Rain Storm -- an online journal of opinion and culture

Johnson serves 18 months in Iraq.  Mine kills his buddies.  He's hurt, but okay: Purple Heart.  Goes to Germany before being rotated out.  Heath nut.  Exerciser.  Looking forward to reuiniting with his pregnant wife, doing recruitment for National Guard.  Calls wife, says he doesn't feel well.  Goes to bed.

Dies in bed.

Remember former head of the White House office of Faith Based Initiatives, John Dilulio and his Esquire interview about the Bush White House?

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Who heads up the political arm? Karl Rove. Yet we're to believe from Rove and his attorney that Rove not only didn't see the State Department memo about Ambassador Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, but that Rove had never even heard of it.

Rove said of the memo that he "had never seen it, had never heard about it and had never heard anybody else talk about it," according to a lawyer familiar with his testimony. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said he can say "categorically" that Rove did not obtain any information about Plame from any confidential source, such as a classified document.

Really? In the Bush White House, the day after Joe Wilson writes a blistering attack on the president in the NYT, calling into question the entire WMD justification for going to war, Colin Powell is walking around Air Force One with a memo about - who else? - Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame - and NO ONE ever tells Karl about the memo, doesn't show it to him, nothing.

We are to believe that Karl Rove was totally out of the loop on the Joe Wilson WMD "sixteen words" gate. Uh huh. Sure.

Plans to reform our government to more Christian-like principals are in the works and we may feel the effects, right here in the Upstate. That is because South Carolina has been chosen as the place for hundreds, even thousands of Christians to move to, in hopes of impacting the government. But people who live here have mixed opinions about the Christian Exodus.

Though the GOP hatchetman claims he's never spoken to the grand jury about the column, a well-known Democratic pundit tells Radar, "Novak is the media's Joseph Valachi," referring to the 1960's mafia capo who was the first mobster to testify against La Cosa Nostra. "There's no question he rolled over." According to our sources, Miller shared Plame's identity with her perfidious fellow neocon after deciding not to publish it herself; Novak then called his two White House sources --one of whom was Karl Rove -- for confirmation and wrote the July 14, 2003 column that blew Plame's cover.

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - An Army general who has been criticized for his role in the treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has contradicted his sworn congressional testimony about contacts with senior Pentagon officials.

Gen. Geoffrey Miller told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004 that he had only filed a report on a recent visit to Abu Ghraib, and did not talk to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his top aides about the fact-finding trip.

But in a recorded statement to attorneys three months later, Miller said he gave two of Rumsfeld's most senior aides - then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Intelligence Steve Cambone - a briefing on his visit and his subsequent recommendations.

"Following our return in the fall, I gave an outbrief to both Dr. Wolfowitz and Secretary Cambone," Miller said in the Aug. 21, 2004, statement to lawyers for guards accused of prisoner abuse, a transcript of which was obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

"I went over the report that we had developed and gave them a briefing on the intelligence activities, recommendations, and some recommendations on detention operations," Miller added.

And I think people like Tim Russert and the others, who gave this guy such a free ride and all the media, they're the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove.

I don't know how far the Rovians plan to take this mirror image building campaign. But I won't be too surprised if we wake up tomorrow to find Bill O'Reilly claiming that Karl Rove used to be an undercover CIA operative (a kind of fat, ugly version of Keifer Sutherland) until he was outed by Valerie Plame -- all as part of a left-wing dirty tricks operation masterminded by Jim Carville.

A number of legal experts, some of whom are involved in the case, said evidence that has emerged publicly suggests Rove or other administration officials face potential legal threats on at least three fronts (emphasis added).

The first is the unmasking of CIA official Valerie Plame, the original focus of special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's probe. But legal sources say there are indications the prosecutor is looking at two other areas related to the administration's handling of his investigation. One possible legal vulnerability is perjury, if officials did not testify truthfully to a federal grand jury, and another is obstructing justice, if they tried to coordinate cover stories to obscure facts.

“When Unites States military recruitment shows steady growth, and terrorist/insurgent recruitment shows steady decline, we have turned the corner and are now winning the war.”

50 USC 421(b)

Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identity of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined not more than $25,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

And of course you've got the endless microscopic hairsplitting over what Karl did and did not know about Plame and her job, and whether he did or did not "intend" to out her to the oh, six or seven reporters on his get-Joe-Wilson call list.

On that score, Greg also points to the latest bit of sophism from Rove's mouthpiece, Robert Luskin, who now argues the Lizard King couldn't possibly have intended for Time to finger Plame, since he spoke to Cooper on "double super secret background."

It's just like regular background but with no tagbacks, frontsies or backsies, taken to infinity plus one on opposite day, circle circle dot dot now you've got a cootie shot. It was first pioneered by Edward R. Murrow.

That might be a brilliant point for the defense -- if the Agee law made such a distinction. But it doesn't. Whether Plame's identity was published or not doesn't matter. All that matters is whether it was intentionally disclosed by someone who was authorized to know it to someone who was not authorized to know it. There's also the rather awkward fact that Time did publish the information -- although not until after the undead corpse of Bob Novak had done it first.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan says President Bush has directed members of his staff to cooperate with the investigation, but will not say whether that means staffers are being directed to sign confidentiality waiver forms.

"No one wants to get to the bottom of it and find out the truth more than the president of the United States," McClellan said Tuesday. "That's why the president has directed the staff to cooperate fully in that ongoing investigation and work with the investigators."

tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official -- told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger.