Focus on the President

We heard it earlier today from four longtime CIA agents and in BooMan’s captivating rant. We read it in tomorrow’s New York Times, this time from Frank Rich:

It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.


More Frank Rich gems:


  • “To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail.”
  • “Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship.”
  • “… Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller’s fate.”
  • “That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.
    Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush’s fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week’s erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan …”
  • “This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit – the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes – is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.”
  • “The brief against the administration’s drumbeat for war would be just as damning if [Wilson had] never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora’s box it can’t slam shut.”