As far as the KKKarl Rove affair, " the core issue at stake ...

[whistle]

....is being seriously overlooked."

This is one of the most well-written articles on this subject. It avoids distractions and goes straight to the essential issues.


<snip>
The Karl Rove Scandal and Bush’s Drive for War with Iraq
By Joel Wendland
7-15-05, 8:46 am

It’s all very exciting. Just days ago, word came out that White House aid and President Bush’s close friend, Karl Rove, leaked classified information to the press about the identity of an undercover CIA agent.

When the story broke last year, that someone from the White House may have been the source of the leak, Bush promised to fire the culprit. Earlier this week, when it became clear that Rove was the culprit, rather than keeping his word, Bush kept mum. He also refused to express confidence in Rove, an admission that something serious is going down.

Then yesterday the Washington Post reported that the special prosecutor, appointed by the Justice Department, is preparing to indict someone related to the leaking case.

Indictments, the Post added, may be sought not just for leaking classified information, but also for perjury and obstruction of justice (for lying and conspiring to lie under oath to the grand jury).

Investigation into the President’s role in the leak, the conspiracy to level partisan attacks on critics of the war, and the conspiracy to cover up who was responsible is also called for.

Still no word from Bush. We are waiting for firings or indictments. Which will it be?

<more>
<link> http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/1481/1/32/

[babylonsister]

1. Great article, perhaps tying Bolton and the DSM into

this as well! It just gets better and better! :applause:

[wiggs]

2. Spot on. Here we go. Lots of good questions asked that MSM is not asking

Rove is a gateway to bigger game.

[whistle]

3. Indeed, MSM is spinning right along with RoveCo and Bushie....

...all about deflections and non-responses and blaming everyone but the guilty. Right out of the pages from the Leo Strauss books of which the following are four cover summaries:

<snip>
Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 1921-1932

This translation of eighteen virtually unknown early publications provides access for the first time to the origins of Leo Strauss's thought in the intellectual life of the German Jewish 'renaissance' in the 1920s. Themes range from the Enlightenment critique of the religion of Spinoza and the anti-critique of Jacobi, to the political Zionism of Herzl and the cultural Zionism of Buber and Ahad Ha'am. The essays and reviews reprinted in this volume document a youth caught in the theological-political conflict between the irretrievability of premodern religion and the disenchantedness of honest atheism, an impossible alternative that precipitated Strauss to seek out the possibility of a return to the level of natural ignorance presupposed in Socratic political philosophy.

Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire
by Anne Norton

Punchy, personal and passionate, this book aims to explain "how an unlikely group of academics came to power in Washington and provided the philosophical justification for the war on Iraq." The German-born Strauss (1899–1973) came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1938, ultimately teaching political philosophy at the University of Chicago. In sketching his life and the legacy of his ideas, Norton (95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method) argues that Strauss’s method of closely reading great books (à la late disciple Allan Bloom) does not presuppose the neoconservative politics with which the method has come to be associated. Strauss’s readings of Islamic texts, in particular, she says, are contrary to the "clash of civilizations" that has been constructed by Straussians William Kristol and Robert Kagan in their collection Present Dangers. Norton, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, was trained by Chicago Straussians herself, and she writes less as a turncoat than as a watchdog. She tracks Paul Wolfowitz’s years at the University of Chicago and decries the culture of clubby, masculine power that she says Bloom created there. She also traces the series of Strauss-related political appointments that brought Wolfowitz to the Bush administration. Straussians, Norton claims, admire Lincoln for his willingness to act dictatorially on behalf of democracy; Strauss himself, she suggests, was far less Machiavellian. Some strands could be better woven together to explain how Straussians directly undergird the war, but this book should nonetheless stimulate debate.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Thoughts on Machiavelli
by Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss argued that the most visible fact about Machiavelli's doctrine is also the most useful one: Machiavelli seems to be a teacher of wickedness. Strauss sought to incorporate this idea in his interpretation without permitting it to overwhelm or exhaust his exegesis of The Prince and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy. "We are in sympathy," he writes, "with the simple opinion about Machiavelli , not only because it is wholesome, but above all because a failure to take that opinion seriously prevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in Machiavelli: the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech." This critique of the founder of modern political philosophy by this prominent twentieth-century scholar is an essential text for students of both authors.

Natural Right and History (Walgreen Foundation Lectures)
by Leo Strauss

In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever.

"Strauss . . . makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves . . . brings to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind."--John H. Hallowell, American Political Science Review

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Chicago.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/sim-explorer/explore-items/-/0312217838/0/101/1/none/purchase/ref%3Dpd%5Fsxp%5Fr0/103-8960110-3271043