Rove-Rove-Rove your boat gently down the stream

.......for Bush to get rid of Rove, would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen......
Marshall Wittmann

White House expresses confidence in Rove

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House broke its silence and said on Tuesday that President Bush continued to have confidence in his top political adviser, Karl Rove, despite his involvement in a scandal over the leak of the identity of a CIA agent.

"Any individual who works here at the White House has the president's confidence. They wouldn't be working here if they didn't have the president's confidence," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters in answer to a question.

McClellan had previously refused to say whether Bush still had confidence in Rove in two days of pointed questioning. He said the White House was asked to remain silent by prosecutors investigating who leaked the identify of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Bush had pledged to dismiss any leakers in the case, which is being investigated by a special prosecutor.

This is no surprise of course, like the continued support of Tom DeLay. They both are the modern day Republican party. The administration has no choice but to support them and both men will eventually bring them down, perhaps sooner rather than latter. As Wittmann says:

Rove is the nerve center of today's Republican Party. The White House is already lowering the bar for punishment in the Plame case. Unless, the prosecutor has the goods on Karl, he stays. The President and the GOP has no choice. Rove is the closest in Washington to the indispensable man.

I have noted that John Bolton has disappeared from the radar screen as the most recent Rove/Plame shit hit the fan. Bolton may be an immediate casualty of the ongoing Plame investigation. Josh Marshall agrees that Bolton was probably involved but thinks it will go much deeper.

A reader over at TPMCafe suggests that the Plame case may end up being tied to John Bolton, because of some evidence that strongly suggests the particular piece of information about Plame came out of a classified memo from State.

I suspect that's likely true. But it's only a part of the story.

If you go back and trace out just what happened as the phoney Niger papers, and the reports based on them, made their circuitous way through the executive branch -- and this using both public information and stuff from reporting -- an odd and at first hard to explain pattern emerges.

Confidence in the documents kept getting knocked down. But someone or some group kept giving them fresh life. And, improbably, those someones seemed to be at the State Department.