7/30/05

Given what we've seen of late, you might assume I'm making this up, but this news report is real.

Democrats and their allies are demanding that Sen. Pat Roberts hold hearings on presidential advisor Karl Rove's role in the unfolding Valerie Plame scandal.

But Roberts, who chairs the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence, isn't budging, saying that Rove's role in the revealing of CIA agent Plame's identity is already under investigation and that his critics are playing politics.

"The sharks are in the water," he said. "Senate Intelligence has to be nonpartisan."

That's right, Pat Roberts is accusing us of playing politics, and pretending to care about non-partisanship on his committee. That would be the same Roberts who…

* prevented his Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from making any inquiry into the origins of the Niger forgeries;

* refuses to investigate the Plame scandal, but is prepared to investigate Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame scandal;

* believes the CIA does too much to keep their agents undercover;

* told a national television audience that Plame wasn't really a covert agent, despite all evidence to the contrary;

* dismissed the need for Plame hearings in 2003, less than five days after the White House was notified about the criminal probe, because the controversy was, as he put it, "an old story";

* defied comprehension by arguing in 2004, "If in fact [Saddam] didn't have [WMD], why on earth didn't he let the U.N. inspectors in and avoid the war?";

* and broke a promise to his colleagues (and the nation) in March 2005 by announcing that he would not allow his committee to prepare a report explaining how the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence on Iraq before the war began.

And now Roberts wants to lecture Dems about playing politics and the need for non-partisanship in the Senate Intelligence Committee. Simply breathtaking.

The Carpetbagger Report

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