If Rove were a Democrat, he’d be shot

I’m certainly happy that George W. Bush and Karl Rove are not Democrats. If they were, just imagine the mess this country would be in right now, even worse than the mess it is in.

First, there would be cries of "treason" directed at Mr. Rove from the Republican ranks. Some of the more overheated members of Congress would demand that he be taken immediately out back of the Capitol and shot by a firing squad.

After all, he revealed the identity of a covert CIA agent, did he not?

As for his alibi that he never mentioned the name of agent Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, the Republicans would laugh out loud. What he did tell Mr. Novak was that "the wife" of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson worked for the secret agency. Mr. Wilson had been openly critical of some of President Bush’s falsehoods that led us into war in Iraq, and this was the White House’s way of getting even.

Names never are mentioned at police lineups, either. The witnesses just point a finger or say the number a certain suspect is holding.

Can you envision the reaction to Mr. Rove’s cop-out if he, Mr. Bush and even Mr. Novak happened to be Democrats?

"This could have cost that woman her life," the Republicans would cry, and they would be right.

Republican "talking points" might mention that all Ms. Plame’s contacts in the Middle East also were in grave danger now. The right-wingers would scream that our efforts to win the trust of the Arab people had been undermined by Mr. Rove’s act of vindictiveness. And only the president’s mother would believe he knew nothing about this outing of a secret agent.

We would be smack dab in the middle of a constitutional crisis right now, as bad as, if not worse than, Watergate.

But that would happen only if the president, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak - their journalistic shill - were Democrats. Instead, the president and Mr. Rove, at least, are staunch Republicans. As for Mr. Novak, his politics seem to be to the right of Ivan the Terrible.

And so, instead of a crisis, we have a string of Republican talking heads showing up on the Sunday TV shows, chuckling in dismissive fashion whenever the Rove leak is mentioned.

One Republican spokesman Sunday referred to the entire matter as "a tempest in a teapot." It reminded me of Richard Nixon’s aides calling Watergate a "third-rate burglary." The Republicans tried to chuckle away Watergate, too, and only the dogged efforts of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein kept the investigation alive.

If you want to get an idea of how this Karl Rove scandal might play out if the roles were reversed and the Democrats were in the White House and ruled both houses of Congress, look at what the Republicans did to President Clinton.

He had an affair with an intern and - to be blunt - lied about it. Nobody’s life was placed in jeopardy because of it. It was nasty, in the way that supermarket tabloids are nasty, but that was about the extent of it.

Yet the Republicans shouted "perjury," appointed a biased special prosecutor and managed to impeach Mr. Clinton.

Not one Republican chuckled or called the affair a tempest in a teapot. Instead, they acted as if Mr. Clinton had sold the key to Fort Knox.

But now, they try to convince us that this whole thing about secret agents and such is just a big joke.

The problem is, they are the only ones laughing.

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