Here's Hitch on the latest scandal over Karl Rove:
Writing to a friend in 1954, P.G. Wodehouse commented:
Are you following the McCarthy business? If so, can you tell me what it's all about? "You dined with Mr. X on Friday the tenth?" "Yes, sir." (Keenly) "What did you eat?" "A chocolate nut sundae, sir." (Sensation) It's like Bardell vs Pickwick.
Wodehouse of course was only affecting ignorance and making light of a ludicrously pompous and slightly sinister proceeding. But he was essentially correct in his lampooning of the McCarthy hearings, since even the most convinced anti-communist would not learn anything from the spectacle that he did not already know, and since the show trials managed to go on without producing either any evidence of any crime, or any evidence of any perpetrator, or any evidence of any victim.
It is the entire absence of the above three elements that makes the hunt for Karl Rove (who was once so confidently confused with I. Lewis Libby) so utterly Snark-like. In fact, in his column of July 17, Frank Rich was compelled to concede that the whole thing is absolutely nothing in itself, but is rather a sideshow to a much larger event: the deception of the Bush-Cheney administration in preparing an intervention in Iraq.
Hitchens goes on (rightly), by way of providing context for this whole drama, to strip the credibility of Joseph Wilson and his wife. He then concludes by questioning the scope and validity of the very law that gave rise to this whole controversy. That, of course, sidesteps the entire issue of Rove's legal culpability. Intent to knowingly break the law would compel the President to show Rove the door. But, as I've written before, that is not something that any evidence has yet shown. And Hitchens is right to argue that Rove's actions might be charitably interpreted as an instance of doing his job, that is, rebutting what was - at the time - being gulped up by the media. The media loved the Wilson story and fed the idea that Joseph Wilson was objectively gathering evidence that some of Bush's claims on Iraq's attempted acquisition of yellowcake uranium were were just plain wrong. In this instance, Rove's actions might be interpreted as simply trying to indicate that Wilson was not the best source to assess such claims - which, by the way, turned out to be exactly right.
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