The Bush/Cheney cover-up of treason worked

Excellent point. It wasn't just hubris. Rove knew that to win the election they had to cover-up the treasonous outing of a CIA spy. They did and they won. The cover-up was worth the price. Even Libby will simply fight until he's pardoned.

Needless to say, "Justice" has been having a bad five years, and the future looks no brighter.

Salon.com - War Room

Today is the first Tuesday in November. That doesn't count for much this year, but it did last year. On the first Tuesday in November 2004, the American people reelected George W. Bush.

What did they know then? On the question of whether the White House had revealed the identity of a CIA agent in order to undercut criticism of the Iraq war, not much. The president had suggested that he didn't know who had leaked Valerie Plame's identity, and he had promised to fire anyone who did. Scott McClellan had assured the American people that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby weren't involved, and he said that the president knew -- at least so far as Rove was concerned -- that it was ridiculous to say otherwise. Reporters for Time and the New York Times knew Rove and Libby had been involved, but they kept that knowledge to themselves as voters went to the polls and reelected a president a year ago today.

There's a short way to say that, and E.J. Dionne nails it today:

"The coverup worked."

As Dionne notes, Patrick Fitzgerald suggested at his press conference Friday that his investigation might have been completed in October 2004 rather than October 2005 if Time's Matthew Cooper and the Times' Judy Miller had testified when they first received subpoenas. In other words, the American public might have learned a month before Bush was reelected, rather than a year later, that members of his administration had outed a CIA agent for political gain and had lied about it afterward...