USA: Politics: Buckingham of Boston Herald clears air on Karl Rove
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The truth, the whole truth:
column first appeared in the Boston Herald on Thursday, June 15, 2006
It must be my parochial school training but I’ve always considered lying a very big deal.
Venial, mortal?
I don’t know. I just know it would earn you a good whack from the nuns with the board of education, right in front of your classmates.
Karl Rove’s been whacked pretty hard the past three years. He’s spent way too much time - and way too much money - hunkered down with his attorney, when he wasn’t testifying before a grand jury.
How ironic that he was told of the prosecutor’s no-go decision while on a Southwest Airlines flight. Rove is now free, politically speaking, to move about the country.
I predict Scooter Libby will get the same freedom to go - along with his huge legal bills - once a jury gets his case.
There is, however, one proven liar who has not had to shell out a penny for defense lawyers in this case. Former Ambassador Joe Wilson actually had the gall to say on Tuesday that he and wife Valerie Plame are now considering a civil suit against Rove.
It ought to be the other way around.
It’s an old saying that yesterday’s front-page news wraps today’s fish. Unfortunately, Rove’s good news will be like that, too - fleeting.
But before the nation’s attention shifts to other matters, like John Kerry’s absolutely, positively, I-mean-it-this-time position on the Iraq war, it is well worth resurrecting the findings of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee on the Wilson fabrications.
Remember, Wilson insisted for months that his wife had nothing to do with the decision to send him to Niger to investigate the claim that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake uranium. The unanimous Senate report, however, said she did, in a memo no less.
The “officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’ and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, ‘my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.’ ”
The former ambassador also insisted Vice President Dick Cheney himself not only was behind the fact-finding Niger trip but also was personally briefed on Wilson’s conclusions.
Not so, said the Senate: “The Central Intelligence Agency should have told the Vice President and other senior policymakers that it had sent someone to Niger to look into the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal and it should have briefed the Vice President on the former ambassador’s findings.”
Wilson was also caught boldface lying to the media. In June 2003, Wilson told The Washington Post, “The Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged.”
The unanimous Senate report found: “The former ambassador said that he may have ‘misspoken’ to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were ‘forged.’ ”
There’s more, but like old newspapers, 500-plus page Senate reports aren’t good for much once the news and political cycle moves on.
I was also taught, however, that truth is eternal.
Thus, the maelstrom stirred up by 16 words that turned out to be wrong in a State of the Union address comes down to six which are undeniably true:
Joe Wilson lied. Karl Rove didn’t.
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