From Mark Felt to Karl Rove

Top Bush and Cheney aides were "intensely focused on discrediting" Wilson after the criticized the administration on Iraq, the Los Angeles Times reports.

"A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove's interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: 'He's a Democrat.' Rove then cited Wilson's campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said."

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dick Polman joins the can-Rove-survive sweepstakes:

"President Bush may soon face the ultimate loyalty test: whether to jettison the principal architect of his political career in order to reverse his sagging public support and salvage his imperiled second-term agenda.

"It would be a tough call. He and Karl Rove have been tight ever since their first encounter on Nov. 21, 1973, back when Bush was a college kid clad in an Air National Guard flight jacket and cowboy boots and Rove was a young Republican operative who, by his own recent recollection, was instantly smitten. . . .

"Legalities aside, the Rove saga could spell political trouble for a president who already has been experiencing a rocky second term (as most lame-duck presidents do). Charlie Cook, a Washington analyst who runs the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said Friday: 'This is about discrediting people on the taxpayer's dime. It's an embarrassment for Bush at a time when people increasingly don't like the way the economy is going, and the way Iraq is going. For him, this is an ugly political environment right now.'"

Jonathan Alter contrasts the behavior of the president and his dad:

"Was Plame 'fair game,' as Karl Rove told Chris Matthews? George H.W. Bush didn't think so. Even after Wilson embarrassed the president publicly, Bush Sr. wrote Wilson--whom he had appointed to various ambassadorial posts--to congratulate him for his service and sympathize with him over the outing of his wife. The old man was head of the CIA in the 1970s and knows the consequences of blowing the identities of covert operatives.

"But does his son? A real leader wouldn't hide behind Clintonian legalisms like 'I don't want to prejudge.' Even if the disclosure was unintentional and no law was broken, Rove's confirmed conduct--talking casually to two reporters without security clearances about a CIA operative--was dangerous and wrong. As GOP congressman turned talk-show host Joe Scarborough puts it, if someone in his old congressional office did what Rove unquestionably did, that someone would have been promptly fired, just as the president promised in this case.

"Scarborough, no longer obligated to toe the pathetic Republican Party line, says it's totally irrelevant if Joe Wilson is a preening partisan who misled investigators about the role his wife played in recommending his Niger trip. The frantic efforts of the GOP attack machine to change the subject to Wilson shows how scared Republicans are that the master of their universe will be held accountable for Rove's destructive carelessness."

An accompanying Howard Fineman piece in Newsweek puts it this way: "In a familiar Washington twist of fate, Rove's theory of politics is being turned against him--and he is being forced to deploy the Republican machine, which he built on Bush's behalf, for a more personal task: his own defense."

Frank Rich goes a bit over the top, in my view, with this Rove slam: