Bush WH rollovers on phony Plame “outing” (Post 1)

I promised recently to say more about why the Bush White House rolled over when charged falsely by Dems and their MSM surrogates (NYT, for example) with “outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame.”

The “Plame outing story” was bogus from the start, even when the NY Times was demanding a criminal investigation.

How do you “out” a “covert CIA agent” who’s been commenting the past 5 years from her home in DC to CIA headquarters in VA?

Even the Bush-bashing MSM didn’t try to answer the question; they just ignored it.

Reporting on it would have blown their “the Bushies outed Plame” cover and exposed most of MSM and the Dem congressional leadership for peddling a bogus story whose only purposes were to hurt the President and weaken public support for the war in Iraq.

But if the “Plame outing” was a bogus story which could’ve easily been refuted, why was the Bush WH so defensive about challenging it?

Worse, why did the President give the story “legs” by promising to dismiss anyone at the WH connected with “outing” Plame?

I can’t give you “the answer” to either question, but I’ll say some things I think reasonable people will agree are worth considering.

First, there never was “a plot in the White House to out” CIA commuter Plame.

Regarding Karl Rove, for example, all TIME’s Matt Cooper (husband of Mandy Grunwald, long-time Democratic party activist and Clinton insider) testified to was this: At the end of an interview on an unrelated subject, and weeks after deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, a Bush foe opposed to the war in Iraq, had "leaked" Valerie Plame’s CIA employment to WaPo’s Robert Woodward he, Cooper, mentioned to Rove that Bush-basher Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. (Only Cooper didn’t call Wilson a Bush-basher)

All Rove did, according to both Cooper’s testimony and Rove’s testimony, was confirm he’d heard the same thing.

Such confirmation of what's already known doesn't constitute an "outing," but from such stuff most of MSM and the Dems can manufacture “a scandal.”

But even if you accept there was no “deep, dark WH plot” to “out” Valerie Plame weeks after MSM favorite Armitage had already "outed" her, you can still fairly ask the two questions I posed above:

1) But if the “Plame outing” was a bogus story which could’ve easily been refuted, why was the Bush WH so defensive about challenging it?

2) Worse, why did the President give the story “legs” by promising to dismiss anyone at the WH connected with “outing” Plame?

In fact, given the "outing" story was bogus from day one, the two questions are, for many of us, especially puzzling given the absences of a WH "plot."

In follow-up posts, I’ll say more about both questions.