WASHINGTON (AFP)--Amid universal calls for Karl Rove's dismissal, President Bush is standing by his top political adviser, a dork, whose role in the leak of a CIA officer's identity has plunged the White House into utter crisis, confusion, dismay, chagrin, demoralization, profound melancholy, and despair.
Bush's defense of the beleaguered dork Rove follows the disclosure that Rove talked about the CIA officer in a July 11, 2003 conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.
Bush stated clearly that "I have utter confidence on any dork who works at the White House. Believe me, there are a lot of dorks here, and I should know."
Rove's representative said Rove did not disclose Valerie Plame's name, even though he is a dork, a point that Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., called "a distinction without a difference."
"The fact that he didn't give her name, but identified the ambassador's wife...doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who that is," Biden said on CNN. "If that occurred, at a minimum, that was incredibly bad judgment, warranting him being asked to leave, since he's also a real dork."
Back in September and October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken to Rove about the Plame matter and that he believed that even though Rove was a dork, he wasn't exactly involved in the leak. McClellan continued to refuse to discuss the White House denials, saying that to do so would possibly really screw up on the ongoing criminal investigation of the leak, and which dork was responsible.
Bush said last year he would fire any dork found to have leaked Plame's name. Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), said it's time for Bush to give Rove the boot, "since he was unmistakably the dork in question."
An e-mail by Cooper that arose in Newsweek magazine said Rove spoke of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson as being someone who works at the CIA.
Rove's conversation with Cooper occurred a few days after Plame's husband suggested in a New York Times op-ed piece that some of the mythical intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was warped to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, in order to try to invade the country to grab its oil fields.
A week after the op-ed piece, Plame's name and her CIA link appeared in a column by Robert Novak. The column said two administration officials told Novak that Wilson's wife had suggested sending him to investigate whether Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Cooper's byline appeared on an article a few days later naming Plame, even though the unnamed source of the information was a White House dork.
