Does This Mean What I Think It Means?
While everybody is breathlessly poring over what Matt Cooper has to say in this week's Time, I'm thinking that the other newsweekly has the real story of signicance hitting the newstands Monday--and not for what it says, but for what it is.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek is the very well-known, very mainstream journalist who wrote this piece. He's always been, to my memory, as "straight down the middle" as they come in that business. (A Google search revealed accusations of conservative bias, if anything; no less than Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online praised him to the Columbia Journalism Review.) He's not William Safire; he's not Bob Herbert. And he's certainly not "Jeff Gannon" or Sidney Blumenthal (who was a transparently, at times almost embarrassingly liberal while working as a journalist, and was known as such).

But the story he's written, at least to my reading, reads with barely concealed contempt and outrage at Karl Rove... and indeed at the whole m.o. of the Bush administration.

Some prominent administration officials scurried for cover. Traveling in Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had long harbored doubts, disowned the "sixteen words" about Niger that had ended up in Bush's prewar State of the Union speech. So did CIA Director George Tenet, who said they shouldn't have been in the text. But Cheney—who tended never to give an inch on any topic—held firm. And so, therefore, did Rove, who sometimes referred to the vice president as "Leadership." Rove took foreign-policy cues from the pro-war coterie that surrounded the vice president, and was personally and operationally close to Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby.
...
In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam. You are loyal to a fault to your friends, merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details, and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves. You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political—and everyone is fair game.
...
It's unlikely that any White House officials considered that they were doing anything illegal in going after Joe Wilson. [b]Indeed, the line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration[/b]. In the months after 9/11, the Republican National Committee, a part of Rove's empire, had sent out a fund-raising letter that showed the president aboard Air Force One in the hours after the attack. Democrats howled, but that was the Bush Rove was selling in the re-election campaign: commander in chief. Now Wilson was getting in the way of that glorious story, essentially accusing the administration of having blundered or lied the country into war.

... Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was sent out to trash the Wilson op-ed. "Zero, nada, nothing new here," he said. Then, on a long Bush trip to Africa, Fleischer and Bartlett prompted clusters of reporters to look into the bureaucratic origins of the Wilson trip. How did the spin doctors know to cast that lure? One possible explanation: some aides may have read the State Department intel memo, which Powell had brought with him aboard Air Force One.

Meanwhile, in transatlantic secure phone calls, the message machinery focused on a crucial topic: who should carry the freight on the following Sunday's talk shows? The message: protect Cheney by explaining that he had had nothing to do with sending Wilson to Niger, and dismiss the yellowcake issue. Powell was ruled out. He wasn't a team player, as he had proved by his dismissive comments about the "sixteen words."Donald Rumsfeld was pressed into duty, as was Condi Rice, the ultimate good soldier. She was on the Africa trip with the president, though, and wouldn't be getting back until Saturday night. To allow her to prepare on the long flight home to D.C., White House officials assembled a briefing book, which they faxed to the Bush entourage in Africa. The book was primarily prepared by her National Security Council staff. It contained classified information—perhaps including all or part of the memo from State. The entire binder was labeled TOP SECRET.

All emphases mine.

The whole thing is remarkable. He's exposing things the White House badly wants kept quiet--most notably, the culture John DiIulio talked about when he told Ron Susskind:

What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. [They] consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."

This was by the White House Director for Faith-based Initiatives, mind you, not some left-winger blogger or Democratic operative. (He later recanted; the theory is that Rove left a figurative--or not--horse's head in his bed. Susskind's next Bush administration collaborator, ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, told much the same story in his memoir.)

Remember--I'm not talking about me here. I'm not even saying that everything Fineman writes here is true. (How would I know?) I'm saying that the fact Fineman would write such a piece suggests to me one of two things:

1) His own personal outrage at Rove, or anger at the treatment of his journalistic colleagues, has led him to a potentially career-ending mistake. If Rove survives--hell, maybe just if Bush survives (which I'm sure he will)--Fineman will never get a phone call to a Republican returned for the rest of his career. That he did this under the Newsweek aegis, no less, makes it quite possible that the magazine will force him out to ease potential White House retaliation.

2) Fineman is fairly sure that what looks like spleen on his part today will in fact be conventional wisdom tomorrow--and he wants to be the Woodward of this story, the prescient and dogged scribbler who told the world the truth.

Another piece of speculation: given the detail of what he's been told--the briefing book for Rice, the conclusion that the pushback against Wilson came from Cheney--he pretty much has to have a very inside source. The discussion of who would go on the talk shows is not something they did in front of the press corps.

Either way, this is a turning point.