Novak Should Go To Jail For The Plame CIA Leak

Who will take the rap for leaking American agent’s identity

Another bad week for us conservatives. All this big ruckus about somebody in our White House intentionally revealing the identity of an American CIA agent. The White House insider who did it was probably trying to discourage other agents from expressing public doubts about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.

Now it turns out that blowing an American intelligence agent’s cover is some kind of ‘big crime’. Somebody’s got to take the fall, and it can’t be the President. Who should we prosecute? Who is going to take the rap? Here are the scenarios.

1) Karl Rove, the President’s top political advisor, takes the fall. Although Rove denies having anything to do with it, he is the most likely suspect because he’s made a career out of ruining other people’s careers and reputations. In fact, that’s one of the reasons he was hired; he’s very good at dirty tricks; in fact, I heard his resume lists “Ruining other people’s reputations” under “Skills”.

The problem with this scenario is that the President needs Karl Rove to get re-elected. And Rove is one of those guys who knows where the bodies are buried, if you know what I mean. He knows all the dirt about Bush; all the skeletons in the closet. In fact, in many cases, Rove is actually the guy who buried the bodies, shoveled the dirt, and put the skeletons in the closet. If he’s indicted he might talk; and when Karl Rove starts telling the public all he knows about the President, it’s goodbye, White House and hello, Geraldo.

So we can’t let Rove take the fall for this one. He knows too much.

2) Some administration flunky takes the fall. There’s always some poor Young Republican slob who’s running around the White House in a suit and tie, wandering the hallways with a piece of paper in his hand, trying to look important when he’s really clueless as to what’s going on.

The reason they keep guys like this in the White House is so that they can go to jail instead of the administration bigwigs. Remember all those Watergate presidential aides who actually ended up doing time? There are plenty of guys like that around the White House right now. They’re easy to frame, and they look guilty as hell when they’re accused of something, because they’ve all done something they’re ashamed of to get into the White House, anyway.

Perfect for taking the rap. The only trouble is, will the public buy it? Will they believe that some low-rent White House flunky took it upon himself to start calling all these newspapers around D.C., breaching security and blowing the cover of one of our agents? The public probably won’t believe it. The public realizes that flunkies like that don’t know anything and aren’t told anything; those guys don’t even go to the bathroom without an order from Mr. Rove or a senior administration official.

So that won’t work.

3) Robert Novak takes the fall. After all, he is the one who actually revealed the woman’s identity to the public, after a bunch of other columnists apparently refused to do so. We accuse him of breaking the law by blowing the cover of the agent. When he tries to defend himself by saying he got the story from two senior administration officials, we say he’s lying, and he just made that up about his two senior administration official sources.

My personal pick for a ‘fall guy’ is Novak. He is expendable, because he is old and easily replaced. Practically anybody could do his job as a political ‘expert’; we could find a younger, more attractive Anne Coulter to take his spot. But when he is convicted, Novak should go to a minimum security prison. He has always been loyal to the Bush Administration, so we shouldn’t let the judge sentence him to a real prison where he would probably be slapped around, and bullied into being some bigger prisoner’s ‘girlfriend’.

The only trouble is, Novak might not go for it. But we could probably—oh, my God, what’s this? This news headline, someone just put on my desk! Oh, no! No!

Rush Limbaugh is ON DRUGS! Rush has been doing illegal ‘hillbilly heroin’ in secret for years! It can’t be—It-- No! NO! NOOOOOO!

William Prendergast is the author of the crime thriller “Forbidden Hollywood” and advises the Bush White House on how to handle all the scandals and stuff.