HELIOLITH

Lately my first stop for news, the Slate’s “today’s papers” section shared a few good links around the currently evolving scandal regarding the leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity and Karl Rove. Especially interesting is the juxtaposition of previous administration comments and the somewhat irrepressible hounding of gag-ordered? Whitehouse frontman Scott McClellan who absolutely refused to speak stating as his reasoning that there was an ongoing investigation and it would be inappropriate to comment.”

As one reporter alleged, McClellan had already discussed things far beyond where he as stopping today, even after the investigation had begun. Rather than “all of a sudden [having] respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation” as one reporter put it, it seems more probably that they are stonewalling as they dig for spin. Clearly, Rove is one of the highest architects of spin and posturing himself, and if he’s not able to find an angle to leverage the bad snowball effect, one wonders who will.

Already seeds of “nothing illegal has been done” have been sown, and although Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post suggests, “…signs thus far suggest that the White House’s say-nothing strategy is only feeding the conflagration, rather than starving it.” It’s pretty easy to see that the strategy is to try and highlight the outrage many is experiencing by not commenting, and to make it a partisian attack from the left.

The NYTimes summary of past comments is fairly rich, if you can stomach the meandering nonsense of the President who speech embarrasses many US citizens:

And then we’ll get to the bottom of this and move on. But I want to tell you something - leaks of classified information are a bad thing. And we’ve had them - there’s too much leaking in Washington. That’s just the way it is. And we’ve had leaks out of the administrative branch, had leaks out of the legislative branch, and out of the executive branch and the legislative branch, and I’ve spoken out consistently against them and I want to know who the leakers are.

Ouch. I can’t seem to get desensitized to the painfully plentiful evidence of how poorly versed our President is on basic social studies. Poor W. could never pass the teacher’s examination!