Let’s say you’re looking for a job in the journalism business. I have a couple of suggestions for you. I happen to know that the New York Times has an opening for an investigative reporter, because one of theirs currently is taking an open ended vacation in a federal jail because of a story she never wrote. But the real plum job in the scribe business would be White House Press Secretary. Right now, it’s taken, but I’m guessing that Scott McClellan is scanning the classified ads for a comfortable position delivering pizzas or flipping burgers, anything that doesn’t involve lying your ass off to the White House press corps while trying not to break down in tears and run from the room.

This is a complicated story with a cast of hundreds, especially in the world of the 20 second sound byte, but the mainstream press seems to be catching up to it. I hope the readers are doing as well. Forgive me for telling you what you may already know, but I think I can get this into the most concise form yet reported. Chronologically, in February ‘02 a career diplomat named Joe Wilson went to Africa on the CIA’s credit cards to see if it was true that Saddam Hussein was down there shopping the shelves for weapons grade uranium. He concluded that Saddam wasn’t doing any such thing. His mistake wasn’t necessarily reporting this conclusion; it was telling the New York Times. Since the Bush crowd was looking for an excuse to pick a fight with Saddam, Wilson’s big mouth was considered an embarrassment to the administration.

A guy named Karl Rove, widely known as the political brains behind most of the successful Republicans in recent times, including the Bushwhacker, decided to make Wilson pay for running his mouth. Apparently, the only thing Rove could devise was to tell a couple of reporters that Wilson got the job because his wife is a CIA agent. That was a pretty nasty thing to do, because it cost Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, her job as a spy and probably put her life in danger. That Karl Rove is a nasty guy wasn’t news. What has finally become news about three years later is that what he did is a federal felony.

Rove denied it of course, and the guy who thinks he’s President also lied about it. Both of them are laying kind of low right now, possibly hoping that trains exploding in London will take some of the heat off. Since Time and the Chicago Sun-Times both had published the name of a CIA spy, however, the Justice Department and later a federal grand jury started nosing around and issuing subpoenas. Eventually, Time rolled over and Rove was toast, or he should be, but it remains to be seen. He’ll be tried in the court of public opinion, and if he skates there, he probably won’t meet up with a real judge. Democrats in the Senate are saying they’d like to hear Mr. Rove talk under oath, but public opinion is said to hold Democrats in severe minority status right now.

Along the way, a New York Times reporter named Judith Miller was working on the "weapons of mass destruction" story, and she got one of those subpoenas. She never wrote the story, but when she raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, she refused to reveal her sources. So Miller is sitting in jail, while Rove and the people who actually outed the CIA agent are sitting by the pool.

The most entertaining part of these intertwined stories, so far, is the performance of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan at a news conference last Monday. The White House press corps is an elite group in a way; they don’t have to go to the war zones and be herded around by military flaks trying to prevent them from seeing what’s going on. They’re supposed to have access to the President and other top dogs. Instead, they get to listen to poor schmucks like McClellan refusing to answer their questions. They crucified him. "Were you lying, Scott, when you told us three years ago that Rove had nothing to do with it?" "The President said he’d fire anyone in the administration responsible for doing what we now know Rove did. When is he going to fire Rove, Scott?" "Is Rove now the subject of a criminal investigation, Scott?" McClellan’s answer to all those questions and many more was that he refused to answer. You can understand why McClellan’s job got a little uncomfortable on Monday.

Conclusions: First, remember that Karl Rove is a political flunkie. His job title is Assistant to the Chief of Staff, but he doesn’t direct staff and he doesn’t discuss policy. His only responsibility is to manage the political implications of what the Bush crowd is doing. If you want to believe that the Bushwhacker has any real principles which might be influencing his decisions, please note that Karl Rove is said to be his closest advisor.

All the talk about more investigations and Congressional hearings is nonsense. The reporters already nailed it. Rove and Bush lied about the Valerie Plame story; Bush and Blair lied about their plans for invading Iraq. Everyone knows it. The only question is, "does anyone care enough to at least put these people in the unemployment line, if not in jail?"

A lot of people suspect that terrorist acts actually are carried out, not by terrorists who go by names like al Queda, but by terrorists who pass themselves off as legitimate leaders of countries, people whose true constituencies are corporations, not citizens. A lot of the same citizens suspect that the mainstream media cooperate in selling the corporate agenda. I’m not selling any conspiracies, here, but it smelled a little rancid last week, just as it did on 9/11, when the TV reporters started telling us that Islamic terrorists did the terrible deeds even before they gave us an adequate description of the deeds. Then Tony Blair started blathering about how Britain would have to trash civil liberties, just as the U.S. did, to thwart these Islamic terrorists.

Throwing reporters in jail may be the scariest part. The ones who do the government’s bidding can keep it up as long as they can sleep at night and look in the mirror in the morning, but the one’s who behave like real journalists go to jail. Your government doesn’t even try to disguise it. I’m covering my tail by not even pretending to be a reporter.

The opinions in this commentary, and they are only opinions, don’t necessarily protect the sources of KVMR, etc.