NEW WHITE HOUSE SPIN-- BUSH SAID "BAD DOG!" TO HIS BRAIN. (BUT WAS BUSH A CO-CONSPIRATOR ?)

Growing up in Brooklyn, my earliest memories of the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS was its pages blowing around the floors of the subways. People seemed to read the NEW YORK TIMES. The NEWS was just on the floor, with muddy footprints. I haven't seen one in a number of years. But today in Blogostan I notice the NEWS has manufactured some silly story-- or is carrying some silly manufactured story-- purporting to distance the Imbecile-in-Chief from the CIA-outing scandal. According to a story by Thomas DeFrank, the paper's DC bureau chief (They have a bureau? I always thought they just made everyone up in that rag! Ya live and ya learn!), "An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News. 'He made his displeasure known to Karl,' a presidential counselor told The News. 'He made his life miserable about this.'"

So why didn't Bush fire the law-breaking, treason-committing Rove? THE NEWS has the answer, which sounds strangely like a GOP talking points memo some genius like Grover Norquist would come up with: "Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the President's rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world." An anonymous White House leaker told THE NEWS that "Karl is fighting for his life, but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that." Ahhhh... so does that make Bush a co-conspirator?

Maybe. The NEWS story inadvertently seems to indicate Bush was up to his eyes in the shit. "Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said. But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger. A second well-placed source" (so it's more than just Scotty???) "said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President. 'Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way,' the source said." (No pun intended, I'm sure.)