Only the naïve believed George W. Bush would dare fire his resident hatchet man, Karl Rove, whose guile, dirty tricks and smears transformed a ne'er-do-well Texas party boy into a serious politician and made Rove the second most powerful man in Washington.
Bush could not exist without Rove at his side.
So, it was sheer smokescreen when Bush vowed to fire any White House staffer involved in the revenge outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Now that Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have been fingered, Bush changed the standards -- they must've "committed a crime."
That means indicted, tried and convicted. If Rove and Libby were charged, which seems wholly improbable in any event, trial could be years away, assuming the Bush-controlled Justice Department, Bush-appointed judges and the Bush-controlled Republican Congress even had the stomach to take on Rove.
Even now, Rove -- Bush calls him "The Architect" of his political victories -- is masterminding his own escape from justice.
He hurried the president into nominating a successor to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, thereby igniting a new Washington controversy and effectively shoving the CIA-leaker story out of the news and off the agenda.
Rove has other possible tricks to keep his conduct pigeonholed. How about announcing early withdrawal of troops from Iraq? How about another headline-making Bush turnaround -- an attack on global warming? How about all-out efforts to capture Osama bin Laden?
President Bush's sudden fancy for ironclad proof of Rove's and Libby's hateful, possibly criminal, abuse of a CIA operative is something new.
He surely needed no proof of weapons of mass destruction, only trumped up fiction, before declaring war on Iraq.
No ironclad proof was required before he uttered the memorably inane and untrue boast about the war in Iraq, "Mission Accomplished."
And Vice President Cheney's bragging that Iraqi insurgents were "in their last throes" surely lacked ironclad proof: suicide bombings have soared since Cheney's wild claim.
Despite high points in the American presidency, (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Truman), Bush is one of modern-day Democrat and Republican presidents (Nixon, Johnson, Clinton) who've disgraced their terms with lies and broken promises.
Even the Republican faithful see through the Rove sham: 71 percent of Republicans in an ABC News national poll this week believe Rove should be fired for being the leaker (83 percent of Democrats) and only 25 percent of the public believe President Bush is cooperating with the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame's name.
Pat Murphy
