Fun in the Tub

When you make a mistake, Richard Nixon said to his close friend Millie, admit it: just don’t tell anyone about it.
That’s essentially what I want to do now – not admit that I made a mistake when, about a year ago, I impulsively suggested that Karl Rove had something to do with the Valerie Plame ‘leak’.
Actually I want to do a bit more than simply not admit to something.
In the spirit of modern, existential political honesty, I am not only not going to admit to making a mistake, I am going to suggest that what I did not do was not illegal.
Not that anyone has accused me of doing something illegal: just that if they do, what I did not do, was not illegal.
(Politics and good grammar do not mix.)

We’re dealing in hypotheticals here: I wasn’t around when the White House sprang a leak, so I can’t personally attest to the facts surrounding this famous drip.
We do have the written reports from those that were there – and Grand Jury testimony and, coincidentally, those reports have now been retroactively declassified, allowing me to share what others knew to be leaks, at the time, without being accused of leaking myself.
According to those reports, Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leaks at the White House.
In fact, Karl turns out to have been a victim of those leaks. Or perhaps I should put it a different way.
When the leaks first appeared (and leaks are like trees that fall in the forest, if you’re not there to see them, they don’t exist) Karl was the one called in to the fix them.
Karl was essentially - the declassified, insignificant, politics as usual, facts now seem to suggest, a plumber.
Now I don’t want you to think (wink wink, nudge nudge) that by using the word ‘plumber’ I am in any way suggesting any similarities to the way that Karl Rove functioned in the White House, and the way the infamous Watergate ‘plumbers’ functioned.
No: they are very different.
Karl has his plumber’s license, and Nixon’s plumbers were undocumented aliens that the White House hired to save a few bucks.
Poor Karl, he was just a hired hand, called in to fix a few leaks.
You know how it goes: you see a little water damage on the ceiling, a few drips, and so to be safe you call for the plumber.
The plumber would be just as happy tightening up a few screws, adding a nut and bolt here and there, and getting his $250. But when Karl arrived, it was immediately apparent that there was a hidden leak, the source of which had to be found, or else.
So Karl got out his tools and started looking.
He dug through the ceiling of his office, and into the office of Scooter Libby: though he found a big pool of water there, the source was still hidden.
So he dug through the wall of Libby’s office and into the Vice President’s office: though the water was a lot deeper, the leak did not originate there.
So he dug through the floor of the Vice President’s office and, finally, he found the source.
There was the President himself, taking a bath: laughing and splashing about, playing with his GI Joes, and unknowingly causing a little water to cascade over the tub and onto the floor and.. well, you know the rest.
Nothing illegal there.
Just a lot of good clean fun, and a little innocent, inadvertent leaking.
Or course Karl and Scooter and Dick couldn’t talk about the President taking a bath. The press would have had a field day with the image of the President and his GI Joes.
So they protected him.
The President did not even know that he was the one responsible for the leak. He couldn’t imagine anyone would care about his bathing habits.
So when days later, he told the plumbing press that he would not tolerate any leaks in the White House, he meant it.
Informed sources at the White House have now told me, on condition of anonymity, that he is very sorry for all the trouble that he has caused, however inadvertently.
The President has now had all the tubs in the White House removed, replacing them with enclosed shower stalls.
And just to be safe, the President has issued a secret order that all classified information that is inadvertently leaked, for any reason, is to be considered declassified as soon as it is revealed.

So okay, I will admit that when I leaked the story of Karl Rove leaking the story I was not exactly leaking the truth.
I didn’t know the truth, at the time.
But now that the truth has changed, I stand by my story.