Karl canned?

07:15 PM CDT on Saturday, July 16, 2005

By MICHELLE COTTLE / The Dallas Morning News

This tip just in! White House sources reveal that the wife of top presidential adviser Karl Rove has been discovered to pose a serious national security risk because of massive debts that she has run up over the years – some from her penchant for the ponies, some from her long-standing addiction to Oxycontin.

What Bush administration Deep Throat leaked this juicy bit of raw meat to me? No one. I made it all up.

To the best of my knowledge, Karl's wife is a perfectly lovely woman. But let us say, just for the sake of argument, that all of the above were true. White House officials would come out swinging, denouncing me for invading the Roves' private life and indulging in character assassination for cheap political purposes.

They would have a point – and in times past I might have felt a wee bit guilty about such tabloid tactics. But now, I would simply smile virtuously and protest that I had done absolutely nothing wrong because, well, you see, I never actually revealed her name.

Would such an excuse be pathetic? Intellectually dishonest? Morally indefensible? You bet. But that is precisely the kind of hair-splitting hogwash we are being fed by those currently arguing that Karl Rove himself did nothing wrong when he apparently outed Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA operative.

After months of denying Mr. Rove's involvement in the Valerie Plame affair – dismissing such accusations as downright ridiculous – the White House can no longer deny Mr. Rove's status as a leaker. But it doesn't matter because, as Mr. Rove's compadres keep reminding us, he never actually uttered the words "Valerie Plame."

Cont.