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Matter-eater Man said:
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Wonder Boy said:...
Is it a scandal, a legal scandal?
No.

It's -- it's embarrassing. But it's not the scandal that some people think it is that's going to lead to resignations and firings.
...



Libby had to resign quite a while ago & Rove still may be indicted so I think it's fair to say that it's past embarrassing & well into being a legal scandal. On the other hand if Brooks is talking a legal scandal compared in scope to something like Watergate, he may be right.



Okay, touche.

You're right on Libby (at least partly. Judge Fitzgerald himself said that Bush authorized the intelligence report leak to answer the Joseph Wilson accusations, but ultimately that was just de-classification of intelligence that was safe to release in answer to the charges. But Fitzgerald said there was no indication that Bush or Cheney authorized publicly disclosing Plame's identity. Whether that would have been simply "unethical", or an actual crime.)

A Rove indictment is still speculation at this point. It looks to me like the level of scandal on this has crested and receded.

And what about Brooks' point that --to Democrats--mentioning Valerie Plame amounted to treason, but that Democrats have a different standard regarding:
1) exposure of the NSA top secret phone-tapping surveilance of Muslim terrorist calls overseas?
2)What about internal White House strategy secrets revealed by Richard Clarke?
3)What about exposure of abuses at Abu Ghraib (which the U.S. military JAG was already investigating internally, and the CBS expose story just made it that much harder to get the facts) ?
4)What about public officials revealing interrogation procedures at Guantanamo Bay and other military prisons, information that will make it that much harder for our military to get information from captured terrorists, that Al Qaida now knows our interrogation procedures and can resist them?


And for the record, despite not agreeing with you often, I appreciate the civility with which you present your liberal perspective in recent months. I think since the Bush/Kerry election, you've been much less inflammatory. Although we all have our moments.
I certainly think r3x is capable of doing the same, as are many others here on both the left and right.
And I'm doing my best to be less inflammatory myself.