The Swarm of Talk Around 'Indicted Yet?'

Copyright © 2009 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

This week White House adviser Karl Rove escaped the legal cloud that had been hanging over him. He will not be indicted in the CIA leak case. And that has prompted commentator and National Review editor Richard Lowry to ask for a favor, that we ban the word indictment from our discussion of politics.

RICHARD LOWRY reporting:

There's something spectacular in watching a pillar of someone's world collapse in a heap. It happened to Erich Honecker, the hard line president of East Germany, when the Berlin Wall fell in one day in 1989. And it happened to a segment of the left this week, when the news came down that Karl Rove wouldn't be indicted.

Until about three years ago, it wasn't an article of faith for anyone that Karl Rove should be or would be indicted, not even for the left, which believed in quainter things. Like say, universal health insurance, smaller class sizes and the United Nations. But that was before all these priorities were eclipsed by the advent of the Valerie Plame leak investigation.

It is here that my NPR editor will ask me if I'll provide a little background on the case to explain the reference and the answer is no. No, I won't. Because if you don't know what Karl Rove might have told prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about his conversation with Time magazine's reporter Matt Cooper in his second of five Grand Jury appearances, well then, you just haven't been paying attention.

In any case, all of this is the most perishable information in our politics. Soon enough, Valerie Plame will be Valerie-who? Today, it isn't enough to see a political opponent beaten or even just disgraced. No, he has to be saddled with potentially ruinous legal bills and face jail time. He has to be razed to the ground and the earth beneath his feet salted, just as Cato the Elder demanded of Carthage.

Bill Clinton was scoffed at by conservatives when he called this the politics of personal destruction, but he was right. Because the impulse behind this politics is driven by a passion, namely hatred, it loses all sense of proportion and reality. No one on the left had ever cared before about the alleged outing of a CIA agent.

Until the controversy around the leak of CIA employee Valerie Plame's name provided an opportunity to get Karl Rove. A few weeks ago a blogger reported that oh, blessed day, Rove had actually been indicted. The left-wing blogoshpere lit up with the glorious news. Hosanna, hosanna. It poured scorn on those journalists who punctured their self-reinforcing belief system with the news that reports of Rove's indictment had been greatly exaggerated.

That is to say, fabricated.

For me, this was all sadly familiar since it exactly mirrored what went on on the right during the Clinton years. I remember the hopeful conversations at cocktail parties where someone allegedly in the know would confide that yes, Hillary was about to be indicted. For what? I can't remember exactly. But she must have spent about six of her eight years as First Lady on the verge of indictment. At least in the fevered minds of her critics.

After all this, I'd favor banning the I-word from our politics entirely. Let's go back to thinking our opponents are wrong or even evil, but not criminals. But I know I'm naïve. I can guarantee you, in the next administration, there will rampant speculation that one of its radioactive figures is about to be, is hours away from being, indeed just was, you know what.

SIEGEL: Richard Lowry is the editor of the National Review.

Copyright ©2009 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.