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Monday, July 11, 2005
It Depends on What the Meaning of the Word "Is" Is
Poor Karl Rove -- I weep for you. The man who elected a President almost solely on the basis that he would not resort to hypertechnical verbal parsings and pyrotechnics is himself resorting to those very tactics. Here's Exhibit A:
Consider his two on-the-record comments about the leak (which are both
on-camera):
Reporter: Did you have any knowledge or did you leak the name of the CIA
agent to the press?Rove: No. [ABC, 9/29/03]
Rove: Well, I’ll repeat what I said to ABC News when this whole thing
broke some number of months ago. I didn’t know her name and didn’t leak her
name. [CNN, 8/31/04]
Notice that in the second statement, Rove rephrases what ABC’s original
question was to him, omitting the part where the reporter asked whether he had
“any knowledge” of the leak. Rove offered a categorical denial to the entire
question. The ABC reporter did not ask whether Rove knew Plame’s name – that was simply offered as part of Rove’s later recasting of the question.
If Rove wants to play these legal word games, then he should explain why he
said he did not have any knowledge of the leak when he was Matt Cooper’s source.
Next up, shortly: Scott McClellan's verbal parsing in response to questions about Rove and Plame.
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