Yeah, you're paranoid.

Rove has been doing these things for years. Since he was a kid, really. One classic example is when he planted a bug in his own office to frame the opposing campaign.

So no, I don't think this is hiding something worse. It's just what Rove has always done.

I don't think they're throwing us a bone, if only because the timing of this doesn't depend on them; it depends on Fitzgerald. I did wonder when it seemed that Rove had given permission for Cooper to testify, but if the Washington Post is right (I won't try to link; when I do, the hateful tags appear), he didn't; his lawyer just kept repeating the 'blanket waiver, of course my client is eager for everyone to tell what they know' once too often, and Cooper decided to take him at his word.
Which means: I don't think they decided the timing of this at all. And unlike the press, a decent prosecutor doesn't just let stuff drop when the public loses interest. 
Between this and Guantanamo, I am feeling very grateful to the legal system these days.

As I posted earlier, there's a question in my mind about the possible scope of Fitzgerald's investigation. Can Fitzgerald broaden it himself? Who sets the limits? If the WH is worried more about the story behind the story, that is, the Yellowcake forgeries, then perhaps they are hoping to short circuit Fitz by tossing him a bone. Give him a a way to publicly do his job, feel good about it, and go home. As good as it feels to think Rove may have screwed himself in this, you have to remember that he isn't the biggest puppet master in DC. I believe that distinction belongs over at OVP.
Paranoid? Yes. And for good reasons. There's a bigger story and you know it. Rove, for all of his talents, may not be the biggest and best in DC at playing all of us. And, most frightening of all, at least to me, is that the president may really have been asleep through all of this.

My gut instinct is to be just as bat-guano paranoid as you, Annie. And yet...and yet...there is a pretty good history of these yahoos twisting themselves into knots, trying to be too clever by half, then getting bailed out by an electorate that just doesn't seem to give a crap. Whatever master plan they may have had in mind, this looks like it's spun out of their control and taken on a life of its own. Looks like even the Fox clowns and their frantic spin attempts will be swallowed up in this one. The question is whether anyone has the courage to follow up the chain of command to El Jefe himself.

The "war on terror" is a contest between two international intelligence and paramilitary networks with a common origin, one still morally bound to the United States and accountable to it, the other freelancing and foraging opportunistically. The Plame matter makes clear which network retails the Republican asset.

Martial law, if chance permits, but not dictatorship. Bush is not a self-propelled phenomenon like Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte. He is a tractable neurotic, happy to buy friends with other people's money and relieved to hear that contempt trumps competence. The perfect candidate, in other words, to head a puppet government.

It isn't up to Bush or his pompous gangsters when the United States gets hit next. They don't even rate a "need to know." They are, in fact, disposable. What happens to Rove will be decided by public relations consultants.

Wow! This thread makes me worried about posting here.
I use tin foil to wrap food.

These people are not invincible, they're stupid.  They don't have superpowers.  In fact, its the idea that they do have such powers which has led us to this point, and it is the push back that should have happened long ago which is changing the reality we see each day.

Remember, these are humans, humans who make mistakes, humans responsible for the boneheaded @#*#&%^ $%#$ that is Iraq.

I'm reminded in some ways of Napoleon--he was thought to be an invincible genius.  What happened was that the people he was up against couldn't see in his terms.  Each time they suffered a defeat, they collapsed completely and assumed that the defeat they just suffered meant the end.

Lo and behold, Napoleon's enemies found themselves still around, despite all of the "crushing defeats" they suffered.  They realized Napoleon's strength was that he knew that the French people were resilient enough to take a hard defeat--a knowledge that allowed the Emperor to take risks that his enemies felt they could not.

When those arrayed against Bonaparte realized that the defeats they suffered did not mean they were out of the fight, they too started to take the risks necessary to win.  At that point, Napoleon was doomed by the forces he stirred up.

The same goes for us.  The Republicans hold every branch of government, yet we are still here.  Indeed, the minute we seemed to really start fighting, really started to take risks, our fortunes began to look up.  

Now is the time for renewed action and perserverance on our parts.  If there is anything our American ancestors have given us, it is this strength to go on, the ability to continue to press despite adversity.  We need to draw upon that strength now.  As we do, we will start to really believe in ourselves again.  After that, the World. . .  

I have to disagree with the poster.  They will not be able to stage a terrorist attack again and use it against us.  Indeed, they didn't stage the first one.  They are not allpowerful, they are weak.

You said "How can such a savvy political strategist leave himself so wide open? Surely it couldn't have been hubris. Or maybe it could. After years of steering the media, perhaps the felt untouchable."

That is exactly the point. People think that Rove is some kind of evil genius, but really they are all caught in the same trap, the assumption that no one could be that low and power hungry.

It is this lust for power that can never be satisfied that pulls down all these "evil geniuses". I don't know who said it, but the banality of evil applies to Rove as few cliché’s do.  

Rove is no more or less than a political hack that will do anything he can to jump on the other side with both feet. That he got caught on this just means that he had it so easy for so long that the edge came off of his game.

He is street smart and that works for a long time, if other people help, but just like any other thug from the street sooner or later the rules of civil society trip them up and they wind up guests of the state somewhere away from decent people. With any luck, that will happen to our pal Rove.

Look, I don't doubt that Rove could have screwed up.  Here are some reasons why:

• Rove's genius is overrated, as Digby has pointed out.  There are many campaigns he did not win.  Bush's first congressional race, for one. The famous example of the Alabama judge race that he took to the courts he eventually lost.  He did in some sense win eventually by spreading nasty rumors about the man forcing him to bow out in future races.  Let's face it that he also lost in 2000 and got caught with his pants down in terms of the Get out the Vote efforts by the dems.  True, he had a back up system in place (the rigging of Florida) but it really came down to the brink and required a sympathetic SCOTUS to pull it off.  
  
• Rove has been caught in shenanigans before.  He was revealed as the one who bugged his own office in a Texas race of years past, although he wound up suffering no harm for that one.  He was kicked out of Bush senior's 1992 campaign for leaking to Novak. 
  

So,yes, Rove has had some hits (using the homeland security vote against the dems in 2002, screwing McCain in 2000 in South Carolina, using the swift boat campaign against Kerry) but he has had plenty of misses. 

Now, it is clear that to the extent Rove is a genius, his talent best emerges when his back is to the wall.  Let us not forget that the administration fought Homeland Security for months before they realized that they had to take it on and the only way to do so was with the poison pill about dropping civil service protections for department employees.  This is Rove at his best:  nail the dems on placing their love of big government over security, and simultaneously start wedging into the power and security of government employees to further drown the beast, borrowing from Norquist.  Rove's back was to the wall, and he responded.  

This then is why I do have a troubling, nagging doubt on your paranoia remarks.  I will happily and quickly dismiss this when presented with viable alternatives, but so far the press reports simply fuel my paranoia. 

With the Plame incident Rove's back is to the wall like never before.  It is not a campaign he will lose, but everything.  If he is successfully prosecuted, he goes to jail, loses his daily family life, loses his power, loses his dream of a Republican majority for generations to come. 

To this end, I belive Rove's speech was clearly intended not to save Bush's butt, but Rove's.  It fit the bill of trumping up terror whenever fortunes come down.  However, such trumping up works best in the context of manifest, real-time terror.  The trouble is that there was no such terror to be found when Rove gave his speech.   

Here we are, scarcely two weeks after the speech, with the horrific  bombings in London.  These bombings caught the very competent UK counterterrorism pros off guard.  The links to Al Qaeda so far appear tenuous at best (although it is plausible that the high power explosives they got were lifted from Iraq).  THe bombs were not crude, as in Madrid, and did not require lots of explosive material (also like Madrid).  The Fox News talking points after the explosion seemed ready made from Rove's speech. 

You get the drift.  Please, someone, prove me too paranoid here.  

Those exit polls did it for me.  But I expected the theft. The discouraging part is the media's acceptance, refusal to make it a story.  You just couldn't even get a letter in the Times on the subject, I tried, others tried - finally months later they published a letter from Bob Fitrakas, the lawyer who filed suit in Ohio - too late - mentioning that statistics don't stop working at the American border. 

What stories on the election that were printed tended to dampen criticism:  they talked about the long lines, but rarely mentioned the vote-flipping machines in, for example, Mahoney County. And I never saw a story which made the connection between the exit polls and the tens of thousands of reported cases of fraud.

Not that the Times, the Wall St. Journal, and all, were incapable of reporting that kind of story. They did it with aplomb when the same thing happened in the Ukraine. 

But the press's behavior around the "elections"  of 2000 and 2004 makes me distrust everything I read.   

With the Plame incident Rove's back is to the wall like never before.  It is not a campaign he will lose, but everything.  If he is successfully prosecuted, he goes to jail, loses his daily family life, loses his power, loses his dream of a Republican majority for generations to come.

Well, does he really?

Let's say Rove gets fired. What's next?

• Maybe indictment for him. Once out of the public eye, he can mount as Byzantine a legal defense as necessary and run the clock against Fitzgerald. Republicans are hardly afraid of people who are connected to dirty tricks and appearances of impropriety, and in many cases not even afraid of indicted and/or convicted criminals. I'm really not sure what Rove loses or, in the bigger picture, what the Republicans lose there: there's always a back door, as others here have pointed out (blakew).
  
  
• Maybe indictment that goes further up. For Dems, this would be the biggest win. Any trial there would be longer, could not be hidden from the public eye, and might get played out with the Senate sitting as a jury. This is the type of trial that could have ramifications at the ballot box.
  
  
• Maybe just fired. And then he comes back in through the back door, like they always do. He gets hired at a lobbying firm that takes a contract from KBR or Halliburton to consult. Or else he gets tapped for an Energy Task Force-esque cabal. Neither Rove nor the Republicans lose there.

 I don't think it's too paranoid at all to suspect that there's a bigger game going on here. Yes, one can wrap oneself up in second-guessing and conspiracy theories, but that can also be called thinking ahead, or trying to anticipate your opposition.

Conspiracy theories, in my opinion, seem to become detrimental when they begin to focus on and obsess about details--what time did Scott call Amber?--but can be quite beneficial when they take a step back and take a synthetic view of the Big Picture. I guess I'm with Annie on this one.

Paranoia or reasonable deductions? Who forged the documents? Not a word of wonder do we hear from the bushgroup. That would seem to be an obvious investigation. (Seymour Hersh should take a long hard look at this.) He who forges just might pillage. The bushgroup needs a distraction. Watch out, or perhaps they have made one or two disruptions already.

1. Rove is the monstrous pig, not Novak.
2. Novak is a crabby weasel.
3. Everyone makes mistakes sometime. This may be Rove's time.
4. May it be so.

Rove takes a bullet for Cheney.

Remember?

Scooter Libby?

President pro tem Cheney's gofer?

Heard his name recently?

Nope.

Heard CHENEY'S name recently?

YOU know...that 500 lb. corporate gorilla in the corner?

Remember the original stories?

"Libby Libby Libby Libby Libby..."

Connect Libby to this...then you connect Cheney.

Connect Cheney...and there's Corporate America with its ass hanging out.

<img src="http://www.bettybowers.com/graphics/roadcheney.gif" border="0">

DETOUR!!!

Nice.

The butt-boy/brain , in CLASSIC pulp lit style.takes the fall.

<img src="http://www.dmoma.org/lobby/exhibitions/presidentially_speaking/images/tuby_rove.jpeg" border="0">

And the hero...ALWAYS a big-time asshole if looked at in a certain way...
<img src="http://www.republicangear.com/george%20W%20Bush%2043rd%20President%20Round.gif" border="0"> 

Comes out as clean as a steam-dried condom.

Nice work, boys.

They haven't lost their touch.

Bush's Brain.

<img src="http://www.tart.org/ilovekarlrove/archives/250_ilk.gif" border="0">

Not EXACTLY...

S.

I like to keep tabs on what the enemy camp is saying, and came across this little piece at the National Review today:

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/annis200507180805.asp

What will they think of next?