Bush, Rove & Co. -- they're eating your lunch and you can't stop them

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A couple of thoughts after watching Matt Cooper on Meet the Press, reading his cover story in Time Magazine, watching Ken Mehlman defend Karl Rove, etc etc today.

Whether or not Karl Rove committed a crime, well, I still don't know, and neither do you.

And/But until we do find out, we need to step back in order to try to see the big, historical lesson here.

I think Frank Rich has the best take on it:

This case is about Iraq, not Niger.

The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons.

The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

Yes, the mention of Nixon is apt: this gang is Nixon-creepy. Whereas Clinton lied about getting blowjobs in the Oval, we know now that this gang lied about an entire war and (if that wasn't bad enough) used the levers of power to destroy anyone who spoke out against them.