The American Spectator

Hardly anyone in the media or the Democratic Party needed any double-checking when it came to the unsubstantiated charge that Rove had engineered an attack on Joe Wilson. “There’s no question that Rove was the one that leaked the information about the CIA agent’s name,” DNC Chairman Howard Dean told MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell on April 28, 2006. According to Paul Krugman in the New York Times, “there’s no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.” In an unresolved matter with so few definitive answers, there was “no question” that Karl Rove was guilty of treason.

Krugman explained that Rove’s smear tactics succeed because “[a]ll they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they’ll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy” being smeared. Insofar as there is “something wrong” with Mark Foley, why can’t his downfall be counted among Rove’s success stories?

Among all the talk of a former congressman and a former teenage boy, no one has bothered to ask if the boy genius is implicated for one reason: To imply that Rove had something to do with the present scandal would mean that the boy genius was never so genius to begin with.