LEAKING IN ORDER TO DISCREDIT THE LEAK RECIPIENT: THE MARK OF ROVE?

Yesterday I said it seemed possible that the Bush administration leaked the story of U.S. surveillance of financial records to the press in order to arouse GOP voters' anger at "liberal media traitors."

Would the Bushies leak a story just so they could discredit the recipient of their own leaks? Well, there is this story from Karl Rove's past, assuming it's true:

In 1999, St. Martin's Press published a critical biography of Bush titled "Fortunate Son". The book quoted an unnamed "high-ranking advisor to Bush," who revealed Bush's 1972 drug bust....

Hatfield later revealed that his source was none other than Karl Rove.... [L]eaking the story to Hatfield essentially discredited the story and sent it into the annals of conspiracy theory. Soon after the book was published and just as St. Martin's was preparing a high profile launching of the book, the "Dallas Morning News" ran a story revealing that Hatfield was a felon who had served time in jail. In response, St. Martin's pulled the book.

"When the media stumbled upon a story regarding George W. Bush's 1972 cocaine possession arrest, Rove had to find a way to kill the story. He did so by destroying the messenger," says Sander Hicks, the former publisher of Soft Skull, which re-published "Fortunate Son." "They knew the stories of Dubya's cocaine and drink busts would come out, so they made certain that it would come out of the mouth of a guy they could smear," said journalist Greg Palast, who wrote the forward to the final edition of the book.

The circumtances aren't exactly comparable, but Rove knows his base considers The New York Times as sleazy as many mainstream observers found Hatfield.

Would the Bushies accuse their enemies of violating privacy when the violation was their own doing? Well, there's this story from Karl Rove's past:

Rove Allegedly Bugged His Own Campaign Office To Distract From A Debate. During the 1982 Clement campaign, Rove discovered an electronic listening device in his campaign office. While an FBI investigation was inconclusive, rumors later swirled that Rove in fact had planted the bug himself in order to distract from an impending debate. The local DA concluded that "Rove had hired a company to debug his office, and that the same company had planted the bug,"? according to one unnamed DA's office source. [The Nation, 3/5/2001, New Yorker, 5/12/2003, Washington Post, 10/7/1986]

Karl Rove is a small-time political dirty trickster who's been given access to all the levers of power of the imperial presidency. It's like giving Beavis and Butt-head the nuclear launch codes. And it's even worse than that, because Rove got access to this power at a moment in history when allowing the White House to do just about anything seems justified in a lot of people's eyes.

I think this is a sleazy local political operator's tawdry little dirty trick -- but it's done in an incredibly high-stakes game in which the chump doesn't lose a local political race, he could lose his life. As TBogg notes, the righties are actually talking about vigilante murders of journalists:

I truly believe that the only tangible impact should be the judicious and righteous exercise of our Second Amendment rights against [New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau] and [James] Risen. We are at war and I can easily make a perfectly legal case for the termination of saboteurs by any means necessary.

Even if nobody takes a shot at these guys now, Politics Rove Style will persist (it's so successful, after all), and sooner or later some operative (Rove or an emulator of Rove) is going to paint a target on a political enemy's head and someone's going to hit that target.

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NOTE: None of this is meant to imply that Rove leaked this story himself. But you know the man's rep -- he leaves no fingerprints.