A dozen red Turd Blossoms, please

When asked about Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove on Monday, Dubya said, "Karl's got my complete confidence. He's a valuable member of my team." Now, he's previously backtracked on his promise to fire any leaker in this case, refusing to comment because the investigation is ongoing. It seems almost a foregone conclusion that the investigation will reveal he was definetly at least one of the leakers. If that happens, the reluctance to fire him because the investigation is ongoing will turn into a reluctance to fire him because criminal charges haven't even been fire. If he's indicted by Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, that will then turn into a refusal to fire him because he's "innocent until proven guilty." I'm betting he would hold his office up until an actual conviction, at least, which would likely be after Bush leaves office.

But Bush's "complete confidence" doesn't wash. I can only come up with two possible interpretations of his statement:

• Bush doesn't think Karl was involved in the leak
• Bush actually approves of outing Plame's covert identity and the damage to our national security it caused

I just can't imagine any other way you can parse Bush's continuing "confidence" in Rove. The former possibility would be willfull blindness, at the very least, not to mention a striking lapse of judgement. The latter possibility, however, is almost frightening to contemplate. Is it even possible that Karl revealed her identity with the approval or possibly even under instruction from the President? Remember, this is an administration where even those involved in it have said it has absolutly no policy wing; everything is driven by political considerations.

The sidebar has a new blog, which I've been reading for a while, and I will quote Seeing the Forest where Dave Johnson said:

Rove outed a covert CIA agent working on keeping WMD out of the hands of terrorists. This "rolled up" her network of contacts, possibly getting some killed. And by exposing her he exposed her cover company, possibly causing damage to other agents and networks as well.

Rove did this at a time of war against terrorists. His act exposed all of us to increased danger of attack by those WMDs she was trying to keep away from terrorists.