, but surely the folks who are defending this episode based on whether it was technically illegal are the worst of all the shills out there. Hell, even sliming Joe Wilson at least has a point. But Taranto isn’t suggesting that this kind of behavior is excusable as long as it’s technically legal, is he? It sure sounds like it.
