Regarding all this navel gazing in the media about whether Rove broke the law by outing an undercover CIA operative, and all the crap we're hearing from wingnuts who actually try to portray this treasonous behavior as heroism, I just have this one thing to say before running off to Friday-night television:

The real issue is not that Rove is a criminal and possibly a traitor for doing what he did. It's not about how the Dems can exact political payback. It's not about whether a reporter is languishing in jail even though she didn't even write a story on this.

These are all important, but that's not the most important thing. The most important issue at hand is this:

Rove's leak was to punish an insider critic of the Bush Administration's drumbeat to war. The fact is that Wilson found no nukes, revealing the lie in Bush's State of the Union. The fact is that the rationale for attacking Iraq had nothing to do with "terrorism" and everything to do with a pre-existing agenda (as revealed by Woodward, O'Niell and, of course, all of the Downing Street Memos. The fact is that Bush and Company lied to the American people about the facts and the reasons to go to war.

Now we like to pretend that it's all about spreading freedom. Even if you think you can do that with bombs, that was not the reason they said we must go to war. In the aftermath of 9/11, and with troops committed in Afghanistan in what really was a war on al Qaeda, if Bush came to the American people and said, "I want to go nation building, folks!" people would have howled, "No! We have more important things to do!"

They lied to us. That's the real issue. We're stuck in Iraq, and there's no getting out easily. It's our 21st century tar babe. We're there because of a lie. Our soldiers are dying there because of a lie. Threats from al Qaeda, North Korea and elsewhere are all the greater because our military is overextended because of a lie.

Clinton was impeached over a blowjob. When are Bush's lies going to be matters of high crimes and misdemeanors?

About author

media girl also blogs at other places.