Game Boy

In what are supposed to be the lazy days of summer, I struggle to keep up with the Rove - Wilson - Plame - (Bush) story as it unfolds, and it’s hard to know where to start. But I think I would choose Rove’s characterization of Wilson’s wife, Plame, as being “fair game,” because really, doesn’t that explain the whole story, while also shining a harsh light of truth on Rove’s (and the GOP’s) view of women, and wives in particular?

Of course I am disturbed about the “outting” of Plame’s CIA role, a role that has been progressively minimized by GOP spinners, first calling her “undercover” when her role was far more than that—she was actually “a non-official cover officer,” which “meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.”^*

In other words, she had agreed to put her life at serious risk in service to her country, admittedly a foreign concept to the Bush Whitehouse. But that downgrading of her profession wasn’t good enough; they’re now referring to her as a “desk jockey,”^* whose outting is irrelevant. Liars never know when to stop.

There has been plenty of discussion on the possible repercussions of having her cover blown, creating serious risks to her and her contacts (and her cover organization) as well as destroying her ability to do her job (which focused on issues of WMDs, something Bush is comfortable ridiculing in his fatuous schoolyard clown way), but I keep coming back to the idea of Rove considering her to be “fair game” in his dispute with her husband. Fair game??? Rove is clearly one sick puppy if he thinks it reasonable to take revenge against a man by attacking his wife. (Revenge for what? For telling the truth? This sounds like nothing so much as a criminal enterprise that the RICO laws were written to address!)

So, I continue to spend the bulk of my non-working, non-sleeping hours trying to keep up with this story, and all the other idiocy emanating from the current regime. But there are not enough hours in the day! We are being buried in flotsam (and I mean that in the water treatment plant sort of way) to a degree unknown in my (long) lifetime! How can anyone keep up, but what happens if we don’t?

Fair game, indeed. Rove wouldn’t know a fair game if it bit him on the ass.

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^*“The Big Lie About Valerie Plame,” by Larry Johnson, at Josh Marshall’s TPM Cafe. Johnson further describes the role of the CIA’s more common undercover officers: “[we were] undercover—in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport—i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.”