Rich on WHIG

Frank Rich, once again available through truthout, writes this week about the White House Iraq Group. Made up of Rove, Rice, Libby, Matalin, Hughes, and various others, WHIG was exactly what it sounds like: a group charged with marketing and selling the war against Saddam Hussein. In "It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby," Rich adds his voice to those asking about the methods and intentions of this group. Here's one meme that's been going around but which Rich expresses well:

It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved" with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as "Bush's brain," he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

Since he only gets into print once a week these days, Rich also has to make the most of his space. He can't help reflecting on the Prez's stellar performance hammering nails on the Today show earlier this week:

Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman and [Martha] Stewart, he stonewalled.