Turd Blossom Must Go

There is no moral case for keeping Karl Rove on the government payroll.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, July 11, 2005, at 9:02 AM PT

We now know, courtesy of Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, what Karl Rove told Time's Matt Cooper. On July 11, 2003—three days before a Robert Novak column outed Bush administration critic Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee—Rove outed Plame to Cooper. Rove did not mention Plame by name, but that hardly matters (except possibly in a narrow legalistic sense, and I have serious doubts even about that). Merely saying that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA was enough to blow Valerie Plame's cover.