Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Semi-Retired
Your blogger quite nearly retired without a peep this week--having gone without blogging since last Thursday morning and not missing it a bit, I thought about just letting this website trail off into insignificance, like pets.com or, oh, I don't know, MSNBC. But I'm back, if only to point you to the Rude Pundit, who gets at the nuance-free fact at the heart of the Rove affair:
The mainstream media seems to be catching on to the true meaning of Rove's actions, although some of them (the Los Angeles Times, for one, as Best of the Blogs noted earlier today) prefer to frame the controversy as entirely political. Cable networks are running unscientific polls showing that wide majorities think Rove should quit or be fired. Nevertheless, for now I am going to stick by my prediction of a week or so ago that Rove will suffer no consequences as a result of this. But I'd like to be wrong.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Internet: While I've not been blogging over here much lately, I have been busy over at The Hits Just Keep On Comin', where I've posed a simple question that needs an answer: why do we listen to our old records, or attend concerts by the people who recorded them? It seems like a simple question, but my suspicion is that the answer isn't so simple. I'm working on mine at the moment, but I'd like to know yours too.
Your blogger quite nearly retired without a peep this week--having gone without blogging since last Thursday morning and not missing it a bit, I thought about just letting this website trail off into insignificance, like pets.com or, oh, I don't know, MSNBC. But I'm back, if only to point you to the Rude Pundit, who gets at the nuance-free fact at the heart of the Rove affair:
And so it is that Karl Rove now hides behind his attorney when it comes to what Rove revealed to Matt Cooper, parsing words worse than Clinton ever did. As it stands now, Rove's defense against treason rests on the notion, put forth by his lawyer, that Rove never gave Matt Cooper the actual name "Valerie Plame," that he just told Cooper that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction. . . .And that's the ultimate point of the Rove affair. If Bill Clinton got impeached for "sexual relations" and parsing the definition of "is," then Rove and his boss ought to be cast adrift on a raft in shark-infested waters with prime rib tied to their necks.
So Robert Luskin's defense of Rove is truly bizarre, as if there's some existential notion of identity being attached only to names, that without a name, Valerie Plame could not, in fact, be identified. Or, to go more absurdist, that sans name, Valerie Plame doesn't even exist. Kinda makes the definitions of "sexual relations" and "is" seem rather quaint.
The mainstream media seems to be catching on to the true meaning of Rove's actions, although some of them (the Los Angeles Times, for one, as Best of the Blogs noted earlier today) prefer to frame the controversy as entirely political. Cable networks are running unscientific polls showing that wide majorities think Rove should quit or be fired. Nevertheless, for now I am going to stick by my prediction of a week or so ago that Rove will suffer no consequences as a result of this. But I'd like to be wrong.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Internet: While I've not been blogging over here much lately, I have been busy over at The Hits Just Keep On Comin', where I've posed a simple question that needs an answer: why do we listen to our old records, or attend concerts by the people who recorded them? It seems like a simple question, but my suspicion is that the answer isn't so simple. I'm working on mine at the moment, but I'd like to know yours too.
